Geoffrey Wall: Thinking With Demons: Flaubert and de Sade

Thinking with Demons: Flaubert
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and de Sade
Geoffrey Wall
I make it my business to write books that will heat the loins of even
the most cold-blooded reader.
(Letter from Flaubert to Louise Colet, 3 July 18521)
There are some things which one says but does not write down, and
certain things which one writes down but does not care to see pub-
lished.
(Letter from Flaubert to Sainte-Beuve, 27 December 18622)
For in the midst of the most intimate confidences, false shame, delicacy,
or pity always impose a certain reticence. We discover the pit and the
mire, in ourselves or in the other person, which bring us to a halt.
(Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, 18693)
1
‘Il y a peu de femmes que, de tête au moins, je n’ai déshabillées jusqu’au
talon. J’ai travaillé la chair en artiste et je la connais. Je me charge de faire des
livres à en mettre en rut les plus froids. Quant à l’amour, ç’a été le grand sujet de
réflexion de toute ma vie.’ Correspondance, ii. 124.
2
‘Il y a des choses que l’on dit et que l’on n’écrit point, d’autres que l’on écrit
et qu’on ne se soucie pas qu’il soit publié.’ Ibid. iii. 286.
3
‘Car, au milieu des confidences les plus intimes, il y a toujours des restrictions,
par fausse honte, délicatesse, pitié. On découvre chez l’autre ou dans soi-même
des précipices ou des fanges qui empêchent de poursuivre.’ L’Education sentimentale,
pt 3, ch. 1.
doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfl030
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The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email:
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102 T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY
ON THE FINAL PAGE of The Interpretation of Dreams, that wide-awake

compendium of muted desires, Freud raises a teasing farewell question. In
what sense are we responsible, ethically, for the content of our dreams?
The dream is famously ‘a different scene’,4 a place of metamorphosis, a
scene of wonder and horror. In dreams, as in jokes and works of art,
we are allowed to play at breaking the law, the intimate laws of morality,
identity, and temporality. The dead come alive. Childhood is restored.
Cowards are heroes, and the virtuous get to be fabulously wicked. But
what are we to do, Freud asks, with the waking knowledge of that other
self and the things it does in our name, on that other scene? Accept that
knowledge, says Freud. Accept the iniquity and the ingenuity of your
dreams. Your dreams have something to teach you: ‘It is [ . . . ] instruc-
tive’, he writes, ‘to get to know the much trampled soil from which our
virtues proudly spring.’5
With Freud’s down-to-earth conclusion in mind, I propose to observe
that eighteenth-century demon, the Marquis de Sade, as he dwells in the
mind of an eminently lucid nineteenth-century dreamer, Gustave
Flaubert. To anticipate my argument in parable form: the emergent
bourgeois soul, shackled by strict new imperatives of moral propriety,
engenders an imaginary aristocrat to act out its sullen and undemocratic
fantasies of supreme power, material luxury, and sexual pleasure. The
subsequent contortions are hideously and instructively comic.
Something about de Sade, then as now, makes it difficult to measure
his real presence in the culture. The idea of de Sade – supplementing the
texts that were circulating under his name – rapidly enjoyed such gross
infamy as to make reading him almost superfluous. The de Sadeian
Thing, a useful notion, is perfectly uncanny: a potent fusion of author,
text, and reader in the mutually contaminating embrace of an extreme
psychopathology. Demonisation, concealment, and exaggeration, those
collective editorial processes, have twisted and erased the primary evi-
dence as to how they once read de Sade, and, more significantly, how he
was invoked. A book by the Marquis de Sade was something to hide or to
flaunt, a precious secret, dangerous and exciting. Reading it might be less
significant, among your circle, than being thought the kind of person who
might own such things. Hide the book from your father, your teacher,
your priest, your employer, because, so they say, it will surely ensnare the
4
Freud borrowed the expression ‘another scene’ (German: eine andere Schauplatz)
from G. T. Fechner, and used it in The Interpretation of Dreams, stating that ‘the scene
of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life’. The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900a) SE V. pp. 535– 6.
5
Ibid.
THINKING WITH DEMONS 103
tremulous reader in madness. Show the book to your friends, as a sign of

your heroic moral audacity. You may even exaggerate a little, like
Baudelaire, faking a coldly urbane enthusiasm for the unspeakable.
First though, in a more sober and censorious spirit, we might ask, quite
simply, ‘Was Flaubert a sadist?’. The simple answer is no, he was not. At
least not in the modern sense as defined in psychiatric manuals of person-
ality disorder. Yet there is evidence, both public and private, in the novels
and in the letters, to indicate that Flaubert was profoundly engaged both
by his reading of de Sade and by a complex comic conception of the de
Sadeian. In that lesser sense, he was perhaps merely a de Sade-ist, one
who played the monster in order to master it. This lesser de Sade is ulti-
mately prophylactic, purging his readers of their more brutal fantasies by
the potent comic action of ridicule and disgust.6 My argument depends
upon the twentieth-century rehabilitation of de Sade, a project which
drew variously upon psychoanalytic concepts of ambivalence in order to
observe, describe, and understand the scene of reading. Here are two
voices from 1965, speaking from the heart of that process. ‘It may be a
fact’, wrote John Weightman, reviewing the first serious, non-clandestine
edition of the Marquis de Sade’s writings to appear in America, ‘that
each of us, in the depths of his unconscious, has a Gothic castle in which
he works his will on an endless supply of appetising victims of both sexes
[ . . . ] if so it is to De Sade’s credit that he exteriorised this fantasy in the
completest manner possible and so allows his readers to grasp
it objectively.’ In the same year, Raymond Giraud commended de Sade’s
Justine for revealing: ‘the embarrassing spectacle of what the sadist under-
goes . . . it took some courage on De Sade’s part to reveal in such
minute detail these mirror images of himself in pursuit of “happiness”,
hitherto witnessed only by paid prostitutes and servants behind closed
doors.’ However tendentious, that rehabilitation makes it possible to
pursue the question of Flaubert’s long-alleged sadism in less anxiously
defensive tones.
So was Flaubert merely a de Sade-ist? We might point to the fact that
his surviving letters to his close male friends include dozens of jokingly
positive allusions to de Sade. Currency of a relatively innocuous homoero-
tic conspiracy, these allusions are splendidly monotonous, a characteristic
quality of the group joke. I describe them as innocuous to emphasise that
they represent nothing like the sex-lab torture camp imagined in Justine.
They are rooted in that more commonplace traffic in women which was
6
Weightman, New York Review of Books, 26 Aug. 1965; Yale French Studies, 35,
p. 47.
analysed for our time by Gayle Rubin.7 Beyond the surviving letters, there
is also evidence of an earlier and more primitive layer of homoerotic feeling.
This is a corner of Flaubert’s history to which we have almost no access,
because the bulk of the evidence, in the form of intimate pornographic
letters to and from a schoolfriend, was prudently destroyed at some point.
Flaubert’s interest in de Sade was no mere schoolboy extravagance. It
persisted to the end. From the age of 17 until the year of his death, over a
period of forty years, Flaubert repeatedly came back to de Sade. The name
appears in many different discursive contexts: in private conversation, in
letters, in unpublished manuscripts, and in the published fiction. Can it be
denied that Flaubert’s art is nourished from impulses which may plausibly
(if not technically) be described as sadistic? Sadistic-erotic themes come to
the surface most explicitly in Salammbô (1862?) and in Saint Julian (1875?).
Yet these themes are by no means peculiar to Flaubert. The more lurid aca-
demic history painting of the day, much of it a pastiche of Delacroix, plays
to exactly the same tastes. Antiquity, among its many pre-capitalist attrac-
tions, was a secure and spacious stage on which to enact fantasies of meticu-
lous and astonishing violence. But pain also shadows the action of
Flaubert’s modern novels. Every reader can recall the lingeringly detailed
scenes of physical agony in Madame Bovary. The amputation of a leg, the her-
oine’s death by arsenic poisoning: they suggest that the body-in-pieces was
Flaubert’s speciality.8 His irony is a punitive instrument. Some have said
that he tortures his characters, adding, in partial mitigation, that he was
the son of a surgeon, in the days before anaesthetic. Consequently, as a boy,
he saw and heard and smelt things that it was difficult to forget. What was
he to do with those memories, but work them somehow into art?
Reading Flaubert, we meet an array of contrary impulses. His inner
world, that portion of it which we are invited to see, is both a majestic
bringing together and an equally hectic tearing apart. These conflicting
impulses make for a unique imaginative audacity. Pleasant and unplea-
sant, they are the reason we keep reading. Flaubert is the pantheist, the
fusion artist, the man of sudden sympathetic wonder, composer of memor-
able romantic harmonies, the creature of a vivid natural world which
nourishes and enfolds. And then, in the same hour, perhaps on the same
7
Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of
Sex’, in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York 1975).
8
Lacan has christened this particular fantasy: ‘Among these imagos are some
[ . . . ] with an efficacy that might be called magical. These are the images of
castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration,
devouring, bursting open of the body [ . . . ] imagos of the fragmented body.’ Écrits: A
Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London 1977) p. 11.
page, he is the man of envy, gleefully pursuing cruel, punitive fantasies of

