.

L'art, au bout du compte, n'est peut-être pas plus sérieux que le jeu de quilles. Tout n'est peut-être qu'une immense blague, j'en ai peur, et quand nous serons de l'autre côté de la page, nous serons peut-être fort étonnés d'apprendre que le mot du rébus était si simple.

Gustave Flaubert : Correspondance, 3 novembre 1851

Tanto che prendo una decisione : cercherò di decifrare le sue intenzioni ... Se mi sbaglio, pazienza : la storia non cambia.

Umberto Eco : L'isola del giorno prima, 1994

The triple coffin Charles Bovary commissions for Emma is the key to everything in Madame Bovary, including the famous casquette described in the book's first chapter. The nouveau's casquette has resisted all attempts to comprehend it, the novel casket has received but scant and cursory attention. There are two very good reasons for this neglect. The first is that the reader loses interest in the story once he learns, at the end of III, 8 that 'elle (Emma) n'existait plus'; the second is that Flaubert does his utmost to divert the reader's attention from the tiering of the casket. Let us take a look at what Charles stipulated and at the finished product, the casket perceived by the inhabitants of Yonville- l'Abbaye.

In all there are three references to the casket. The first one is part of a TEXT-WITHIN-THE-TEXT (the funeral arrangements Charles pens SHUT UP in his "cabinet")- the sole specimen, by the way, of the officier de santé's hand:

Je veux qu'on l'enterre dans sa robe de noces, avec des souliers blancs, une couronne. On lui étalera les cheveux sur les épaules; trois cercueils, un de chêne, un d'acajou, un de plomb. Qu'on ne me dise rien, j'aurai de la force. On lui mettra par-dessus tout une grande pièce de velours vert. Je le veux. Faites-le. (Flaubert, MB, 1971:334)

Charles is quite specific about the materials, but what about their tiering? Is the sequence "one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead" aleatoric or inviolable, and if the latter, is the outermost coffin, the only one that will actually be seen, made of lead or of oak? The second reference would seem to resolve the question:

Ils rencontrèrent en bas, dans le vestibule, les ouvriers qui arrivaient. Alors Charles, pendant deux heures, eut à subir le supplice du marteau qui résonnait sur les planches. Puis on la descendit dans son cercueil de chêne, que l'on emboîta dans les deux autres; mais, comme la bière était trop large, il fallut boucher les interstices avec la laine d'un matelas. Enfin, quand les trois couvercles furent rabotés, cloués, soudés, on l'exposa devant la porte; on ouvrit toute grande la maison, et les gens d'Yonville commencèrent à affluer. (Flaubert, MB, 1971:341)

Unlike the enumeration of the three materials, which leaves open the question of their tiering, the "rabotés, cloués, soudés"/ "planed, nailed on and soldered" sequence can be altered only at the risk of ruining one's tools, and even if the workmen are not quite up to their unwonted task - the outermost coffin ( "la bière") does not fit perfectly around the intermediate one - they know what they are about: the visible coffin must be of lead. To make sure that his readers were left in no doubt, the first Latvian translator of Madame Bovary rendered 'comme la BIÈRE était trop large' as "SWINA sahrks israhdijàs par leelu" / "the LEAD coffin turned out to be too large" (Flaubert, MB, 1926: 298). The carpenter was right, the translator erred - the third reference leaves no doubt that the outermost coffin is of mahogany:

Enfin on entendit un choc; les cordes en grinçant remontèrent. Alors Bournisien prit la bêche que lui tendait Lestiboudois; de sa main gauche, tout en aspergeant de la droite, il poussa vigoureusement une large pelletée; et le bois du cercueil, heurté par les cailloux, fit ce bruit formidable qui nous semble être le retentissement de l'éternité. (Flaubert, MB, 1971:345)

Before we examine why the outermost coffin is of mahogany, let us briefly examine how the Latvian translator (1926) was induced into his illuminating error: the arrangement of the initial triad (wood, wood, metal) seems to be echoed by the logical processing sequence (planing, nailing, soldering). With the exception of the most recent English translation (1992), in which 'soudés' is rendered as 'sealed up', all previous British and American translators put 'soldering'. But soldering is only one way of sealing something.

