SOURCE: Overaker, Lewis J. “Manifestations of the Holy Ghost in Flaubert's ‘Un Coeur simple.’” Renascence 53, no. 2 (winter 2001): 119-48.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

—1 Corinthians 6.19-20¹

The variously interpreted character of Félicité continues to inspire—and to frustrate—the many readers of Flaubert's popular story, most of whom remain puzzled by what seems like a jarring incongruity in the fundamental terms and imagery of the narrative. The title figure in her moving unsophistication enjoys a saintly relationship with the third Person of the Holy Trinity, yet the prominent symbol of that relationship is the nearly absurd one of a decaying stuffed parrot named Loulou.² In the quasi-satirical world of Félicité's spirituality, the pervasive richness and indwelling timelessness of the Paraclete have been comically reduced to the vulgar artifices and none-too-permanent craft of the taxidermist. Even while the parrot is still alive, Flaubert refuses to spare us the bird's less than endearing animal habits such as his biting his perch, his pulling out is own feathers, his scattering his droppings indiscriminately, and his spilling of his bath water (218/44).³ In short, the tale presents us with a Loulou problem. How can we take seriously a story about sainthood and the Holy Ghost when an illiterate maidservant and the wormy carcass of an exotic bird are the vehicles of such a putatively theocentric narrative? The purpose of this essay is to argue that the reason for which Félicité deserves the title of saint is not in spite of the impact Loulou has upon her life, but rather because of it, and that in re-evaluating the role of the parrot in the tale, we find ourselves witnesses to a serious and triumphant spiritual journey in which the workings of the Holy Ghost are disclosed.

Before proceeding with detailed analysis of “Un Coeur simple,” however, it may be helpful to refamiliarize readers with the tale by offering a brief synopsis. The title figure, Félicité, an illiterate maidservant, selflessly devotes most of her life to Mme. Aubain and her household, becoming attached in turn to various people—an unworthy fiancé, the children of her mistress (especially the daughter Virginie), her nephew, and an old man dying of cancer. All these persons desert her by going away or by forgetting her or by dying, thus causing her increasingly to turn to religion as an anodyne for physical and emotional loss. Eventually she acquires a pet, the parrot Loulou, who serves as a beloved surrogate for the close attachments of which her desolate life has deprived her; but when the parrot also dies, Félicité has him stuffed and keeps him near her as an icon of the Holy Spirit. Finally, on her own deathbed, the servant has a vision of God the Holy Ghost in the form of an immense parrot looming over her. Flaubert's story constitutes the introductory unit of a trilogy of tales all of which explore religious themes and two of which, “La Légende de Saint Julien” and “Hérodias,” feature canonical saints (Saint John the Baptist in the latter instance) as characters.

As a point of departure in their search for the true meaning of “Un Coeur simple,” scholars often consult Flaubert's correspondence for clues. Although we certainly cannot afford to ignore the author's own statements, we must be wary of encumbering our reading of the story with too many preconceived notions. The danger of doing so is that Flaubert often contradicts himself or seems inconsistent in his expressions of religious opinion. Arguing that the author was a natural skeptic and even a scoffer in sacred matters, readers sometimes point to his remark on the pilgrims to Lourdes, whom he viewed as victims of superstition, as in his letter of 5 October 1872 to Mme. Roger des Genettes: “What are your feelings about the pilgrims to Lourdes and of those who abuse them? Oh, wretched humanity!” (Correspondance 15. 167). Alternatively, they cite his comment on “Hérodias” in a letter of 19 June 1876 to the same recipient, “The story …, as I understand it, has nothing to do with religion” (Correspondance 15. 458), or his observation concerning our tale in the same letter that Félicité's final vision simply portrays her befuddlement: “when her time to die comes, she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost” (Correspondance 15. 458). There are, however, in Flaubert's correspondence just as many observations that reveal a wholly different religious orientation. In a letter of 30 March 1857 to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, for instance, Flaubert writes, “religion attracts me above all else. … All dogmas are particularly repulsive to me … but I consider the sentiment that invented them as the most natural and poetic known to mankind” (Correspondance 13. 570). To the same lady in June 1857 he writes, “All piety attracts me, Catholic piety above all other kinds” (Correspondance 13. 587), and to his niece Caroline on 9 March 1868, “The only important thing … is religion” (Correspondance 14. 404). The natural and poetic nature of Christian faith and sentiment, made more attractive by the absence of dogma, describes very closely the basis of Félicité's spiritual journey. Finally, it is important to remember that on 19 June 1876 Flaubert makes it abundantly clear, again addressing Mme. Roger des Genettes, just how he wishes us to react to the life of Félicité: “Being a sensitive soul myself, I want to move others like me to pity and to tears” (Correspondance 15. 458); and a few weeks later (7 August) he expresses to Caroline his intention to conclude the story on a high note: “But above all, I must end my Félicité in a magnificent way!” (Correspondance 15. 481)—this latter hardly consistent with a concept of Félicité dying alone, hallucinating and duped, no matter how ironically gaudy and crudely circus-like the scene in the street below may be.

Whatever his personal religious attitudes, Flaubert could hardly have isolated himself from the spiritual climate of his age. Nineteenth-century France witnessed a Catholic revival and the recrudescence of a certain personalism in Christian faith. As early as 1762 Rousseau, rejecting the deism of his own century, could write through the voice of his Savoyard Priest, “I serve God in the simplicity of my heart. … As to those dogmas which have no effect upon action or morality, dogmas about which so many men torment themselves, I give no heed to them” (Emile 272). Chateaubriand in his Génie du christianisme (1802) professed a similar revulsion toward dogma: “The Gospel has been preached to the poor in spirit. … Its doctrine is not to be found in the workings of the intellect but in the heart; it does not teach one to argue, but to live well” (1.72).⁴ Although clearly associated with the mind-set of Catholic royalists and Romantics, Chateaubriand nevertheless continued to exert broader cultural influences in France throughout the century, and, as Philip Spencer has noted (165), these extended to writers such as Flaubert, who were in obvious sympathy with the earlier writer's scorn of prescriptive dogma.

In searching for traces of the author's attitude toward Félicité, we must continually bear in mind his writerly principle of self-exclusion and non-intervention in the imaginary experiences he sought to represent, although, in fact, numerous elements from the creator's own biography—characters, places, emotions—enter the tale entirely unaltered or but thinly disguised.⁵ Perhaps Flaubert's most illuminating words on the role of the author in his fiction appear in a letter of 6 February 1876 to George Sand, written just after the completion of “La Légende de Saint Julien” and only days before he commenced “Un Coeur simple”:

As for revealing my personal opinion regarding the characters I create, I say no, no, a thousand times no! I do not have the right to do so. If the reader does not draw from a book the moral which is to be found there, it is either because he is an imbecile or because the book is false in the precision of its artistry.