omnipotence. How are we to map this extraordinary imagination,
powered as it was by the confusion of the delicate and the brutal? Is it
possible to reconcile the amorously tender idealist with the cynical
mocking connoisseur of prostitution?
What did he think he would find, the schoolboy Flaubert, when at the
age of 17 he first read about de Sade?9 What were the ideas already
attached to the name? What did this peculiarly receptive reader bring to
the texts he read? What did they speak to in his previous experience?
How did he make them his own? What did he do with them, artistically?
De Sade died in 1814 and Flaubert was born in 1821. Just as Flaubert
was learning to read, a certain idea of de Sade was insinuating itself into the
imagination of the age. The word ‘sadist’ entered the French language
when Flaubert was nearly 13. It first appeared in a dictionary of 1834, as if
to mark the fact that de Sade, now twenty years dead, refused to lie down.
Like his well-bred cousins, Count Dracula and Lord Byron, he lingered
seductively in the collective memory, a prodigious symptom of something
that wouldn’t go away. The older generation, those who had survived the
high-mortality decades of revolution and empire, could scarcely forget the
grandiose, allegedly sadistic performatives of Robespierre and Napoleon.
Sober men who had seen the real thing, they had little patience with the
perennial youthful nonsense that flaunted itself under the name of satanism.
In a serious prosperous bourgeois century there was no place for such ambi-
guities of feeling, whether delicately morbid or brutally exciting. If educated
young men were to stray into those dark places of the mind, they might lose
their way. Let susceptible youth beware of decadent aristocrats peddling
their tainted pleasures. That was not what the imagination was for, was it?
‘De Sade est partout.’ By 1834, according to one gleeful young Parisian
journalist, de Sade was everywhere. That was the message from Jules
Janin, famous author of a recent horror novel, in his much-pirated pocket-
size pamphlet essay on de Sade. From one of his letters we know that
Flaubert read Janin’s pamphlet in 1839. Reading over Flaubert’s shoulder,
we find a flamboyant essay by Janin, alongside a more sober scholarly
piece by one Paul Jacob, ‘bibliophile’, La Vérité sur les deux procès criminels du
marquis de Sade. Janin’s piece expounds the received idea of the
Marquis de Sade, ‘ce phénomenal et célèbre ordurier’,10 with a certain
9
It has been suggested, speculatively, that Alfred le Poittevin introduced
Flaubert to de Sade several years before 1839 and that the influence of de Sade
permeates Flaubert’s earliest writings. I disagree. The evidence from 1839–40
implies that de Sade is a very recent discovery.
10
Janin 1834, p. v.
lurid relish. His declared qualifications for this task are impressively
unorthodox. He claims that the skull of the Marquis de Sade, so small
and shapely that you would take it for a woman’s, sits on his table as he
writes. The organs of tendresse maternelle are surprisingly prominent.
Macabre jokes apart, Janin’s purpose is honourably scientific. One may
write about de Sade in the same positive spirit as a natural historian
composing a monograph describing the scorpion or the toad. The
purpose is moral hygiene: ‘We shall place a warning light at the edge of
this stinking precipice, so that in future no unwary person falls into it.’11
He offers a nicely imprecise précis of the complete works:
It is all of a piece: bloody corpses, children torn from the arms of

their mothers, girls having their throats cut at the end of an orgy,
cups full of blood and wine, extraordinary tortures, beatings, horrible
whippings, [ . . . ] ever the same, twelve or fifteen volumes, relentlessly,
the same on every page.12
The scene of reading is a haunting. De Sade has the power to drag the
reader into his dungeon.
How the reader feels ashamed of his wretched audacity! How his hands
tremble. How his ears are ringing, assailed by the death-bell of the final
torture! Already the hideous punishment has begun for this unfortunate
creature who defiles his eyes and his heart with this hideous book, and
he finds himself beset by these wretched phantoms.13
And there follows a gloriously alarmist account of how this uncanny de

Sadeian Thing is propagated.
For make no mistake, the Marquis de Sade is everywhere; he is in all

the libraries, on a certain mysterious shelf, a hidden shelf that we
11
‘Nous allons poser une lampe salutaire au bord de ce précipice infect, afin
qu’à l’avenir nul imprudent n’y tombe.’ Ibid., p. 1.
12
‘Ce ne sont que cadavres sanglans, enfans arrachés aux bras de leurs mères,
jeunes femmes qu’on égorge à la fin d’une orgie, coupes remplies de sang et de
vin, tortures inouı̈es, coups de baton, flagellations horribles. [ . . . ] et cela pendant
douze ou quinze volumes sans fin, et cela à chaque page.’ Ibid., p. 17.
13
‘Comme le lecteur est honteux de sa triste hardiesse! Comme les mains lui
tremblent! Comme les oreilles lui tintent, frappés qu’ils sont par le glas du dernier
supplice! Comme c’est déjà un horrible punition pour le malheureux qui souille
ses yeux et son cœur de cette horrible lecture, de se voir poursuivi par ces tristes
fantômes.’ Ibid., p. 19.
always find; this is one of those books which is usually placed behind
a copy of Saint John Chrysostomos, or Nicole’s Traité de morale, or the
Pensées of Pascal. Ask any auctioneer’s valuer if they ever make a
probate inventory without finding the Marquis de Sade. And,
because this is one of the books that the law does not recognise as
legal property, it always happens that either the clerks or their bosses
grab it first and thereby sell it on to the public.14
De Sade’s imagined world will fill your real world. De Sade will pull you
into the abyss of debauchery: abduction, imprisonment, sodomy, flagella-
tion, vivisection, etcetera. To prove his point, Janin offers a macabre
cautionary tale, a supposedly true story from his own boyhood.
Eighteen years old and still pure in thought, Jules and Julien are best
friends. They have recently left the village school and they now stand in
that morally precarious place, on the verge of manhood. Julien’s uncle, the
village priest, is the owner of a large disorderly library, which includes
dubious material of unspecified origins, material confiscated, concealed, or
merely hoarded. One day Julien, still implausibly innocent, discovers an
unspecified volume of de Sade standing on a high shelf in a corner of his
uncle’s library. In a classic instance of the erotic-illicit, the boy notices the
book in question only because of an odd bit of paper concealing the title
on the spine. Julien takes down the book, takes it away, and locks himself in
his bedroom to read undisturbed. He is soon possessed by de Sade’s fero-
cious version of Gothic. As he reads his heart is pounding, his hair is stand-
ing on end, his face is pale, and he trembles. He ages twenty years in a
single night. Next morning at breakfast he is scarcely recognisable. Because
his uncle is away on parish business there is no one to rescue Julien from
spiritual danger. He spends a second night alone, with the book.
When his uncle returns next morning, Julien has not yet appeared. He
must be lying ill in bed. They break down his door. At the sight of his
uncle, Julien flees the house in terror, running half-naked along the street.
When he sees the village church he shudders. At the sound of the
14
‘Car, ne vous y trompez pas, le marquis de Sade est partout; il est dans
toutes les bibliothèques, sur un certain rayon mystérieux et caché qu’on
découvre toujours; c’est un de ces livres qui se placent d’ordinaire derrière un
saint Jean Chrysostome, ou le Traité de morale de Nicole, ou les Pensées de Pascal.
Demandez à tous les commissaires priseurs, s’ils font beaucoup d’inventaires
après décès où ne se trouve pas le marquis de Sade. Et, comme c’est là un de
ces livres que la loi ne reconnait pas comme une propriété particulière,
il arrive toujours que les clercs des gens d’affaires, ou leur patron, s’en
emparent les premiers, et les rendent ainsi à la consommation du public.’ Ibid.,
pp. 20–1.
Angelus he falls to the ground. They carry him home unconscious to his
bed. The village doctor is summoned. He diagnoses epilepsy. Julien has
never recovered. He lives in a state of terror. He hallucinates dead babies
floating in the river. He cries out for help when he sees a girl in a passing
carriage, convinced that she is being abducted. Julien, dear reader, has
‘fallen into the abyss’.15
At this point in his cautionary tale, Janin stands back. He asks himself
why he – Janin – brought himself to read de Sade, in spite of the moral
disaster that overwhelmed his friend. His answer is interesting. It is the
only moment of ambiguity in a discourse otherwise rigidly orthodox:
It was to show off to myself my own moral strength; for that is one of
the great dangers of these dreadful books: there is always some
excuse for opening them; you open them out of innocence, or curios-
ity, or courage, as a kind of challenge you set yourself.16
Flaubert may have smiled his agreement when he came across this
particular psychological truth. Other wise he found Janin disappointingly
predictable and uninformative. He deplored the pusillanimous tone, Janin
declaiming, ‘on behalf of morality, philanthropy and deflowered
maidens’.17 For the moment, though, Janin remained his only source of
real information on de Sade.
Published in the same decade as Janin’s pamphlet, Frederic Soulié’s
novel, entitled Les Mémoires du diable (1837), also staged the perils of
reading de Sade in vividly tendentious form.18 Luizzi, the sub-Faustian
voyeur-protagonist, enlists the aid of the devil, and the devil grants him
various visions. In the chapter that concerns us Luizzi spies upon a young
woman who has been imprisoned by her family as a punishment for her
alleged sexual incontinence. The devil opens a magic window for Luizzi.
It looks onto the shadowy sealed room where the woman is imprisoned.
In a heavily framed image, she sits there, as if on stage, in the lamplight.
We can see a small child asleep on her knee. The mother is pale as death,
15
Ibid., p. 29.
16
‘C’était pour me faire parade, à moi-même, de ma force morale; car c’est là
un des grands dangers de ces horribles volumes: on a toujours un prétexte pour
les ouvrir; on les ouvre par innocence, ou par curiosité, ou par courage, comme
une espèce de défi qu’on se fait à soi-même.’ Ibid., p. 31.
17
‘il déclamait pour la morale, pour la philanthropie, pour les vièrges
dépucelées’. Letter to Ernest Chevalier, 15 July 1839: Correspondance, i. 48.
18
There is no evidence that Flaubert read Soulié. My argument is rather that
Soulié further illuminates the cultural moment at which Flaubert first came across
de Sade.
like a wax statue before the colours are added. She lays her child down in
its cradle and takes out a book. She reads with her head in her hands.
The hidden spectator, Luizzi, is taken aback to see that the mother
appears to be reading Justine: ‘that unclean work by the Marquis de
Sade, that frenzied and loathsome collection of every crime and every
obscenity’.19 Luizzi gazes in wonder. He cannot make sense of it. Why is
this lovely young mother reading Justine? (He seems to know that de Sade
cultivates a relentless hatred for the maternal body.) His speculations
mimic the orthodox anxiety that already, circa 1835, clustered around the
idea of de Sade.
This young woman, could it be that she is one of those whom fate
has marked out for infamy and disorder? Was she entombed in this
dungeon simply to restrain the violent promiscuity of a depraved
nature? Had she hidden this book from her keepers so as to gloat
upon it in secret in her delirious imagination? Had she given her
family cause to fear that she would act out the hideous frenzied acts
depicted in this book by that mind in which blood and filth were see-
thing like the lava in a volcano? Could such corruption dwell amid
such youthfulness? [Was she perhaps] born with that frenetic delirium
which medical science can explain but our language cannot
describe?20
Yet the young woman is weeping as she reads. And there is something
written in between the printed lines of the book. Something written in
red. Now, just as in Justine, the mother, Henriette, unfolds the story of her
misfortunes.21
19
‘l’ouvrage immonde du marquis de Sade, ce frénétique et abominable
assemblage de tous les crimes et de toutes les saletés’. Les Mémoires du diable, p. 223.
20
‘Cette jeune fille serait-elle un de ces êtres fatalement marqués pour l’
infamie et le désordre? N’était-elle ensevelie dans ce cachot que pour y enfermer
avec elle les féroces lubricités d’une nature effrénée? Avait-elle soustrait ce livre
aux regards de ses gardiens pour s’en repaı̂tre en secret dans les délires de son
imagination, après avoir fait craindre à sa famille de la voir réaliser les
épouvantables fureurs versées dans cet ouvrage par une âme où le sang et la boue
bouillonnaient comme la lave d’un volcan? Tant de corruption pouvait-elle s’allier
à tant de jeunesse! [ . . . ] elle est née avec ce frénétique délire que la science
médicale explique, mais que notre langue ne peut décrire?’. Ibid., pp. 223–4.
21
The complaint, a first-person narrative of persecution, is the primary
convention of de Sade’s Justine. The genre has a spacious history which includes
Clarissa, as filtered through Laclos. The complaint may also have contributed to
the disconcerting intimacies of Madame Bovary.
This is my story and I’m writing it in my own blood on the pages of

