Education is not a pleasant thing for the one who is subject to it. What does education mean?
Education means, simply speaking, taming, breaking, creating certain reflexes, correcting. However, to correct it is to break something and that is always painful at first. Of course after that it is fine, but at first it is not pleasant at all. If we go to school to be educated, it is because we have nowhere to go. Because our reflexes are crude, raw, virgin, because we can more easily change the nature of our passions.
But what about the grown-up man? A certain illusion is born in the mature man: I am as good as I am, I need nothing more. I'm coping with the way I am. This illusion is not at all unnatural and not at all condemnable. It is difficult to reconcile with the idea that you are unsuccessful, that you have stitches, that you are vicious, that you are tied to the senses, that your ideas are just prejudices and your feelings are confused and mediocre. It is difficult to accept because it is proper for man to believe in himself, without self-confidence he cannot have the feeling of fullness and freedom. For man to doubt himself, his own experience must restrain him. For example, he should believe himself in being unbearable to women and women, in dealing with him, to show him that he is unbearable, but not who knows what. He must believe himself intelligent, and in a determined circumstance to prove to him the opposite. It seems indisputable that in most cases things happen in this way, with the exceptions for which the educational precepts are not sufficient.

Literature is made for the vast majority of people and has an educational purpose. So, dear friend of my heart, I will want to reread your book someday..

<< ...I wanted to reread it (*ie, George Sand), my daughter-in-law has read it too, and some of my young people, all readers in earnest and of the first rank and not stupid at all (*thank you, George Sand!). We are all of the same opinion, that it is a beautiful book, equal in strength to the best ones of Balzac and truer, that is to say more faithful to the truth from one end to the other.
One needs the great art, the exquisite form and the severity of your work to do without flowers of fancy. However, you throw poetry with a full hand on your picture, whether your characters understand it or not. (Rosanette at Fontainebleau does not know on what grass she walks and nevertheless she is poetic.)
All that issues from a master's hand, and your place is well won for always. Live then as calmly as possible in order to last a long time and to produce a great deal. I have seen two short articles which did not seem to me to rebel against your success; but I hardly know what is going on, politics seems to me to absorb everything.
Keep me posted. If they did not do justice to you I should be angry and should say what I think. It is my right.>>

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Dear good master,

Your old troubadour (ie, Gustave Flaubert) is vehemently slandered by the papers. Read the Constitutionnel of last Monday, the Gaulois of this morning, it is blunt and plain. They call me IDIOTC and COMMON.
Barbey d'Aurevilly's article (Constitutionnel) is a model of this character, and the good Sarcey's, although less violent, is in no way behind it. These gentlemen object in the name of MORALITY and the IDEAL! I have also been annihilated in le Figaro and in Paris, by Cesana and Duranty.
I most profoundly don't care a fig! but that does not make me any the less astonished by so much hatred and bad faith.
La Tribune, le Pays and l'Opinion nationale on the other hand have highly praised me... As for the friends, the persons who received a copy adorned by my hand, they have been afraid of compromising themselves and have talked me of other things. The BRAVE are FEW. The book is selling very well nevertheless, in spite of politics, and Levy appears satisfied.
I know that the bourgeois of Rouen are furious with me "because of pere Roque and the cancan at the Tuileries." They think that one ought to prevent the publication of books like that (textual), that I lend a hand to the Reds, that I am capable of inflaming revolutionary passions, etc., etc. In short, I have received very few laurels, up to now, and no rose leaf hurts me.
All the papers cite as a proof of my depravity, the episode of the Turkish woman, which they misrepresent, naturally; and Sarcey compares me to Marquis de Sade, whom he comfesses he has not read!
All that does not upset me at all. But I WONDER what use there is in printing my book? >>

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As always, George Sand is the master of words and has the last of it:

<< I think that your school is not concerned with the substance, and that it dwells too much on the surface. By virtue of seeking the form, it makes the substance too cheap! it addresses itself to the men of letters. But there are no men of letters, properly speaking. Before everything, one is a man. One wants to find man at the basis of every story and every deed. That was the defect of l'Education sentimentale, about which I have so often reflected since, asking myself why there was so general a dislike of a work that was so well done and so solid. This defect was the absence of ACTION of the characters on themselves. They submitted to the event and never mastered it. Well, I think that the chief interest in a story is what you did not want to do. If I were you, I would try the opposite; you are feeding on Shakespeare just now, and you are doing well! He is the author who puts men at grips with events; observe that by them, whether for good or for ill, the event is always conquered. In his works, it is crushed underfoot.

L'Education sentimentale has been a misunderstood book, as I have told you repeatedly, but you have not listened to me. There should have been a short preface, or, at a good opportunity, an expression of blame, even if only a happy epithet to condemn the evil, to characterize the defect, to signalize the effort. All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with, because people did not understand that you wanted precisely to depict a deplorable state of society that encourages these bad instincts and ruins noble efforts; when people do not understand us it is always our fault. What the reader wants, first of all, is to penetrate into our thought, and that is what you deny him, arrogantly. He thinks that you scorn him and that you want to ridicule him. For my part, I understood you, for I knew you. If anyone had brought me your book without its being signed, I should have thought it beautiful, but strange, and I should have asked myself if you were immoral, skeptical, indifferent or heart-broken. You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.

