The Feminist Critic Who Kept Flaubert on His Toes

Madame Bovary, c’est moi. The phrase, often attributed to Gustave Flaubert, may be better known than any line in his novels. But many scholars consider the remark to be apocryphal. It has trickled down through history thirdhand, first appearing in a footnote to a study of Flaubert by the scholar René Descharmes, in 1909. Descharmes reported that, according to someone he knew who was “intimately” acquainted with one of Flaubert’s women friends, it was to her that the writer uttered the phrase. That friend could easily be assumed to be Flaubert’s early lover, Louise Colet, the poet, novelist, and salonnière who was his main correspondent when he was composing “Madame Bovary,” in the eighteen-fifties. But, in fact, the woman Descharmes cited was a novelist, folklorist, and socialist feminist activist who, like Flaubert, hailed from Rouen. Her name—known today to careful readers of Flaubert’s letters, if few others—was Amélie Bosquet.

Almost all Bosquet’s letters to and from various nineteenth-century writers and intellectuals remain unpublished; nearly all her exchanges with Flaubert are untranslated. As these letters reveal, throughout the eighteen-sixties, Flaubert and Bosquet maintained a flirtatious (though by all accounts platonic) friendship. Then, suddenly and definitively, the correspondence broke off. Their rupture was no lover’s spat. It was occasioned by Bosquet’s feminist riposte to Flaubert’s 1869 novel, “Sentimental Education,” in a quarrel that became literary, political, and deeply personal all at once.

The two writers met in Rouen, sometimes called the “Manchester of France,” where both were born in the early years of the Bourbon Restoration (she in 1815, he six years later). Neither had children; neither ever married. Both relished their independence, the freedom they found necessary to work. Their friendship solidified over a shared distaste for capitalist culture and the provincial bourgeoisie. Bosquet’s first novella, written under a male pseudonym and published as “A Provincial Passion” in a literary review, bears a striking resemblance to “Madame Bovary,” which had appeared in the same publication mere months earlier. Like Emma Bovary, Bosquet’s protagonist dreams of Paris from provincial Normandy and nurses his amorous difficulties through reading.

But here the similarities end. Raised in a working-class neighborhood, Bosquet came from a humbler background than Flaubert, a doctor’s son, and was a passionately committed socialist; she believed that a novel could and should illuminate injustice and spark social change, and she used her fiction to explore the lives of the working classes, especially working women. This put her in opposition to Flaubert, who espoused an equal disdain for capitalism, monarchism, and socialism, and who saw progress as a bourgeois fantasy. (Human beings, as he once wrote to Colet, are like Sisyphus, always “rolling the same stone.”) The role of literature, he thought, was not to intervene in the world but to record it as impartially as possible. Flaubert famously declared, in an 1852 letter to Colet, that “an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” In 1866, he tried out another version of his authorial dictum with Bosquet: “In my view, a novelist has no right to give his opinion on the things of this world. He should, in his own creation, imitate God’s: that is, do his work, then shut up.” (The French is more stylish: “faire et se taire.”)

The story of Flaubert’s epistolary friendship with Bosquet is inextricable from the philosophical, social, and aesthetic questions that preoccupied them both all their lives. What role should the writer play in the modern world? How, if at all, might politics find its way into writing? What kind of work is the peculiar labor of literature? Why, after all, does one write? Bosquet and Flaubert came up with radically different answers to these questions. At first, their debates and disagreements on these matters were playful, even coy. But over time the quarrel stopped being fun. Their positions solidified. The stakes grew higher. As Flaubert moved into ever more aristocratic circles in Paris, and as Bosquet came to frequent a radical feminist milieu, their diverging opinions on the proper relationship between literature and life began to tear them apart.

The two writers met at Rouen’s municipal library. In a letter from October, 1863, Flaubert reminisced about their first encounter, a few years earlier. He had caught sight of Bosquet sitting at a table and eating mirlitons, a local pastry. The powdered sugar had left a faint mustache on her upper lip. “You were so charming, one could almost bite into you,” he wrote.