(Correspondance 15. 435)

Flaubert's preference for the “survol” or “overview” technique is a highly sophisticated approach to composition; but it also presents many challenges to interpretation. William VanderWolk describes the on-going task Flaubert sets for us as readers: it is as if the author, “cognizant of the importance of memory, looked one hundred years into the future and called out to us to comb our own experience in order to find the key to the mysteries he presents us” (184). Confronted by an author who seems to relish ambiguity (Paul Kran describes any effort to decipher Flaubert's true feelings about religion as “doomed to failure,” [42]), we will undoubtedly find our best access to the spiritual marrow of the stories in the texts themselves—armed, but not burdened, with the knowledge of Flaubert's biography and his statements on spirituality, but nevertheless free to let the fictions come to us as the author invites us to do. Flaubert warns us indeed that unlocking the door to his deeper significances will be far from easy and that any formulations in this realm will tend to be inconclusive. In a letter of 7 April 1848 to Maxime du Camp he affirms his allegiance to ambiguity: “I have a need to say incomprehensible things” (Correspondance 13. 622). And recognizing that Flaubert, like several of his contemporaries, sometimes employs irony as a means of veiling his own deepest feelings and beliefs, we must guard ourselves from being pushed too decisively in the direction either of cynicism on the one hand or of sentimentality on the other. If we accept Flaubert's invitation to allow his fictions to speak for themselves, we shall find that, finally, we can be comfortable in regarding Félicité without qualification as a saint, and in being able to understand the importance of Loulou in fresh perspective as an essential component of, rather than an obstacle to, the hagiographic profile offered us.

A brief review of the critical perspectives on Loulou in the scholarship of “Un Coeur simple” may be useful at this point. As early as 1922, Albert Thibaudet elevated Félicité to the ranks of Flaubert's “vies gagnées,” i.e., characters whose lives are ultimately successful and even exemplary; he regards the life of Flaubert's heroine as one “qui a mérité d'être”—one not lived in vain (212). Félicité's classification as a saint, however, which is now almost universally accorded (though often grudgingly), has been the result of a long, hard labor. Of course, there are those who continue to deny Félicité sainthood. One such is Ben Stoltzfus, who sees in Loulou Flaubert's “supreme mockery” (23) of the solace available to the faithful, and who regards Félicité as “merely the dupe of religious faith” (20). Martin Bidney shares this cynical point of view, evaluating Loulou's function as follows: Félicité's “faith has been nourished by ecstasies brought on by rays of light rebounding from the glass eye of an idolatrously worshipped, worm-eaten stuffed parrot. … With all his respect for the sincerity of Félicité's simple heart, Flaubert cannot resist the temptation of playing ironic tricks on her,” tricks which approach “the point of semi-parody” (215-16). Victor Brombert, another critic of the skeptical persuasion, can declare that, although Flaubert's “compassionate account of this simple woman at times comes close to hagiography” (Novels 238, emphasis mine), the “old servant,” a near saint, “lives a meaningless existence in a disconsolate world of which she herself is unable to make any critical assessment” (Novels 245, emphasis mine). Obviously Loulou creates a problem for these writers, even those who affirm Félicité's saintly status, since their principal difficulty lies in coming to terms with the awkward symbolism of the parrot. Enid Starkie, for instance, acknowledges the presence of “holiness” in each of the Trois Contes, but because “Félicité has perfect innocence and goodness,” her “sainthood might then not be considered of the highest” (Master 273-74). Ultimately, Starkie can offer only a negative assessment of the effect upon readers of Félicité's problematic icon: “the tale is basically as pessimistic as anything [Flaubert] ever wrote. In his view, all of us here below, metaphorically speaking, have only a moth-eaten stuffed parrot to represent the Holy Ghost” (Making 300). Stirling Haig, who allows that the life of Félicité progresses from the profane to the sacred on account of the presence of Loulou in her life, seems ultimately to recant his own assertion by declaring that the link between the two is nothing more than “a result of the well-known confusion” (305). Aimée Israel-Pelletier, also adamant in her asseveration of Félicité's saintliness, is equally unable to reconcile the role of Loulou with the religious basis of her interpretation. She grants that Félicité achieves a “mystical reunion with the Holy Spirit” (22) at the end of her life, but concludes by apparently denying that the parrot can embody any authentic spiritual meaning in its owner's existence: “what [Félicité], and Flaubert, expose through Loulou is the wholly contrived, arbitrary, mobile, and, here, comical and pathetic nature of representation, in particular, of religious representation” (49). Other responses to Loulou as a central figure in the tale range from the patronizing words of Jonathan Culler, who implies that we exaggerate the bird's significance (“We allow the arbitrary connection between the parrot and the Holy Ghost and permit the potentially sentimental to pass over into the sacred” [211, emphasis mine]), to the reaction of Karen Erickson, who finds the embarrassing emblem of Félicité's religious pilgrimage inadequate: “Though it is a caricature, the parrot comes to represent the voice of God which speaks in the descent of the Spirit in Félicité's deformed theology” (69). By thus suggesting that Flaubert has set up a dichotomy between the presence and the absence of God in the tale, Erickson merely voices, as have so many before her, a sense of impasse or irreconcilable conflict in the fundamental import of Flaubert's work—a conflict that continues to plague readers.

The Loulou problem, then, persists in erecting a barrier between our wish to grant sainthood to Félicité for the right reasons and our capacity for integrating her story of sanctification into a tale of the workings of the Holy Spirit, ironically objectified by a physically tawdry symbol. For it is not enough to award Félicité the status of “saint” simply on the basis of her many acts of service and sacrifice nor because of her loving and forgiving nature. Even if Félicité had undergone three times as much suffering at the hands of insensitive and ungrateful persons as that depicted in the tale, she would hardly qualify as a saint. Legions of headstones in innumerable cemeteries, actual and fictitious, commemorate lives not dissimilar to Félicité's with such inscriptions as “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” The graves these headstones mark are usually those, as Benjamin Bart suggests, of Montaigne's “innocents,” those who, because their lives are “completely unreflective” (Starkie's phrase for Félicité [Master 274]), do not have to struggle heroically or vigorously with sin and are therefore “always and effortlessly good” (697). Such “innocents” must be carefully distinguished from saints.

True saints come in all shapes and sizes and in all degrees of physical activity and inactivity. They may lead armies into battle or may never leave the confines of the cloister. They may be blatant sinners most of their lives or may exemplify purity from their earliest days. They live in fiction and in real life today. But active intervention of the Holy Spirit is a vital component of true sainthood. The lives of saints reveal an identifiable presence of grace betokening an intimate relationship with God, a relationship almost always marked by a vision, by an encounter with the divine, or by a miracle. In Flaubert's own work one has only to instance the lives of Saint Anthony or Saint Julian to grasp the distinction between “innocents” and “saints.”

