Oeuvres completes, Vol. I: Oeuvres de jeunesse (review)

The first of the five projected volumes of Flaubert's complete works in the Pléiade series covers the years 1831-1845. As one might expect with scholars of the caliber of Claudine Gothot-Mersch and the late Guy Sagnes, it sets a magnificently high standard, at last providing us with an authoritative version of these early texts based wherever possible on a return to the manuscripts. Though we know that some of Flaubert's early writings have been lost (a list is given by Gothot-Mersch on p. lxxxi), the present edition brings together in chronological order all the known texts. An appendix includes school rédactions (where the full text of "Lutte du sacerdoce et de l'empire" gets into print for the first time) and the scenarios to which Bruneau drew attention in Les Débuts littéraires de Gustave Flaubert. Scholars who have looked at Flaubert's early manuscripts have been aware for many years that a new edition was essential. The influential Conard edition of 1910 had, for all its merits, left a long legacy of misreadings, and the young Flaubert's eccentric spelling, punctuation and par-agraphing were often regularized and sanitized to excess. The editors of the current volume have applied the very sound principle of exercising minimal intervention, though as they point out, this is not always possible, particularly where Flaubert omits obvious punctuation signs such as the question mark. Equally, they have restored names to their full form or regularized them under a single spelling (thus "Bruegel," "Breughel," and "Breugell" are given uniformly as "Bruegel," the commonest of the three forms used by Flaubert; and since Flaubert drops the "h" of "Smarh" only a few pages into the manuscript, the entire work is now retitled Smar). On the other hand, Flaubert's almost ubiquitous use of the dash has been respected wherever possible - unless a dash very obviously replaces another punctuation mark - and the paragraphing, often corresponding to single sentences, has been restored. This near-diplomatic approach has a major effect on the appearance of the text, which comes across in many instances as more fragmented, yet more open and more authentic. As Gothot-Mersch points out, it brings out more fully the rhythms and cadences of the young Flaubert's writing. One small example, the opening paragraph to Chapter 15 of Les Mémoires d'un fou, will illustrate the point. The Conard and Seuil versions read: "Il fallut partir; nous nous séparâmes sans pouvoir lui dire adieu. Elle quitta les bains le même jour que nous. C'était un dimanche. Elle partit le matin, nous le soir." The Pléiade edition, omitting the semicolon (never used by the young Flaubert) and restoring the stop and dashes, now looks like this: "Il fallut partir. Nous nous séparâmes sans pouvoir lui dire adieu. - Elle quitta les bains le même jour que nous - c'était un dimanche - elle partit le matin, nous le soir" (492). Clearly, the sense we have of the young Flaubert's prose is quite different as a result. We have not yet reached the smooth and seamless movement of the mature works, though the building blocks are in place. One of the many merits of this new edition is that it allows us to glimpse these early texts as the drafts and experiments they so often were.

Yet the master-stroke of this first volume - which in Gothot-Mersch's words "connut le meilleur et le pire" (lxxxiii) - is surely the rediscovery of the manuscript of Les Mémoires d'un fou, which had disappeared into private hands on the death in 1914 of its original owner and editor, Pierre Dauze. Gothot-Mersch was able to find the...