A Simple Heart

Beautiful story of a servant's life
By sally tarbox on 30 November 2016
This short (52p) work tells the uneventful life of devoted servant Felicite. After a wretched childhood followed by an unsuccessful romance, Felicite spends the rest of her days in the calm haven of Mme Aubin's household. Here she finds moments of happiness in caring for Mme's children; in having her nephew come to visit, and in religion, which she approaches in an entirely simple and uneducated way.
And the years roll by, each much like the last:
"Domestic events marked dates that later served as points of reference. Thus in 1825 a couple of glaziers whitewashed the hall."
There are tragedies and happinesses, notably when Felicite is gifted an unwanted pet parrot. As show more she looks at an image of the Holy Spirit, "one day she noticed that it had something of the parrot about it." She comes to vaguely conflate her beloved Loulou with the Holy Ghost:
"although Felicite used to say her prayers with her eyes on the picture, from time to time she would turn slightly towards the bird."

Although the reader smiles at this, the innocent and pure-minded devotion of this woman's life are touchingly described - I loved it. show less

The opening sentence introduces Félicité as the perfect servant in every way. She is also devoted to her faith, despite the tragedies and traumas in her past. Flaubert’s famous realism is plain, as is the language. There are some shafts of light and beauty, and ultimately humour, but mostly it's tragedy.

I read it for the story but got bogged down in translation issues.

The story and setting

The first chapter introduces Félicité and her somewhat disagreeable employer, the widowed Madame Aubain. The second starts with Félicité’s backstory and then draws in Madame and her young children, Paul and Virginie. There’s a dramatic and symbolic incident with a bull, and a trip to the coast for Virginie’s health.

The third chapter is show more the longest. It starts with Félicité taking Virginie to daily catechism. Sitting apart, copying what the children say and do, stirs a simple faith, although she can’t picture the Holy Spirit, which, she learns, could be a bird, a flame, and even a breath:
“Perhaps it is its light that at night hovers over swamps, its breath that propels the clouds, its voice that renders church-bells harmonious.”
As she watches, she almost feels the rapture of Virginie’s first communion, but when she herself asks for hers the next morning, it’s not the same. Just one of many disappointments in her life, and far from the worst.

Virginie is despatched to a convent to be educated and both women endure her absence differently (Paul has already gone away to school). Félicité fills the void with visits from her nephew, Victor, though his parents take advantage, and that thread doesn’t end happily. And then there’s another tragedy. Faith weaves through it, but it offers little succour. The name Virginie (or Virginia, in some translations) is surely no coincidence, but the name Félicité (happiness) seems cruelly ironic.

The parrot

Image: Félicité Sleeping, with parrot, David Hockney, 1974 (Source)

Loulou, the parrot that inspired Julian Barnes’ Flaubert's Parrot, is given to Madame. She gives him to Félicité, who adores him like a son or a lover. (Which? They should be very different!) When he dies, she has him stuffed and keeps him in her room, which is already like a cross between a chapel and a bazaar. Gradually, the stuffed and worm-ridden Loulou overlaps with, and maybe supplants, God in her increasingly enfeebled mind.

Félicité’s wish for Loulou is reflected in her final vision. The closing sentence is presumably intended to be profound, but I had to stifle a laugh. Perhaps too much mention of a dead parrot had put me in mind of Monty Python’s most famous sketch, HERE.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

A famous line from Socrates, and presumably an idea in Flaubert’s mind. Félicité is not given to introspection, but Flaubert presents her life for us to examine. She seems to make few marks on the world and leaves no descendants or other family, though people exploit her good nature.

But she touches many in small ways that do make a difference, such as tending to cholera victims and offering a drink to passing soldiers. Everyone she cares about, let alone loves, she loses, so was her life worth living? Only she could answer, but I think Flaubert suggests the affirmative. If in doubt, think of the starfish analogy, HERE.

Image: A starfish being returned to the sea: it makes a difference for that one (Source)

The problems of translating le mot juste

In The Art of the Short Story, this story is prefaced with a short biography of Flaubert and followed by an extract of a letter he wrote while working on Madame Bovary (see my ancient and very brief review HERE). Both stress his devotion to realism by honing his text to achieve stylistic perfection, finding the perfect word in every instance. Comparing translations made me question the validity of reading a translation at all.

I started off with John Siscoe’s, which is in the anthology. His first two sentences describe Félicité, and the next starts “She”, referring to the mistress, which confused me, even though she had been mentioned at the end of the previous sentence. A few pages later, it referred to Paul and Virginie's grandparents as “defunct”, rather than dead or deceased!

Thereafter, I switched between Siscoe and Gutenberg, which was interesting, sometimes infuriating, and occasionally funny. But it distracted me from the story itself. I wish I’d picked one (or none?) and stuck with it.

