Agape Agape - pg. 49

try to educate them did they buy those "Educator" piano rolls teach them to play with their hands no, went right on discovering their unsuspected talent playing with their feet here's Flaubert yes, "The entire dream of democracy" he says, "is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity." You want the essence of elitism there he was, his idea of art that "the artist must no more appear in his work than God does in nature, that the artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed" good God, the rate things change a generation lasts four days what posterity? Everywhere present and nowhere visible leads him right into the embrace of the death of the author whose intention have no connection with the meaning of the text which is indeterminate anyway,

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 243

In 1857, in Madame Bovary, Flaubert could write of the pedlar's six percent interest charge as extortionate, blood-letting. Now we lived easily with that kind of charge. In 1955, when I was very young and new to London and trying to write, I wanted nothing more than five hundred pounds a year; and, more modest than Virginia Woolf thirty years before, I would have undertaken to pay for my own rented room out of those five hundred pounds. In 1962, at a lunch in a London club with a humorous writer and a cartoonist, I put my needs -- the two other men had asked -- at two thousand pounds a year: I had moved up from the rented room to the rented, self-contained flat. This figure had scandalized my fellow lunchers, older men, as far too low. And indeed, just three years later, when I had bought a house and taken on a mortgage, I would have considered five thousand pounds a year as just about fair. Now that was a figure that could be talked about as a heating charge. Not many fortunes would have been able to stand that kind of expense, one among many; and my landlord had retired from the world in 1949 or 1950, some years before I had thought five hundred pounds a year enough for my needs.

Madame Bovary (Provincial Life) - pg. 12

He got into the habit of going to the cafes, and had a passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every evening in the dirty public room, to push about on marble tables the small sheep-bones with black dots, seemed to him a fine proof of his freedom, which him in his own esteem. He was beginning to see life, the sweetness of stolen pleasures; and when he entered, he put his hand on the door-handle with a joy almost sensual.

Gustave Flaubert

"the artist must raise everything to a higher level: he is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. he sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it out in great jets to the sunlight."

Madame Bovary (Provincial Life) - Opening

We were in class when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy, not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.

With a translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling
and Paul de Man

Copyright 2005 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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