II
Flâner—Se promener en musant, perdre son temps â des bagatelles.
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1879)
Flâner—to dawdle about, to waste one's time on trifles.
The urban discourse secured in the texts of Balzac and his contemporaries is a discourse of placement, of exploration and explanation. Narrative control is a function of urban possession. This discourse of placement acknowledges the diversity, the mystery, and even the danger of the city, but it also assumes control of risk by unraveling each mystery before the reader's very eyes. By midcentury flânerie becomes altogether more problematic, the flâneur a suspicious character. The Revolution of 1848—the hopes raised and then dashed—divides more than the century; among other things, as Roland Barthes would later point out in Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, it is the crucial factor separating Balzac from Flaubert. The Second Empire that arose out of the coup d'état of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851 staged both a new politics and a new urban text, and the Paris that we know today is largely the city torn down and rebuilt in the 1850s and 1860s under the aegis of the prefect Haussmann. A program of drastic urban renewal propelled Paris into the present. Necessarily, the flâneur performs very differently in the assertively modernizing city of broad
boulevards and expansive parks, of fashionable promenades and racetracks, of new apartment buildings, a city made over for and in the image of the grande bourgeoisie.
In the radically different urban setting made by haussmannization, the flâneur embodied a new, and disquieting, relation to the city, one that held special meaning for the artist. Despite Balzac's early classification of the artist-flâneur, Baudelaire's recasting set the archetype of the flâneur as modern artist and the artist of modernity. Baudelairean flânerie offers the key to Baudelaire's conception of the artist and his tortured relationship to society. And, however different from his predecessor, Baudelaire's flâneur in search of modernity claims as his ancestor the paradigmatic artist-flâneur of the July Monarchy investigating the city.[7]
Like Balzac's artist-flâneur, Baudelaire's painter of modern life aims "higher" than the "pure flâneur." But those heights are defined differently. The city is no longer reflected in the puzzles resolved by the detective but by the mysteries confronted and savored and, for that matter, created by the artist. The flâneur has become "L'Étranger" (1862), the opening poem in Le Spleen de Paris that transforms the observer into the "enigmatic man," the "extraordinary" foreigner-stranger who loves "the clouds that pass . . ., the marvelous clouds," the painter of modern life who proposes to "extract the eternal from the transitory." Balzac's controlling narrator gives way to Baudelaire's anguished poet, for whom exploration of the city is a pretext for the exploration of self. He seeks not society, and not the city, but modernity. The locus of personal misery, the city is also the site of creativity, the place of "Idéal" as well as of "spleen." The realm of pure art, this Paris is also the empire of prostitution, but it is, as Baudelaire has it for his poet-man of the crowd in "Les Foules," "the sacred prostitution of the soul." The flâneur's ambivalent, and ambiguous, relationship to the city now enters and defines the very condition of creativity.
The recasting of flânerie is not Baudelaire's alone, and his is not the only flâneur in Paris at midcentury. The malaise of the artist to which his work bore witness was social, not individual. The other great universe of flânerie in nineteenth-century literature, an urban universe contemporaneous with that of Le Spleen de Paris, is that created by Gustave Flaubert. In 1869, the same year that Le Spleen de Paris was published, L Éducation sentimentale ushered in another world in which the flâneur plays an exemplary role. Flaubert's flâneur is nei-
ther Balzac's triumphant artist nor again the detached onlooker of the July Monarchy. He does not even attain the intermittent creativity of Baudelaire's tortured artist. He is, rather, a figure of failure, of the impossibility of placing oneself in the city so emphatically producing the space of modernity. Balzac's ordinary flâneur from the July Monarchy turns into the hapless soul of the Second Empire, overwhelmed by the city that refuses security. Far from empowering the walker in the street, the altered urban context disables the individual and devastates the collectivity. Distance and inactivity no longer connote superiority but rather estrangement, alienation, anomie. Moreover, it is not the creative estrangement that sets the condition of Baudelaire's poetry but an alienation that paralyzes the will.
There are, to be sure, earlier hints of the darker side of flânerie. Startling images of failure develop in Balzac's later work—Lucien de Rubempré's disastrous first sojourn in Paris in Un Grand Homme de province à Paris of 1839, the feckless Wenceslas Steinbock's decline in La Cousine Bette of 1846. In César Birotteau (1844) Balzac warns us that the Parisian flâneur is just as often a desperate man as an idler (6:63). Yet Balzac's own work affirms that the artist-flâneur remains a possibility. Balzac's romanticized, essentially aristocratic producer of the urban text has no station in the relentlessly bourgeois city depicted by Flaubert. The new Paris of squandered opportunities utterly lacks the dramatic derelictions and successes depicted by Balzac, Hugo, and other urban novelist-adventurers like Eugène Sue or by their successors like Zola and Maupassant. The flânerie that undermines the resolve of Wenceslas Steinbock and Lucien de Rubempré governs Flaubert's entire universe. The artist-flâneur has become extinct. Productivity of any sort is not even a remote possibility in Flaubert's world because the artist-flâneur at midcentury stands for anomie and alienation.
