The Vatard Sisters Read Online Free Page B

the positive things he found in the book, but he also took the occasion to castigate Huysmans over certain elements that annoyed him in his style and his general approach:

    If you weren’t my friend and if I’d thought your book mediocre, I would have just made a banal compliment and that would have been it. But I feel that there is a lot of talent in the book, a lot; it’s a work that is out of the ordinary and very intense. So, I will tell you what I really think. Your dedication, in which you praise me for L’Éducation sentimentale , gave me an insight into the structure of your novel—and its faults—which, on a first reading, I hadn’t noticed. Like L’Éducation , The Vatard Sisters suffers from a falsity of perspective. There is no progression. The reader, at the end of the book, has the same impression he had at the start. Art is not reality. Whatever one writes, one is obliged to choose among the elements it provides… and as a result one must choose wisely. Your descriptions are excellent, your characters well-observed. One says throughout: “Yes, it’s just like that,” and one believes in your fiction, which is brilliantly executed. What struck me the most is the psychology, you analyse like a master. In your next book, give full rein to this facility, which seems natural to you and which is your own.
    The basis of your style, its very substance, is very solid. However, it seems to me you don’t have confidence in it. Why did you feel the need to reinforce it with lively and often crude expressions? When it is the author speaking, why do you speak like one of your characters?…When a writer employs a whole pile of words that aren’t in any dictionary, I have the right to rebel against him, because it offends me, it spoils my pleasure…
    You have an aesthete say that he finds withered wallflowers more interesting than blooming roses. Why? Neither wallflowers nor roses are interesting in themselves: what is interesting is the manner in which they’re depicted. The Ganges is not more poetic than the Bièvre, but neither is the Bièvre more poetic than the Ganges. Take care, otherwise you’ll fall, like in the time of classical tragedy, into an aristocracy of subjects and an over-refinement of words…You may have reversed the rhetoric, but it is rhetoric nonetheless. It pains me that a writer of your originality should spoil his work with such childish absurdities. Have a little pride, by God, and don’t believe in formulas.
    That said, I can only admire your conception of the novel and its development. Vatard père is a real find…and the ending is almost sublime.
    ( Letter from Flaubert to Huysmans , 7 March 1879)

    Despite Flaubert’s attempt to be encouraging in his letter to Huysmans, he was more laconic in his assessment of the book a week later in a note to the actress Edma Roger des Genettes, with whom he frequently corresponded on literary and political subjects:

    I recently read three books which they sent me, The Vatard Sisters by Huysmans, one of Zola’s pupils, which I found abominable…
    ( Letter from Flaubert to Mme Roger des Genettes , 14 March 1879)

    In any event, Flaubert’s criticisms were unlikely to have concerned Huysmans, who despite a genuine admiration for L’Éducation sentimentale , was not that taken with Flaubert as a man: “When this great writer hasn’t got a pen in his hand,” he told Lemonnier in a letter of May 1877, “he’s as thick as a butcher.”
    Edmond de Goncourt’s comments are interesting not just about the book itself, but for the advice he included about Huysmans’ future direction as a novelist:

    Today I have read your book, properly read it, and I’m happy to tell you how artistic I found it, and teeming with admirably written passages. The neutral grey tones of your two girls are traced with the hand of a master realist, and there are beautiful things in the psychological representations of the older girl’s temptations,