The public sees a mahogany coffin. Moreover, it is unaware that it is being taken in by appearances, that concealed beneath the mahogany surface are two smaller coffins - a secret known only to Charles, the apothecary and the priest, and the anonymous workmen.
Why does Charles choose oak, mahogany, and lead, why is Emma lodged in the oak coffin? Why does the mahogany coffin not fit perfectly around the lead coffin? Why are the empty spaces stuffed with wool from a mattress? Where did the mattress spring from? Lack of space doesn't permit me to answer all five questions; the last three will be dealt with elsewhere.

The word 'acajou' occurs three times in the text, twice in conventional type (the conjugal bed in Tostes; the adulterous bed in Rouen) and once, in Charles's stipulations for the coffin, in italics. Flaubert was determined that French readers take the text at face value, i.e. as a story of provincial adultery. And he succeeded - in France Madame Bovary continues to be read in that way to this day. One has but to open a French annotated edition to realise the truth of my assertion. But had it been Flaubert's intention to write an ordinary novel, employing conventional symbolism, Emma would have been boxed not in a triple coffin but in just one, made of mahogany, and the moral would have been clear: the wages of sin is death. But Flaubert is not of the 'Vengeance is mine' school. Mahogany, for all its being remarkably hard, fine-grained and taking a high polish was never a candidate for the coffin encompassing Emma - a New World wood, mahogany lacked literary lineage, unlike 'chêne', the tree of gods and kings, the tree of the Cross. The soul being immortal, it is only natural that Charles should have entrusted his most precious possession (Emma = âme) to an (invisible) oak casket. That the connotational ramifications of 'chêne' take precedence over the word's restricted denotative function becomes clear if we examine its first occurrence in the text: the word occurs for the first time in a simile referring to - Charles ('Aussi poussa-t-il comme un chêne), the book's most enigmatic character, whose destiny provides the frame for Emma's. More about frames anon. But first the intermediate coffin. Why does the oak casket fit perfectly into the lead one? One reason is Shakespeare: 'What says this leaden casket? Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath'. That Charles did indeed. But we must go back to before the Bard. Believed by the alchemists to be the oldest of metals, lead was given the sign of Saturn, whose reign was regarded as the golden age of Italy, and under whose temple in Rome, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, was the Roman treasury. Saturn, saturnism, Emma's suicide ....

If 'chêne' is initially linked to Charles, 'plomb' first appears linking two invisible sketches to a pronominal pair: 'Il montrait avec orgueil, dans la salle, deux petits croquis d'elle, à la mine de plomb, qu'il avait fait encadrer de cadres très larges et suspendus contre le papier de la muraille à de longs cordons verts. 'This elaborate mise en relief of 'deux petits croquis d'elle' (OF her ? BY her ?) rivets the reader's attention , irritatingly , on trivia , on the accidental - to what is essential, to the lead-occluded sujet, the chaîne of words that forms the sentence blocks access. How the very wide (presumably heavy) frames stay suspended against the (paper!) of the wall by long green cords is Flaubert's secret. A number of English translators, including the most recent one (1992), simply hang the outsize frames (up) on the (papered) wall. In Francis Steegmuller's streamlined Centenary translation (1957) the fine grain of the mahogany is obscured by excessive application of polish: 'He had two of her pencil sketches framed in wide frames, and hung them proudly in the parlor , at the end of long green cords. 'No paper, no wall. Perhaps the green (velours?!) cords were attached to the ceiling - who knows? Of one thing one can be sure, however - without a paper background for the moving pen Flaubert would have been unable to trace the letters that constitute the text of Madame Bovary. The frames are easily related to the casket. Too, they are evidence that Flaubert was not planning to write a novel about nothing, but that he was already d o i n g it:

Ce qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c'est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait lui-même par la force interne de son style, comme la terre sans être soutenue se tient en l'air, un livre qui n'aurait presque pas de sujet ou du moins où le sujet serait presque invisible, si cela se peut.

