Novelists From France

"I want to think that every character is a little-I guess like Flaubert saying "Emma Bovary, c'est moi"-that I am the characters but the characters aren't me"

"Madame Bovary is written entirely according to the system of tanka. Flaubert wrote it so slowly and painstakingly, because he had to begin it anew after every fifth word."

"When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Henry James, who were able to write great women characters. I don't remember if they said women had done men in this way or not, but I remember thinking that to finish myself as a great artist I'd have to be able to create men characters. Along with that, I was thinking that I had to do more than the first person pronoun."

"I see now, looking at this little book, November, by Flaubert, so many of the themes that he was going to explore so wonderfully later are just touched upon, he didn’t have the skill to carry them any further. And then, as his life went by, he followed them, he followed these dark tunnels."

"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use."

"L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre – tout"

"Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the bourgeois in coats. It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity. (10 May 1867)"

"Notre ignorance de l'histoire nous fait calomnier notre temps."

"Tout le rêve de la démocratie est d'élever le prolétaire au niveau de bêtise du bourgeois."

"Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. (June 1857)"

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him. (18 March 1857)"

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. (14 August 1853)"

"... la machine ronflait, crachait, comme une bête qu’on surmène, avec des sursauts, des coups de reins, où l’on aurait cru entendre craquer ses membres."

"Could he love this one, without killing her?"

"Ne me regardez plus comme ça, parce que vous allez vous user les yeux."

"She was a combative virgin, was Flora, scornful of the male sex, all of which in the end had led folk to conclude that she could not be quite all there."

"Des morts, des semences, et le pain poussait de la terre."

"Only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play."

"Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going."

"If the earth was restful and good to those who loved it, the villagers contaminating it like vermin, those human insects battening on it's flesh, were enough to disgrace it and blight any approach to it."

"They all listened to him, with curiosity but with the blank indifference of practical people who in their hearts no longer feared his God of wrath and chastisement. ... The whole thing was a complete waste of time; there was much more point in keeping on the right side of the Government police, who were the people with the power."

"Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly."

"It was the noisome fruit of ignorance and filth, ever recurring, the Black Death, the Great Plague, which stride like giant skeletons through past centuries, scything down the pale, sad people of the countryside."

"Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!"

"The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones."

"The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. ... It’s like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time."

"From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture."

"Haven’t I told you scores of times that you’re always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!"

"Ah! bonne terre, prends-moi, toi qui es la mère commune, l'unique source de la vie! toi l'éternelle, l'immortelle, où circule l'âme du monde, cette sève épandue jusque dans les pierres, et qui fait des arbres nos grands frères immobiles! ... Oui, je veux me perdre en toi, c'est toi que je sens là, sous mes membres, m'étreignant et m'enflammant, c'est toi seule qui seras dans mon oeuvre comme la force première, le moyen et le but, l'arche immense, où toutes les choses s'animent du souffle de tous les êtres!"

"What was Art, after all, if not simply giving out what you have inside you? Didn’t it all boil down to sticking a female in front of you and painting her as you feel she is?"

"Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre."

"Last month marked the centennial anniversary of the greatest newspaper article of all time... Written in the form of an open letter to the President of France, the 4,000 word article, entitled "J'Accuse!" (I Accuse!), rightly has been judged a "masterpiece" of polemics and a literary achievement "of imperishable beauty." No other newspaper article has ever provoked such public debate and controversy or had such an impact on law, justice, and society."

"Zola's true crime has been in daring to rise to defend the truth and civil liberty... for that courageous defense of the primordial rights of the citizen, he will be honored wherever men have souls that are free..."

"In 1886 he published... L'Oeuvre, the hero of which was a painter. ...Zola's own notes are evidence that the portrait... was based partly on Manet and partly on Cézanne... [T]he hero, symbolizing an impressionist, is characterized as a painful mixture of genius and madness. The struggle between his great dreams and his insufficient creative power ends in utter failure, in suicide. ...Cézanne was deeply hurt ...[and] found there a moving echo of his own youth, which had been inseparable from that of Zola, but also the betrayal of his hopes. ...[H]e now saw irrevocably expressed in this novel: Zola's pity for those who had not achieved success, a pity more unbearable than contempt. Zola had not only failed to grasp the true meaning of the effort to which Cézanne and his comrades had devoted all their strength, he had lost all feeling of solidarity. From the secure castle he had built himself in , he passed judgement upon his friends, embracing all the bourgeois prejudices against which they had once fought together. The letter which Cézanne wrote to Zola to thank him for sending a copy of L'Oeuvre was meloncholy and sad; it was... a letter of farewell, and the two friends were never to meet again."

