Three Tales

Three Tales Review

Three Tales was written quickly, in a burst of creative energy in 1877, when Flaubert was sixty-five and exhausted by years of labour on Bouvard and Pécuchet, his vast unfinished satirical novel. He turned aside from that project to write three short stories in sequence, completing them in a matter of months. The contrast with his usual methods — the five-year agony of Salammbô, the years of searching for le mot juste in Madame Bovary — is striking. And yet the three stories are as formally precise as anything Flaubert ever wrote. Perhaps the speed was release rather than haste.

The first story, “A Simple Heart,” is the one that has earned Three Tales its place in the canon. Félicité is a servant woman who spends her entire life in devoted service to a Normandy household, outliving everyone she loves — her mistress, her mistress’s children, her nephew who goes to sea. She acquires a parrot, Loulou, whose green feathers become entangled in her fading religious devotion, so that by the end of her life she cannot clearly distinguish the Holy Spirit from her stuffed bird. This is not presented as a critique of her faith or her intelligence. Flaubert renders Félicité’s entire life — its narrowness, its devotion, its losses — with complete moral seriousness, from the inside, without condescension. The result is among the most affecting things in French literature.

The second story, “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator,” retells the medieval legend of a man who, having killed his parents (inadvertently fulfilling a prophecy he tried to escape), becomes a ferryman for the poor in an act of perpetual penance. It is written in the register of hagiography — deliberately flat, stylised, without psychological analysis — and it is a perfect miniature: a complete tonal world sustained for thirty pages.

“Hérodias,” the third story, retells the story of Salome and the execution of John the Baptist with the archaeological precision Flaubert brought to Carthage in Salammbô. Herod Antipas is a political realist making tactical calculations; John the Baptist is an irritant whose death is more politically useful than his survival. The famous dance and the severed head are present, but stripped of mysticism and rendered in the terms of petty court politics. The effect is more disturbing than a reverential retelling would be.

Taken together, the three stories demonstrate the full range of Flaubert’s methods: the contemporary realist mode of “A Simple Heart,” the stylised legendary mode of “Saint Julian,” the archaeological-historical mode of “Hérodias.” They are also a demonstration that the fundamental commitment — to style as moral vision, to precision as a form of sympathy — works across all three modes.