Madame Grout seemed to remember with especial pleasure the evenings when he used to sit at the table with her, going over her translation of Faust: “That noble man, to give his time to my childish efforts!” She well remembered the period during which he was writing Les Eaux printanières, and her own excitement when she first read that work. Like Henry James, she seemed to resent Turgeniev’s position in the Viardot household; recalling it, even after such a long stretch of time, with vexation. “And when they gave a hunt, he looked after the dogs!” she murmured under her breath. She talked one evening of his sad latter years: of his disappointment in his daughter, of his long and painful illness, of the way in which the death of his friends, going one after another, contracted his life and made it bleak. But these were very personal memories, and if Madame Grout had wished to make them public, she would have written them herself.

  Madame Viardot she had known very well, and for many years after Turgeniev’s death. “Pauline Viardot was a superb artist, very intelligent and engaging as a woman, with a great charm — and, au fond, very Spanish!” she said. Of Monsieur Louis Viardot she did not think highly. I gathered that he was agreeable, but not much more than that. When I asked her whether Monsieur Viardot had not translated some of Turgeniev’s books into French, the old lady lifted her brows and there was a mocking glint in her eyes.

  “Turgeniev himself translated them; Viardot may have looked over his shoulder!”

  George Sand she did not like. Yes, she readily admitted, her men friends were very loyal to her, had a great regard for her; mon oncle valued her comradeship; but Madame Grout found the lady’s personality distasteful.

  I gathered that, for Madame Grout, George Sand did not really fill any of the great rôles she assigned herself: the devoted mistress, the staunch comrade and “good fellow,” the self-sacrificing mother. George Sand’s men friends believed her to be all these things; and certainly she herself believed that she was. But Madame Grout seemed to feel that in these various relations Madame Dudevant was self-satisfied rather than self-forgetful; always self-admiring and a trifle unctuous. Madame Grout’s distaste for this baffling kind of falseness was immediate and instinctive — it put her teeth on edge. Turgeniev, that penetrating reader of women, seems never to have felt this shallowness in his friend. But in Chopin’s later letters one finds that he, to his bitter cost, had become aware of it — curiously enough, through Madame Dudevant’s behaviour toward her own children! It is clear that he had come upon something so subtly false, so excruciatingly aslant, that when he briefly refers to it his sentences seem to shudder.

  Though I tried to let Madame Grout direct our conversations without suggestion from me, and never to question her, I did ask her whether she read Marcel Proust with pleasure.

  “Trop dur et trop fatigant,” she murmured, and dismissed the greatest French writer of his time with a wave of her hand.

  When I made some reference to Anatole France she said quickly: “Oh, I like him very much! But I like him most where he is most indebted to my uncle!”

  When she was tired, or deeply moved, Madame Grout usually spoke French; but when she spoke English it was as flexible as it was correct. She spoke like an Englishwoman, with no French accent at all.

  What astonished me in her was her keen and sympathetic interest in modern music; in Ravel, Scriabin, Albéniz, Stravinsky, De Falla. Only a few days before I quitted Aix I found her at the box office in person, getting exactly the seats she wanted for a performance of Boris Godounov. She must change her habitual seat, as she had asked some friends to come over from Sallanches to hear the opera with her. “You will certainly hear it? Albert Wolff is conducting for the last time this season, and he does it very well,” she explained.

  It was interesting to observe Madame Grout at the opera that night, to watch the changes that went over her face as she listened with an attention that never wandered, looking younger and stronger than she ever did by day, as if the music were some very potent stimulant. Any form of pleasure, I had noticed, made her keener, more direct and positive, more authoritative, revived in her the stamp of a period which had achieved a great style in art. In a letter which Flaubert wrote her when she was a young woman, he said: —

  “C’est une joie profonde pour moi, mon pauvre loulou, que de t’avoir donné le goût des occupations intellectuelles. Que d’ennuis et de sottises il vous épargne!”

  Certainly those interests had stood her in good stead, and for many more years than the uncle himself lived through. She had still, at eighty-four, a capacity for pleasure such as very few people in this world ever know at all.