this book, because I have neither paper nor ink. If I have not deleted
every single line of this abominable book in which I write and which
a scoundrel put into my hands to kill my soul once he had killed my
body, if I have not deleted every word it is because my blood is too
precious and scarcely suffices to write out my tale of woe and to
plead for revenge.22
These two intensely moral tales by Janin and Soulié sound a note which
manages to be both stridently orthodox and slyly ambiguous. There were
other voices, probably more influential, simultaneously raised against de Sade.
In 1843, exasperated by the immense success of Les Mystères de Paris – an
urban picaresque fairytale soon to be imitated throughout Europe – the critic
Sainte-Beuve offered the readers of La Revue des Deux Mondes a denunciation of
the current literary fashion for the perversely erotic.23 Byron and de Sade
were equally to blame, he argued. They were two sides of the same coin. This
deplorable taste for a cleverly veiled version of de Sade had arisen in the
1830s. Pervading the new popular fiction, it flourished in the feuilleton, that
ugly symptom of the industrialisation of contemporary literary production. It
was rooted in a boyish sub-Byronic urge to astonish the bourgeois, to flaunt
one’s heartless sophistication. Most disconcertingly, the genre exploited the
imaginative susceptibility of young women readers.
Conceit combined with czupidity, with industrialism, with the need to

profitably exploit the crude tastes of the public, have produced, in
works of the imagination and in the novel, a refinement of immorality
and depravity which is becoming ever more insistent and typical, a
ghastly and ignoble ulcer which grows larger every day. There is a
core of de Sade, disguised but perfectly recognisable, in the inspi-
rations of two or three of our best known novelists: it is a thing that
touches and titillates many of the simple-hearted. With the women,
22
‘Ceci est mon histoire, je l’écris sur ce livre et avec mon sang, parce que je
n’ai ni papier ni encre. Si je n’ai pas effacé ligne à ligne le livre abominable sur
lequel j’écris, et qu’ un infâme a mis dans mes mains pour tuer mon âme après
avoir tué mon corps, si je ne l’ai pas effacé c’est que mon sang est devenu rare, et
qu’à peine il m’en reste assez pour raconter mes malheurs et demander
vengeance.’ Les Mémoires du diable, p. 227.
23
Sainte-Beuve, ‘Quelques vérités sur la situation en littérature, La Revue des
Deux Mondes (July 1843). Les Mystères de Paris was published first in Le Journal des
Débats, a pro-government newspaper, from 19 June 1842 to 15 Oct. 1843. Sue was
already one of the highest-paid writers in France and rose to be Europe’s first
press baron.
even respectable women, it’s a tasty morsel; as soon as they are

awake, without thinking, they go after it, they hurry to get it, a dis-
guised illicit pleasure [ . . . ] and I dare declare, without fear of con-
tradiction, that Byron and de Sade (I apologise for the conjunction)
have perhaps been the two greatest inspirations of our modern
writers, the former blatant and visible, the latter clandestine, not too
clandestine. Reading some of our currently fashionable novelists, if
you want to unlock the cupboard, if you want to find the secret stair-
case, then the latter is the key.24
Sainte-Beuve’s admonition coincided with a significant strengthening

of the general apparatus of censorship. It was around this time, between
1836 and 1844, according to Robert Darnton, that the Bibliothèque
Nationale set up its collection of ‘forbidden books’, ‘L’Enfer’.25 From his
early years, Flaubert knew that he lived in an age of insidious petty
censorship of the arts. ‘I see with indignation’, he wrote in August 1835 at
the age of 13:
24
‘La fatuité combinée à la cupidité, à l’industrialisme, au besoin d’exploiter
fructueusement les mauvais penchants du public, a produit, dans les œuvres
d’imagination et dans le roman, un raffinement d’immoralité et de dépravation
qui devient un fait de plus en plus quotidien et caractéristique, une plaie ignoble
et livide qui chaque matin s’étend. Il y a un fond de Sade masqué, mais non point
méconnaissable, dans les inspirations de deux ou trois de nos romanciers, les plus
credités: cela gagne et chatouille bien des simples. Pour les femmes, meme
honnêtes, c’est un ragout; elles vont, elles courent dès le réveil, sans le savoir, à
l’attrait illicite et voilé. . . . j’oserai affirmer, sans crainte d’être démenti, que
Byron et de Sade ( je demande pardon du rapprochement) ont peut-être été les
deux plus grands inspirateurs de nos modernes, l’un affiché et visible, l’autre
clandestin, – pas trop clandestin. En lisant certains de nos romanciers en vogue, si
vous voulez le fond du coffre, l’escalier secret de l’alcove, ne perdez jamais cette
dernière clef.’ Sainte-Beuve, ‘Quelques vérités’, p. 14; repr. in Portraits contemporains
iii. 428 –30.
25
‘The librarians created “l’Enfer” sometime between 1836 and 1844 in order
to cope with a contradiction. On the one hand, they needed to preserve the fullest
possible record of the printed word; on the other, they wanted to prevent readers
from being corrupted by bad books. The answer was to cull all the most offensive
erotic works from the library’s various collections and shut them up in one spot,
which was declared off limits to ordinary readers. This policy belonged to the
bowdlerisation of the world that took place in the nineteenth century. As part of
the general buttoning-up and locking-away, the librarians everywhere put certain
kinds of books beyond the reach of readers and invented codes to classify them:
the “Private Case” of the British Museum, the Delta callmark of the Library of
Congress, the * * * * * of the New York Public Library, and the Bodleian’s Greek
letter F, which when pronounced in Oxford English sounded like “Fie!”’.
Darnton, ‘Sex for Thought’, New York Review of Books, 41/21 (1994).
that stage censorship is going to be re-established and freedom of the