Loulou, I wish to argue, supplies that additional ingredient in Félicité's life that separates her from a mere “innocent.” For as long as we deride or ignore Loulou, keeping the parrot at a distance or treating him as a loose metaphor for religion in general rather than as a serious and successful representation of the Holy Ghost, we fail also to accept Félicité's saintliness without reservation, and also to perceive the profoundest meaning of her life. Culler speaks of the tension that the reader experiences by facing up to the deliberately unresolved significance of the story: “to state explicitly [Félicité's] saintliness and the sacred character of her suffering and vision would be to expose oneself to multiple and inescapable ironies; but to draw the line across the very threshold … is to leave an uncompleted structure which the reader must complete if he is to feel satisfied” (211). Culler points clearly to the absolute necessity of redefining the role of Loulou if one is ever to find unity and connectedness in the tale: “we can take the ending as finally transcending irony only if we have come to postulate a kind of order which makes the identification of the parrot and the Holy Ghost worthy and appropriate” (210). Anthony Thorlby employs similar threshold imagery: “the resolution of such suffering and love as Félicité's is made in heaven, and across the very threshold Flaubert draws his most daring line” (58-59). Similarly, Robert Griffin, stressing Flaubert's theoretically ambiguous relationship between the sacred and the profane, and following in Culler's traces, remarks that we often feel invited to collaborate “with the text and thus corrupt … it by averring a circumscribed but unauthorized meaning” (18). Nevertheless Israel-Pelletier, not content with interpretive indeterminacy, has recently encouraged us not to back away from what some might regard as a “singular or subversive” reading of the tale; for to “refuse to do so … is … to opt for aesthetic contemplation over responsibility” (12).

It would appear, then, that if we are to cross the “daring line” and commit ourselves to a responsible reading of the story, we must wholeheartedly engage the Loulou problem by entertaining the idea that the Holy Ghost is truly fundamental to the narrative—intimately and crucially associated with the mystery of Félicité's entire life. References to the Holy Ghost in scripture can throw light on the question of whether or not Loulou may serve as an appropriate representative of the Holy Spirit and whether Félicité may be properly regarded as a uniquely blessed recipient of His gifts as we experience them in mundane life. Here we may consider passages in the Christian Bible from both the Old and New Testaments.

Even in the Old Testament, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Joel foretell the coming of the Holy Spirit. Isaiah (32.15) images the Spirit of God being poured upon all Israel like rain transforming a wilderness into a fruitful field. Félicité's farm background may be loosely, though perhaps unconsciously, relevant here. Flaubert makes it clear in “Un Coeur simple” that her early life has been associated with farming, ploughed fields, crops, and pastures—with “la campagne” (202/19), “les récoltes” (203/20), and “la troisième pâture” (205/24)—and that, when she is dying, “The scents of summer came up from the meadows …” (224/54). Flaubert adds at one point that Félicité was impressed and moved by the Gospel references to sowing, reaping, and wine-making: “The sowing of the seed, the reaping of the harvest, the pressing of the grapes—all those familiar things of which the Gospels speak had their place in her life. God had sanctified them in passing …” (209/29-30). The narrator also associates Loulou with thunderstorms and heavy rain, which agitate the parrot disturbingly, perhaps because they remind him of the sudden downpours of his native forests (220/47). Ezekiel echoes Isaiah's imagery of the Spirit being poured out (39.29) but also introduces the idea of the Holy Ghost as the means by which God enlivens the valley of the dry bones: “Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. … And you shall know that I am the Lord. … And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live …” (Ezekiel 37.12-14). The mention of graves in this passage suggests a kind of subterranean relevance to the incident of Virginie's burial in “Un Coeur simple” (215-16/40-41); Flaubert makes a special point of Félicité's faithfulness in tending and visiting the girl's grave. Whereas Mme. Aubain's initial reaction to the death of her daughter is despair and rebellion against God, Félicité humbly accepts the loss and, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, helps to console and fortify her mistress. A passage from Joel, however, probably relates more closely to Félicité's spiritual career, speaking as it does of visions and servants: And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even upon the menservants and maidservants in those days, I will pour out my spirit. (Joel 2.28-29)

New Testament writings on the coming of the Holy Ghost (also commonly referred to as the “Holy Spirit,” “Advocate,” or “Counselor” and related to the Greek word, parakletos) include passages from all four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and several of Saint Paul's epistles. Taking up the earthly life of Jesus first, we recall from the story of the Incarnation that the Blessed Virgin Mary “was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1.18); compare “Un Coeur simple”: “In one of the stained-glass windows in the apse the Holy Ghost looked down on the Virgin” (209/29). The Holy Ghost then makes His entrance into Christ's physical life at the time of His baptism, the account of which appears in all the Gospel accounts. John the Baptist proclaims that he has been baptizing with water but that soon the Messiah will appear, the one who, in John's words, “will baptize … with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Luke 3.16). In John's Gospel it is the dove resting on Jesus' head that enables John the Baptist to identify the Son of Man in the crowd (John 1.32-33), whereas in the other three Gospels, the Spirit of God descends upon Jesus after His baptism but always in the form of a dove (Matthew 3.16; Mark 1.10; Luke 3.22). Mention of this episode also occurs in “Un Coeur simple” when Félicité observes the dove—the emblem of “the Holy Ghost … in a colour-print depicting the baptism of Our Lord” (221-22/50). Additional Gospel references to the Holy Ghost provide a deeper understanding of His nature and function. He is often associated with the giving of strength and protection and with the ability to act without fear. Mark records Jesus' words to the Apostles: “And when they bring you to trial and deliver you up, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say; but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit” (Mark 13.11). Here we might recall Félicité's early embarrassed encounter with Théodore after she had screamed in fright at his attempt to assault her sexually. When Théodore tries to excuse his behavior as the result of drunkenness, “She did not know what to say in reply and felt like running off” (“Un Coeur simple,” 203/20). A moment later, however, she finds her voice and responds to his enquiry about her marriage plans with considerable aplomb and self-composure: “She answered with a smile that it was mean of him to make fun of her” (203/20). It is the power of the Holy Ghost which sustains Jesus during His long fast and confrontation with Satan: “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil” (Luke 4.1-2). Flaubert tells us that Félicité “copied all Virginie's observances, fasting when she did and going to confession with her” (“Un Coeur simple,” 209/30). And Jesus credits the Holy Ghost, for example, as His source of power in being able to cast out evil spirits: “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12.28).

Even though the Holy Ghost does not become fully manifest in the Bible until after the crucifixion, He enters several Gospel narratives at earlier points and in a variety of ways. It is because of the promise and intervention of the Holy Ghost, for example, that Simeon is led to the temple to meet Jesus: “it had been revealed to [Simeon] by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And inspired by the Spirit he came into the temple” (Luke 2.26-27). Speaking to a crowd after denouncing the Pharisees, Jesus warns them that they will be forced to acknowledge Him before the rulers and authorities of the synagogues; but He allays their fears by saying, “for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say” (Luke 12.12). Again, Félicité's response to Théodore comes to mind. The Holy Ghost is also portrayed as a great provider of human needs. Jesus speaks of God's loving generosity by telling the disciples: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. … If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11.9-13).

In the Book of John, Jesus speaks of the real nature and function of the Holy Ghost, foretells the day of Pentecost, and, in a post-resurrection appearance, bequeaths the Holy Ghost to the disciples. John records Jesus' words regarding the knowledge and peace that the Holy Ghost will bring them: “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you …” (John 14.26-27). Again addressing the disciples, Jesus gives them a further definition of the Holy Ghost: “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you” (John 14.16-17). Many English translations use the word “Advocate” (for “Counselor”) in this context; in the French Bible of 1830 (translated by Father Bouhours), which Flaubert undoubtedly knew, the word is rendered as “consolateur” (comforter). Then, after the crucifixion, at the time of Jesus' appearance to the downhearted disciples, the gift of the Spirit is actually bestowed. Coming upon them suddenly, Jesus says, “‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’” (John 20.21-23). A commentator in The Interpreter's Bible paraphrases the core message of these words to the Apostles as follows: “by ourselves” the difficulty of rising above our own sinful natures “cannot be done at all. But then, Christ does not ask impossibilities from his people. He gives what makes it possible”—namely the gift of the Holy Spirit. “And with something of Christ within them, all things spiritual [come] within their reach”; “ordinary people, once Christ's Spirit has touched and inspired and quickened them, can live and do live, can serve God and the cause and do serve God and the cause, as they could not do before” (8.797).

