Flaubert et Louise Colet: l’amour en poste restante by Joseph Vebret (review)

Reviewed by: Flaubert et Louise Colet: l’amour en poste restante by Joseph Vebret John T. Booker Vebret, Joseph. Flaubert et Louise Colet: l’amour en poste restante. Écriture, 2021. ISBN 978-2-3590-5341-8. Pp. 236. The course of the relationship between Flaubert and Louise Colet—by turns passionate, strained, or stormy—can be traced through the former’s expansive correspondence and the latter’s less well-known Mementos. Drawing on that body of material, while giving free rein to his imagination, Vebret crafts a dramatized version of the liaison, faithful in broad lines to its ebb and flow, but filled out and embellished by what Flaubert and Colet might have actually felt, thought, or said at a given moment. Since there is no introduction, only the word récit, in smaller print on the title page, might alert the reader that what follows will be something other than a conventional scholarly study. Vebret begins brusquely by staging the chance encounter that brought the couple together, in the studio of the sculptor James Pradier, in the summer of 1846. “C’est Louise Colet, la poétesse. Vas-y!,” he imagines Pradier encouraging the younger Flaubert, still unknown at the time; “C’est une femme célèbre, puisque tu veux écrire, mon petit, elle t’aidera” (11). Such is the point of departure for a breezy treatment of the relationship, framed as a drama—or rather, as the tone often suggests, a melodrama—in three acts. Categorical assertions are frequent: Flaubert’s behavior reveals “une certaine forme de masochisme, un plaisir à être tourmenté par sa mère, maltraité par sa maîtresse” (99), for example, while Colet embraces “sa liberté de femme, et s’offre à qui elle veut” (140). At times, Vebret seems to get carried away by the rapid pace of his own narrative and momentarily slip into the persona of one or the other protagonist, without using quotation marks to signal a change of voice: “Désormais elle le vouvoie. Je n’ai plus rien à vous dire. Tant mieux, réplique-til, car j’ai usé tous les moyens de vous faire comprendre les choses” (108). Sprinkled throughout are allusions that reflect a broad familiarity with nineteenth-century French literature. Of the inexperienced Flaubert, “Nerval dirait qu’il porte en lui le soleil noir de la mélancolie. Il est le ténébreux, le veuf, l’inconsolé…” (24-25), while Colet, of necessity ambitious, is characterized succinctly as “ce Rastignac en jupons” (31). The account of a particularly passionate tryst of the lovers in Mantes culminates in a provocative riff on the refrain of Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage:” “Ce n’est alors que luxure, fureur et volupté” (88). Once the relationship has definitively begun to cool, Vebret devotes a good deal of attention to Colet’s contemporaneous liaisons with Musset and Vigny, before forecasting in a portentous tone the outcome with Flaubert: “la rupture, inéluctable comme la fin d’une tragédie, est inscrite dans le marbre” (191). A chronology at the end is a welcome resource, since it can be difficult at times to follow the irregular pace and timeline of Vebret’s narrative, while a brief bibliography includes some scholarly studies of the Flaubert-Colet relationship. This imaginative recreation makes for light and lively reading, as long as one recognizes it for what it is. [End Page 215] John T. Booker University of Kansas Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French