The old lady gave a dry little laugh. “So if the farmers use a word it is quite safe, eh?”

  Yes, I told her, that was exactly what I meant; safe.

  We talked a little longer on that first occasion. She asked if I had been to Chamonix, and strongly advised me to go to a place near Sallanches, where she had lately been visiting friends, on her way to Aix-les-Bains. In replying to her questions I fell into the stupid way one sometimes adopts when speaking to people of another language; tried to explain something in very simple words. She frowned and checked me with: “Speak idiomatically, please. I knew English quite well at one time. If I speak it badly, it is because now I have no practice.”

  I said good-night and sat down at a desk to write letters. But on the way to my room I stopped to tell the friend with whom I was travelling that the old French lady we had so often admired spoke very good English, and spoke it easily; that she seemed, indeed, to have a rather special feeling for language.

  II

  The next day was intensely hot. In the morning the beautiful mountain ridges which surround Aix stood out sharp and clear, but the vineyards looked wilted. Toward noon the hills grew misty, and the sun poured down through a slightly milky atmosphere. I rather dreaded the heat of a concert hall, but at two o’clock I went to Albert Wolff’s concert, and heard such a rendition of Ravel’s La Valse as I do not expect to hear again; a small orchestra, wonderfully trained, and a masterly conductor.

  The program was long, with two intermissions. The last group did not seem to be especially interesting, and the concert was quite long enough, and fine enough, without those numbers. I decided that I could miss them. I would go up to the Square and have tea beside the Roman arch. As I left the hall by the garden entrance, I saw the old French lady seated on the veranda with her maid, wearing a white dress and a white lace garden hat, fanning herself vigorously, the beads of moisture on her face making dark streaks in the powder. She beckoned to me and asked whether I had enjoyed the music. I told her that I had, very much indeed; but now my capacity for enjoying, or even listening, was quite spent, and I was going up to the Square for tea.

  “Oh, no,” said she, “that is not necessary. You can have your tea here at the Maison des Fleurs quite well, and still have time to go back for the last group.”

  I thanked her and went across the garden, but I did not mean to see the concert through. Seeing things through was evidently a habit with this old lady: witness the way she was seeing life through, going to concerts and operas in this wilting heat; being concerned that other people should go, moreover, and caring about the way in which Ravel was played, when in the course of nature her interest in new music should have stopped with César Franck, surely.

  I left the Casino gardens through a grotto that gave into the street, went up to the Square, and had tea with some nice English people I had met on Mont Revard, a young business man and his wife come over for their holiday. I felt a little as if I had escaped from an exacting preceptress. The old lady took it for granted that one wished to accomplish as much as possible in a given space of time. I soon found that, to her, life meant just that — accomplishing things; “doing them always a little better and better,” as she once remarked after I came to know her.

  While I was dressing for dinner I decided to go away for a few days, up into the high mountains of Haute-Savoie, under Mont Blanc. That evening, when the old lady stopped me to discuss the concert, I asked her for some suggestions about the hotels there, since at our first meeting she had said I must certainly go to some of the mountain places easily reached from Sallanches.

  She at once recommended a hotel that was very high and cool, and then told me of all the excursions I must make from that place, outlining a full program which I knew I should not follow. I was going away merely to escape the heat and to regard Mont Blanc from an advantageous point — not to become acquainted with the country.

  III

  My trip into the mountains was wholly successful. All the suggestions the old lady had given me proved excellent, and I felt very grateful to her. I stayed away longer than I had intended. I returned to Aix-les-Bains late one night, got up early the next morning, and went to the bank, feeling that Aix is always a good place to come back to. When I returned to the hotel for lunch, there was the old lady, sitting in a chair just outside the door, looking worn and faded. Why, since she had her car and her driver there, she had not run away from the heat, I do not know. But she had stayed through it, and gone out sketching every morning. She greeted me very cordially, asked whether I had an engagement for the evening, and suggested that we should meet in the salon after dinner.