Theologians sometimes retitle the entire Book of Acts “The Acts of the Holy Spirit”; but the most familiar passage involving the Holy Ghost deals with the day of Pentecost, which in liturgy commemorates the birthday of the Church: “And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where [the Apostles] were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit …” (Acts 2.2-4). Finally, Paul, particularly in his letters to the Romans and the Corinthians, sheds additional light on how the Holy Ghost functions ideally in human lives. To the Corinthians Paul makes it clear that the gift of the Holy Ghost was bequeathed to all: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12.4-7). In Romans Paul relates the Holy Ghost to suffering and prayer. As regards suffering, Paul writes, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God … and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8.14-17). As for prayer, Paul observes: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness: for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8.26-27).

What the biblical accounts tell us of the Holy Ghost, then, can be seen as specifically relevant to Félicité's own experience, although, of course, she is too ignorant to rationalize the connections theologically or to articulate them in a conscious way. In Flaubert's words, “Of dogma she neither understood nor even tried to understand anything,” “her religious education” having “been neglected in her youth” (209/30). To sum up, we learn that although the Holy Ghost generally cannot be seen, He did actually reveal himself briefly during Jesus' earthly life in visual form as a dove. We discover also that the Holy Ghost casts out fear, providing both the strength and protection needed to serve God; that He functions chiefly as a source of comfort for those who suffer; that He acts as an intermediary between God and our needs, responding even to our feeblest prayers; and that He empowers us to forgive. It is clear, too, from scripture that He exists in the minds and hearts of true believers as a constant reminder of God's presence in human life, and that, armed with His power, believers are led to righteous actions. The Nicene Creed, recited or sung at Mass, sums up the Holy Spirit in the understanding of the Church as the power through whom the Incarnation became possible—“the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son,” with whom He “is worshiped and glorified,” and who “has spoken through the Prophets.” And the gifts of the Holy Ghost are available to all, but perhaps especially so to the simple and the outcast. The annals of saints and martyrs, indeed, are replete with persons who would have led seemingly insignificant lives had they not been chosen by God, and aided by the Holy Ghost, for a special task. Saint Joan of Arc, for instance, was a peasant, Saint Bernadette of Lourdes was illiterate, and Saint Felicity was a slave. The last of these has a certain interest for Flaubertians since Saint Felicity and her companion Saint Perpetua were both martyred at Carthage, the setting of Flaubert's earlier novel Salammbô, and since both were also tossed by a savage cow before being killed in the arena by gladiators—an incident conceivably related to that of the charging bull in “Un Coeur simple” (see Butler's Lives of the Saints 1.498).

Reminded then of how the Comforter, as revealed in scripture and the teachings of the Church, can enter and affect individual lives, we can better understand Félicité's close relationship with this unique Person of the Trinity—a divine and all pervasive force of which Loulou (from Félicité's naive and uneducated angle of vision) provides a suitable, if also ironic, representation.

To know a successful relationship with the Holy Ghost is not something many believers, even the most learned and prayerful, achieve easily. We have seen that the Holy Ghost is commonly invisible and speechless, so that any immediate or dramatic connection one might experience with Him is likely, by definition, to be exceptional, even extraordinary and non-traditional. But if we recall that the Holy Ghost was bequeathed to all followers of Christ and that the gift is not restricted by any need for theological knowledge or any requirement, or even conception, of dogma, it follows that Félicité's potential for a rare bond with the Holy Ghost is entirely valid. All we need do is trust the insights of scripture and, in the light of these, accept that “Un Coeur simple” is written to make vital to the reader what can actually occur within the believing heart of a very simple woman. And we need also to lay aside the idea that the story reflects Flaubert's own spiritual odyssey and, with it, Professor Stoltzfus' misguided contention “that Loulou is Flaubert's symbol rather than Félicité's” (23). Nor need we regret that the inherent theodicy represented in the tale lacks scholarly or intellectual persuasiveness. Rather, what Flaubert would have us encounter is exclusively Félicité's religious experience; and we must begin with her if we are to free ourselves to consider her uniqueness in a serious way. Not to do so is both arrogant and theologically maladroit. Regarded within this admittedly restrictive framework, Félicité's story becomes a microcosm of the process by which the true believer grows slowly, often incognizantly, into a relationship with the most elusive and difficult-to-define Person of the Holy Trinity.

In the opening paragraphs of the tale, Flaubert imparts a view of Félicité's going to daily Mass and sleeping in front of the hearth with her rosary beads in her hands—the very portrait of a believer. It is not important that her supplications lack sophistication or that her prayer-life consists, in all likelihood, only of the words heard at Mass or of the rote petitions of the Angelus, which she probably understands but vaguely. Félicité, no matter how unlettered, impresses us as one who has embraced the faith unquestioningly and for whom traditional Catholic values are vitally important, even if she is almost totally unaware of the high and special gift of faith she has received. This gift is clearly that of the Holy Ghost as a working partner in her life, a gift which affords her a sense of God's presence even as she performs the most humdrum chores. Her life, work, and feelings are all irradiated by a penumbra of the sacred—that quality that the Holy Ghost is uniquely empowered to supply. Apart from the assumption of Félicité's living in intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit, no matter how obscure or even superstitious that relationship might appear to outsiders, it would be virtually impossible to account for the almost incredible resilience and courage that characterize her life.

