Volume 41, Number 10 · May 26, 1994
Romancing Flaubert
By Julian Barnes
Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet, Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse
by Francine du Plessix Gray
Simon and Schuster, 432 pp., $27.50
Who burned Louise Colet's letters to Flaubert? For a century it was taken for granted that the destroyer was Flaubert's niece Caroline, the inheritor of his literary estate. Caroline, the stiff, correct, high-bourgeois protector, 'la dame si bien,' who in publishing her uncle's correspondence cut out any passages she deemed intimate or indecent, suppressed uncomplimentary opinions, changed his punctuation, and tidied up his phrasing; who wouldn't allow the expression 'tenir le bec hors de l'eau' in a letter to Turgenev, gentrifying it into 'tenir la tête hors de l'eau.' Such editorial interventionism was of the period: when negotiating with Louise Colet's equally proper daughter, Mme. Bissieu, Caroline received permission to publish 138 of Flaubert's letters to Louise (and none of the more unbuttoned ones) on the condition that she changed tu to vous throughout. What could be likelier, in this suppressive, censoring, cleaning-up ambience, than that Caroline, while adjusting her uncle's image into something more Pantheonic and less fun, should dispose of the no doubt licentious outpourings of the notoriously pesky Louise?
Review, 6354 words
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