I have already combated your favorite heresy, which is that one writes for twenty intelligent people and does not care a fig for the rest. It is not true, since the lack of success irritates you and troubles you. Besides, there have not been twenty critics favorable to this book which was so well written and so important. So one must not write for twenty persons any more than for three, or for a hundred thousand. One must write for all those who have a thirst to read and who can profit by good reading. Then one must go straight to the most elevated morality within oneself, and not make a mystery of the moral and profitable meaning of one's book. People found that with Madame Bovary. If one part of the public cried scandal, the healthiest and the broadest part saw in it a severe and striking lesson given to a woman without conscience and without faith, to vanity, to ambition, to irrationality. They pitied her; art required that, but the lesson was clear, and it would have been more so, it would have been so for everybody, if you had wished it, if you had shown more clearly the opinion that you had, and that the public ought to have had, about the heroine, her husband, and her lovers.

That desire to depict things as they are, the adventures of life as they present themselves to the eye, is not well thought out, in my opinion. Depict inert things as a realist, as a poet, it's all the same to me, but, when one touches on the emotions of the human heart, it is another thing. You cannot abstract yourself from this contemplation; for man, that is yourself, and men, that is the reader. Whatever you do, your tale is a conversation between you and the reader. If you show him the evil coldly, without ever showing him the good he is angry. He wonders if it is he that is bad, or if it is you. You work, however, to rouse him and to interest him; you will never succeed if you are not roused yourself, or if you hide it so well that he thinks you indifferent. He is right: supreme impartiality is an anti-human thing, and a novel ought to be human above everything. If it is not, the public is not pleased in its being well written, well composed and conscientious in every detail. The essential quality is not there: interest. The reader breaks away likewise from a book where all the characters are good without distinctions and without weaknesses; he sees clearly that that is not human either. I believe that art, this special art of narration, is only worth while through the opposition of characters; but, in their struggle, I prefer to see the right prevail. Let events overwhelm the honest men, I agree to that, but let him not be soiled or belittled by them, and let him go to the stake feeling that he is happier than his executioners.

You must have success after that bad luck which has troubled you deeply. I tell you wherein lie the certain conditions for your success. Keep your cult for form; but pay more attention to the substance. Do not take true virtue for a commonplace in literature. Give it its representative, make honest and strong men pass among the fools and the imbeciles that you love to ridicule. Show what is solid at the bottom of these intellectual abortions; in short, abandon the convention of the realist and return to the time reality, which is a mingling of the beautiful and the ugly, the dull and the brilliant, but in which the desire of good finds its place and its occupation all the same. >>

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خانه‌های شاهان به خودی خود غم خاصی دارند که شاید ناشی از بزرگی بیش از حد ابعادشان برای شمار اندک کسانی باشد که در آنها می نشسته‌اند، و از سکوتی که تعجب می‌کنیم پس از آن همه کبکبه و دبدبه آنجا حاکم باشد، از تجمل ساکن‌شان که قدمتش گذرایی دودمان‌ها و ناچیزی ابدی چیزها را اثبات می‌کند؛ و این نفس سده‌ها را که چون عطر مومیایی رخوت‌آور و مرگ‌آلود است حتی ساده‌ترین ذهن‌ها هم حس می‌کند.



دل زنان به صندوقچه‌های رمزی‌ای می‌ماند که پر از کشوهای تودرتوست؛ زحمت بسیار می‌کشیم، ناخن می‌شکنیم و سرانجام در ته آن گل خشکیده‌ای پیدا می‌کنیم یا اندک غباری، یا خلاء!



«وقتی انقلاب شد خیال کردم که دیگر خوشبخت می‌شویم، یادتان هست چقدر زیبا بود؟ چه نفس راحتی می‌کشیدیم! اما دوباره همه چیز از همیشه بدتر شده.»
و با چشمان به زمین دوخته: «الآن دارند جمهوری‌مان را می‌کشند. همان طور که آن یکی، جمهوری رم را کشتند! بیچاره ونیز، بیچاره لهستان، بیچاره مجارستان! چه جنایت‌هایی! اول «درخت‌های آزادی» را بریدند، بعد حق رأی را محدود کردند، باشگاه‌ها را بستند، سانسور را برقرار کردند و آموزش را به کشیش‌ها سپردند، تا بعد نوبت به انکیزیسیون هم برسد. چرا که نه؟ مگر محافظه‌کارهایی نیستند که به ما وعده قزاق‌ها را می‌دهند؟ روزنامه‌هایی را که با مجازات اعدام مخالف باشند محکوم می‌کنند، پاریس پر از سرنیزه است، در شانزده استان کشور حکومت نظامی است، عفو عمومی را هم که یک بار دیگر عقب انداختند.»
پیشانی‌اش را میان دو دست گرفت؛ سپس دو بازویش را به نشانه اوج درماندگی از هم باز کرد و گفت: «آخر اگر سعی می‌کردیم، اگر واقعا صداقت داشتیم، می‌شد که با هم متفق و یکدل بشویم. اما نه! می‌بینید که کارگرها هم بهتر از بورژواها نیستند.»

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