press abolished; yes this law will go through because the representa-
tives of the people are nothing but a bunch of filthy crooks, their aim
is self-advancement26
Bourgeois crimes against the imagination soon became an insistent theme
in his writing. By 1846 his radical indignation had acquired a more
urbane note of ridicule.
I feel an intense and perpetual hatred for all the restorers, the white-
washers, the correctors, the expurgators, the chaste veilers of profane
nudity, the devisers of abridgements and resumes; for all who would
shave everything and make it wear a wig, ferocious in their pedantry,
pitiless in their ineptitude, they set about amputating Nature. . .27
If the spirit of the age imposed a somnolent decency, an emasculated

political culture and an expurgated literature, then satanic heroes would
inevitably be in demand. How else to express illicit thoughts? The discon-
tents of the class of 1839 found flamboyant if provisional expression in the
trinity of Byron, de Sade, and Robespierre. ‘Our dreams were superbly
extravagant’, Flaubert wrote in 1872, at a fond distance of forty years
from his schooldays.
The last ripples of Romanticism [ . . . ] compressed by the provincial

milieu, made a wonderful ferment in our brains. Some eager souls
yearned for dramatic love affairs [ . . . ] The more sombre amongst us
had set our hearts on the rowdy world of journalism or politics or the
fame of the conspirator. One of the older boys composed a Vindication
of Robespierre which circulated outside the school and so scandalised a
certain gentleman that there ensued an exchange of letters with a
challenge to a duel in which the gentleman came off the worse.28
26
Correspondance, i. 20.
27
‘je porte une haine aiguë et perpétuelle à [ . . . ] tous ceux qui restaurent,
badigeonnent, corrigent, aux éditeurs d’expurgata, aux chastes voileurs de nudités
profanes, aux arrangeurs d’abrégés et de raccourcis, à tous ceux que rasent quoi
que ce soit pour lui mettre une perruque, impitoyables dans leur ineptie, féroces
dans leur pédantisme, s’en vont amputant La Nature’. Tooke 1987, p. 112.
28
‘les notres etaient superbes d’extravagance, – expansions dernières du
romantisme arrivant jusqu’à nous, et qui, comprimées par le milieu provincial,
faisaient dans nos cervelles d’étranges bouillonnements. Tandis que les cœurs
enthousiastes auraient voulu des amours dramatiques [ . . . ] quelques caractères
plus sombres [ . . . ] ambitionnaient les fracas de la presse ou de la tribune, la
Up to this point I have argued that Flaubert came to de Sade impelled by

the spirit of the age. Yet if he stayed with de Sade it was because of some-
thing more elusive, more private, more obscure even to him.
Rouen, July 1839: a classroom in the Collège Royale. Flaubert is strug-
gling with the boredom of a summer evening maths lesson. This is nearly
the end of the school year, but it is not a happy moment. The insurgent
youth knows that he will be stuck at home for the summer, yet again,
because his father is too busy to take a holiday. Nearly 18 years old, he
can already feel himself turning bourgeois. ‘My life, which I had fancied
so beautiful, so poetic, so ample, so amorous, will be just like any other,
monotonous, sensible, stupid.’29 In this impotent sardonic mood he
caresses dreams of reckless violence. By December of this same year,
Flaubert will have been expelled from school for stubborn high-minded
insubordination. For the moment, animated by a certain dark energy, he
is writing, surreptitiously, under the eye of authority, to his best friend,
Ernest Chevalier, already a student in Paris. This is the moment at which
the Marquis de Sade, or at least an idea of the Marquis de Sade, makes
its first ghostly appearance.
Half-way into his letter Flaubert runs out of local news and begins to
improvise. He deplores the nonsense that comes out: ‘I’m no philosopher’,
he says. ‘Unlike Cousin or Pierre Leroux. Unlike Brillat-Savarin or
Lacenaire.’ The sequence is a joke. It pulls together three contemporary
philosophers and a notorious criminal recently executed for a double
murder. The thought of Lacenaire, the joker in the pack, is the inspiration
for a flight of fancy that leads to de Sade. The story of Lacenaire is
entwined with the name of de Sade.
Pierre François Lacenaire was the great celebrity criminal of the age.
Executed for a double murder in 1836, the story of his life, shrewdly
embellished, followed the conventions of picaresque rogue fiction. His
execution was the finale of a satanic courtroom performance that had
fascinated the newspaper-reading portion of the nation for many months.
Wielding a recklessly aggressive irony against his accusers, mocking the
incompetence of his accomplices, boasting of his skill in the art of murder,
gloire des conspirateurs. Un rhetoricien composa une Apologie de Robespierre, qui,

répandue hors du collège, scandalisa un monsieur, si bien qu’un échange de
lettres s’ensuivit avec proposition de duel, où le monsieur n’eut pas le beau rôle.’
G. Flaubert, Pour Louis Bouilhet, ed. A. Raitt. Exeter. University of Exeter Press
1994, p. 24.
29
‘Mon existence que je j’avais revée si belle, poétique, si large, si amoureuse
sera comme les autres, monotone, sensée, bête.’ Letter to Ernest Chevalier, 24
Feb. 1839: Correspondance, i. 38.
parading his modest talents as a poet, Lacenaire laid waste all the sober
virtues. It was a performance that spoke with a certain insidious charm to
anyone who had their doubts about the claustrophobic politics of
Restoration France.
Inspired by reading Vidocq’s memoirs, Lacenaire had originally had
himself imprisoned for petty theft, with the aim of learning his trade from
the real experts. Once in prison he consorted with political prisoners and
wrote a savagely witty song which was soon published. Acclaimed as the
new prison-poet, in a line that went back to François Villon, Lacenaire
acquired a bourgeois patron, the philanthropic owner of a newspaper
who encouraged him to write. Meanwhile Lacenaire recruited two accom-
plices for a robbery. Expecting a great hoard of cash, they murdered a
slum-dwelling transvestite and his aged mother. Brutally amateurish, the
murderers fled with only 500 francs.
Awaiting trial, Lacenaire held court. In his cell he gave interviews,
entertained journalists, read the classics, and wrote poetry. He allowed a
phrenologist to measure his head and to make a life mask. A fashionable
Parisian event, his trial was covered in all the newspapers of the day.
Lacenaire took command of the proceedings, gleefully confessing his
crimes and astonishing the courtroom with an improvised closing solilo-
quy. People gathered at the door of his cell, pleading for an audience.
They said he would be pardoned and made chief of police. A great lady
wanted one of his manuscript poems for her collection. A countess sent
him a love letter. A crowd of journalists followed him to the guillotine,
and published accounts of their supposed conversations with him.
Showing ‘no sign of weakness in his face or in his movements’,
Lacenaire was executed on 9 January 1836 at the barrière Saint Jacques.
The Minister of Justice asked the Gazette des Tribunaux to spread the
impression that Lacenaire had died a coward’s death. Lacenaire’s right
hand was removed from his corpse and embalmed. The hand later found
its way into the possession of Maxime Du Camp, where it adorned the
salon and became the subject of a poem by Gautier.
The memory of Lacenaire’s exploits fed into the general imagination,
far beyond the year of his execution. Balzac, among others, took him up.
In the autograph album of one of his provincial ladies, in between contri-
butions from Berlioz and Napoleon, there is ‘a song by Lacenaire, an
autograph much sought after’. Lacenaire inspired Dickens’s Rigaud, the
gentlemanly villain of Little Dorrit. Victor Hugo drew on Lacenaire for the
character of Montparnasse in Les Misérables. Dostoyevsky had Lacenaire in
mind when he created Raskolnikov.
In his letter Flaubert invokes Lacenaire along with de Sade and the
Emperor Nero. He has a special niche ready for them all. ‘I like to see
men such as this’, he writes. ‘They are like the little priapic statues which
the Egyptians placed alongside the immortals. [ . . . ] To my mind they
explain history, they are the complement, the apogee, the morality, the
dessert.’30 A potent version of the grotesque, Priapus mocking the immor-
tals, they spoke agreeably to an adolescent sensibility increasingly exasper-
ated by the burdens of a schoolboy life that was reaching an end. Not
that Flaubert had yet read de Sade. He asks Ernest, in Paris, to send him
some. He says he will pay the books’ weight in gold.
He was ready for what he hoped he might find. Did Ernest send him
the books he wanted? I think it unlikely. Ernest was ambitious, and this
meant gradually untangling oneself from disreputable impulses and low
company. Though there is no further mention of the request, we know
that Flaubert was soon in a position to judge for himself. His private
journal for this year records his first impression:
Once you have read the Marquis de Sade and once you recover from
the dazzling effect, you find yourself wondering if it’s all true, if what
he teaches is the truth – this because you cannot resist the hypothesis
he makes you dream about, unlimited power and magnificent
ejaculations.31
Jokingly, Flaubert observes that de Sade omitted to mention cannibalism

