Something to Declare

Flaubert always believed that the production of art necessarily involved some amputation of the life. What if he had been wrong, what if he could have taken a wife, had children to dote on, and discovered that this didn't affect his work? Sand always believed that art was not something separate from life but something that grew out of it and fitted into it, something you did, if you had enough energy (and she had lots), after putting the grandchildren to bed and paying the bills. What if she had been wrong, what if her art were rendered flimsy by its ease and normality of manufacture?

Later, they report an overhearing from Princesse Mathilde's conservatory: amid the habitual vous of Flaubert and Sand, a tu suddenly escapes Sand's lips, and the Princesse looks meaningfully across at the Goncourts. Was this a theatrical tu or a lover's tu? In fact, neither: throughout their correspondence Sand regularly addressed Flaubert as tu, just as, out of respect for her age and sex, he always addressed her as vous. He also called her chère maître, the feminizing of the adjective marking a double homage to his friend.

Inevitable moments of repetitiousness are balanced by the way we are allowed to follow the life of even a phrase: how “Fuck your inkwell!” (to Feydeau, 1859) becomes “The inkwell is the true vagina for men of letters” (Feydeau 1859) becomes “Drink ink! it makes you drunker than wine” (Feydeau 1861) becomes “Ink is a wine that makes us drunk, let's plunge into dreams since life is so appalling” (Amélie Bosquet 1861) becomes “Let's get drunk on ink, since we haven't got any nectar of the gods” (Bosquet 1861).

Writing consists of laboriously taking out extraneous words (“I've used faire four times in a row—oh, shit!”) and not getting screwed by your publisher. Writing consists of complaining that there are more than the agreed number of lines per page on your proofs—“my style is dense enough without making things even harder for the reader”—and of making sure you get the correct Carthaginian circumflex: “The circumflex on Salammbô shouldn't have any sort of curve to it. Nothing could be less Punic. I insist on you making it more open.”

In other sports, fans go to a stadium, where there are entrance fees, tacky souvenirs, overpriced food, a general marshalling and corralling, and a professional exploitation of the fan's emotions. With the Tour de France, the heroes come to you, to your village, your town, or arrange a rendezvous on the slopes of some spectacular mountain. The Tour is free, you choose where you watch it from, bring your own picnic, and the marketing hard sell consists of little more than a van offering official Tour T-shirts at sixty francs a throw just before the race arrives. Then you get to see your heroes' grimacing faces from merely a few feet away; every seat is a ringside seat. These aspects make the Tour unique, and still rightly cherished by the French.

One by one, Festina riders admitted illegal drug use, though Virenque adamantly protested his innocence from the start. The only note of unintentional comedy that year came during a judicial hearing in Lille, when the judge put it to him that, “You must have known what was going on because you were the leader.” Virenque, in a panicky mishearing, replied, “Me a dealer? No, I am not a dealer.” (The same two English words are used in French.) Whereupon Virenque's lawyer interjected, “No, Richard, the judge said leader. It's not an offence to be a leader.”

And Ventoux, where the mistral mixes with the tramontane, is officially the windiest place on earth: in February 1967, the world gusting record was set there, at 320 kilometres per hour. Popular etymology derives Ventoux from vent, wind, making it Windy Mountain; appropriate but erroneous. The proper etymology—Vinturi, from the Ligurian root ven- meaning mountain—is duller but perhaps truer. Mount Mountain: a place to make bikers feel they're climbing not one peak but two; a place to give bikers double vision.

The morning radio is preparing the French for their annual lemming dash to beach, second home, or up-country pension. A bland voice reports the findings of a survey into national expectations in the matter of holiday romance. Fifty per cent of French women apparently hope that the amorous encounter will extend beyond the duration of the holiday. By contrast, only fifteen per cent of French men want such affairs to continue after bag-packing time. Chabrol shrugs. “They need a survey to tell us that?” Another summer, another heartbreak. Today's Emmas murmuring, “I have a lover.” Today's Rodolphes thinking, “She's not bad, the doctor's wife, I think I'll have her.” They should read the novel before their holidays. Or at least see one of the films.

Is the film an easy point of access for those daunted by a Classic Novel, or a way of avoiding it altogether? And for those who know the book, is the film a parallel experience, an extension, or an alternative? I used to suspect filmic infidelity, and would snort at anachronisms, misquotations, non-quotations, hair-colour changes, and so on. The director's principal task, I assumed, was to protect the integrity of the book against the producer's and money-men's instinctive desire to coarsen and banalize. Now I am much less sure. In part, this comes from the experience of having a couple of my own novels turned into films. One was made by the French director Marion Vernoux. I kept away from the process and only met her—appropriately enough, aboard a cross-channel ferry— half an hour after shooting had finished. The first thing I found myself saying was, “I hope you have betrayed me.” “Of course,” she replied, with a complicit smile. Neither of us exactly meant it, though we knew what we meant—and what the other meant—all the same.