Despite her simple faith and at times almost risible naiveté, however, Félicité possesses a keen moral sense and is not without skills that earn our admiration. The tale's opening paragraphs establish her as a treasure among domestics whose ceaseless diligence and varied capacities—sewing, washing, ironing, cooking, butter-churning, barnyard care, etc.—excite the envy of Mme. Aubain's bourgeois counterparts in Pont-l'Évêque (201/17). Nor are her talents limited to the performance of household chores. We learn early on, for instance, that Félicité is a shrewd bargainer at local markets (202/18) and no-one's fool when it comes to outwitting the visiting sellers of hens and cheeses who would take unfair advantage; these latter always go away “full of respect for her” (204/22). Only once does Flaubert suggest any failure of intellect in his heroine. When Félicité asks her mistresses' solicitor, M. Bourais, to help her understand where Havana is (knowing that her nephew Victor resides there), she is surprised to discover that the map contains no likeness of the young man: her “intelligence was so limited that she probably expected to see an actual portrait of her nephew” (213/36). Though unlettered and totally unfamiliar with books, she is far from helpless or easily duped in practical affairs. Also in ethical and sexual matters her instincts are sound, as becomes clear in her refusal to be seduced by Théodore, who had briefly pursued her when she was only eighteen: “She was not ignorant of life as young ladies are, for the animals had taught her a great deal; but her reason and an instinctive sense of honour prevented her from giving way” (203/20). In addition Félicité displays considerable social expertise in regularly managing to get rid of the drunken Marquis de Gremanville, Mme. Aubain's improvidently comic uncle, whose unwelcome visits disrupt household order: “[She] used to push him gently out of the house, saying politely: ‘You've had quite enough, Monsieur … See you another time!’ and shutting the door on him” (204/22). Félicité's dismissal of the undesirable but nobly-born uncle finds a humorous parallel toward the end of the story. Loulou, for the moment endowed with human characteristics, laughs derisively at the face of Bourais when the solicitor approaches the house: “[it] obviously struck him as terribly funny, for as soon as he saw it he was seized with uncontrollable laughter” (218/45). In perhaps the most comic episode of the tale, Bourais, humiliated before the neighbors by Loulou's outbursts of ridicule, is forced to enter by a circuitous route through the garden, hiding his face with his hat; and the looks he gives the troublesome parrot “were far from tender” (218/45). Here Flaubert seems to fortify the bond between Félicité and Loulou, enhancing their shared sense of partnership and common experience. In both episodes social inferiors—an illiterate maidservant in one case, a talking bird in the other—invert traditional hierarchy by dominating a situation in which guests who regard themselves as superior to others are humbled.

Although Flaubert describes Félicité early in the narrative as lacking in distinctive features—as a kind of “femme en bois” (202/18) or wooden doll in appearance and manner, he deliberately fails to sustain this caricature. Her behavior, for instance, is sometimes unpredictable. When Mme. Aubain's friend Liébard counsels her to assuage her grief for Victor's death by visiting the young man's mother at Trouville, she reacts with anger, dismissiveness, and a judgmentalism that, for the moment at least, excludes forgiveness: “It doesn't matter a bit, not to them it doesn't” (213/37). But Félicité is not immune to growth and change. After Virginie has died and Mme. Aubain finally lets down her guard, permitting herself to weep in communion with her servant, Félicité is so grateful for the embrace and so moved by the common bond of suffering, that she feels a totally dependent loyalty to her mistress from that point on: she cherishes her indeed “with dog-like devotion and religious veneration” (217/43). Yet immediately after characterizing his title figure as servile and blindly loyal to Mme. Aubain, Flaubert in the following sentence certifies that his “femme en bois” is far from being rigid or unable to evolve: “Her heart grew softer as time went by” (217/43).

In addition to domestic skills, social aplomb, and righteous impulses, Félicité can claim a certain degree of self-awareness. While she is trudging to Honfleur with the dead Loulou in her basket, an angry coach-driver whips her savagely for having startled his horses. Bleeding from the wound but still clutching the parrot that has become the center of her life, she reaches the summit of a hill, feels faint, then experiences a moment of expanded consciousness (221/48). The sudden violence of her trauma has jolted her into a new psychological and spiritual dimension. The painful reverses that seem to have composed her life collect in her mind and well up in her throat stiflingly—her miserable childhood, the unhappiness of her first love affair, the successive losses of her nephew and of Virginie. At this point of crisis we see her for the first time grasping as a whole the significance and value of her life rather than simply being immersed in and overwhelmed by its quotidian minutiae. Haig would undoubtedly interpret the incident as an example of Flaubert's narrative complexity, a stylistic means of providing the illusion of Félicité's interior growth while keeping her still at arm's length—and thus remotely ambiguous; from such a critical perspective, “Félicité is for observation, not for absorption” (315). But an impression of the character's dignity, based on her hard-won cognizance that life is composed of choices, is inescapable, to which Flaubert adds the pathos of an old woman looking back over the long years of an existence that might have been different. Even if Félicité were wholly stupid and uninsightful, even if she responded to every eventuality in the same way, loving and forgiving indiscriminately, and even if she were incapable of self-knowledge, she would still be a child of God eligible to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But her story would then be uncompelling. Rather, Flaubert is careful to surround his heroine with a framework of anecdotal details that encourages the reader to respect her and to respond seriously to the totality of her life—and this in spite of the simplicity and naiveté, even the existential flatness, that appear to define it. If we re-examine the profile that emerges from Flaubert's artfully selected particulars, applying to them some knowledge of how the Holy Ghost can enter and affect human lives, we may begin to recognize that “Un Coeur simple” is the fictional account of a genuine saint, of a woman whose inner strength and power to serve others elevates her far above the level of mere “innocents,” and for whom the presence of the divine in the most mundane experiences becomes an urgent reality.

We have seen already that the manifold gifts of the Holy Ghost specifically include the courage to act righteously without fear or hesitation and the ability to forgive others. It is clear also that among His other functions are the readiness to assist prayer and the provision of comfort in discouraging circumstances. Danger, separation, privation, misunderstanding, fatigue, and loneliness are Félicité's constant companions, yet she always picks herself up and returns to the task of loving and serving others without a hint of self-pity or any sense of sacrifice. When she saves the life of her mistress and the children by blinding a stampeding bull with clods of earth, the townspeople are awe-struck with admiration and tell of her extraordinary bravery and resourcefulness for many years afterwards; yet the unassuming maidservant regards the matter as quite inconsequential: “Félicité never prided herself in the least on what she had done, as it never occurred to her that she had done anything heroic” (206/25). In the context of Félicité's belief system, it is difficult to attribute such fearless virtue and selfless humility to merely natural traits, unassisted by higher powers. And many years later we see our heroine offering cider to soldiers as they pass through town, caring for the victims of cholera, tending Polish refugees, and dressing the wound of the cancer-ridden Père Colmiche who is dying in a pig-sty. For the latter, who holds out his trembling hands whenever she leaves him, Félicité is like a savior: “The poor old fellow would thank her in a faint whisper, slavering and trembling all the while, fearful of losing her and stretching his hands out as soon as he saw her moving away” (217/43). Stepping in to assure the safety of those in danger and ministering to the needs of the suffering, Félicité becomes, in Flaubert's ordering of her life, an agent of the Holy Ghost.

It is, however, in her capacity to forgive those who have wounded her that Félicité shows herself uniquely blessed by the power of the Holy Spirit; for Flaubert presents her as almost the incarnation of this virtue, exploring that aspect of her character in rich particularity. At one painful juncture Félicité feels distraught because six months have passed since she has heard from Victor, her nephew who has gone abroad. Mme. Aubain cruelly waves her concerns away, suggesting that worries about a forgettable ship-lad are far less upsetting than her own failure to receive a letter from Virginie within the space of a mere four days: “‘Oh, your nephew!’ And Mme. Aubain started pacing up and down again, with a shrug of her shoulders that seemed to say: ‘I wasn't thinking of him—and indeed, why should I? Who cares about a young, good-for-nothing cabinboy? Whereas my daughter—why, just think!’” (212/35). At first naturally indignant, Félicité, presumably operating under the grace of her divine mentor, is able to do more than forgive these slurs; she completely forgets them, rationalizing that such hurtful behavior might only be the understandable reaction of a mother, momentarily losing her head over a beloved child. Flaubert gives us a second instance of forgiveness when Félicité, now on her deathbed, sends for Fabu, who had toyed with Loulou and tried to teach him to swear. Having suspected the butcher's assistant of having poisoned her beloved parrot with parsley, she now wishes to cleanse her soul by confessing that she has harbored ill thoughts of him: “‘Forgive me,’ she said, making an effort to stretch out her arm. ‘I thought it was you who had killed him’” (224/53). We are never told whether her suspicions have any basis in fact; very probably they do not. But Fabu's guilt or innocence is beside the point. What Flaubert wishes to dramatize is Félicité's extraordinary ability, even in semi-delirium, to forgive a man she believes has deprived her of her most precious companion and, as an extension of the Holy Spirit's universal embrace, to try to bring him within the compass of her love by weakly extending her arm.