  I was dining with my friend, and after dinner we both went into the writing-room where the old lady was awaiting us. Our acquaintance seemed to have progressed measurably in my absence, though neither of us as yet knew the other’s name. Her name, I thought, would mean very little; she was what she was. No one could fail to recognize her distinction and authority; it was in the carriage of her head, in her fine hands, in her voice, in every word she uttered in any language, in her brilliant, very piercing eyes. I had no curiosity about her name; that would be an accident and could scarcely matter.

  We talked very comfortably for a time. The old lady made some comment on the Soviet experiment in Russia. My friend remarked that it was fortunate for the great group of Russian writers that none of them had lived to see the Revolution; Gogol, Tolstoi, Turgeniev.

  “Ah, yes,” said the old lady with a sigh, “for Turgeniev, especially, all this would have been very terrible. I knew him well at one time.”

  I looked at her in astonishment. Yes, of course, it was possible. She was very old. I told her I had never met anyone who had known Turgeniev.

  She smiled. “No? I saw him very often when I was a young girl. I was much interested in German, in the great works. I was making a translation of Faust, for my own pleasure, merely, and Turgeniev used to go over my translation and correct it from time to time. He was a great friend of my uncle. I was brought up in my uncle’s house.” She was becoming excited as she spoke, her face grew more animated, her voice warmer, something flashed in her eyes, some strong feeling awoke in her. As she went on, her voice shook a little. “My mother died at my birth, and I was brought up in my uncle’s house. He was more than father to me. My uncle also was a man of letters, Gustave Flaubert, you may perhaps know . . .” She murmured the last phrase in a curious tone, as if she had said something indiscreet and were evasively dismissing it.

  The meaning of her words came through to me slowly; so this must be the “Caro” of the Lettres à sa Nièce Caroline. There was nothing to say, certainly. The room was absolutely quiet, but there was nothing to say to this disclosure. It was like being suddenly brought up against a mountain of memories. One could not see round it; one could only stupidly realize that in this mountain which the old lady had conjured up by a phrase and a name or two lay most of one’s mental past. Some moments went by. There was no word with which one could greet such a revelation. I took one of her lovely hands and kissed it, in homage to a great period, to the names that made her voice tremble.

  She laughed an embarrassed laugh, and spoke hurriedly. “Oh, that is not necessary! That is not at all necessary.” But the tone of distrust, the faint challenge in that “you may perhaps know . . .” had disappeared. “Vous connaissez bien les œuvres de mon oncle?”

  Who did not know them? I asked her.

  Again the dry tone, with a shrug. “Oh, I almost never meet anyone who really knows them. The name, of course, its place in our literature, but not the works themselves. I never meet anyone now who cares much about them.”

  Great names are awkward things in conversation, when one is a chance acquaintance. One cannot be too free with them; they have too much value. The right course, I thought, was to volunteer nothing, above all to ask no questions; to let the old lady say what she would, ask what she would. She wished, it seemed, to talk about les œuvres de mon oncle. Her attack was uncertain; she touched here and there. It was a large subject. She told me she had edited the incomplete Bouvard et Pécuchet after his death, that La Tentation de Saint Antoine had been his own favourite among his works; she supposed I would scarcely agree with his choice?

  No, I was sorry, but I could not.

  “I suppose you care most for Madame Bovary?”

  One can hardly discuss that book; it is a fact in history. One knows it too well to know it well.

  “And yet,” she murmured, “my uncle got only five hundred francs for it from the publisher. Of course, he did not write for money. Still, he would have been pleased . . . Which one, then, do you prefer?”

  I told her that a few years ago I had reread L’Éducation sentimentale, and felt that I had never risen to its greatness before.

  She shook her head. “Ah, too long, prolix, trop de conversation. And Frédéric is very weak.”

  But there was an eagerness in her face, and I knew by something in her voice that this was like Garibaldi’s proclamation to his soldiers on the retreat from Rome, when he told them he could offer them cold and hunger and sickness and misery. He offered something else, too, but the listeners must know that for themselves.