and wild beasts. More seriously, ‘he ought to have ridiculed vice, which
he did not do, and that is where he falls short’.32
In a letter to the same friend written six months later, Flaubert adopts
a magisterial pose which may not be entirely serious. He instructs Ernest
to read de Sade from cover to cover: ‘It will complete your moral edu-
cation and give you brilliant insights into the philosophy of history.’33
30
‘J’aime bien à voir des hommes comme ça [ . . . ] ces figures ressemblent aux
priapes égyptiens mis à côté des statues des immortels [ . . . ] Ces monstres-là
expliquent pour moi l’histoire, ils en sont le complement, l’apogée, la morale, le
dessert.’ Letter to Ernest Chevalier, 15 July 1839: Correspondance, i. 47–8.
31
‘Quand on a lu le marquis de Sade et qu’on est revenu de l’éblouissement,
on se prend à se demander si tout ne serait pas vrai, si la vérité n’est pas tout ce
qu’il enseigne – et cela parce que vous ne pouvez résister à cette hypothèse à
laquelle il vous fait rêver d’un pouvoir sans bornes et de jouissances magnifiques.’
G. Flaubert, Oeuvres de jeunesse, ed. C. Gothot-Mersch. Paris. Gallimard 2001,
p. 743.
32
‘il aurait du se moquer du vice aussi, ce qu’il n’a pas fait, et c’est là sa faute.’
Ibid., p. 744.
33
‘Cela complétera ton cours de morale et te donnera de brillants aperçus sur
la philosophie de l’histoire.’ Correspondance, i. 61.
At the close of the same letter Flaubert proposes a facetiously egalitarian

novel in the style of Goethe. It was to be the story of a king and a cesspool
cleaner. They meet and converse in a brothel. This is scarcely a scenario to
be found in de Sade, where social differences are carefully preserved,
though it testifies to the interesting fact that the comic truth of our sexuality
now comes ludicrously spattered with traces of blood, shit, and semen.
Within a few months Flaubert is teasing this same friend by incorporat-
ing undeclared quotations from de Sade into his letters. Ernest, to
Flaubert’s delight, was too unenlightened to realise what he had been
reading: ‘You had no idea that I was sending you some de Sade.’
Flaubert’s notebook for this same year records troubling thoughts that
push towards blood and horror: ‘I have sweet desires for love, and I have
desires that burn, desires that mean blood and horror.’34 On the following
page of the same notebook these thoughts are worked up into a brief
Pastiche which, as he recalls, he wrote one idle Sunday as a remedy for a
mood of boredom and anger. Its an oriental tyrant fantasy wrapped up in
an exquisitely modulated prose: palace balcony, regal boredom, purple
couch, severed heads, supple concubines, and the drinking of fresh blood.
No mention of de Sade here. No hint of his raucously polemical material-
ism. Yet this Pastiche looks like the finale of something that de Sade
allowed Flaubert to explore. De Sade showed him how draw a certain
comic-satiric-erotic aggression, how to put fire into his writing.
Since the age of 15 Flaubert had been experimenting with a precocious
range of literary genres, shaping the materials that lay to hand in the
world of his boyhood. Recent family history, on both sides, offered an
abundance of traumatic experiences. In 1794, at the age of 9, Flaubert’s
father had been tutored to make a speech that saved his royalist father
from the guillotine. Flaubert’s mother, less fortunate, was an orphan of
the storm. Her mother died the week she was born and her father died
before she was 10.
As well as these family memories there was much in the here and now,
on the streets of the city of his boyhood, to confirm anyone’s darkest
imaginings. Rouen in the 1830s had a high-mortality, quick-profit
economy based on steam-powered textile production in large factories.
Labour was effectively unregulated. Thirteen hours a day was the norm,
fourteen or fifteen hours a day in the worst cases. In a hard winter the
city was a place of hunger, violence, and fear. The destitute crawled into
church doorways, to die of hunger and cold.
34
‘Si j’ai de suaves desirs d’amour, j’en ai d’ardents, j’en ai de sanglants, j’en ai
d’horribles.’ Oeuvres de jeunesse, p. 733.
In the spring of 1832 when Flaubert was 10 years old – an age keenly
receptive to intimations of death – France and the city of Rouen were
struck by cholera. The first of the catastrophic nineteenth-century
European epidemics, cholera generated an acute social crisis. Because it
killed the urban poor in great numbers it inflamed everyday class antag-
onisms. There was panic down below, ignorance, prejudice, and contempt
up above. Hatred, rage, and fear displaced the nervously smiling trans-
actions of middle-class philanthropy. The rumours were almost as virulent
in their effects as the disease itself. In cities the destitute said it was a plot
to exterminate the poor. Many of the cholera victims died in the hospital,
just behind the simple wooden partition that separated the family
dining-room from the sick ward.
The moral spectacle of pain was a striking feature of Flaubert’s early
world. The family lived in a wing of the municipal hospital, intimate
witness to the casualties of industrial labour and the rough procedures of
pre-scientific medicine: children arriving with arms torn off by factory
machinery, surgical operations conducted without anaesthesia. I see strik-
ing analogies between the symbolic geography of de Sade’s novels and the
real architecture of the paternal hospital. They share many features: seclu-
sion from the city, total enclosure, rigid hierarchy, and a distribution of
roles in which doctor and patient enact a marvellously ambiguous version
of master and slave. The father-doctor-surgeon becomes the focus of a
classic ambivalence. He is the much-loved saintly healer, but he is also the
man of blood, the man with a sharp knife. He holds people down and
cuts them open, and if they survive they love him dearly for it.
Flaubert’s early writings wrestle with disguised versions of these themes.
In Un parfum à sentir, a tale written in April 1836, Marguerite is a young
woman working as a street acrobat. Starving on the edge of misery, her
performance declines. She is greeted with mocking laughter, ‘the fierce
laughter prompted by the man who falls over, the disdainful laughter that
the proud man in his expensive clothes bestows on the prostitute, the
laughter of the child as he tears the wings from the butterfly’.35 Within a
narrative line of some complexity, our sympathies are firmly with the
victim. The nuanced cruelty of the comic spirit is precociously
acknowledged.
In Quidquid volueris, a tale written in the autumn of 1837, sympathy is
unexpectedly displaced. The hero is half-man and half-ape. Modelled on
Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, he is the child of a black slave inseminated by
35
‘ce rire féroce que l’on donne à l’homme qui tombe, de ce rire dédaigneux
que l’orgueil en habits dorés jette à la prostitution, de ce rire que l’enfant soufflé
sur le papillon dont il arrache les ailes.’ Œuvres de jeunesse, p. 85.
an orang-utan. The ape-man rapes and murders his master’s young wife,
kills her new baby, and then kills himself. We can read this as a fancy-
dress parable of envious attack, sexual envy exploding in bestial rage. This
rage is directed against an image of that bourgeois conjugality from which
the creature is forever excluded. But the real energy of Quidquid volueris is
in the audaciously sympathetic rendering of the ape-man’s inner world.
We see through his eyes the happiness of the human couple. We feel with
him as speechless envy drives him to rape and murder.
This precocious early tale – the author was not yet 16 – touches upon
one of Flaubert’s most cherished themes, a theme which has aptly been
described as ‘a generalised love for the monster’.36 Flaubert’s monster was
a composite figure, originally an imaginative projection of the incipient
violence that came from within himself, from the great gap between body
and mind. It was the thing they called his epilepsy, though he would never
adopt that name. Whatever it was called, it gave him a secret affinity with
the barbarian, the idiot, the simpleton, the lunatic. The monster is the
one who brings chaos. He incites murder, suicide, incest, adultery, and
prostitution. Yet he inspires in the reader– spectator the mad laughter of
complicity. He is touched by ambivalence. Whereas the juvenilia trade in
the explicitly and externally monstrous, the later work explores the linger-
ing modern disasters that come from within: suicide in Madame Bovary,
bankruptcy in L’Education sentimentale. In this framework, the scenes of
death by torture in Salammbô, the deluded murders in Saint Julien, and the
joke decapitation in Herodias signify a reversion to an earlier and more
direct mode of the monstrous. The blind beggar who shadows Emma in
the later episodes of Madame Bovary is a chaotic, regressive, mutilated
figure, a man from another, older world, conscripted to add some intima-
tion of the sacred.
Flaubert played the monster with his beloved younger sister Caroline,
in the happy years before her marriage. A thrillingly violent erotic game,
it was called Lugarto, the name of the melodramatically wicked villain in
a recent novel by Eugène Sue. Sue’s Lugarto is a nineteenth-century
Caliban, the offspring of a Brazilian slave. He is hideous, sickly, and
fragile but immensely violent. As he is described at the climax of Sue’s
novel, his lips twitch with rage and his eyes shine with hatred. He intends
to rape the heroine. Thereafter he dies a miserable death, starved in a
secret dungeon. When she was confined to bed by ill health, Flaubert
36
M. I. Marsaud, ‘The Notion of the Monoter in the Works of De Sade and
Flaubert’, University of California, San Diego, PhD Dissertation, 1976, p. 5.
used to entertain Caroline with his performances of Lugarto. After her