Because of her habit of living exclusively for others, however, Félicité can experience the virtue of forgiveness at higher levels than the merely personal. Listening to the priest at Virginie's catechism lesson, she identifies tearfully with the pain of Christ in the story of the Passion, then extends her feelings of affection to the animal world—to lambs and doves because of their association in her mind with the Lamb of God and the traditional avian emblem of the Holy Ghost (209/30). Fortified by her love of Christ and companioned by the Holy Ghost, she is also almost uniquely able to love those around her and to orient herself psychologically toward their lives. Usually she focuses on a single person at a time, on Virginie or Victor for instance, preoccupying herself almost exclusively with that person's joys, sorrows, and needs. At Virginie's first communion, Félicité participates vicariously in the sacramental experience with unusual intensity, identifying almost physically with the little girl who has been her charge, and nearly fainting when she watches her receive the host (209-10/30-31). Her own private communion the following morning lacks the rapture she had felt the previous day, chiefly because it lacks the element of close emotional identification with the child she has come to adore. After Victor has left for Havana, she experiences an even higher degree of identification with a loved one: “From then on Félicité thought of nothing but her nephew” (212/34). Her concern for Victor's welfare reaches an absurd level of intensity when she worries that the same hot sun or buffeting wind that afflicts Pont-l'Évêque on a given day might cause her nephew discomfort in far-away Cuba. The effect nevertheless is only mildly satirical, dominated as it is by our sense of Félicité's all pervasive love for someone who is absent from her. Félicité even understands her own mortality in relation to another human being, for she feels it contrary to the natural order of life that Mme. Aubain should predecease her: “That Madame should die before her upset her ideas, seemed to be contrary to the order of things, monstrous and unthinkable” (222/51). Leading a life of almost total self-abnegation, Félicité gets used to rebuffing slights and so resists taking umbrage; she accustoms herself to spontaneously pardoning those who thoughtlessly wound her. She develops in short the God-inspired talent for giving freely of herself and of exposing herself to pain without expectation of solace or reward. Ordinary magnanimity is a recognizable and attractive quality in persons of good will; but the generosity of heart embodied in Félicité belongs to a higher order. Unrelated to self-interest and utterly unconscious of itself, this higher capacity for forgiveness is Christlike in nature and, at least from Flaubert's point of view, cannot possibly be willed into existence without divine assistance or intervention.

Even Flaubert's pregnant silences reinforce the concept of Félicité as a perpetual forgiver of others. Curt dismissals, abandonments by those to whom she has committed herself, and simply being forgotten become a pattern in her life. At these times we can assume that she offers pardon without realizing that she does so; for Félicité, the capacity to forgive is innate and spontaneous, and Flaubert often marks the nature of this special gift by refraining from any overt mention of her reactions, leaving the matter entirely to inference. Thus, although Félicité's heart is grieved to the quick by Virginie's departure for the Ursuline convent at Honfleur, Flaubert provides us with only the externalities of the scene—the arrival of the carriage, the loading of the baggage, instructions to the driver, the giving of provisions and parting gifts, the sobbing of the passenger, the mother's kiss—all of which poignantly exclude Félicité's profound feelings of loss and regret though she is explicitly present (210/31). Then the carriage pulls away, Mme. Aubain breaks down in sorrow and is consoled by numerous friends, while Félicité is left to suffer in silence and, in the imagination of the reader, to forgive those who have ignored her. The narrative reticence, sometimes referred to as a blank, is more powerful emotionally than any words could possibly be because, as readers, we are already becoming aware of the sanctity that empowers and sustains the character who, though mute, is the heart of the scene's pathos. A similarly telling exclusion in the life of Flaubert's heroine occurs near the end of the tale when Paul and his vulgarly aggressive wife come to the house after Mme. Aubain's death to collect their inheritance; drawers are ransacked, furniture is sold, pictures are removed, and the setting in which Félicité had come to love and serve her mistress for many years past is brusquely disrupted. The author, with the ironic precision that so often characterizes his prose, refers to the invasive couple merely as “the heirs” (222/51), failing even to name them. But the point of the scene is that Félicité must play the role of silent and impotent observer as Mme. Aubain's memory is desecrated and what she has come to think of as her own home is virtually destroyed. Yet, again, we are invited to imagine that Félicité's habitual spirituality triumphs—that the Holy Ghost strengthens her to absorb the new pain and then to forgive those who have caused it with no particular consciousness of altruism or heroic conflict.

As must by now be clear, Félicité's extraordinary capacity to forgive is linked indissolubly in the tale to her faculty for perseverance. Often she is denied the solace of intimate moments of personal contact—a final good-bye, a last embrace, for instance—that in most human lives fortify the sufferers of loss, helping them to bear their grief and come to closure. She learns of Théodore's decision to abandon her (she is told he marries a rich old widow instead), only through the impersonal agency of a stranger, one of the young man's friends (203/21). She walks ten miles to Honfleur so that she may bid farewell to Victor, whom she never sees again, only to find the gangway to his ship being pulled ashore (211/34). Devastated by the news that Virginie is dying at her convent, again she arrives too late, learning of the beloved child's death only from the lips of an unfamiliar nun (215/39). The significant point is that she recovers from each of these calamities and always returns to her life of loving, giving, and forgiving. It is a pattern that continues until her death. But although Félicité exhibits unfailing endurance in the face of misery, perhaps the only effectual power of the powerless, we never feel that she suffers in abject aloneness. The fortitude that she fails to derive from human support on these occasions is clearly supplied by the Holy Ghost, one of whose designations, we recall, is Comforter—a term that derives from the Latin confortare (to strengthen). The age-old symbol of divine comfort and advocacy for Christians is the Holy Spirit, referred to as a dove in the Gospels and traditionally so depicted, as in the parish church that Félicité attends. When Loulou enters her life, therefore, it should hardly surprise us that Mme. Aubain's domestic, who after all is only an ignorant peasant, should associate her gift of comfort, almost instinctively, with a parrot. The symbolic association itself is a kind of gift—a poignant illustration of how God enters the lives of souls who are willing to receive Him. Félicité's emotional attachment to the parrot therefore becomes for her a way of loving the divine source of her astonishing strength, a commanding example of what Israel-Pelletier sees as her unique wisdom, her innate capacity for living instinctively both inside and outside the Church's theological structure (26).