  It had seemed to me when I last read L’Éducation sentimentale that its very faults were of a noble kind. It is too cold, certainly, to justify the subtitle, Roman d’un jeune homme; for youth, even when it has not generous enthusiasm, has at least fierce egotism. But I had wondered whether this cool, dispassionate, almost contemptuous presentation of Frédéric were not a protest against the overly sympathetic manner of Balzac in his stories of young men: Eugène de Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempré, Horace Bianchon, and all the others. Certainly Balzac’s habit of playing up his characters, of getting into the ring and struggling and sweating with them, backing them with all his animal heat, must have been very distasteful to Flaubert. It was perhaps this quality of salesmanship in Balzac which made Flaubert say of him in a letter to this same niece Caroline: “He is as ignorant as a pot, and bourgeois to the marrow.”

  Of course, a story of youth, which altogether lacks that gustatory zest, that exaggerated concern for trivialities, is scarcely successful. In L’Éducation the trivialities are there (for life is made up of them), but not the voracious appetite which drives young people through silly and vulgar experiences. The story of Frédéric is a story of youth with the heart of youth left out; and of course it is often dull. But the latter chapters of the book justify one’s journey through it. Then all the hero’s young life becomes more real than it was as one followed it from year to year, and the story ends on a high plateau. From that great and quiet last scene, seated by the fire with the two middle-aged friends (who were never really friends, but who had been young together), one looks back over Frédéric’s life and finds that one has it all, even the dull stretches. It is something one has lived through, not a story one has read; less diverting than a story, perhaps, but more inevitable. One is “left with it,” in the same way that one is left with a weak heart after certain illnesses. A shadow has come into one’s consciousness that will not go out again.

  The old French lady and I talked for some time about L’Éducation sentimentale. She spoke with warm affection, with tenderness, of Madame Arnoux.

  “Ah yes, Madame Arnoux, she is beautiful!” The moisture in her bright eyes, the flush on her cheeks, and the general softening of her face said much more. That charming and good woman of the middle classes, the wife who holds the story together (as she held Frédéric himself together), passed through the old lady’s mind so vividly that it was as if she had entered the room. Madame Arnoux was there with us, in that hotel at Aix, on the evening of September 5, 1930, a physical presence, in the charming costume of her time, as on the night when Frédéric first dined at 24 rue de Choiseul. The niece had a very special feeling for this one of her uncle’s characters. She lingered over the memory, recalling her as she first appears, sitting on the bench of a passenger boat on the Seine, in her muslin gown sprigged with green and her wide straw hat with red ribbons. Whenever the old lady mentioned Madame Arnoux it was with some mark of affection; she smiled, or sighed, or shook her head as we do when we speak of something that is quite unaccountably fine: “Ah yes, she is lovely, Madame Arnoux! She is very complete.”

  The old lady told me that she had at home the corrected manuscript of L’Éducation sentimentale. “Of course I have many others. But this he gave me long before his death. You shall see it when you come to my place at Antibes. I call my place the Villa Tanit, pour la déesse,” she added with a smile.

  The name of the goddess took us back to Salammbô, which is the book of Flaubert I like best. I like him in those great reconstructions of the remote and cruel past. When I happened to speak of the splendid final sentence of Hérodias, where the fall of the syllables is so suggestive of the hurrying footsteps of John’s disciples, carrying away with them their prophet’s severed head, she repeated that sentence softly: “Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient al-ter-na-tiv-e-ment.”

  The hour grew late. The maid had been standing in the corridor a long while, waiting for her mistress. At last the old lady rose and drew her wrap about her.

  “Good night, madame. May you have pleasant dreams. As for me, I shall not sleep; you have recalled too much.” She went toward the lift with the energetic, unconquered step with which she always crossed the dining-room, carrying with hardihood a body no longer perfectly under her control.