They soon developed an epistolary relationship that, at least on Flaubert’s side, revelled in innuendo: a play of the dotted line. “I kiss your hands,” he wrote in July, 1860, “since propriety (!!!) prevents me from going further . . . *” (At the bottom of the page, he glossed the asterisk: “*Dotted lines always express Reverie.”) Bosquet became a welcome visitor to Flaubert’s family home at Croisset. Their letters describe them passing whole afternoons together, swapping books, reading each other’s writing, and complaining about Rouen’s dull mercantile culture. Flaubert spent much of his time in Paris, and Bosquet visited him there more than once.“Did you know that on your last trip,” he wrote in autumn, 1862, “the two times we saw each other remained not on, but in my heart? I feel that we were more intimate than usual; there was . . . I don’t know. Something very good, strong and tender at the same time . . . and like a gentle embrace. I like you very much when you’re not teasing.”

Bosquet never came close to matching such a tone. She kept her distance, signing one of her letter with the valediction “I shake your hand with all my heart.” (In another letter, he replied, “although you call me Monsieur, I kiss you on both sides of your lovely neck.”) “He never, according to the old-fashioned expression, ‘courted’ me, and I never wished him to,” she wrote later. “Nonetheless our conversations were very lively, and we’d often talk for two or three hours one-on-one. But the intoxication that took hold of us then was entirely intellectual.”

Her note may protest slightly too much. Yet, as the literary critic Antoine Albalat once wrote, Flaubert “expected nothing from love; he demanded everything of friendship.” Those demands, which the writer placed on his major female correspondents—Colet, Bosquet, and, later, the writer George Sand—included serving as a sympathetic audience for his prolific tirades about contemporary mediocrity and the miseries of literary composition. But he knew how to listen, too. His letters to Bosquet reveal that he came to treat her as an intellectual interlocutor. “Try to be alone next Sunday afternoon so that we can be at our leisure to littératurer together,” one letter reads. When Bosquet’s mother died, in May, 1862, Flaubert sent her a letter of condolences from Paris, advising her, “Throw yourself headlong into work. Ink is an intoxicating wine: let us dive into dreams since life is so terrible!” Writing as secular salvation, literature as drug of choice: Flaubert would return to these themes in other letters. “Let’s get drunk on ink, since we lack the nectar of the gods,” he wrote Bosquet later that year. (He had fallen upon a felicitous phrase; years later, in January, 1869, he would echo the sentiment in a letter to Sand: “To get drunk on ink is better than to get drunk on brandy.”)

Bosquet didn’t need to be convinced that she should prioritize her own literary career. With mourning had come a certain freedom. She went on the hunt for a Parisian flat: at forty-eight, she was finally ready to try her luck in the capital. In 1863, she relocated from central Rouen to an apartment in Batignolles, a neighborhood in northwest Paris. “After all, you couldn’t have stayed in Rouen any longer,” Flaubert wrote, shortly after she moved. “You were drowning in boredom.”

Like many aspiring writers in the city, Bosquet struggled to find her footing. She suffered not only for being a provincial in the capital but for being a woman with literary aspirations. She may not have dressed like a man, like Sand had sometimes done, but she was subject to much the same heckling as the older author was. The right-wing writer and critic Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly ridiculed Bosquet as a “thick, flamboyant woman” with “a shadow of a mustache on her lip.” When she turned up at the offices of the journal La Liberté to ask for an audience with the editor, Émile de Girardin, his assistants gave her directions to Girardin’s home so as to get rid of her. When she called on him, Girardin, without ceremony, showed her the door. “He received me as one receives an unwelcome beggar,” she wrote to Flaubert.

Flaubert, at least, didn’t treat Bosquet as an unwanted visitor; he maintained their connection and introduced her to editors and journalists. But he scolded his friend for her worldly ambitions, writing in one letter, “Watch out—you may well catch that Parisian disease, Celebrity.” At the same time, as his correspondence attests, he himself had recently become a regular at the salon of Princess Mathilde, the emperor’s cousin; she took pride in curating a collection of guests from across Parisian arts and letters. In 1866, thanks in part to her intercession, he was awarded the Legion of Honor, a prize that he had mocked in the last line of “Madame Bovary.”

