Beautiful poetic prose by Flaubert PLUS a great professional narration of these 3 works from David Barnes of Librivox ( )

In 1877, towards the end of his life, Flaubert published Three Tales, which included "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller," "A Simple Soul," and "Hérodias." My book, Three Short Works, which I downloaded from Project Gutenberg, substitutes "The Dance of Death" for "Hérodias" for reasons unknown. The three stories I read represent, if not the full range, at least some part of Flaubert's range of storytelling techniques. I had already downloaded A Simple Soul as a separate work, not realizing it was part of this collection.

"The Dance of Death"
Flaubert wrote this in 1838 when he was seventeen years old, and he called it "a prose poem." It reflects Romanticism in full bloom. It is full of irony and is beautifully written.

Death blames God for his eternal state of wreaking destruction. He is tired; he wants to sleep. He loves Satan who has seemingly abandoned him. "I am doomed to lasting solitude upon my way strewn with the bones of men and marked by ruins."

Death waxes eloquent about his horse, his only companion, who participates fully in the chaos: "My steed! I love thee as Pale Death alone can love. . . . Stars may be quenched, the mountains crumble, the earth finally wear away its diamond axis; but we two, we alone are immortal, for the impalpable lives forever!"

Then Satan speaks: "Dost thou complain — thou, the most fortunate creature under heaven? The only splendid, great, unchangeable, eternal one — like God, who is the only being that equals thee!"

Satan acknowledges that in the end, when all has been destroyed, death too will ". . . cast thyself into the abyss of oblivion . . . all must die — except Satan! Immortal more than God! I live to bring chaos into other worlds!"

After bragging how powerful he is against God, he begins to catalog his own complaints against God and how he must "inhale the stench of crimes that cry aloud to heaven."

Suddenly, the scene changes to a procession in ancient Rome, led by Nero, "pride of my heart, the greatest poet earth has known!"

Nero speaks, his madness apparent: "This night I shall burn Rome. The flames shall light up heaven, and the Tiber shall roll in waves of fire!"

But Nero hears death approaching: "What didst thou say? Must I die now?"

DEATH: "Instantly!"

NERO: "Die! I have scarce begun to live!"

But death has the last word.

"The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller"
This story — based in part on a medieval legend and told in that style — was written in 1876, just before Flaubert began to write A Simple Soul. It is the story of Julian, the son of a castle lord, who was one of those children who took a sadistic pleasure in killing small animals. As he grew older, his father taught him to hunt, providing an endless supply of dogs and birds of prey. As a young man, he would go out on a hunting trek which lasted for many days, wantonly killing every animal in sight. Once, when he had killed a doe and her fawn, a great stag which had seen this charged toward Julian, who shot his last arrow at the stag. The arrow struck between the stag's antlers, but it continued toward Julian. Suddenly, the stag halted and called out: "Accursed! Accursed! Accursed! Some day thou wilt murder they father and thy mother!" Then the stag fell to his knees and died.

Julian could not put this curse out of his mind. He returned home and took to his bed with a strange illness. Eventually he recovered, and he did in fact kill his parents in a strange set of Oedipus-like circumstances. Upon realizing what he had done, he abandoned all worldly goods and took up the life of a wandering beggar.

Eventually, Julian is presented with an opportunity for atonement and he experiences an apotheosis and is carried away into heaven.

A Simple Soul
The importance of this novella — also known as "A Simple Heart" and "Un Coeur simple" — was revived by Julian Barnes' 1984 book Flaubert's Parrot, which is the source of my interest in reading it. In an 1876 letter to a friend, Flaubert writes:

Do you know what I've had on my table in front of me for the last three weeks? A stuffed parrot. It sits there on sentry duty. The sight of it is beginning to irritate me. But I keep it there so that I can fill my head with the idea of parrothood. Because at the moment I'm writing about the love between an old girl and a parrot.

The "old girl" in question is Félicité, a young servant girl, who gains employment in the household of Madame Aubain:

For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did the housework, washed, ironed, mended, harnessed the horse, fattened the poultry, made the butter and remained faithful to her mistress—although the latter was by no means an agreeable person.

At some point the household acquired a hand-me-down parrot, whose novelty wore thin after a while, and it ended up belonging to Félicité. Eventually the parrot died and Félicité had him stuffed.

In church she had noticed that something about the parrot resembled the Holy Spirit. And she had acquired a picture of Jesus' baptism where the resemblance was even more marked. She hung this picture, before which she acquired the habit of praying, in her room, and over the years the parrot became in her mind an actual representation of the Holy Spirit. As an old woman on her death bed, deaf and almost blind:

The beats of her heart grew fainter and fainter, and vaguer, like a fountain giving out, like an echo dying away; and when she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw in the half-opened heavens a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.

Many questions arise regarding these stories. Was Flaubert mocking religion in his usual way? Was he laughing at poor simple Félicité, or Julian for that matter? The mockery is apparent in the first story about Death. But it was written decades before and really bears little in common with the latter two stories.

We know from Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand that he wrote A Simple Soul in response to a challenge from her to write something positive and sympathetic. She had complained that his books were too filled with pessimism and desolation. He was in the process of writing A Simple Soul when George Sand died, so she never actually read it. But Flaubert pushed on and finished it. Here is what he had to say about his own motivation:

A "Simple Heart" is just the account of an obscure life, that of Félicité a poor country girl, pious but mystical, quietly devoted, and as tender as fresh bread. She loves successively a man, her mistress, her mistress' children, a nephew, an old man she is taking care of, then her parrot. When the parrot dies she has him stuffed, and when she herself is dying, she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. It's not at all ironic, as you suppose, but on the contrary, very serious and very sad. I want to arouse people's pity, to make sensitive souls weep, since I am one myself.

It would seem to me that this story and Flaubert's comment should be taken at face value. While equating the parrot with the Holy Spirit may seem blasphemous to some, one cannot discount the archetypal significance that the apotheosized parrot provided for Félicité in the waning days of her life. ( )