(À Louise Colet, 16 janvier 1852)

Armed with the knowledge that the mahogany coffin contains/conceals a lead and an oak coffin, we can now turn our attention to the cap conundrum :

Mais, soit qu'il n'eût pas remarqué cette manoeuvre ou qu'il n'eût osé s'y soumettre, la prière était finie que le nouveau tenait encore sa casquette sur ses deux genoux. C'était une de ces coiffures d'ordre composite, où l'on retrouve les éléments du bonnet à poil, du chapska, du chapeau rond, de la casquette de loutre et du bonnet de coton, une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d'expression comme le visage d'un imbécile. Ovoïde et renflée de baleines, elle commençait par trois boudins circulaires; puis s'alternaient, séparés par une bande rouge, des losanges de velours et de poil de lapin; venait ensuite une façon de sac qui se terminait par un polygone cartonné, couvert d'une broderie en soutache compliquée, et d'où pendait, au bout d'un long cordon trop mince, un petit croisillon de fils d'or, en manière de gland. Elle était neuve; la visière brillait.(Flaubert, MB, 1971:4)

"The cap", an American critic asserts, "is, in its excessiveness, a parody of a symbolic object, in that by throwing down a challenge it calls into play interpretive operations that are inadequate to the task it appears to set" (Culler, 1974:92). Even if one accepts that a cap can throw down a challenge, one does not have to accept that the interpretive operations called into play are (necessarily) inadequate to the task it appears (?) to set; neither is it self-evident why in its excessiveness (?) the cap should be a parody of a symbolic object. The success of any interpretive operation (or of any other operation for that matter) depends on the appropriateness of the method employed - and the unique has criteria peculiar to itself. The approach called for here is unorthodox, and so we shall react to the challenge thrown down by the cap by throwing I T down. It then becomes obvious that the nouveau had a very good reason for not flinging his casquette all the way from the door so that it might strike the wall and raise a lot of dust: the casse-tête-casquette would have disintegrated into its constituent parts - the letters of the alphabet; and these might just have fallen into their original configurations, thereby spoiling Flaubert's capital joke (blague supérieure). The cap, it turns out, is an en-chaîne-ment of craftily conceived and superbly crafted anagrams (1).

Before pressing on, we should pause to ponder the following statements made by Flaubert:

1. J'ai l'infirmité d'être né avec une langue spéciale dont seul j'ai la clef. 2. Il y a manière de faire le sujet tout à l'inverse et sans que rien y ressemble. 3. L'illustration est antilittéraire...Vous voulez que le premier imbécile venu dessine ce que je me suis tué à ne pas montrer? (2) 4. B o v a r y, en ce sens, aura été un tour de force inouï et dont moi seul jamais aurai conscience. 5. Comme je vais lentement! Et qui est-ce qui s'apercevra jamais des profondes combinaisons que m'aura demandées un livre si simple?

Now to the cap. The nouveau never wears his casquette; is reluctant to part with it. Once it is no longer his, however, the nouveau acquires a name, an identity. The parallel with Flaubert is evident: until the publication of Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert was a nobody on the French literary scene.

