French Mutt & Jeff

BOUVARD AND PECUCHET (348 pp.)--Gustave Flaubert--New Directions ($3.75).

Anybody but Gustave Flaubert would have been satisfied to go down in history as the author of Madame Bovary, one of the most searching and compassionate stories of a woman ever written. But Flaubert was also gifted with an acute sense of the fatuous, had long thought his mission was to write an encyclopedic lampoon of human stupidity. At 51, he set out to write Bouvard and Pecuchet, the story of a couple of Paris copying clerks, simpletons both, who want to improve their minds. In preparation, he settled down to read everything he could find that passed as authoritative knowledge in the arts and sciences.

Flaubert's best friends tried to dissuade him. Russian Novelist Ivan Turgenev reminded him that Voltaire had dashed off Candide, the finest satire in French letters, in just three days; he warned Flaubert to work fast or not at all. But Flaubert plodded along at his own schedule, poring through some 1,500 volumes as research. After eight years, not quite finished with his story but with the end clearly indicated, Flaubert died. Now, for the first time, the English-reading public can judge for itself whether Flaubert or Turgenev was right.

"It's Gold! It's Gold!" Flaubert's simpletons are a Mutt & Jeff pair. Franc,ois Denys Bartholomee Bouvard is fat and gay, Juste Romain Cyrille Pecuchet thin and dour. When they come into some money, they move to Normandy and become gentlemen-farmers, foreseeing "mountains of fruit, torrents of flowers, avalanches of vegetables." Pan and brush in hand, Pecuchet tramps the roads for fertilizer. When others contemptuously hold their noses, Bouvard cries, "But it's gold! It's gold!" Too much "gold" burns out the strawberry patch.

Undaunted, Bouvard and Pecuchet go on to more ambitious studies--chemistry, physiology, geology, archeology, history, politics, literature, esthetics, philosophy, religion. The cultural scenery of the times flashes by as they careen along the road to knowledge. They are a little ashamed on discovering that "their own organism contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like the whites of eggs, hydrogen like gas lamps," but delighted to learn that "the tongue is the seat of taste, and the feeling of hunger resides in the stomach." Not complete imbeciles, they become suspicious of historians on reading that the Loire during the French Revolution was "red with blood from Saumur to Nantes, a length of 45 miles." But Dumas' romantic novels enchant them with the news of life they find there, i.e., that "love observes the proprieties, fanaticism is lighthearted, massacres excite a smile." Flaubert's unwritten but clearly foreshadowed ending: frustrated and impoverished, the simpletons go back to work as copying clerks.

How to Crush a Farce. In English, as in French, Flaubert's catalogue of follies is well short of hilarious. He believed that if he made his story "concise and light, it would be a fantasy--more or less witty, but without weight or plausibility." But his text tends to prove that in writing Bouvard, Flaubert spent eight years with the wrong idea.

In many places the hand of the master is apparent and some passages are amusing, but like poor old Bouvard and Pecuchet, who ruined their strawberries with too much dung, Flaubert has crushed his farce with too many fatuities.

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