Unlike Balzac or Baudelaire or others, Flaubert says relatively little about the flâneur or flânerie. Nowhere does he call Frédéric Moreau a flâneur.[8] Nevertheless, Frédéric is a flâneur, and even though the novel takes place during the July Monarchy, Frédéric is a flâneur for the Second Empire during which Flaubert wrote the novel. Frédéric is a flâneur who does not possess the city so much as he is possessed by it. Flânerie defines his world and his being. Most obviously, Frédéric and his friends (including his beloved Mme Arnoux) spend an impressive amount of time moving about the streets of Paris, back and forth across the Seine, up to Montmartre, over to Saint-Augustin, down to the Quartier Latin, and back again. The chance meetings on
those streets that play so conspicuous a role in the novel bear further witness to the role flânerie plays in defining the novel, and surely it is fitting that Frédéric and Mme Arnoux mark their final encounter with a walk through the streets of the city that has both favored and frustrated their liaison. Paris has provided space for their meetings, but the city affords no place for their love.
The aimlessness of Frédéric's meanderings, in particular, contrasts sharply with the energy that dispatches the characters of Balzac and Hugo from one place to another. Place still signifies for the older generation of romantics. For Balzac, who writes in the July Monarchy about the Restoration, Eugene de Rastignac's route from the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève to the faubourg Saint-Germain in Le Pre Goriot and Lucien de Rubempré's movements from one quartier to another in Illusions perdues are charged with symbolic significance. Streets exist as places, each endowed with a particular character—as in the meditation on la rue Soly that opens Ferragus or the entire section, "L'Idylle rue Plumet et l Épopée rue Saint-Denis," that Hugo places in Les Misérables. Because Balzac and Hugo equate Paris with history, the monuments, streets, and neighborhoods speak eloquently about the past and portentously about the present. For Flaubert, writing about the July Monarchy and the Revolution of 1848 from the vantage point of the Second Empire, the demonstration at the Panthéon, like the destruction of the Louvre during the February days of 1848, mirrors the degradation, the confusion, and the loss of meaning in Paris as a whole.[9]
Notwithstanding the evident difference of these many urban landscapes of L 'Éducation sentimentale, flânerie constitutes an exceptionally appropriate image for a man distanced from his surroundings. Walking alone at night after quitting Mme Arnoux, Frédéric "was no longer conscious of the milieu, of space, of anything" (99). Walking heightens this insensibility because it is associated with intoxication (ivresse ) The night that he walks the streets "the movement of his walking kept up the intoxication" (129). Incapable of concentrating on any task in the absence of Mme Arnoux, he spends hours on his balcony contemplating the Seine (116); on the first day of the Revolution of 1848, he and Rosanette spend the afternoon on the balcony looking at the crowd in the street (352, cf. 429). When he comes into closer contact with the insurrection, events scarcely touch him. The wounded "did not seem like real wounded men, the dead did
not seem like real dead men. It seemed to him that he was watching a performance [un spectacle ] (357). Some time later on "his promenade" (389) on the boulevards in search of something to do, Frédéric finds the agitated crowd of workers, policemen, and bourgeois bystanders "a very amusing sight [un spectacle ] (390). The detailed presentation of events of 1848 only makes more obvious the essential absence of the revolution.
Frédéric's inability to direct his steps—his existential flânerie—signals his inability to conduct either his career or his emotions. He has little attachment to society despite his many ineffectual attempts to participate fully therein. Frédéric has no effective ties to the numerous and diverse milieux that he frequents. His many undertakings are so incompatible that he executes none of them. His abortive candidacy at the Club de l 'Intelligence, like his consideration of M. Dambreuse's proposition to be general secretary of a new corporation and his scheme for a wealthy marriage, not to mention the great works he thinks about painting or writing, all come to naught. Frédéric is suspended in the city and in society at large, but this suspension is the consequence less of choice than of a marked aversion to the responsibilities that choice demands. Not surprisingly, his most important resolutions appear negative—not to accept M. Dambreuse's offer, not to run for office, not to seduce Mme Arnoux, not to marry Mme Dambreuse, and so on.
Paris cannot be conquered because it is a utopia, an elsewhere forever beyond reach, another creation of Frédéric's imagination. However much time he spends contemplating the city, Frédéric never perceives it clearly. Thus, in the first scene he is leaving Paris. Its buildings recede in the distance, obscured by the smoke and the cloud of steam emitted by the boat, and by the fog (47). Returning to the capital a richer man a few years later, he watches factories "smoking" and the sun shining "through the haze" (156-7). The pervasive rain, fog, and mist all blur the line between reality and reverie. All in all, it is no wonder that the city remains unfocused, particularly given the frequent association of Frédéric with one or another variant of intoxication, dizziness, or bedazzlement (ivresse, étourdissement, éblouissement ).
