Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) is most famous for his salacious Madame Bovary (1857), but it’s perhaps three short stories in one tome that offer his best writing.
Three Tales (Trois contes) was first published in 1877. At less than 100 pages, its stories contain A Simple Heart, Saint Julian the Hospitalier, and Hérodias.
Inspirations for these came from events in Flaubert’s life, but collectively they explore themes of doubt, love, loneliness, and religion. Let’s explore all three and see where he could take his readers.
Three Tales and Flaubert’s Exploration of Fluttering Hearts
It’s worth remembering the publication date of 1877. Flaubert died in 1880, so this was pretty much the last major work he wrote.
Three Tales is viewed as a triumphant end to a glittering career. And we do think it’s the very first story that cements his status as a great writer.
A Simple Heart
“Her sorrow was extreme. She threw herself on the ground, screamed, appealed to God, and wept all alone in the fields until the sunrise. Then she returned to the farm and announced that she wanted to leave.”
This is the memorable and moving story of Felicité, an uneducated serving-woman who has simple needs and lives her life with a sense of simplicity that borders on elegance.
In A Simple Heart (Un cœur simple), she leads a life of solitude, loss, and poverty—one deeply rooted in Catholicism and servitude. She completes her daily existence without asking questions, instead complying with expectations in near mindless fashion.
Also in the story is Loulou the parrot (see the cover of this book), whose presence in the short story provides Felicité with solace. As despite her limited intelligence, she’s a pure woman. There’s no husband, children, or home to talk of—she leads a barren existence and then dies at the close of the story.
Her ghost rises above her deathbed (Holy Ghost) as the only remarkable moment from her life—entering into death. Unremarkable, simple, and unexamined. But it’s so beautifully written you can’t help but swoon for the story.
“A blue haze of incense floated up into Felicité’s room. She opened her nostrils wide to breathe it in, savouring it with mystical fervour. Her eyes closed and a smile played on her lips. One by one her heartbeats became slower, growing successively weaker and fainter like a fountain running dry, an echo fading away. With her dying breath she imagined she saw a huge parrot hovering above her head as the heavens parted to receive her.”
According to contemporary reports, Flaubert wrote this short story with a stuffed parrot on his desk. By the end of A Simple Heart he’d come to hate the sight of that parrot.
Anyway, parrot or not we do think Three Tales can hold the status as the masterwork from this collection. Penguin even released it as a standalone work in its Little Black Classics series (No. 45).
It’s certainly our favourite. And the one we’d recommend you read above the rest, as we do think it’s clearly the finest piece in this collection and a shining tribute to Flaubert’s craft.
The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier
A marked shift over the first tale, here we have the story of Julian the hunter. He’s brutal in his ways and follows a downward mental spiral that leads him to murder his parents.
Flaubert was inspired to write the story after spying a stained glass window in a Rouen cathedral.
The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier begins with a quite a blunt description of the castle where Julian’s parents live, along with a quick overview of their personalities. But then Julian is born!
“After a number of adventures he took unto himself a wife of high lineage.
She was pale and serious, and a trifle haughty. The horns of her head-dress touched the top of the doors and the hem of her gown trailed far behind her. She conducted her household like a cloister. Every morning she distributed work to the maids, supervised the making of preserves and unguents, and afterwards passed her time in spinning, or in embroidering altar-cloths. In response to her fervent prayers, God granted her a son!”
Although delighted with their son, Julian does start showing, shall we say, somewhat psychotic tendencies towards innocuous things.
“One day, during mass, he raised his head and beheld a little white mouse crawling out of a hole in the wall. It scrambled to the first altar-step and then, after a few gambols, ran back in the same direction. On the following Sunday, the idea of seeing the mouse again worried him. It returned; and every Sunday after that he watched for it; and it annoyed him so much that he grew to hate it and resolved to do away with it.”
After slaying the mouse he then goes after a pigeon and murders that, too. And his bloodlust only continues to grow.
Julian eventually rises to be ruler of the land, which inevitably leads to delighting in slaying men. This is until he has a vision of killing his parents, which causes him to panic and flee the land.
He repents and forms hospital to help the sick, attempting to overcome his sins. Flaubert concludes the story with this simple line.
“And that is the story of Saint Julian Hospitator almost exactly as you will find it told in a stained-glass window in a church near to where I was born.”
Before he died, Flaubert did allow for a black and white image to be included with this story to depict the window. However, apparently the depiction is quite baffling. It leaves many wondering how the writer got this story from something to crude.
But that’s the power of imagination for you! And this is an intriguing little story that plays out like fable, Greek tragedy style.
Hérodias
“The torches were extinguished. The guests left, leaving only Antipas in the hall. He stood with his head in his hands, still gazing at the severed head. In the centre of the great nave, Phanuel, with his arms extended, muttered prayers to himself.”
Hérodias is the most divisive from Three Tales, mainly as most people reading it won’t have much of a clue what’s going on.
It’s a reworking of John the Baptist and his execution. It’s a good idea to have a basic understanding of the history surrounding that story, otherwise reading this one will likely be baffling to you. As it was for us—we had no idea what was going on upon our first read through.
When we did some research after, we got a better idea of what the thing is about.
It’s a story about the weaknesses of a man and his inability to resist temptations. In the story, Hérodias holds a birthday party for her husband Herod Antipas. But he doesn’t know she has a devious plan to behead John the Baptist.
To do this she manipulates her daughter, Salome, to ask for his head. All of this is told from the perspective of Hérodias and Herod.
Flaubert wrote this more as historical fiction than anything else, but we must say we’re not overly partial to this story and consider it a bit of a flat ending to Three Tales.
However, it was influential for some, as it was the inspiration (and basis) for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1893) and later the 1905 opera by Richard Strauss.
Flaubert as a Writer: Exploring His Literary Themes
Okay, so our copy of Three Tales (again, see the parrot at the top of the page) is the Penguin Classics edition.
It features an extensive introduction by Geoffrey Wall. He notes Flaubert’s fans from his era would have been confused by the stories. A Simple Heart appeared in the 12th April 1877 edition of Le Moniteur universel and was quite different to many of his previous works. Of them, Wall notes this.
“Flaubert’s Three Tales display the final glistening catch. This is what the pearl-diver has retrieved from those lower depths, after a lifetime of staring heroically into the dark.”
Flaubert’s literary themes (perhaps most notably in Madame Bovary and her selfish behaviour) focus on freedom versus confinement, boredom, foolishness, repression etc.
His other works, such as Sentimental Education (1869), consider art’s purpose, love, and upper class life. Salammbô (1862) covers love and war. Desire features across a lot of these works, too.
As for Three Tales, Wall notes this.
“Prompted by adversity, the tales came quickly. Yet they are wonderfully impersonal in their chronical of profit and loss. Their undeclared theme is abjection and all the ambiguous visions that crowd upon the mind as it falls into the dark. They each portray a certain religious experience, but they do this in the contemporary secular idiom of the novel. Like Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Flaubert’s Three Tales show how the sacred survives, oddly disguised, even in the century of wide-awake bourgeois techno-miracles.”
The structure of the three stories is such, Wall claims Flaubert had essentially reinvented how to write short works.
Three Tales was very influential, being praised by contemporary critics (something they hadn’t really done for his earlier works), and creating Flaubertistes—his fanboys of the 19th century.
This included writers such as Kate Chopin, Anton Chekov, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Emile Zola, and many more.
An impressive legacy for three short stories that, with a superficial glance, may appear brief and confusing, but on closer inspection reveal a multi-layered world delivered by a master writer for the ages.