marriage, he complained, there was no more Lugarto.
In his writings Flaubert soon moved on from the primitive sexual
crimes of ape-men and took up the more interesting, grandiose, defiant
transgressions of emperors and poets, the kind that go unpunished. In La
Danse de morts, written in May 1838, he writes briefly in the voice of the
Emperor Nero, declaiming as if in grand opera: ‘I want to die of love,
voluptuously, deliriously. While I eat [ . . . ] with girls naked to the waist
serving me from dishes of gold, leaning forward to see me, and I want
them to cut somebody’s throat, for it is a godlike pleasure to mingle the
smell of blood with the smell of cooked meat; and the cries of the dying
will send me to sleep as I eat.’37 Flaubert’s pantomime Nero was not
especially original. In the early 1830s, in advanced Romantic circles,
Nero was often applauded as the perverse type of the artist.
Madness, on a grand scale, might one day make for great art.
Laughter, more modestly and more immediately, could deflect punish-
ment. Writing later that year, Flaubert praised Rabelais and Byron as ‘the
only two who have written with the aim of attacking the human race
while laughing right in its face’.38 Laughter makes all the difference. It
confuses the issue, protects the joker. Later in the same year, horrid laugh-
ter returns in another letter, closer to home this time. His friends have left
for Paris. Flaubert reassures them that he has not lapsed from the austere
sensibility that they once cultivated together. ‘I analyse myself all the
more, myself and others. I dissect endlessly, it entertains me and when at
last I have discovered corruption in something thought pure, discovered
gangrene in all the best places, I look up and I laugh.’39
Resigned to the realities of studying the law, Flaubert was
cultivating an insurgent fantasy self: ‘If ever I play an active part in
the world’, he declared, ‘it will be as a thinker and a demoraliser. I
shall do nothing but tell the truth but it will be horrible, cruel and
37
‘Je veux mourir d’amour, de volupté, d’ivresse! Et tandis que je mangerai
[ . . . ] et que des filles nues jusqu’à la ceinture me serviront des plats d’or et se
pencheront pour me voir, on égorgera quelqu’un, car j’aime, et c’est un plaisir de
Dieu, à mêler les parfums du sang à ceux des viands; et ces voix de la mort
m’endormiront à table.’ Œuvres de jeunesse, p. 431.
38
‘Rabelais et Byron, les deux seuls qui aient écrit dans l’intention de nuire au
genre humain et de lui rire à la face.’ Letter to Ernest Chevalier, 13 Sept. 1838:
Correspondance, i. 28.
39
‘Je m’analyse advantage, moi et les autres. – Je dissèque sans cesse, cela
m’amuse et quand enfin j’ai découvert la corruption dans quelque chose que l’on
croit pure, et la gangrène aux beaux endroits, je lève la tête et je ris.’ Letter to
Ernest Chevalier, 28 Dec. 1838: ibid., p. 35.
40
naked.’ These imaginings culminated in Smarh, finished in April 1839.
Smarh, he said, would be ‘superb, monstrous, frighteningly lascivious
. . . which would compel men and women to copulate in the street just
like dogs’.41
Smarh explores the power of art to release the madness so carefully
contained. Yuk, the God of the grotesque, presides over the corruption and
seduction of a virtuous married woman. He knows from the inside her fru-
strated sexual desires. He stimulates a fertile vein of erotic fantasy in her
mind and persuades her to give herself indiscriminately to every man that
comes along (i. 40). Smarh offers lascivious fancy-dress demons in a mode of
preposterously unconstrained fantasy. But it also explores something more
original, more nuanced, and more constrained, something that comes out of
the woman’s head. The sadistic impulse, though not labelled as such, surfaces
repeatedly in Flaubert’s writings hereafter. It is present in various guises in
the unpublished 1845 version of L’Education sentimentale. Henri, the active pro-
tagonist, elopes with an older married woman. The love she lavishes upon
him is both sweet and bitter, and the latter is by far the more interesting:
sharp lacerations bringing delicious pain which drove him into a

frenzy; sometimes she bit him hard and her white teeth snipping at the
flesh of her lover clattered with the ferocity of some antique Venus.42
As their passion fades Henri finds that ‘monstrous desires’ invade his
heart. Flaubert now envisages the monstrous with a certain serenity, as an
ever-present human possibility. It has been integrated into a larger vision
of the perversities and the failures of love. Only the artist is allowed to
venture into this realm and to return unharmed. Henri’s counterpart, the
young artist Jules, discovers ‘the monstrosities’ of de Sade’s Justine. Against
the public consensus of the day, Flaubert portrays the scene of reading
positively, as an instructive thought experiment.
Justine, a book so splendid by virtue of horror, a book in which crime

looks you in the eye and sneers in your face, showing her sharp teeth
40
‘Si jamais je prends une part active au monde ce sera comme penseur et
comme démoralisateur. Je ne ferai que dire la vérité mais elle sera horrible, cruelle
et nue.’ Letter to Ernest Chevalier, 24 Feb. 1839: ibid., p. 37.
41
‘superbe, monstrueuse, épouvantablement impudique . . . qui forcerait
hommes et femmes a s’accoupler dans la rue à la façon des chiens.’
42
‘d’âcres déchirements pleins d’un douleur joyeuse qui tournait au délire;
quelquefois elle avait des morsures chaudes ou l’émail de ses dents blanches,
s’appuyant sur la chair de son amant, claquait avec la férocité de la Vénus
antique’. Œuvres de jeunesse, pp. 929 –30.
and holding out her arms to you; he went down into these shadowy
depths of human nature, listened to the death-rattle, observed the
convulsions and was not afraid. For is there not poetry everywhere –
if it exists at all?43
Some magical lucidity, some immunity allows Jules to witness the ambigu-
ous moans and convulsions of le petit mort without fear. There was an
obvious model for such courage in the face of death: the father, in his
professional persona, Dr Achille-Cléophas Flaubert. Flaubert several
times claimed that as a young man he had conducted ingenious sexual
experiments with prostitutes, emerging unscathed, thanks to his excep-
tional willpower.
I’ve indulged in all that sort of thing too! When I was eighteen! I
[ . . . ] believed that alcohol and harlotry were an inspiration! [ . . . ] I
used to spend a small fortune on mythological processions, but I
found it all as silly and as empty as anything else. [ . . . ] If I am,
venereally, so well behaved, it is because in my early youth I passed
through a phase of somewhat precocious debauchery, quite deliber-
ately, so as to find out.44
He returns to the subject, in slightly more grandiose terms:
Madness and lust are two things I have sounded so deeply, seas that I
have sailed so far upon at will, that I shall never (I hope) become
either a lunatic or a de Sade. But I have suffered for it, I can tell you.
My nervous illness has been the scum from these little intellectual
drolleries.45
43
‘Justine, cette œuvre belle à force d’horreur, où le crime vous regarde en face
et vous ricane au visage, écartant ses gencives aigues et vous tendant les bras; il
descendit dans ces profondeurs ténébreuses de la nature humaine, prêta l’oreille à
tous ces râles, assista à ces convulsions et n’eut pas peur. Et puis la poésie n’est-elle
pas partout – si elle est quelque part?’ Ibid., pp. 959 –60.
44
‘Mais j’ai donné dans tout cela aussi moi! A 18 ans! J’ai cru également que
l’alcool et le bordel inspiraient. J’ai quelquefois [ . . . ] mangé dans un seul coup
beaucoup d’argent à des processions mythologiques, mais j’ai trouvé tout cela
aussi bête que le reste et aussi vide. [ . . . ] Si je suis, sous le rapport venerien, un
homme si sage, c’est que j’ai passé de bonne heure par une débauche supérieure
à mon âge et intentionellement, afin de savoir.’ Letter to Louise Colet, 3 July
1852: Correspondance, ii. 124.
45
‘La folie et la luxure sont deux choses que j’ai tellement sondées, où j’ai si
bien naviguée par ma volonté, que je ne serais jamais ( je l’éspère) ni un aliené ni
un de Sade. Mais il m’en a cuit, par exemple. Ma maladie de nerfs a été l’écume
This is the defiant theme of Flaubert’s private existential legend: braving

the worst, emerging damaged but unbroken, thanks to some exceptional
inner strength. From an early age, so he said, he habitually made himself
do things that went against the grain. He took a distinct pride in this virile
power, this calm triumph over feeling and impulse. For a man subject to
epilepsy, self-command remained a great imperative.
Recalling that these claims were made in letters to Louise Colet and
that they were intended to provoke her indignation, we ought to allow for
some exaggeration and certainly for some imprecision as to the year in
question. Flaubert was 18 in December 1839 and it was around this time
that he probably read de Sade for the first time. We don’t know if those
costly ‘mythological processions’ were inspired by Justine, though we may
observe that they coincided.
Madame Bovary stages many delicately nuanced scenes of reading. On the
eve of disaster, as her affair with Leon reaches its finale, Emma indulges a
taste for books that testify to her state of morbid, solitary, hallucinatory
eroticism.
Madame was up in her room. Nobody went in to her. She stayed

