“Quelque chose de rouge”: On the aesthetics of tableaux vivants in Salammbô

“… Il rêve ses acteurs dans la pose de la statuaire … ”¹

The much anticipated Salammbô was received with great acclaim by Flaubert’s friends. Théophile Gautier enthused: “Ce n’est pas un livre d’histoire, ce n’est pas un roman, c’est un poème épique!” and Leconte de Lisle: “Bravo, mon bonhomme! Tu es un poète et un peintre comme il y en a peu. Tu as vu et bien vu, je n’en doute pas.” Same reaction with Eugène Fromentin: “Vous êtes un grand peintre, mon cher ami, mieux que cela, un grand visionnaire!”²; George Sand: “C’est du Beethoven,” and Guy de Maupassant: “une sorte d’opéra en prose.”³ So the novel was a poem, an opera, a painting. Less supportive voices concurred in the qualifications: “Mathô n’est au fond qu’un ténor d’opéra dans un poème barbare,” the Goncourts sneered in the privacy of their own diary.⁴ The key point here, of course, is that contemporary readers of Salammbô picked up on the non-novelistic nature of this “novel,” and compared it to other arts instead—to painting, to opera, etc. The book was, from the start, claimed for other arts, with a strong emphasis on the visual—whether painting or drama, it appeared to belong to the spectacular and visual rather than to the verbal arts.

This essay seeks to explore the principle of the tableau vivant as a generative pattern of the writing. According to a modern, neutral definition, a tableau vivant refers to “a scene presented on stage by costumed actors who remain silent and motionless as if in a picture.”⁵ Furthermore, the tableau vivant is also a historically dated cultural practice, both a social pastime and an art form, which reached its climactic popularity during the Second Empire, precisely in the same years as Salammbô. The Grand Larousse du XIX^e siècle defines a tableau vivant as “Reproduction de certains tableaux connus ou de certaines scènes de l’histoire, à l’aide de personnages vivants qui prennent les attitudes indiquées par le sujet.”⁶ In Salammbô, this essay suggests, the text is governed by a principle analogous to the tableau vivant, pulling the novel in the direction of the spectacular arts—painting and theater. The tableau vivant, combining theater, painting, photography, and sculpture, appears to be a kind of nexus, at the intersection of various genres and media which Flaubert sought either to emulate or to rival in his writing. First and foremost, of course, painting in general, and Orientalist painting in particular: within the larger question of the painterly dimension of Flaubert’s novel, the question of the tableau vivant can be viewed as a sort of subset. Moreover, as this essay hopes to show, the tableau vivant provides an ideal vehicle for Flaubert’s particular vein of Orientalism, which blends beauty and horror in a way that Flaubert considered a quintessentially Oriental synthesis: the relentless cruelty of scene after splendid scene in Salammbô offers an illustration of the links between tableaux vivants and the aesthetics of sadism. Secondly, the theater: Flaubert, we know, took an active interest in Salammbô’s stage adaptation, and he also tried his hand (in the years following Salammbô), at the popular genre of féeries, doggedly and unsuccessfully trying to achieve fame on the stage with his own féeries, in particular Le Château des cœurs, co-written with Louis Bouilhet and Charles d’Osmoy.⁷ The turn away from the drabness of realism, toward a genre that allowed—in fact required—excess, special effects and phantasmagoria, is another evidence of overlap between the novel’s tableaux vivants and the highly visual theatrical style that appealed to Flaubert. Early photography, too, was close to the tableau vivant, since its technical limitations made elaborate composition of groups, and complete immobility, necessary for the success of the photographic image.⁸ Ever since the fateful voyage to the Orient in the company of Maxime Du Camp, who brought...