Bosquet persevered. Within a few years, she had won the attention of some Parisian editors. Between 1864 and 1869, she published four novels—all while Flaubert was still laboring over “Sentimental Education.” After she wrote to seek his response to the third book, “Novel of Working Women” (1866), about the plight of textile workers in Rouen, he obliquely derided her prolific output: “Are we novelists or are we farmers?” He criticized what he saw as the book’s stylistic failings, writing, “You have sufficiently troubled yourself with the True, but not enough with the Beautiful.” As he saw it, Bosquet was no longer sufficiently devoted to what he called “sacrosanct style.” In letting her political views guide her choice of subject, she had collapsed moral value with aesthetic judgment.

Bosquet, meanwhile, was becoming an increasingly recalcitrant disciple. She had fallen in with a circle of radicals and feminists, including Élisée Reclus and André Léo (the pseudonym of Victoire Léodile Béra), later to become central figures in the Paris Commune of 1871. With Léo, Bosquet attended a series of public meetings on “women’s work,” and at one point even mustered the courage to stand up and speak. Flaubert couldn’t stand Léo (“a talent of the twenty-third rank”) or the other left-wing writers and activists clustered around Bosquet’s neighborhood. He told his correspondent to “look past the People, for that is a limited, transient horizon.” He also neglected to pay her a visit on several of his next Parisian tours.“I hope, my dear friend, that it isn’t this democratic sin that’s preventing you from coming to see me,” she wrote to Flaubert in 1869, in a letter recounting her participation in the public meetings. She had become a columnist for a new feminist newspaper, Le Droit des Femmes, that year. Did he disapprove of her position? “As for me,” she added, “your aristocracy doesn’t prevent me from having the sincerest affection for you.” In any case, she told him, she was looking forward to reading the novel he was finally perfecting: it would be “a pleasure both intellectual and sentimental.”

When Flaubert sent her a copy of “Sentimental Education,” she responded with a complimentary note, writing that the book contained “everything I know and love about your talent and even your character.” Less than a month later, in a two-part review of the novel in the December 11 and December 18, 1869, issues of Le Droit des Femmes, she would balance such praise with a harsher critique.

Flaubert’s novel, which he (correctly) concluded was misunderstood, is a portrait of Parisian society around the revolution of 1848. It features a cast of students, artists, industrialists, sex workers, and republican activists, all centered on the hapless protagonist Frédéric Moreau, who can never quite manage to commit to a career, to a politics, or to a mistress. The book casts a jaundiced eye on the high-minded aspirations and petty quarrels of Flaubert’s contemporaries, employing an irony that verges at times on contempt. When it was published, Victor Hugo and a young Émile Zola praised Flaubert’s achievement. Parisian newspapers across the political spectrum had a frostier reaction, calling it pessimistic, overly descriptive, and lacking in moral clarity. They found Frédéric’s impotence as infuriating as the novel’s own refusal to take a clear stance on revolution. Flaubert had seen this coming, writing to George Sand in mid-1868 that “the patriots won’t forgive me this book—nor the reactionaries either!”

Neither would the feminists. Bosquet spent part of her review praising Flaubert’s capacity to seize on the perfect phrase. He had discovered expressions “whose precision defies critique,” she wrote. But she quickly turned to politics, pointing out that the interior life of Madame Arnoux, the married woman who is the target of Frédéric’s starry-eyed passion, remains unplumbed. “Why then, do M. Flaubert’s women never speak?” she asked. The sole exception, she noted, was a minor character named Mademoiselle Vatnaz, an idealistic feminist who is part of Frédéric’s circle in Paris. And yet Mademoiselle Vatnaz was a “go-between and thief,” Bosquet wrote, who could only be an “affront to our cause.”

Flaubert’s description of Mademoiselle Vatnaz may well have hit close to home. Once a schoolteacher in the provinces, he writes, she had moved to the capital and become

one of those Parisian unmarried ladies who each evening, when they have finished giving lessons, or tried to sell little drawings or place pitiful manuscripts, go back to their apartment with mud on their skirts, make dinner, eat it alone, then, feet on a warming jar by the light of a dirty lamp, dream of love, a family, a home, money, everything they don’t have. So in common with many others she greeted the Revolution as the harbinger of revenge. And she gave herself up to a frenzy of socialist propaganda.