We have seen Charles provide very large frames for Emma's croquis; and herself with 3 coffins. Cela ne l'a pas tué, but it must have cost him a lot. Did he order the cap too? What is the provenance of "this weird tressage of anomalous and incongruous fragments" (Tanner, 1979:238)? I suspect it was fashioned by the person who gave birth to the nouveau, his mother, the daughter of a knit-goods dealer, a 'marchand-bonnetier'. Curiously, the nouveau's mother has no first name, a puzzling lacuna considering that his father has three. The persons of father, son and mother are thus linked solely by the surname 'Bovary'. Altering the initial letters of 'father' and 'son' to capitals, we have the first two Persons of the Holy Trinity; 'person' originally meant 'mask', and the first Madame Bovary masks the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit - which explains why the nouveau's female parent has no first name, why when she had a child it had to be placed out with a wet-nurse, and why it was she who bestowed on him the gift of reading. What Charles read we are not told; Flaubert's reading is documented by his correspondence. And the correspondence makes it abundantly clear that Flaubert was a fils of the divine family of the BEAV and the VRAY (Bovary). Reshuffled, "Charles Bovary" reads

Three sentences are devoted to the description of the cap: two long ones and a short one. Its fifteen (3) voyages across the Channel and across the Atlantic do not fail to leave their mark: on its maiden voyage, in 1881, all that is discernible of the casquette's composite order, on arrival in America, is that it is 'neither round nor tall, neither felt nor fur'; in 1905 it fares even worse: the hapless nouveau steps ashore in Dover hatless, ferry-master Henry Blanchamp having chucked it and much else overboard. In the remaining 13 voyages a promiscuous assortment is discharged - in lieu of the original five types of hat one is now called upon to recognise some 30 odd - rather taxing on anyone not hooked on hats. Unimpressed by the confusing collection exported and mindful of the three-tiered casket one asks why there are only five types of hat in the French casquette and what prompted their election. The answer to the first question is provided by the 'ordre composite' introducing the series: the 'Composite order' is the label of the last of the five kinds of classical column, one of the two orders added by the Romans to the original three Greek orders of Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian, the Composite being a mixture of Ionic and Corinthian. The proliferation of hats in the translations helps answer the second question - new hats spawn new words, new orders of letters, and even where the hats are the same the lettering of their labels is altered in transit. Translating labels violates their lettering(4) and it is the letters of the French hats one must turn one's attention to if one wants to understand what it is that 'on retrouve' whether one be an eleven-year old anonymous French schoolboy en cinquième in a mid-nineteenth century work of fiction or a foreign reader at the end of the twentieth century. Via their response to the question 'to article or not to article' 'les éléments' the English translations tell us why. Most Italian translators are not disconcerted - 'gli' it is in nine cases out of ten (Roberto Carifi's 1994 version is among the rare exceptions, Natalia Ginzburg in 1983 still has it); Germans tend to solve the problem by eschewing it; Spanish translators vacillate. Irrespective of whether they put 'elements', 'traces' or 'features', English translators (with two exceptions) suppress the definite article : the 'the' does not make sense. French readers would seem not to see any problem, perhaps there isn't one. And, anyway, a French reader's reaction, whatever it be, is private, riskless - a translator risks public ridicule if s/he produces nonsense. In English 'the features' and 'the traces' would look rather strange; 'the elements' does occur, once, in 1902, and is demonstrably wrong. But 'les éléments' upon closer perusal turns out to be quite in order if, adjusting our perspective, we realise that these elements do not refer to actual objects but to the letters of their labels. The word 'éléments' occurs just once in the whole book: here. And 'élément' originally stood for a letter of the alphabet. The source is Lucretius:

Quin etiam passim nostris in versibus ipsis multa ELEMENTA vides multis communia verbis, cum tamen inter se versus ac verba necessest confiteare et re et sonitu distare sonanti. tantum ELEMENTA queunt permutato ordine solo. (Lucretius, 1986:64) Consider how in my verses, for instance, you see many letters common to many words; yet you must admit that different verses and words differ in substance and in audible sound. So much can be accomplished by letters through mere change of order.

(Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe, Bk. I, l. 823 ff.; 1994:30)

The importance of Lucretius for Madame Bovary is paramount: the first mention of his name in Flaubert's Correspondence occurs as early as 1847. Lucretius died in 55 B.C., by his own hand, some say. It is no coincidence that the sentence beginning 'C'était une de ces coiffures...' should come to its term with its fifty-fifth word. Nor is it a coincidence that this sentence contains all the letters of the Latin alphabet. And now let us rearrange 'une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d'expression comme le visage d'un imbécile'. To accommodate the 'b' we must go back to the original:

DE RERVM NATVRA, LIBRI SEX par TITVS LVCRETIVS CARVS.

I. J.ALKSNIS

ETI - Genève

NOTES

1. See, for instance, what would have happened to the word 'Ovoïde' at the beginning of the second sentence: the egg-shaped general aspect of the cap would have been altered and those present would have made out the form of Ovid - 'Ovide' being to the French what 'Ovid' is to the English-speaking world. The author of Metamorphoses was born in 43 B.C., which explains why there are 43 invités on the occasion of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault changing their marital status and why the husband spends 43 days at Emma's bedside after Rodolphe has ditched her - Monsieur Boulanger, by the way, was 34 years old. Caps, it has been noted, do not begin; tales do. Now the 'elle commençait' begins to make sense, especially as Ovid is followed by an illustrious captive released from fourteen decades of cetacean confinement: inside 'renflée de baleines' is one other than Alcofrybas Nasier, alias François Rabelais. The rest is a wide and fertile field and will be tilled elsewhere.

2. The first American edition (1881) and the first British edition (1886) were both illustrated editions. Appearances to the contrary, both the translators were women, the American one using a male nom-de-plume, 'John Stirling', and providing the book's thirty-five chapters with titles such as A BROKEN LEG(II), 'COMING EVENTS CAST THEIR SHADOWS BEFORE' (VII), DISTRIBUTION AND PRIZES (XVII), REQUIESCAT (XXXIII), THE FATHER COMES! (XXXIV).

3. The dates of the English translations are: 1881, 1886, 1896, 1902, 1905, 1928, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1957, 1959, 1964, 1965, 1969, 1992.

4.In French, 'chapska' is an alternate spelling of 'schapska', and in English there is no reason to substitute 'shako'/'lancer cap' or 'busby'. On the other hand, 'chapska' is also spelled 'shapska', as in the English translation of 1928, where the word is preceded by 'Polish', which is fine, as it was S H A K S P A who penned 'he smote the sledded Polacks on the ice'.

This article is a condensed and revised version of lectures delivered at the Latvian Academy of Sciences (Riga, 1990) and Tartu University (1994).

REFERENCES:

FLAUBERT, Gustave (1971): Madame Bovary, édition de C.Gothot-Mersch, Paris, Garnier.
FLAUBERT, Gustave (1988): Madame Bovary, édition de Gérard Gingembre, Paris, Magnard.
FLAUBERT, Gustave (1973; 1980): Correspondance, vol.I &II,, édition de Jean Bruneau, Paris, Gallimard.
FLAUBERT, Gustave (1926): Bovari kundze, translation by Julijs Roze, Riga, Valters un Rapa.
FLAUBERT, Gustave (1957): Madame Bovary, translation by Francis Steegmuller, New York, Random House.
FLAUBERT, Gustave (1992): Madame Bovary, translation by Geoffrey Wall, Harmondsworth.
FLAUBERT, Gustave (1983): La Signora Bovary, translation by Natalia Ginsburg, Torino, Einaudi.
FLAUBERT, Gustave (1994): Madame Bovary, translation by Roberto Carifi, Milano, Feltrinelli.
CULLER, Jonathan (1974): Flaubert, The uses of uncertainty, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
TANNER, Tony (1979): Adultery in the novel, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins.
LUKREZ (1986): De rerum natura, Welt aus Atomen, Lateinisch und Deutsch, translation by Karl Büchner, Stuttgart, Reclam.
LUCRETIUS (1994): On the nature of the universe, translation by R. E. Latham, Harmondsworth.

APPENDIX

C'était une de ces coiffures d'ordre composite, où l'on retrouve