Félicité's coming to feel the presence of the Holy Ghost in the form of Loulou is gradual, not a sudden or overpowering supernatural experience. The sequence of details is cumulative in effect and finally circular: Félicité's contemplation of the Holy Ghost in the stained-glass window of her local parish (209/29); her love of doves because of their connection with the symbol she has observed in church (209/30); her attraction to Loulou when he is still owned by the Baron de Larsonnière, subprefect of Pont-l'Évêque, because the bird, coming from America, reminds her of Victor (218/44); the passing of the parrot, first into Mme. Aubain's possession, and then into Félicité's (218/44); the disappearance of Loulou, an event from which Félicité never fully recovers and which shows how deep the attachment has become (219/45-46); the passage of three years during which Félicité becomes so deaf that she can hear only the voice of Loulou (219/46); their conversations involving much intimate touching in which the bird becomes for her almost a son or a lover (21920/47); her discovery of the dead bird in his cage, poisoned, as she imagines, by Fabu (220/47); her part-way journey to the taxidermist (she takes Loulou as far as Honfleur herself) and her installation of the stuffed bird in her room (220-21/47-49); finally in completion of the circle her semi-miraculous identification of Loulou with the image of the Paraclete in the church window—this reinforced by a colorful picture of Christ's baptism with its attendant dove with “its red wings and emerald-green body,” a copy of which she purchases and hangs beside Loulou's perch in her room. Félicité has now come to recognize in these representations “something of the parrot … the very image of Loulou” (221-22/50).

Noting the inception and step-by-step development of Félicité's involvement with the parrot, we can see that her symbolic link between Loulou and the third Person of the Trinity has a certain psychological inevitability about it. The only tangible picture of the Holy Ghost that Félicité can appropriate is that of a dove, whether she examines the images in her local parish or listens to the scriptures read at Mass. Fire and breath, the other two traditional symbols, which Flaubert also correctly associates with the Holy Ghost, are ultimately less compelling to her. Félicité is aware that fire and breath are sometimes identified with the Holy Spirit, but she finds these images difficult to imagine, undoubtedly because of their comparative abstractness and impersonality. Consequently she tries to associate them with familiar or natural phenomena—flickering light, wind-driven clouds, the music of bells (209/30). Fire and breath, however, are subtly introduced into the tale in the description of Félicité's death, particularly in the details of the glowing monstrance which is the centerpiece of the altar on which Loulou is enshrined, referred to by Flaubert as a “great shining gold sun,” and the incense which the dying figure rapturously breathes in during her final moments (225/56). Someone as childlike as Félicité, free to approach spiritual matters in a natural and spontaneous way, could hardly be expected to apprehend or feel intimate with the Holy Ghost in a form other than that of a dove or at least of a bird. As the narrator instructs us, “to minds like hers the supernatural is a simple matter” (215/39). Moreover this bird can speak, “Hail Mary” being one of his three comic utterances; and, as Andrea Greenbaum observes, the parrot's exoticism “represents something … exciting and mysterious, and therefore, to Félicité, divine” (210). Catholic worshipers need visual and tactile symbols of the sacred as aids to devotion, and there is nothing especially inappropriate or unusual about Félicité's requirement in this aspect of her piety. What is noteworthy, however, is Félicité's instinctive connecting of natural phenomena with the holy—her tender love for lambs, for instance, because of their association in her mind with the Lamb of God, and for doves “for the sake of the Holy Ghost” (209/30).

If we are to see “Un Coeur simple” as a tale essentially about the operations of the Holy Ghost in a particular life, the timing of Loulou's arrival into Félicité's world becomes highly significant. During her many years of sadness and loss, the ignorant housemaid remains a pillar of strength and basically unchanged. Presumably, the Holy Ghost has made this steadfastness possible. By the time Loulou enters the household and becomes Mme. Aubain's gift to her servant, however, much has altered. Félicité's loved ones have either died or gone away. For instance at Honfleur Victor sails off on a packet boat to a sea-going vessel at Le Havre and ultimately to his death from yellow fever across a wide ocean. Félicité's confusion at the unfamiliar docking area, which she reaches too late to bid her beloved nephew farewell because she has taken a wrong turn at the “le Calvaire” or town crucifix, constitutes a kind of emotional crucifixion for a lonely woman who desperately needs to express her love but is prevented by ironic circumstance from doing so (“Un Coeur simple” 211-12/33-34). A bleak future awaits her. There remains to her now only the visit of the emotionally dead Paul (appropriately a functionary in the office of Wills and Probates) and his pretentious fiancé; the death of Mme. Aubain; a second visit of the now married couple for the purpose of stripping the house of its possessions; and her own near-blindness and deafness. Félicité now confronts the lack of opportunity and physical stamina to serve others and the absence of any means by which to focus her unselfish feelings and affections. Whereas the Holy Ghost inspires Félicité to right and courageous actions while she is still young, He comes to her now in the unfamiliar form of Loulou as the comfort of her final years. By instinctively embracing the notion that Loulou and her divine Comforter are mystically one, she is able to enter the loneliness of her final years in the assurance of an abiding and transcendent companionship.

The benefits of this recognition are manifold. As Nathaniel Wing remarks, “The ability to imagine the Holy Ghost will await the fortuitous arrival of the parrot Loulou, who furnishes the material component that will eventually enable [Félicité] to assimilate the divine as real” (96). Haig sees the association in an equally positive light: “To the enrichment of Félicité's spiritual life (her deafness and declining eyesight are indices of her absorption into inner existence and slow, but steady passage from the human to the otherworldly) corresponds the decay of Félicité's physical surroundings and her detachment from earthly concerns …” (313). The talking bird, a new and special manifestation of the bequest of grace, is a fitting emblem of her faith and long-standing partnership with the Advocate and Comforter. Loulou serves as the type of her reward for a life well lived and provides the promised solace that she now so urgently needs and deserves. It is important to remember that Félicité's life has been marked from the beginning by the presence of the Holy Ghost. The arrival of Loulou and the connection Félicité makes between the parrot and the third Person of the Trinity do, indeed, reinforce and enhance the relationship, but they do not provide it. The Holy Spirit, who has become the essential link between Félicité and the presence of God in her life, has remained her perpetual companion.

Nevertheless her devotion to Loulou, however credulously excessive it may appear to the rationalist eye, enables Félicité to enjoy full communion with the Holy Ghost. In the parrot she has found a verbal partner: “They held conversations with each other, he repeating ad nauseam the three phrases in his repertory, she replying with words which were just as disconnected but which came from the heart” (219/47). Loulou also becomes an aid to prayer: “Fixing an anguished look on him as she appealed to the Holy Ghost, she contracted the idolatrous habit of kneeling in front of the parrot to say her prayers” (223/52). We have noted already that among the important functions of the Holy Ghost, as specified in scripture, is mediation between God and humankind with respect to what might otherwise be ineffectual prayer. In her now diminished state of mind, which naturally clings to memories of the past, the association is fond and tender: “Every morning when she awoke, she saw [the parrot] in the light of the dawn, and then she remembered the old days, and the smallest details of insignificant actions, not in sorrow but in absolute tranquillity” (221/50). With Loulou as the outward and visible sign of her divine intermediary, Félicité is enabled to rise above the remembered sufferings of her past, to contemplate them in fresh and broader perspective, and to achieve self-acceptance and spiritual serenity. Old, frail, and solitary, Félicité becomes for us, then, the prototype of a Christian soul finally at peace with herself and with her God. Nor is it surprising that she should erect an emotional and symbolic bridge between Loulou, now a somewhat pathetic stuffed effigy, and the Holy Ghost. Considered from within the framework of her own limited taste and mentality, the decaying stuffed bird need not be regarded as humorous, inappropriate, or pathetically inadequate. As readers, Flaubert asks us to identify imaginatively with Félicité's interior simplicity. It should be noted, however, that this process of nearly romantic identification with the narrator's unsophisticated heroine in no way precludes the absurdity which ironic distance lends to the overall effect.