In one scene that bears strong echoes of Bosquet’s fiction and journalism, the character insists that “the emancipation of the proletariat was possible only through the emancipation of women.” A few weeks earlier, Bosquet had specifically mentioned Mademoiselle Vatnaz in the letter she sent to Flaubert upon finishing the novel: “You have given the woman who defends her rights a rather degrading role; but we will lift it back up, that role—it has already been taken up!” She may have been wounded by Flaubert’s depiction of revolutionary feminism, but their years of conversation and correspondence had also equipped her with certain tools. She had grasped the stakes of his method and knew how to counter it on her own terms.

In her review, Bosquet echoed Flaubert’s cherished literary theory back to him mockingly. “He claims to soar atop his work like the God of the spiritualists soars above creation,” she wrote. She proposed a different way to tread the bounds between beauty, truth, and art: “We feel that the world outside, despite its faults and weaknesses, is better than the one in which the author envelops us. There we can seek what the book doesn’t give us: the breath of air that revives, and which we do sometimes find.”

On December 11, Bosquet wrote her “dear friend” a letter to which she appended the first half of the review. “The article isn’t kind, I admit,” she wrote, “but I couldn’t do otherwise.” She went on: “I thought you would accuse me of ingratitude if I did write this review, and with cowardice if I didn’t. The alternative was awkward. It will be up to you to tell me if I chose well or ill.” In closing, she wrote, “Mille amitiés.”

The letter was met with silence. But Flaubert did allude to the affair in his correspondence with other friends. To George Sand, he wrote, “A friend, Mademoiselle Bosquet (who has received real favors from me), wrote me two very bitter letters, and the second was accompanied by an article in La Voix des Femmes [sic], in which she really tore me up.”

1869 had been a difficult year for Flaubert. He had lost his close childhood friend, Louis Bouilhet. He was smarting from the negative reviews of “Sentimental Education.” His ego was bruised by Bosquet’s attack; his friendship, he felt, betrayed. Félix Frank, a mutual friend, tried to reconcile the pair, but Flaubert refused. He had told Bosquet himself, years before, “As for forgetting about my trial and giving up on my grudges, by no means! I’m made of slate for making impressions and of bronze for holding onto them. With me, nothing is ever erased; everything accumulates.”

No further letters from Flaubert to Bosquet have been found. In 1892, nearing the end of her life, Bosquet donated her letters from Flaubert and other literary luminaries—carefully annotated in her looping, generously legible cursive—to Rouen’s municipal library, where they had first met.

Today, there is a veritable Flaubert industry clustered around the University of Rouen’s Centre Gustave Flaubert, and the definitive Pléiade edition of his correspondence stretches to five volumes, plus a separate index—each one printed on whisper-thin paper, each numbering thousands of pages. That published correspondence includes some of his most enduring comments on the art of the novel. It’s rightly considered a literary achievement on par with his fiction. In contrast, remnants of Bosquet’s archive are strewn across several libraries and collections, from the library in Rouen to Paris’s National Library and the Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville. When Bosquet died, in 1904, she was mourned in the pages of the women’s-rights newspaper La Fronde as “one more loss to the feminist camp.” Another brief obituary got both her dates of birth and death wrong.

What we have come to consider certain key virtues of the novel—show, don’t tell; focalize scenes through a narrative center; polish your sentences until they gleam—can in large part be traced to Flaubert. He insisted that the true artist need not answer to anyone, that he had no master other than the writing itself. Yet he did so as he was responding, even objecting, to the style and substance of his friends’ writings. If Flaubert’s literary criticism set the terms of our own, it developed in dialogue with and in opposition to his interlocutors—often, if not exclusively, his female correspondents. Letters are a dialogic form. But dialogue doesn’t always mean reciprocity. In Bosquet and Flaubert’s correspondence, we can glimpse the social, and deeply gendered, stakes of long-standing and ongoing debates on the autonomy of literature and art. ♦