there all day long, sluggish, half naked, and, every so often, burning
oriental pastilles which she had bought in Rouen, from a shop run by
an Algerian. To avoid having that man lying asleep up against her
body every night, she managed, after many a grimace, to banish him
up to the second floor; and she used to read until dawn, bizarre
books, full of orgiastic set-pieces and blood-thirsty adventures.
Terror-stricken, she screamed.46
What exactly is Emma reading at this point? Is this a coded reference to

de Sade: ‘des livres extravagants ou il y avait des tableaux orgiaques avec
des situations sanglantes’? The description certainly fits Justine: just
enough detail to prompt recognition in those who know about such
things, but not enough to provoke a general scandal. It could also describe
de ces petites facéties intellectuelles.’ Letter to Louise Colet, 7 July 1853: ibid.,
p. 377.
46
‘Madame était dans sa chambre. On n’y montait pas. Elle restait là tout le
long du jour, engourdie, à peine vétue, et de temps a autre, faisant fumer des
pastilles du sérail qu’elle avait achetées à Rouen, dans la boutique d’un Algérien.
Pour ne pas avoir, la nuit, auprès d’elle, cet homme étendu qui dormait, elle finit,
à force de grimaces, par le réléguer au second étage; et elle lisait jusqu’au matin
des livres extravagants où il y avait des tableaux orgiaques avec des situations
sanglantes. Souvent un terreur la prenait, elle poussait un cri. Madame Bovary, 3: 6.
any of the early nineteenth-century pornographic texts that were often

erroneously attributed to de Sade in order to increase their attraction. But
is it plausible that Emma could be reading de Sade? Does she have the
privacy? Does she have the contacts? I have heard the interesting
suggestion, from an exasperated female reader, that if only Emma had
read de Sade she could have shunned the arsenic, taken up residence in
Rodolphe’s chateau, and lived a life of consummate sexual satisfaction.
But Emma is not Indiana. She is not a George Sand heroine. She is con-
demned, by genre logic as well as by petit-bourgeois ideology, never to
know that romantic liberation, whatever the fond wishes of her readers.
On the surface, Salammbô is a gleefully sadistic extravaganza. This
aspect of the book was most prominent when Flaubert described his
intentions to Gautier at an early stage of composition:
My characters don’t talk, they bellow. It’s the colour of blood from
beginning to end. There are male brothels, cannibalism, elephants
and scenes of torture. But it may well be that the whole thing is
profoundly stupid and perfectly tedious.47
Beneath the masculine badinage, the psycho-sexual subject of Salammbô

was perilously close to home. Setting the action in ancient Carthage was a
strategy to evade the censor within and without. Less than a month later,
Flaubert described his theme in very different terms to one of his more
soulful female admirers.
I am convinced that the most furious material appetites are expressed

unknowingly by flights of idealism, just as the most sordidly extrava-
gant sexual acts are engendered by a pure desire for the impossible,
an ethereal aspiration after sovereign joy. I do not know (nobody
knows) the meaning of the words body and soul, where the one ends
and the other begins.48
47
‘Mes personages au lieu de parler, hurlent. D’un bout à l’autre c’est couleur
de sang. Il y a des bordels d’hommes, des anthropophagies, des éléphants et des
supplices. Mais il se pourrait faire que tout cela fût profondément idiot et
parfaitement ennuyeux.’ Letter to Théophile Gautier, 27 Jan. 1859: Correspondance,
iii. 11.
48
‘Je suis convaincu que les appétits matériels les plus furieux se formulent
insciemment par des élans d’idéalisme, de même que les extravagances charnelles
les plus immondes sont engendrées par le désir pur de l’impossible, l’aspiration
éthérée de la souveraine joie. Et d’ailleurs je ne sais ( personne ne sait) ce que
veulent dire ces deux mots: âme et corps, où l’une finit, où l’autre commence’.
Letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 Feb. 1859: ibid., p. 16.
Flaubert was first publicly associated with de Sade in December 1862,

when Sainte-Beuve published his intelligently hostile review of Salammbô.
Sainte-Beuve, the scourge of the corruptions of contemporary literature,
had previously objected to the muted cruelties of Madame Bovary. Salammbô
was an even more serious symptom of the same disorder. He had particu-
lar objection to the atrocities that darken the latter portion of the book:
‘peculiar, ingenious, disgusting horrors’, including the torture of the
wounded and the methodical mutilation of corpses. He pronounced a
clear verdict. ‘In these descriptions, already quite strong enough in their
reality, there is the hint of a sadistic imagination at work.’49
Stung by this last phrase, Flaubert wrote an open letter to
Sainte-Beuve. It was an elaborate vindication of his novel, the first time
that he had thus entered the arena to explain or defend his work. Hugo
wrote prefaces. Flaubert made a point of not doing so. Art, so he
believed, was not for explaining. But this accusation could not be left to
circulate unchallenged.
I must tell you quite frankly, cher Maı̂tre, that your phrase about the
‘sadistic tendency’ of my imagination was rather wounding.
Everything you write is taken seriously. Now any such phrase of yours,
once it is in print, becomes almost a mark of dishonour. Have you for-
gotten that I once sat on the criminal bench in a court room, accused
of offending public decency, and that the stupid and the vicious will
use anything to attack me? So do not be surprised if one of these days
in Le Figaro you read something to this effect: ‘Monsieur Flaubert is a
disciple of de Sade. His friend, his sponsor, a master-critic, has said as
much, quite clearly, though with that finesse and good-humoured
mockery which . . . etc.’ What would I say to that? What would
I do?’ [ . . . ] I think I have actually been less hard on humanity in
Salammbô than I was in Madame Bovary. The curiosity, the love that
drew me towards religions and peoples long-vanished, has something
moral, something sympathetic about it, as far as I can see.50
49
‘Une pointe d’imagination sadique se mêle à ces descriptions, déjà bien
assez fort dans leur réalité’ Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, Paris, Michel Levy
Frères, 1865, vol. 4, p. 71.
50
‘Oubliez-Franchement, je vous avouerai, cher Maitre, que “la pointe
d’imagination sadique” m’a un peu blessé. Toutes vos paroles sont graves. Or un
tel mot de vous, lorsqu’il est imprimé, devient presque une flétrissure.
Oubliez-vous que je me suis assis sur les bancs de la correctionnelle comme
prévenu d’outrage aux mœurs, et que les imbéciles et les méchants se font des
armes de tout? Ne soyez donc pas étonné si un de ces jours vous lisez dans Le
Figaro quelque chose d’analogue à ceci: “M. G. Flaubert est un disciple de De De
Several days later Flaubert wrote to Sainte-Beuve once again. He

demanded, decorously but insistently, that he omit ‘the paragraph with
the word sadistic’ from the published version of his review.
It would be picked up by Le Figaro and then we would both have to
deal with that rag! And then, rereading that passage I think it carries
a certain bitterness which offends me. There are some things which
one says but does not write down, and certain things which one
writes down but does not care to see published. This is my reproach
to you. I do not want it made public. Do you understand me?51
Sainte-Beuve did not cut the offending paragraph. There is, though, a
deleted passage in the manuscript of Flaubert’s letter to Sainte-Beuve in
which he spells out the differences between himself and de Sade.
In my ferocities in my bloody excesses I am a world away from