For all of Flaubert's sociological and historical acuity, the Paris of L'Éducation sentimentale is filtered through the stereotypical exoticism of his protagonist's febrile imagination. As Frédéric quits the city in
the opening scene, he daydreams about what he will do when he takes up residence there two months hence. Yet once in Paris Frédéric almost immediately sees himself elsewhere. Settling into his rooms on the quai Napoléon conjures up visions of furnishing a Moorish palace (104). His career plans resemble grandiose fictions of a place in Parisian society—in the courtroom and the Assemblée Nationale (139), in the diplomatic corps (152), in the Conseil d'État (152, 214, 220). Deslauriers urges Frédéric to turn to fiction for his models: "Remember Rastignac in the Comédie humaine!" (65). But unlike those of his Balzacian model, Frédéric's innumerable trips about Paris prove as meaningless as his imaginary dislocations in time and space. In a suitable irony, Frédéric finds his space in Paris only when away from the city. At his mother's in Nogent-sur-Seine, he "plays the Parisian," creating a fictive capital for the locals in compensation for his disappointments in the real Paris. Once again Frédéric fails to rise above mediocrity. His knowledge turns out to be gossip about the theater and high society that he has culled from magazine accounts (308).
Frédéric can no more depict Mme Arnoux than he can define the city, and this is true despite the considerable detail given to each—on the one hand, Mme Arnoux's dress, her hair, her beauty mark, and especially her possessions, and on the other, the scrupulously delineated topography of Paris, its different quartiers, and its institutions. For the one as for the other, detail distracts. It diffuses attention instead of focusing desire. The "rapture of his whole being" propels Frédéric toward Mme Arnoux (441), but that rapture impedes action. As he tells her on their last meeting, she affected him like "moonlight on a summer's night, when everything is perfume, soft shadows, whiteness, infinity" (503). Her very dress appears "infinite" (261). Mme Arnoux fades into the pervasive unreality of Frédéric's life, scarcely more real than the revolution that he also observes through the prism of reverie.
The city and the woman, in loose equation, are as limitless and as elusive as the air that Frédéric breathes. They compose his milieu in the physiological sense of the term, for they supply the medium within which he evolves. The possibility of frequenting the Arnoux household holds the promise of "living in [Mme Arnoux's] atmosphere," the very thought of which sends Frédéric through the deserted streets "at random, lost, carried away," until he finds himself on the quais,
where the lights "vacillated in the depths of the water," a "luminous fog floated above the roof tops," and all the noises "melted into a single hum" (99-100).
Ultimately, Paris, like Mme Arnoux, is not so much unconquerable as evanescent. Flaubert takes such care to join the two because Frédéric views each in much the same light. Everything about Paris "related to her" (120), and Frédéric's conviction that "any attempt to make her his mistress would be in vain" (120) applies equally to his perception of Paris. The city too is the "sphinx" (261) whose enigma Frédéric never solves. His halfhearted attempts to conquer the one and the other, the woman and the city, succumb to the inertia induced by reverie. It is not by accident that here as elsewhere Flaubert takes the Balzacian model only to reverse it. Both writers associate Paris with a woman and the flâneur with male desire. But the correspondence of the trope only highlights the difference between these worlds. The metaphor that Balzac uses to imply possession is used by Flaubert to signify precisely the opposite. In L'Éducation sentimentale desire is dreamed, never realized.
Unlike Balzac or Hugo, Flaubert calls on no outsize, controlling metaphor to subsume the many parts of the city into a powerful, unitary definition. For Balzac's personification of Paris as créature, courtisane, queen, or monster, or Hugo's portrayal of a leviathan ("L'Intestin de Léviathan" in Les Misérables ) Flaubert substitutes the elusive Seine, which connects Frédéric to Paris and to Mme Arnoux, to his home in Nogent-sur-Seine and his mother. Paradoxically, the very mobility of the flâneur precludes effective—that is, directed—movement, and the river joins the omnipresent drizzle, showers, vapor, and human tears in a universal aqueous medium that dissipates Frédéric's ambition, dilutes his desires, and dissolves his will. In contrast to Balzac's conquering aristocratic flâneur who seduces the city-as-woman to engender the urban text, Flaubert's bourgeois flâneur idles to no effect. Frédéric does not seduce; he is seduced, by the city to which he remains almost literally enthralled. He slides through the social hierarchy as he roams about the streets. Aristocratic inclinations and artistic tastes notwithstanding, Frédéric is neither aristocrat nor artist. The text, like the city and the woman, remains out of reach. At every turn the city frustrates desire, baffles intelligence, and resists control.