Neither translation won my heart
Sometimes I preferred Siscoe:
• “At twenty-five she looked forty. Once past fifty, she seemed ageless. Always silent, her back straight, her movements precise, she resembled a woman of wood, functioning like clockwork.” - Siscoe
versus
• “When she was twenty-five, she looked forty. After she had passed fifty, nobody could tell her age; erect and silent always, she resembled a wooden figure working automatically.” - Gutenberg

In this, I prefer Gutenberg - except for the final word:
• “The lazy surf tumbled onto the sands that stretched as far as the eye can see, while landward the beach ended in dunes bordering the Marais, a large meadow shaped like a horsetrack.” - Siscoe
versus
• “The sleepy waves lapping the sand unfurled themselves along the shore that extended as far as the eye could see, but where land began, it was limited by the downs which separated it from the “Swamp,” a large meadow shaped like a hippodrome.” - Gutenberg

Siscoe’s first two words distracted me from the intended imagery:
• “Bright day painted bars of dazzling light between the windowblinds.” - Siscoe
versus
• “The dazzling sunlight cast bars of light between the shutters.” - Gutenberg

At times, they were so different, it was hard to compare them.
• “All things rested, steeped in silence.” Siscoe
versus
• “This silence intensified the tranquility of everything.” - Gutenberg

Important points were rendered utterly differently:
• When Paul goes to boarding school, Siscoe says he said his goodbyes “cheerfully” but Gutenberg says “bravely”; there’s a chasm between those two words, and I have no idea which is closer to Flaubert’s intent.
• When Virginie goes away to school, Siscoe says Madame “broke down” but Gutenberg says she “had a fainting spell”: the former is conscious and emotional, but the latter is a loss of consciousness.
• When Félicité hopes to see Victor’s house in an atlas, Siscoe says Monsieur Bourais is delighted by her “simplicity” where Gutenberg calls it “ignorance”.

I know translation is a tricky art, but the differences are inexplicably wide and tell different stories. In a plot-based piece it might not matter as much, but in this, as for poetry, I wonder to what extent I’m reading the original author’s thoughts.

Short story club

I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

I enjoyed this portrait of an early 19th century maid in rural France. It depicts in a detailed and sympathetic way the emotional life of a woman who is fundamentally unsophisticated, but has deep feelings for the children of her mistress, for her nephew, and finally for a parrot. It could be viewed as patronizing, but I think Flaubert was sincere in his attempt to get inside the head of someone who lives their life in an emotional rather than intellectual world.

The importance of this novella — also known as "A Simple Heart" and "Un Coeur simple" — was revived by Julian Barnes' 1984 book Flaubert's Parrot, which is the source of my interest in reading it. In an 1876 letter to a friend, Flaubert writes:

Do you know what I've had on my table in front of me for the last three weeks? A stuffed parrot. It sits there on sentry duty. The sight of it is beginning to irritate me. But I keep it there so that I can fill my head with the idea of parrothood. Because at the moment I'm writing about the love between an old girl and a parrot.

The "old girl" in question is Félicité, a young servant girl, who gains employment in the household of Madame Aubain:

For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did show more the housework, washed, ironed, mended, harnessed the horse, fattened the poultry, made the butter and remained faithful to her mistress—although the latter was by no means an agreeable person.

At some point the household acquired a hand-me-down parrot, whose novelty wore thin after a while, and it ended up belonging to Félicité. Eventually the parrot died and Félicité had him stuffed.

In church she had noticed that something about the parrot resembled the Holy Spirit. And she had acquired a picture of Jesus' baptism where the resemblance was even more marked. She hung this picture, before which she acquired the habit of praying, in her room, and over the years the parrot became in her mind an actual representation of the Holy Spirit. As an old woman on her death bed, deaf and almost blind:

The beats of her heart grew fainter and fainter, and vaguer, like a fountain giving out, like an echo dying away; and when she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw in the half-opened heavens a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.

Many questions arise regarding these stories. Was Flaubert mocking religion in his usual way? Was he laughing at poor simple Félicité, or Julian for that matter? The mockery is apparent in the first story about Death. But it was written decades before and really bears little in common with the latter two stories.

We know from Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand that he wrote A Simple Soul in response to a challenge from her to write something positive and sympathetic. She had complained that his books were too filled with pessimism and desolation. He was in the process of writing A Simple Soul when George Sand died, so she never actually read it. But Flaubert pushed on and finished it. Here is what he had to say about his own motivation:

A "Simple Heart" is just the account of an obscure life, that of Félicité a poor country girl, pious but mystical, quietly devoted, and as tender as fresh bread. She loves successively a man, her mistress, her mistress' children, a nephew, an old man she is taking care of, then her parrot. When the parrot dies she has him stuffed, and when she herself is dying, she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. It's not at all ironic, as you suppose, but on the contrary, very serious and very sad. I want to arouse people's pity, to make sensitive souls weep, since I am one myself.

It would seem to me that this story and Flaubert's comment should be taken at face value. While equating the parrot with the Holy Spirit may seem blasphemous to some, one cannot discount the archetypal significance that the apotheosized parrot provided for Félicité in the waning days of her life. show less

Now this is how you write a short story! Beautiful, moving and sublime story of the life of a simple maid in 19th century France. It's both funny and heartbreaking, and has that inscrutable quality that makes you keep thinking about it and its various layers of meaning, like a prism that shines out different colored lights depending on which way you turn it.

Flaubert may be my all time favorite writer.

I remember going to D.C. a few years back and having a few hours to kill before my plane left so I went to the National Gallery. I didn’t have a bunch of time so I went straight to the Old Master and found myself standing in front of a self portrait by Rembrandt. I stood there about 5 feet away and was stunned and humbled. I couldn’t imagine someone having that much talent.

Flaubert is that good and A Simple Heart (also titled A Simple Soul) is like that painting. Stunning. Humbling. Quietly profound.

5 stars and a nomination to be put on the “best novellas of all time” list.

Flaubert escribe como si fuese el rey de la escritura, parece sencillo que sea capaz de dar ritmo, musicalidad, sentimiento y profundidad de la manera que lo hace. Además, hacer tan interesante una historia tan pequeña de desdicha es muy meritorio. Supongo que ha sido el más esmerado de cuantos escritores han existido y su maestría se deja ver.