Three Tales

Within each tale the subtractive test is hard to pass. “Un cœur simple” compresses half a century into five sections and nothing in it is idle: the bull in the meadow, the walk to Honfleur, the whip across her face on the road, each is called on later. Its first sentence states the whole frame. “Saint Julien” has the inevitability of its prophecy, and every hunt is a step toward the bedroom. What holds the axis below the top is the book as a book: whether the triptych is required or three finished things bound together is a fair question, and “Hérodias” carries archaeological furniture (the citadel, the stores of arms, the factions at the banquet) that its drama does not all need.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. In “Un cœur simple”, a life of total love given to people who take it as service, by a woman with no words for it, is neither diminished by its objects nor redeemed by them: what she loves (a man who leaves, a child who dies, a nephew dead of fever in Havana, a stuffed parrot) does not measure the love. The book refuses both the sneer and the consolation. In “Saint Julien”, the appetite that kills and the appetite that sanctifies are one appetite. In “Hérodias”, history turns offstage while the powerful attend to taxes. Held lower because the second and third disclosures are carried more by pattern than by understanding of persons, and the third is partly a mood of decadence rather than a meaning.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height is reached in every tale, and at the close of each. Félicité dies in the heat of the Fête-Dieu with the censer smoke rising to her room, and sees, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head: grandeur and absurdity at one height. Julien’s great hunt goes on past reason, and the black stag curses him; at the end the leper on the river is warmed body against body, and the ascent follows. “Hérodias” rises at the dancer and falls to its plain last line. The dreadful stands as high as the warm: the parents in Julien’s bed. Held below the top because elevation is withheld by method for long stretches, most of all in the first half of “Hérodias”, and because the reader’s distance is part of the effect.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Myth built, in three ways. “Saint Julien” is an Oedipal fate built as plot: the prophecy, the two near misses (a sword that falls, an arrow loosed at what he takes for a stork), the deed done in ignorance, the expiation by ferry and the leper who is Christ. “Un cœur simple” builds a myth out of the provinces: the parrot, Loulou, becomes for Félicité the Holy Ghost by steps the story shows one by one (the image in church, the resemblance, the stuffing, the altar of repose), so that the archetype is made in the particular and never leaves it. “Hérodias” stands at the hinge of the Christian story. Together they trace the Holy Ghost, the Son and the Precursor backward through time. Held from the top because “Hérodias” evokes more than it builds.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The inheritance is the conte and the nouvelle, Mérimée’s and Balzac’s, the realist tale of provincial life, and the saint’s legend. The turn: the impersonal method, perfected in the novels, carried into the short form, so that a servant’s life, a legend and a chronicle of antiquity are written under one discipline in which irony and pathos are not chosen between; and the form of the triptych, three ages run backward, with the second tale closing on a legend told as the reading of a church window. The stake was real: a ruined man after two failures, turning to the minor form. What holds the axis at the bar is that the method was his own and proven in Madame Bovary; the departure is in application and arrangement more than a new road.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. “Un cœur simple” is told at the pace of a life seen from outside: years pass in a sentence and an afternoon takes pages, and the narration never rises above Félicité’s understanding to judge it, so that the parrot vision cannot be read as either mockery or miracle. A novel would explain her; the tale cannot, and that is the point. “Saint Julien” is written as the window it names: flat, bright, repetitive, sequential, a legend in panels. “Hérodias” is a single day in three sections, a classical unity, with its event offstage. The backward order makes the first tale’s Holy Ghost the last stage of a history the book then unwinds to its source. Held off the top only because the third tale’s form is more a container for its material.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: about a century and a half of reading has not settled the parrot. Is Félicité’s vision irony, tenderness, or both at full strength? Readers have not stopped arguing it, and Julian Barnes built a novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), on the question of which stuffed parrot was the model. “Saint Julien” keeps yielding on the relation of the hunt to the sanctity, and on the narrator’s closing “mon pays”, which turns the legend into an artefact. The structural readings of the triptych (three ages, three persons, three kinds of faith) are many, and none closes it. Held a step down because “Hérodias” has yielded less, and much of the commentary returns to the same few questions in the first tale.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The field is French prose fiction of the nineteenth century, and the short story in Europe. The force: the book showed that the short tale could carry the full weight of the impersonal art, that a servant’s life could be written with the gravity given to a saint’s, and that three historical registers could be held by one prose; it set a standard for the story as a made object. Held where it is because the reorganising force in Flaubert’s field was Madame Bovary, and this book perfects more than it redirects. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Maupassant, Flaubert’s pupil, worked in its light; Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909) was conceived from “Un cœur simple”; Wilde’s Salomé (1891) drew on “Hérodias” among other sources; and the line of the modern story through Joyce’s Dubliners is commonly traced to Flaubert’s method, the book one source among several.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is weighed on about a century and a half, and on the presence that span allows. The text survives whole, as published, with Flaubert’s own proofs; nothing in its fabric is charged. Presence is continuous: it is set in French schools and universities, translated into many languages and kept in print in English in several versions, and “Un cœur simple” is among the most anthologised and taught stories in French. Its surfaces, Normandy under the July Monarchy, the medieval legend, Roman Judaea, were period settings when it was written and have not dated the book. A survival under two centuries does not stand with the millennia, and the book’s widest presence is carried by one story of three: “Hérodias” is read far less than the first tale.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on the French, with the music of the sentence heard only as far as a reader of French prose hears it; the limit is the reader’s. The prose is as finished as any in the language: the rhythm of the paragraph, the placing of the concrete detail, the imperfect for a life’s habits and the past historic for its breaks, and clauses that close on a fact. The economy of “Un cœur simple” gives Félicité her love story in one sentence that refuses to make her exceptional. The last sentence of “Hérodias” carries the head of the Precursor to Galilee by turns, because it is heavy. Charged: in “Hérodias” the density of names, factions and artefacts sometimes clogs the narration. Elsewhere the making is load-bearing throughout.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Félicité’s room, crowded with relics of the dead and a stuffed bird, and the banquet hall at Machaerus with the Roman legate Vitellius, the Pharisees and the dancer. One law governs them: devotion and appetite pressed to the limit, seen without comment, until the sacred appears in the form the world allows it, a parrot, a leper, a severed head. The range is wide and held: the provinces, a legend in colour, an ancient court. Narrowness is not coherence, and this book is not narrow. Charged: the third tale’s political exposition runs on a looser law than the other two, and the unity of the triptych is partly an arrangement the reader is asked to complete.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what the book holds, as three tales. Consciousness: Félicité’s, given from outside and wholly. The family: Madame Aubain’s house, the children, the nephew, Julien’s parents. Labour: a servant’s fifty years of work, with the farms and the market. The state and history: Rome, the tetrarchy, the Arab war, the factions of Judaea, and the knight’s wars in Julien. The sacred: in all three, from popular devotion to legend to the Precursor. The natural order: the hunt, the animals, the sea at Trouville, the river. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that they are integrated by the triptych’s design more than by any one tale, and each tale holds few of them at depth: history in the first is ground only, the inner life in the third is thin.

Score: 8.0 / 10