  When I reached my room and opened my windows I, too, felt that sleep was far from me. The full moon (like the moon in Salammbô) stood over the little square and flooded the gardens and quiet streets and the misty mountains with light. The old lady had brought that great period of French letters very near; a period which has meant so much in the personal life of everyone to whom French literature has meant anything at all.

  IV

  Probably all those of us who had the good fortune to come upon the French masters accidentally, and not under the chilling guidance of an instructor, went through very much the same experience. We all began, of course, with Balzac. And to young people, for very good reasons, he seems the final word. They read and reread him, and live in his world; to inexperience, that world is neither overpeopled nor overfurnished. When they begin to read Flaubert — usually Madame Bovary is the introduction — they resent the change of tone; they miss the glow, the ardour, the temperament. (It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré at Balzac’s own estimate, one has lived in vain.) We first read Bovary with a certain hostility; the wine is too dry for us. We try, perhaps, another work of Flaubert, and with a shrug go back to Balzac. But young people who are at all sensitive to certain qualities in writing will not find the Balzac they left. Something has happened to them which dampens their enjoyment. For a time it looks as if they had lost both Balzac and Flaubert. They recover both, eventually, and read each for what he is, having learned that an artist’s limitations are quite as important as his powers; that they are a definite asset, not a deficiency, and that both go to form his flavour, his personality, the thing by which the ear can immediately recognize Flaubert, Stendhal, Mérimée, Thomas Hardy, Conrad, Brahms, César Franck.

  The fact remains that Balzac, like Dickens and Scott, has a strong appeal for the great multitudes of humanity who have no feeling for any form of art, and who read him only in poor translations. This is overwhelming evidence of the vital force in him, which no rough handling can diminish. Also it implies the lack in him of certain qualities which matter to only a few people, but matter very much. The time in one’s life when one first began to sense the things which Flaubert stood for, to admire (almost against one’s will) that peculiar integrity of language and vision, that coldness which, in him, is somehow noble — that is a pleasant chapter of one’s life to remember, and Madame Franklin Grout had brought it back within arm’s length of me that night.

  V

  For that was her name. Next morning the valet de chambre brought me a visiting card on which was engraved:

  MADAME FRANKLIN GROUT

  ANTIBES

  In one corner Villa Tanit was written in purple ink.

  In the evening we sat in the writing-room again, and Madame Grout’s talk touched upon many things. On the Franco-Prussian War, for instance, and its effect upon her uncle. He had seen to it that she herself was comfortably settled in England through most of that troubled time. And during the late war of 1914 she had been in Italy a great deal. She loved Italian best of all the languages she spoke so well. (She spoke Swedish, even; she had lived for a time in Sweden during the life of her first husband, who had business interests there.)

  She talked of Turgeniev, of her uncle’s affection for him and great admiration for him as an artist. She liked to recall his pleasant visits to Croisset, which were the reward of long anticipation on the part of the hosts. Turgeniev usually fixed the date by letter, changed it by another letter, then again by telegram — and sometimes he did not come at all. Flaubert’s mother prepared for these visits by inspecting all the beds in the house, but she never found one long enough to hold “le Moscove” comfortably.

  Madame Grout’s regard for Turgeniev seems to have been warmly returned. In a letter written to her in 1873, immediately after one of Turgeniev’s visits to Croisset, Flaubert says: “Mon Moscove m’a quitté ce matin. . . . Tu l’as tout à fait séduit, mon loulou! car à plusieurs reprises il m’a parlé de ‘mon adorable nièce,’ de ‘ma charmante nièce,’ ‘ravissante femme,’ etc., etc. Enfin le Moscove t’adore! ce qui me fait bien plaisir, car c’est un homme exquis. Tu ne t’imagines pas ce qu’il sait! Il m’a répété, par cœur, des morceaux des tragédies de Voltaire, et de Luce de Lancival! Il connaît, je crois, toutes les littératures jusque dans leurs bas-fonds! Et si modeste avec tout cela! si bonhomme! si vache!”