HAUBERT
51
from now on he no longer existed." He begs, wears "a hair-shirt with
iron points," seeks death in all sorts of perilous adventures, finally
decides to live in order to serve others and dies one night in the
embrace of a horrible leper (kissing his blueish, foul-smelling mouth
and pressed, naked, against his cold, scabby body in order to give
him
some of his own warmth.) The leper, suddenly transfigured,
reveals himself as Christ and, as a reward for Julien's absolute
charity, carries him triumphantly up to heaven.
The story skillfully blends psychological and supernatural detail.
Flaubert presents his tale as an exercise in hagiography: "And that,"
he writes at the end,
"is
the story of saint Julien the Hospitaler,
almost as one finds it on the stained-glass window of a church in my
country." The narrator's matter-of-factness throughout the story in–
deed suggests an attempt merely to transcribe the different scenes of
Saint Julien's life as they might be represented in the stained-glass
panels of that church window. And, except for an occasionally false
note, when the narrator's indulgent, sophisticated restraint is a bit
too obvious (as when, speaking of Julien's pious mother, he writes:
"By dint of praying to God, a son came to her"), the unemphatically
literal rendering of the legend, the lack of analytical comment, do
help to make Julien's extraordinary fate seem almost natural. But a
similarly matter-of-fact account of Julien's upbringing and of the
progress of his sadistic impulses provides precisely the commentary
which Flaubert refrains from giving explicitly. A more transparently
reductive analysis might have undone the legend by simply translating
it back into the more probable history (or secret fantasies) which it
transforms but also exposes. And so the advantage of
this
method
would seem to be that instead of a speculative commentary appended
to or inserted in a supernatural tale, we have an internal analysis pro–
vided by the tale itself which indirectly suggests the metaphorical
status of the events being recorded.
But having chosen to imitate rather than explicate the pictorial
version of the legend, Flaubert gives us much more than a psycho–
logical reading of the miracles. The supernatural is no more imaginary
than the natural; or rather, both pathology and hagiography come
to have the same inventive distinction because the literal rendering of
both makes them equally historical and equally fictive. There is no
"reality" which the legend both makes sacred and obscures. While