  VI

  The next morning I told Madame Grout that, because of the illness of a friend, I must start at once for Paris.

  And when, she asked, could I return and go south to Antibes and the Villa Tanit, to see her Flaubert collection, and the interior of his study, which she had brought down there thirty-five years ago?

  I told her I was afraid that visit must be put off until next summer.

  She gave a very charming laugh. “At my age, of course, the future is somewhat uncertain!” Then she asked whether, on her return to Antibes, she could send me some souvenir of our meeting; would I like to have something that had belonged to her uncle, or some letter written by him?

  I told her that I was not a collector; that manuscripts and autographed letters meant very little to me. The things of her uncle that were valuable to me I already had, and had had for years. It rather hurt me that she should think I wanted any material reminder of her or of Flaubert. It was the Flaubert in her mind and heart that was to give me a beautiful memory.

  On the following day, at déjeuner, I said goodbye to Madame Grout; I was leaving on the two o’clock train. It was a hurried and mournful parting, but there was real feeling on both sides. She had counted upon my staying longer, she said. But she did not for a moment take on a slightly aggrieved tone, as many privileged old ladies would have done. There was nothing “wayward” or self-indulgent about Madame Grout; the whole discipline of her life had been to the contrary. One had one’s objective, and one went toward it; one had one’s duty, and one did it as best one could.

  The last glimpse I had of her was as she stood in the dining-room, the powder on her face quite destroyed by tears, her features agitated, but her head erect and her eyes flashing. And the last words I heard from her expressed a hope that I would always remember the pleasure we had had together in talking unreservedly about les œuvres de mon oncle. Standing there, she seemed holding to that name as to a staff. A great memory and a great devotion were the things she lived upon, certainly; they were her armour against a world concerned with insignificant matters.

  VII

  When I got back to Paris and began to re-read the Lettres de Flaubert à sa Nièce Caroline, I found that the personality of Madame Grout sent a wonderful glow over the pages. I was now almost startled (in those letters written her when she was still a child) by his solicitude about her progress in her English lessons — those lessons by which I was to profit seventy-three years afterward!

  The five hundred pages of that book were now peopled for me with familiar figures, like the chronicles of a family I myself had known. It will always be for me one of the most delightful of books; and in none of his letters to other correspondents does Gustave Flaubert himself seem so attractive.

  In reading over those letters, covering a stretch of twenty-four years, with the figure of Madame Grout in one’s mind, one feels a kind of happiness and contentment about the whole situation — yes, and gratitude to Fate! The great man might have written very charming and tender and warmly confidential letters to a niece who was selfish, vain, intelligent merely in a conventional way — because she was the best he had! One can never be sure about such things; a heartless and stupid woman may be so well educated, after all!

  But having known Madame Grout, I know that she had the root of the matter in her; that no one could be more sensitive than she to all that was finest in Flaubert’s work, or more quick to admit the qualities he did not have — which is quite as important.

  During all his best working years he had in his house beside him, or within convenient distance for correspondence, one of his own blood, younger and more ardent than he, who absolutely understood what he was doing; who could feel the great qualities of his failures, even. Could any situation be happier for a man of letters? How many writers have found one understanding ear among their sons or daughters?

  Moreover, Caroline was the daughter of a sister whom Flaubert had devotedly loved. He took her when she was an infant into his house at Croisset, where he lived alone with his old mother. What delight for a solitary man of letters and an old lady to have a baby to take care of, the little daughter of a beloved daughter! They had all the pleasure of her little girlhood — and she must have been an irresistible little girl! Flaubert spent a great deal of time attending to her early education, and when he was seated at his big writing-table, or working in bed, he liked to have her in the room, lying on a rug in the corner with her book. For hours she would not speak, she told me; she was so passionately proud of the fact that he wanted her to be there. When she was just beginning to read, she liked to think, as she lay in her corner, that she was shut in a cage with some powerful wild animal, a tiger or a lion or a bear, who had devoured his keeper and would spring upon anyone else who opened his door, but with whom she was “quite safe and conceited,” as she said with a chuckle.

