Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880)
French novelist.
One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
"What's improper about it?" retorted the clerk. "Everybody does it in Paris!"
It was an irresistible and conclusive argument.
He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.
"I well understand your doing this," said the notary. "A man of science can't be expected to burden himself with the practical details of existence." Charles felt soothed by these oily words: they flattered his weakness, making it look like preoccupation with lofty things.
"What's more delightful than an evening beside the fire with a nice bright lamp and a book, listening to the wind beating against the windows?"
"How true!" she said, her great dark eyes fixed widely on him.
"I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times," he said. "The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of -- I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters -- I live and breathe with them."
How happy she had been in those days! How free! How full of hope! How rich in illusions! There were no illusions left now. She had had to part with some each time she had ventured on a new path, in each of her successive conditions -- as virgin, as wife, as mistress; all along the course of her life she had been losing them, like a traveler leaving a bit of his fortune in every inn along the road.
Rien n'est humiliant comme de voir les sots réussir dans les entreprises o? l'on échoue.
But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Our duty is to feel what is great and love what is beautiful -- not to accept all the social conventions and the infamies they impose on us.
Nothing specific stood out against the vast background of the future that she thus evoked: the days were all of them splendid, and as alike as the waves of the sea; and the whole thing hovered on the horizon, infinite, harmonious, blue and sparkling in the sun.
First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again.
There was a silence. They looked at each other; and their thoughts clung together in their common anguish like two throbbing hearts.
"What an unutterable catastrophe!" The apothecary always had the proper expression ready, whatever the occasion.
But even as they were brought closer together by the details of daily life, she was separated from him by a growing sense of inward detachment. Charles' conversation was flat as a sidewalk, a place of passage for the ideas of everyman; they wore drab everyday clothes, and they inspired neither laughter nor dreams.
She was filled with wonderment at the discovery that there was a bliss greater than mere happiness -- a love different from and transcending all others -- a love without break and without end, a love that increased throughout eternity!... She conceived the idea of becoming a saint. She bought rosaries and festooned herself with holy medals; she wished she had an emerald-studded reliquary within reach at her bed's head, to kiss every night.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Self-confidence depends on surroundings: the same person talks quite differently in the drawing room and in the garret, and a rich woman's virtue is protected by her banknotes quite effectively as by any cuirass worn under a corset.
Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d'?tre violent et original dans vos ?uvres.
What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.