the great Marquis. He hated Nature and I adore it. [ . . . ] I defy
you to find in all of de Sade a tree or an animal or even what is
more a description of a naked woman – descriptions of sexual
organs – that’s all – on every page indeed – But never a man or a
woman – this man this queer gloomy character this metaphysical
and supremely fallacious intelligence always went straight to the
point preached continuously and did not even want to portray
character.52
Sade. Son ami, son parrain, un maı̂tre en fait de critique l’a dit lui-même assez
clairement, bien qu’avec cette finesse et cette bonhomie railleuse qui, etc”
Qu’aurais-je à répondre – et à faire?’ Letter to Sainte-Beuve, 23/4 Dec. 1862:
Correspondance, iii. 281 –2.
51
‘Il serait relevé par Le Figaro et nous aurions à faire vous et moi avec cette
feuille! Et puis, en le relisant, ce passage, il me semble contenir une certaine
âcreté qui me déplaı̂t. Il y a des choses que l’on dit et que l’on n’écrit point,
d’autres que l’on écrit et qu’on ne se soucie pas qu’il soit public. Me
comprenez-vous?’ Letter to Sainte-Beuve, 27 Dec. 1862: ibid., p. 286.
52
‘Je suis au contraire dans mes férocités excès sanguins tout à l’autre bout du
gd Marquis. Il haı̈ssait la nature, et moi je l’adore. [ . . . ] Je vous défie de trouver
dans tout de De Sade un arbre ni un animal [ . . . ] ni même ce qui va vous
paraı̂tre plus fort un description de femme nue ce qui est plus – descriptions
d’organes sexuels c’est tout. – à chaque pas, c’est vrai – mais de femme ou
d’homme jamais – cet homme ce drôle funèbre cet esprit métaphysique et
archi-faux allait toujours au but, prêchait continuellement [ . . . ] et n’a pas même
voulu peindre.’ Ibid., p. 1224.
This whole passage was left out of the letter that Flaubert sent to
Sainte-Beuve. Perhaps he realised it displayed an incriminating familiarity
with the texts. Complex, informed, dissenting opinions on de Sade were
not for publication. Not at this moment in the history of censorship, and
certainly not from a man who had recently emerged from a prosecution
for ‘outrage aux mœurs’. Flaubert’s appreciative critique of de Sade is
thus only to be found in his notebooks, never intended for publication.
Dated around January 1860, this passage was written when Flaubert was
in the very midst of Salammbô.
In this sense, nothing more poetic than vice and crime. That is why
virtuous books are so boring and so false they fail to understand man
and the eternal core of man individual existence unrestrained the self
up against the world, the individual against society or outside it
which is the true organic man. That is why perhaps it is so difficult
to make people laugh at vice. [ . . . ] Note that Molière only ever
attacked the ridiculous [ . . . ] As for vicious characters I know only
those of the Marquis de Sade that make me laugh and that was not
the intention of the author, on the contrary. But in de Sade crime
begins to look ridiculous because nature is so glorified, pushed to
such excess that it becomes impossible and disappears. We are left
with a conception with creatures supposedly human in opposition to
humanity.53
There is a pattern to Flaubert’s mature fictional treatment of sadistic

themes. In the modern works the material of this fantasy has been inter-
nalised. It becomes interestingly convoluted in the process. In the other
works, set long ago and far away, the same material is freely elaborated.
Symbolic distance makes it safe to play with. Let us see how this works in
the case of The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator.
53
‘En ce sens, rien de plus poétique que le vice et le crime: Voilà pourquoi les
livres vertueux sont-ils si ennuyeux et si faux ils méconnaissent l’homme et le fond
éternel de l’homme la vie individuelle sans frein le moi rejaillissant contre tous,
l’individu contre la société ou en dehors d’elle qui est le vrai homme organique.
Voila pourquoi il est peut-être si difficile de faire rire des vices. [ . . . ] Notez que
Molière ne s’est jamais attaqué qu’aux ridicules [ . . . ] Comme personnages
vicieux je ne connais que ceux du marquis de De Sade qui me fassent rire et ce
n’était pas l’intention de l’auteur, bien au contraire. Mais ici, le crime arrive à être
un ridicule car la nature est tellement exaltée, poussée à outrance qu’elle devient
impossible et disparaı̂t. On n’a plus qu’une conception et des êtres donnés pour
humains en opposition avec l’humanité.’ Biasi, P.-M. (ed.), Carnets de trarail de gustave
Flaubert, Paris, Ballaud, 1988, p. 214.
This is Flaubert’s long-meditated and most explicit treatment of the

theme of cruelty. The story follows the outline of the original legend, but
Flaubert’s Julian is obsessed with hunting. As a young boy he discovers a
lascivious pleasure in the killing of small animals. He then carves his way
through the entire catalogue of the animal kingdom, a massacre of the
innocents, beginning with a small white mouse and ending with a large,
majestic stag. Flaubert’s version of the hunting theme is quite explicitly
sadistic. For instance, we watch closely as Julian strangles a wounded
pigeon, fainting with pleasure as he feels the creature’s final convulsions.
Yet Flaubert is infinitely more imaginative than de Sade, whose fictional
torturers of the innocent are gifted with a cartoon-like singlemindedness.
Flaubert has the creatures turn against their persecutor, driving him into
a state of impotent rage. In this dangerous mood he murders his father
and mother, by mistake. It’s a joke, a bungled action, a ridiculous crime.
A dream dating from 1845, when Flaubert was in his early twenties,
points towards the source of the tale. The dream was written down, so
Flaubert explained, three weeks after it had been dreamt. The delay hints
at the persistent power of the dream. It also implies that the original
material of the dream had been variously worked over, in the waking
imagination, before Flaubert told himself to put it all in writing. Here is
the text:
I was in a great forest full of monkeys; my mother was walking with

me. The further we went the more there were; they were up in the
branches, laughing and jumping about; they came across our path,
lots of them, bigger and bigger, more and more of them. They were
all looking at me and I began to feel frightened. They gathered
around us in a circle; one of them wanted to stroke me and took my
hand, I gave it a bullet in the shoulder that made it bleed and it
made a dreadful howling noise. Then my mother said to me, ‘Why
did you hurt him when he’s your friend? What’s he done to you?
Can’t you see that he loves you? He looks so like you!’ And the
monkey was looking at me. It broke my heart and I woke up . . .
feeling my own deep affinity with the animals, fraternising with them
in a tender pantheistic union.54
The essential ingredients of the dream – the fear, the killing, the
reproach, the sorrow, the reparation – have been preserved, elaborated,
and disguised in the story. Thirty years after this initiating dream,
54
Quoted in A. W. Raitt, Flaubert: Trois contes (London 1991) pp. 54 –5.
Flaubert was unusually careful to give nothing away about this his most
darkly enigmatic work. In the letters that he wrote alongside The Legend of
Saint Julian Hospitator he ridiculed the whole enterprise. It was merely ‘a
little religioso-poetico-medievalesque-rococo storyette’, so delightfully
edifying that its author would be suspected of lapsing into clericalism.55
The mockery was a way of saying Keep Out. St Julian was a subject he
had chosen long ago. By the time he came to write about it, it had been
with him for most of his life. Slowly and fondly elaborated, Flaubert’s
saint was a half-private creation, a secret thing of his own that might one
day be passed off as a St Julian. Had he chosen it? Or had it chosen him?
He sometimes confessed, jokingly, that it was probably the latter.
Thinking with demons was never likely to be easy. When one of your
demons was called de Sade there was a strong possibility of being misun-
derstood, of being simply and irrevocably demonised, however evasive or
confused one’s undeclared intentions. My aim has been to describe and
perhaps to understand what Flaubert was trying to do, both in secret and
in his art, with his particular demon. In that great discursive constellation
of insight, affectation, rumour, and hoax, one statement stands out: ‘But
in de Sade crime begins to look ridiculous.’ There, I suggest, is the germ
of an absolutely modern theory of comedy.
55
Letters dated 5 Jan. 1875 and 12 Feb. 1876, quoted in Raitt, ibid., p. 38.

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Thinking with Demons: Flaubert

(Letter from Flaubert to Louise Colet, 3 July 18521)

(Letter from Flaubert to Sainte-Beuve, 27 December 18622)

(Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, 18693)

ON THE FINAL PAGE of The Interpretation of Dreams, that wide-awake

tremulous reader in madness. Show the book to your friends, as a sign of

page, he is the man of envy, gleefully pursuing cruel, punitive fantasies of

It is all of a piece: bloody corpses, children torn from the arms of

And there follows a gloriously alarmist account of how this uncanny de

For make no mistake, the Marquis de Sade is everywhere; he is in all

This is my story and I’m writing it in my own blood on the pages of

Conceit combined with czupidity, with industrialism, with the need to

even respectable women, it’s a tasty morsel; as soon as they are

Sainte-Beuve’s admonition coincided with a significant strengthening

that stage censorship is going to be re-established and freedom of the

If the spirit of the age imposed a somnolent decency, an emasculated

The last ripples of Romanticism [ . . . ] compressed by the provincial

Up to this point I have argued that Flaubert came to de Sade impelled by

gloire des conspirateurs. Un rhetoricien composa une Apologie de Robespierre, qui,

Jokingly, Flaubert observes that de Sade omitted to mention cannibalism

At the close of the same letter Flaubert proposes a facetiously egalitarian

used to entertain Caroline with his performances of Lugarto. After her

sharp lacerations bringing delicious pain which drove him into a

Justine, a book so splendid by virtue of horror, a book in which crime

He returns to the subject, in slightly more grandiose terms:

This is the defiant theme of Flaubert’s private existential legend: braving

Madame was up in her room. Nobody went in to her. She stayed

What exactly is Emma reading at this point? Is this a coded reference to

any of the early nineteenth-century pornographic texts that were often

Beneath the masculine badinage, the psycho-sexual subject of Salammbô

I am convinced that the most furious material appetites are expressed

Flaubert was first publicly associated with de Sade in December 1862,

Several days later Flaubert wrote to Sainte-Beuve once again. He

It would be picked up by Le Figaro and then we would both have to

In my ferocities in my bloody excesses I am a world away from

There is a pattern to Flaubert’s mature fictional treatment of sadistic

This is Flaubert’s long-meditated and most explicit treatment of the

I was in a great forest full of monkeys; my mother was walking with

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