  During his short stays in Paris, Flaubert writes to Caroline about her favourite rabbit, and the imaginary characters with whom she had peopled the garden at Croisset. He sends his greetings to Caroline’s doll, Madame Robert: —

  “Remercie de ma part Mme. Robert qui a bien voulu se rappeler de moi. Présente-lui mes respects et conseille-lui un régime fortifiant, car elle me paraît un peu pale, et je ne suis pas sans inquiétude sur sa santé.”

  In a letter from Paris, dated just a year later, when Caroline was eleven, he tells her that he is sending her Thierry’s Récits des temps mérovingiens, and adds: —

  “Je suis bien aise que les Récits mérovingiens t’amusent; relis-les quand tu auras fini; apprends des dates, tu as tes programmes, et passe tous les jours quelque temps à regarder une carte de géographie.”

  One sees from the letters with what satisfaction Flaubert followed every step of Caroline’s development. Her facility in languages was a matter of the greatest pride to him, though even after she is married and living abroad he occasionally finds fault with her orthography: —

  “Un peu d’orthographe ne te nuirait pas, mon bibi! car tu écris aplomb par deux p: ‘Moral et physique sont d’applomb,’ trois p marqueraient encore plus d’énergie! Ça m’a amusé, parce que ça te ressemble.”

  Yes, it was like her, certainly; like her as she walked across the floor of that hotel dining-room in Aix-les-Bains, so many years afterward.

  Though she had been married twice, Madame Grout, in our conversations, did not talk of either of her husbands. Her uncle had always been the great figure in her life, and even a short acquaintance with her made me feel that she possessed every quality for comradeship with him. Besides her devotion to him, her many gifts, her very unusual intelligence and intuition in art, she had moral qualities which he must have loved: poise, great good sense, and a love of fairness and justice. She had the habit of searching out facts and weighing evidence, for her own satisfaction. Her speech, when she was explaining something, had the qualities of good Latin prose: economy, elegance, and exactness. She was not an idealist; she had lived through two wars. She was one of the least visionary and sentimental persons I have ever met. She knew that conditions and circumstances, not their own wishes, dictate the actions of men. In her mind there was a kind of large enlightenment, like that of the many-windowed workroom at Croisset, with the cool, tempered northern light pouring into it. In her, Flaubert had not only a companion, but a “daughter of the house” to cherish and protect. And he had her all his life, until the short seizure which took him off in an hour. And she, all her life, kept the handkerchief with which they had wiped the moisture from his brow a few moments before he died.

  VIII

  I sailed for Quebec in October. In November, while I was at Jaffrey, New Hampshire, a letter came from Madame Grout; the envelope had been opened and almost destroyed. I have received letters from Borneo and Java that looked much less travel-worn. She had addressed it to me in care of an obscure bookseller, on a small street in Paris, from whom she had got one of my books. (I suppose, in her day, all booksellers were publishers.) The letter had been forwarded through three publishing houses, and a part of its contents had got lost. In her letter Madame Grout writes that she is sending me “ci-joint une lettre de mon oncle Gustave Flaubert adressée à George Sand — elle doit être, je crois, de 1866. Il me semble qu’elle vous fera plaisir et j’ai plaisir à vous l’envoyer.”

  This enclosure had been removed. I regretted its loss chiefly because I feared it would distress Madame Grout. But I wrote her, quite truthfully, that her wish that I should have one of her uncle’s letters meant a great deal more to me than the actual possession of it could mean. Nevertheless, it was an awkward explanation to make, and I delayed writing it until late in December. I did not hear from her again.

  In February my friends in Paris sent me a clipping from the Journal des Débats which read: —

  MORT DE MME. FRANKLIN-GROUT

  Nous apprenons avec tristesse la mort de Mme. Franklin-Grout, qui s’est éteinte à Antibes, à la suite d’une courte maladie.

