Gautier, poor all his life, driven from one bit of hack work to another (Mes colonnes sont alignées) reacts in his Olympian perfection:
"Le squelette était invisible
Au temps heureux de l'Art païen;
L'homme, sous la forme sensible,
Content du beau, ne cherchait rien."
and Flaubert who until his quixotic abandonment of his fortune had been "able to keep out of it," Flaubert capable of his great engineering feat, reacts in his huge labour of drainage and sanitation, beginning as Descharmes so intelligently points out, "when, as a small child, he was already registering the imbecile remarks of an old lady who had come on a visit to his father. (Où, tout petit enfant, il notait déjà les bêtises d'une vieille dame qui venait en visite chez son père.)
The "dictionnaire" of imbecile remarks heard "everywhere, all the time," has found its way into Flaubert's work; it is spread about in the conversation of his characters; the "Album" was intended to form all or part of the second volume of Bouvard et Pécuchet. Descharmes in stating his view is thorough, as a man may dare to be thorough when he wants to settle a question once and for all; he amply proves his qualifications for supervising the Centenary Edition of his hero. One may look on Madame Bovary as the culmination of the anterior art of novel writing; Henry James and Proust are perhaps the only authors who have, since Flaubert, made any contribution of international importance to the art of this sort of novel; they have specialized and elaborated the presentation of the "upper" milieux, and they perhaps grew rather from the Goncourts than from Flaubert.
Descharmes, finding Bouvard et Pécuchet of particular interest ends in a burst of enthusiasm:
"La tâche entreprise était gigantesque, et celle énormité même est une raison d'indulgence. Qui donc a réussi dans cette tentative quasi surhumaine de montrer sous forme de roman et d'oeuvre d'art, le 'pignouflisme universel?'"