"... was named "chief of the executive power of the French Republic" and given the authority to negotiate the terms of surrender with Otto von Bismarck. ...Since escaping to Marseilles in September [1871] Zola had launched a newspaper, La Marseillaise... intended... as a voice of the proletariat. However, this organ ceased publication... when, ironically, the printers struck for higher wages [and] Zola, turning strike-buster, tried unsuccessfully to overcome by engaging a team of cut-rate printers from Arles. With his career as a newspaper proprietor thwarted, he began cultivating plans to secure... a [political] post... [e]ventually... secretary to an elderly and reputedly senile left-wing deputy in the National Assembly. He was also reporting on the National Assembly for La Cloche and fretting about the refugees occupying his apartment in Paris. "Has anything been ransacked or stolen?""

"Then came the sweetly hypocritical compliments, the questions which are traps, the declarations which, if you follow him, he will suddenly interrupt with an 'Oh, my dear fellow, I wouldn't go as far as you!' followed by a virtual recantation of his previous arguments. In fact that art of talking without saying anything of which the Man of Medan is the master."

"The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated. And if, as in the case of Zola, Ibsen and Tolstoy, they compelled their time to accept them, it was due to their extraordinary genius and even more so to the awakening and seeking of a small minority for new truths, to whom these men were the inspiration and intellectual support."

"His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born. I will not, certainly, deny his detestable fame. No one before him has raised so lofty a pile of ordure. That is his monument, and its greatness cannot be disputed."

"He was a moment in the conscience of Man."

"Many older students also read the meticulous details of Émile Zola's downtrodden classes, which strongly echoed some of the realties of my own impoverished neighborhood."

"You can't ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn't know anything about it. But by God, how can he [Émile Zola who was his youth friend in Aix-de-Provence and who had used Cezanne's life as model of a disturbed artist in his novel L'Oeuvre] dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one."

"I've ripped it to pieces - your portrait, you know. I tried to work on it this morning, but it went from bad to worse, so I destroyed it..."

"Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest!"

"In making these accusations I am aware that I am making myself liable to articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29/7/1881 regarding the press, which make libel a punishable offence. I expose myself to that risk voluntarily. As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society. The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight! I am waiting."

"But this letter is long, Sir, and it is time to conclude it. I accuse Lt. Col. du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice — unwittingly, I would like to believe — and of defending this sorry deed, over the last three years, by all manner of ludricrous and evil machinations. I accuse General Mercier of complicity, at least by mental weakness, in one of the greatest inequities of the century. I accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus's innocence and covering it up, and making himself guilty of this crime against mankind and justice, as a political expedient and a way for the compromised General Staff to save face. I accuse Gen. de Boisdeffre and Gen. Gonse of complicity in the same crime, the former, no doubt, out of religious prejudice, the latter perhaps out of that esprit de corps that has transformed the War Office into an unassailable holy ark. I accuse Gen. de Pellieux and Major Ravary of conducting a villainous enquiry, by which I mean a monstrously biased one, as attested by the latter in a report that is an imperishable monument to naïve impudence. I accuse the three handwriting experts, Messrs. Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting reports that were deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a condition that impairs their eyesight and judgement. I accuse the War Office of using the press, particularly L'Eclair and L'Echo de Paris, to conduct an abominable campaign to mislead the general public and cover up their own wrongdoing. Finally, I accuse the first court martial of violating the law by convicting the accused on the basis of a document that was kept secret, and I accuse the second court martial of covering up this illegality, on orders, thus committing the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man."

"These military tribunals have, decidedly, a most singular idea of justice. This is the plain truth, Mr. President, and it is terrifying. It will leave an indelible stain on your presidency. I realise that you have no power over this case, that you are limited by the Constitution and your entourage. You have, nonetheless, your duty as a man, which you will recognise and fulfill. As for myself, I have not despaired in the least, of the triumph of right. I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it. I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come."

"It is a crime that those people who wish to see a generous France take her place as leader of all the free and just nations are being accused of fomenting turmoil in the country, denounced by the very plotters who are conniving so shamelessly to foist this miscarriage of justice on the entire world. It is a crime to lie to the public, to twist public opinion to insane lengths in the service of the vilest death-dealing machinations. It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice. Truth and justice, so ardently longed for! How terrible it is to see them trampled, unrecognized and ignored!"

"Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people's cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext."

"We are told of the honor of the army; we are supposed to love and respect it. Ah, yes, of course, an army that would rise to the first threat, that would defend French soil, that army is the nation itself, and for that army we have nothing but devotion and respect. But this is not about that army, whose dignity we are seeking, in our cry for justice. What is at stake is the sword, the master that will one day, perhaps, be forced upon us. Bow and scrape before that sword, that god? No!"

"General Billot directed the judges in his preliminary remarks, and they proceeded to judgment as they would to battle, unquestioningly. The preconceived opinion they brought to the bench was obviously the following: "Dreyfus was found guilty for the crime of treason by a court martial; he therefore is guilty and we, a court martial, cannot declare him innocent. On the other hand, we know that acknowledging Esterhazy's guilt would be tantamount to proclaiming Dreyfus innocent." There was no way for them to escape this rationale. So they rendered an iniquitous verdict that will forever weigh upon our courts martial and will henceforth cast a shadow of suspicion on all their decrees. The first court martial was perhaps unintelligent; the second one is inescapably criminal."