  Nièce de Gustave Flaubert, Mme. Franklin-Grout a joué un rôle important dans la diffusion et le succès des œuvres de son oncle. Exécutrice testamentaire du grand romancier, qui l’avait élevée et instruite, Mme. Franklin-Grout a publié la correspondance de son oncle, si précieuse pour sa psychologie littéraire, et qui nous a révélé les doctrines de Flaubert et sa vie de travail acharné. Mme. Franklin-Grout publia aussi Bouvard et Pécuchet. . . . Mme. Franklin-Grout était une personne charmante et distinguée, très attachée à ses amis et qui, jusqu’à la plus extrême vieillesse, avait conservé l’intelligence et la bonté souriante d’une spirituelle femme du monde.

  THE NOVEL DÉMEUBLÉ

  THE NOVEL, FOR a long while, has been over-furnished. The property-man has been so busy on its pages, the importance of material objects and their vivid presentation have been so stressed, that we take it for granted whoever can observe, and can write the English language, can write a novel. Often the latter qualification is considered unnecessary.

  In any discussion of the novel, one must make it clear whether one is talking about the novel as a form of amusement, or as a form of art; since they serve very different purposes and in very different ways. One does not wish the egg one eats for breakfast, or the morning paper, to be made of the stuff of immortality. The novel manufactured to entertain great multitudes of people must be considered exactly like a cheap soap or a cheap perfume, or cheap furniture. Fine quality is a distinct disadvantage in articles made for great numbers of people who do not want quality but quantity, who do not want a thing that “wears,” but who want change, — a succession of new things that are quickly threadbare and can be lightly thrown away. Does anyone pretend that if the Woolworth store windows were piled high with Tanagra figurines at ten cents, they could for a moment compete with Kewpie brides in the popular esteem? Amusement is one thing; enjoyment of art is another.

  Every writer who is an artist knows that his “power of observation,” and his “power of description,” form but a low part of his equipment. He must have both, to be sure; but he knows that the most trivial of writers often have a very good observation. Mérimée said in his remarkable essay on Gogol: “L’art de choisir parmi les innombrable traits que nous offre la nature est, après tout, bien plus difficile que celui de les observer avec attention et de les rendre avec exactitude.”

  There is a popular superstition that “realism” asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme? Is the story of a banker who is unfaithful to his wife and who ruins himself by speculation in trying to gratify the caprices of his mistresses, at all reinforced by a masterly exposition of banking, our whole system of credits, the methods of the Stock Exchange? Of course, if the story is thin, these things do reinforce it in a sense, — any amount of red meat thrown into the scale to make the beam dip. But are the banking system and the Stock Exchange worth being written about at all? Have such things any proper place in imaginative art?

  The automatic reply to this question is the name of Balzac. Yes, certainly, Balzac tried out the value of literalness in the novel, tried it out to the uttermost, as Wagner did the value of scenic literalness in the music drama. He tried it, too, with the passion of discovery, with the inflamed zest of an unexampled curiosity. If the heat of that furnace could not give hardness and sharpness to material accessories, no other brain will ever do it. To reproduce on paper the actual city of Paris; the houses, the upholstery, the food, the wines, the game of pleasure, the game of business, the game of finance: a stupendous ambition — but, after all, unworthy of an artist. In exactly so far as he succeeded in pouring out on his pages that mass of brick and mortar and furniture and proceedings in bankruptcy, in exactly so far he defeated his end. The things by which he still lives, the types of greed and avarice and ambition and vanity and lost innocence of heart which he created — are as vital today as they were then. But their material surroundings, upon which he expended such labour and pains . . . the eye glides over them. We have had too much of the interior decorator and the “romance of business” since his day. The city he built on paper is already crumbling. Stevenson said he wanted to blue-pencil a great deal of Balzac’s “presentation” — and he loved him beyond all modern novelists. But where is the man who could cut one sentence from the stories of Mérimée? And who wants any more detail as to how Carmencita and her fellow factory-girls made cigars? Another sort of novel? Truly. Isn’t it a better sort?