Under Pressure: Flaubert’s Human Barometers

ABSTRACT

Roland Barthes called attention to the barometer in ‘Un Coeur simple' to illustrate the concept of l'effet de reel: the presence of objects which constitute a narrative luxury. For Flaubert's characters too, the barometer represents an objet de luxe since it goes unread. This article examines how humans interact with barometers figuratively and physically in Flaubert's works, and how contemporaneous cultural references view conversations about weather and barometers as evidence of provincial taste. Flaubert’s unread barometers may not predict the weather, but they signal the pressure of gratuitous acquisition, preoccupation and conversation, and forebode the consequences of failed interpretation.

KEYWORDS:

• Atmosphere
• barometer
• Barthes
• environment
• Flaubert
• reality
• weather

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my generous colleague Claire Lyu for taking the time to read this article and for sharing insightful comments, and to Masha Belenky for her always astute and patient guidance. I also thank the two anonymous readers who suggested enlightening bibliographical information.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the Dictionnaire Gustave Flaubert, for example, the baromètre entry opens with a citation from ‘L’Éffet de réel’ (Le Calvez, 131).

2 Baudelaire refers to the baromètre spirituel in ‘Le Poème du haschisch’. Balzac depicts the rentier as a human barometer in the Monographie du rentier: ‘il est une machine barométrique pour la connaissance du Temps parisien, comme les grenouilles vertes dans un bocal, comme les capucins qui se couvrent et se découvrent au gré de l’atmosphère’ (18). Balzac also furnishes several dining rooms with barometers. Fabien Lachon analyzes Champfleury’s satire of the provincial, petit-bourgeois fascination with meteorology and barometers in ‘Le rentier et le baromètre: météorologie ‘savante’ et météorologie ‘profane’ au XIX siècle’ (pages 650-651). See Michael Tilby, ‘Playing with Risk: Balzac, the Insurance industry and the Creation of Fiction’ in Journal of European Studies 41.2 (2011): 107–22 (especially p.119 note 18). Tilby observes that in the Comédie humaine, ‘barometers as functional objects, rather than kitsch, are largely to be found in the provinces’ (114).

3 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out that a mahogany barometer is listed on the ‘Inventaire après décès de Caroline Fleuriot-Flaubert’ (April 15, 1872), available at https://www.amis-flaubert-maupassant.fr/gustave-flaubert/documents/.

4 See a discussion of Pascal’s experiments in Rouen in Bouquet, F. Rouen aux principales époques de son histoire jusqu’au dix-neuvième siècle (1886): 92-99.

5 See ‘Sangsues Baromètres’, L’Athenaeum français: journal universel de la littérature, des sciences et des beaux arts (12 August 1854): 758-9.

6 In Bouvard et Pécuchet, set in 1840, the characters attribute the idea of a leech barometer to a source predating Merryweather’s model: ‘et ils recoururent à l’expédient imaginé sous Louis XV par un prêtre de Touraine’ (741).

7 Alain Buisine (1977) discusses the presence of meteorological instruments in literary works, including Flaubert’s, as evidence of the ‘passion scopique du petit-bourgeois’ who ‘porte les marques visibles pour son attirance pour tout ce qui peut être vu’ and as a manifestation of the ‘manie des phénomènes atmosphériques dans la panoplie standard du petit-bourgeois accompli’ (49).

8 Bénédicte Percheron and Gisèle Séginger examine the literary and scientific significance of coral in Flaubert’s works in ‘Polypes ou coraux: images et savoirs biologiques chez Flaubert’ (2020).

9 Later in the century Le Monde comique features a joke in which a servant, while dusting, sends an expensive barometer crashing to the floor. The punch line reads: ‘[c]e n’est rien […] seulement, je crois que nous aurons de la pluie – je n’ai jamais vu le baromètre si bas’. (7).

10 See Anne Green’s discussion of Emma’s automatic gestures and mechanical movements in ‘Madame Bovary and the Sandman: Flaubert’s Uncanny Memories’ (especially pp. 2-6).

11 ‘Chronique du jour’. Le Charivari March 8, 1884, np.

12 Clément Caragule, ‘Le Prophète O’Donnelly’ Le Charivari February 3, 1857, np

13 An article entitled ‘La Pluie et le beau temps’ (Le Charivari, February 2, 1856) pits météorolophiles against météorolophobes in a debate over meteorology’s status as a science. The article finds that ‘le baromètre est le plus savant et le plus habile des météorologues’ (np).

14 Éric Le Calvez argues that the Yonville description is a passage where, stylistically ‘tout vise à assimiler le paysage à une ‘peinture’ et où le redoublement des comparaisons tend à transformer le paysage en un tableau écrit, insistant de la sorte sur sa propre littérarité’ (229-30). In other words, the description is less concerned with reality than with its effect. Le Calvez, ‘Flaubert et le ‘tremplin’ réaliste’, Romance Studies 30: 3–4 (2012), 229–37.

15 Bovary’s barometer is not the only thing Charles Bovary fails to read. We learn early on that he did not cut open the pages of his medical textbooks. The selection of novels Emma reads are represented as dangerous to her mental health, a problem for which both Homais and Emma’s mother-in-law show concern, to such an extent that Charles’s mother has Emma’s lending-library subscription discontinued. In ‘Un Cœur Simple’, Félicité tries with bewilderment to read a map.

16 The print appears in Gaston Tissandier’s 1884 L’Océan aérien, p. 5. When asked for more information on the depiction of this scene, shown to take place in the courtyard of the Saint-Amand Abbey, Tisserand replied ‘La gravure que nous avons publiée a été faite d’après des documents écrits, et la maison a été faite de fantaisie par le dessinateur: c’est une scène reconstituée, qui a un intérêt scientifique, mais qui n’est pas une reproduction archéologique’ (Bulletin de la commission de la Seine inférieure vol. 7, 1889, 378). A discussion of where in Rouen the image is situated appears on pp. 378–80 of the Bulletin.

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Cheryl Krueger

Cheryl Krueger is an associate professor of French at the University of Virginia (USA). Her book publications include Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Toronto, 2023), Perspectives on Teaching Language and Content (Yale University Press, 2020), Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Prose Poems (Modern Language Association, 2017) and The Art of Procrastination: Baudelaire's Poetry in Prose (University of Delaware, 2007). She has published articles and presented papers in France, the UK and the US, focusing in recent years on the intertwining cultures of literature and perfume in nineteenth-century France. She is coediting a special volume of Dix-Neuf entitled “To the Passersby: Before and AFter Baudelaire.” She is working on a new book focused on how artists and writers interacted with hypnotists, mediums, past-life regression, and spirit photography in fin-de-siècle France.