Without Lifting A Finger

We visited the Flaubert Medical History Museum (more for Flaubert than Medical History) in Rouen no more than a month ago, so poor Hippolyte's operation stands out quite vividly: A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a good position and self-possessed, Charles's colleague did not refrain from laughing disdainfully when he had uncovered the leg, mortified to the knee. Then having flatly declared that it must be amputated, he went off to the chemist's to rail at the asses who could have reduced a poor man to such a state. Shaking Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted out in the shop-- "These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas of those gentry of the capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform, lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the Government ought to prohibit. But they want to do the clever, and they cram you with remedies without, troubling about the consequences. We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants, coxcombs,...

Hard to believe the "black butterflies" weren't inspiration for Nabokov's "black butterflies" in Pale Fire, but apparently VN never explicitly admitted it.;) * One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn.  The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at least flew up the chimney. &&& Here's the "parallel" passage in Pale Fire : As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a w...

But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the disturbance caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed to make her believe that she at last felt that wondrous passion which, till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings, hung in the splendour of the skies of poesy; and now she could not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness she had dreamed.

The winter passed waiting for this. Mademoiselle Rouault was busy with her trousseau. Part of it was ordered at Rouen, and she made herself chemises and nightcaps after fashion-plates that she borrowed. When Charles visited the farmer, the preparations for the wedding were talked over; they wondered in what room they should have dinner; they dreamed of the number of dishes that would be wanted, and what should be entrees. Emma would, on the contrary, have preferred to have a midnight wedding with torches, but old Rouault could not understand such an idea. So there was a wedding at which forty-three persons were present, at which they remained sixteen hours at table, began again the next day, and to some extent on the days following.

 

SILK OF A SOUL  Never did I speak—with her  either about love  or about death  only blind taste and mute touch  used to run between us  when absorbed in ourselves  we lay close  I must peek inside her  to see what she wears  at her centre  when she slept  with her lips open  I peeked  and what and what  would you think  I caught sight of  I was expecting branches  I was expecting a bird  I was expecting a house by a lake  great and silent  but there on a glass counter  I caught sight of  a pair of silk stockings  my God I’ll buy her  those stockings  I’ll buy them but— what will appear then  on the glass counter  of the little soul  will it be something  which cannot be touched  even with one finger of a dream Note: Line breaks are mine Translators of Herbert's "Collected Poems": Milosz, Dale, Valles