As Félicité's death approaches, we see Loulou in an advanced state of decay. Owing to blindness, the old woman has been unable to care properly for her icon; and when she offers him up to be used on an altar of repose for the Feast of Corpus Christi, Loulou is infested with worms, broken-winged, and becoming abdominally unstuffed. In the street below the room in which she lies dying, a noisy throng of clergy, church wardens, nuns, and acolytes with thuribles lead the townsfolk and their children in procession. Flaubert partly mutes, indeed even undercuts, the devotional seriousness of the event (signified by the religious singing and the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in its gold monstrance) by his description of the portable altar—an altar overdecorated with garlands and lace flounces, piled high with bric-a-brac (moss, plants, ill-assorted flowers, silver, china, gems, Chinese screens), and highlighted incongruously by Loulou, his blue poll, which resembles lapis lazuli, emerging from a blanket of roses. To accept that a miracle of faith could occur in this satirically tasteless setting puts even the most devoutly inclined reader to a severe test. Karl Uitti concedes that by placing Loulou on an altar at the end of the tale Flaubert prepares us for the supernatural visitation of the parrot at the moment of Félicité's death; but he regards this supposedly otherworldly experience as the product of mental confusion: “The double contiguity—the holy altar in addition to the banal, even ridiculous, junk accompanying it—helps confer upon Loulou an ambiguous sanctification which comments upon and even authorizes narrationally Félicité's final vision” (162). Even if we accept that Flaubert invites us to entertain the notion that Félicité is a genuine saint and that her parrot symbolizes the divinity that overshadows and inspires the totality of her life, it is not hard to understand the reaction of critics such as Greenbaum: “While using the structural narrative of a saint's life, so genuinely valued by Flaubert, and superimposing the preposterous dimensions of devotional excess, “Un Coeur simple” is quite plainly a monumental satire, a ‘parrot-dy’ of faith, a joke turned in on itself …” (211).

But if we focus on the centrality of Félicité's death rather than on the vulgarity of its context, a different mode of perception emerges. For if we grant that the Holy Spirit has attended the dying woman from the beginning of the tale—more noticeably after Loulou's arrival—we cannot but expect that the heavenly force that sustained her throughout her earthly travails would also be present as the comfort of her final hours. Félicité experiences a moment of joy when the priest accepts her offer of the parrot, “the only thing of value she possessed” (223/53), as an altar decoration when she dies. Then in a last embrace she clutches Loulou devotedly, kissing him on the forehead and pressing him against her cheek, before Mère Simon carries him away (224/54). Finally, the last words Félicité speaks on earth reflect passionate concern for Loulou's welfare: “‘Is he all right?’—worrying about the parrot” (225/55). As her life ebbs away, the maidservant thinks only of Loulou, who now fills up her emptiness, at once supplying her with something precious to give away and with someone to love and worry about. At Félicité's end, then, we revisit with her and experience vicariously the generosity, love, and peace that have made up the very fabric of her life. The Holy Ghost, now domesticated and made mystically one with a comically disintegrating bird, becomes for her a veritable and intimate member of her own family.

At the moment of Félicité's death, silence overtakes the citizens of Pont-l'Évêque, who kneel in the street outside Mme. Aubain's house. As the incense rises into the room above, Félicité breathes in the vapors “with a mystical sensuous fervour,” smiles seraphically, and, as the welcoming clouds part to receive her, believes that she sees a huge Loulou gliding over her: “she thought she could see, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head” (225/56). Surely this final climactic moment represents the culminating miracle that had first been adumbrated when Félicité identified her pet with the Holy Ghost in church—a defining miracle traditionally essential to the genre of the saint's life and a clear marker of differentiation from the virtue of mere innocents. Seen in this light, the kneeling assembly in the courtyard below reifies the awe and respect that appropriately characterize witnesses to the departure of a saint from the earth. And Félicité's last smile becomes her ultimate testimonial of the supreme comfort, peace, and happiness that, for believers, only the Holy Ghost can confer.

If, then, we understand the workings of the Holy Spirit as revealed in scripture, accept the universality of His gifts as extending to all, and accord Félicité's life the serious dignity it deserves, at the same time embracing the metonymic relationship she establishes between Loulou and her divine comforter and sustainer, we can do no less than take Flaubert's ending for what it is—a genuinely miraculous vision of supernal love bestowed in rare instances upon the truly holy. Flaubert establishes Félicité's religious dedication in the early pages of his tale, continually reinforcing it in what follows so that we come to understand what a life lived in communion with the Holy Spirit is actually like; then he shows that same life rising in old age and death to mystical unification with the ultimate center of its empowerment. At an important level of the narration too often ignored by critics, we are invited to experience Félicité's spiritual elevation through her own feelings and capacity for faith—a faith that acknowledges the otherworldly and the limits of human rationality. Critics who rightly emphasize Flaubert's ironic mode of narration often stress the bizarre details that attend Félicité's demise—the grotesque improprieties, the superstitious indecorums, and vulgar excesses of the bourgeois culture in which it is embedded. The famous ambiguities of his method, however, are effected largely by the gap that separates this quasi-satiric, omnisciently “objective” stance from the richly subjective interiority of the heroine's profound spirituality, experienced imaginatively by readers as inhabiting her own admittedly artless and untutored consciousness. But the verb croire (to believe), positioned so prominently and so crucially in the tale's final sentence, is itself thoroughly unambiguous. The enlarged and inclusively dominant Loulou which Félicité believes she sees inspires no scintilla of doubt in her soul and, coinciding precisely with her final breath, exists for her, and for us through her, not as a fevered delusion but as a sign of her translation to eternity. As Alexandra Lajoux phrases it,

Although the narrator belittles Félicité's vision by terming it “mere” belief, yet his perspective works once for all to reinforce Félicité's world-view and hence her sanctity. She dies in this instant. The duration of her believed vision is therefore infinite, despite its grammatical status.

(47)⁶

Our argument that in his portrait of Félicité Flaubert occupied himself seriously with the realm of the spiritual can be further supported by reference to the trilogy of which “Un Coeur simple” is but the first part. Per Nykrog broke new ground in 1973 by pointing out that each of the three tales deals with a separate manifestation of the Trinity—“Hérodias” with God the Father (through the words of Jokanaan in their resemblance to the Old Testament prophets); “La Légende de Saint Julien” with Jesus; and “Un Coeur simple” with the Holy Ghost, whom the Danish commentator characterizes accurately as “pure immateriality, interiority, and total spirituality” (61).⁷ The tendency to belittle Loulou continues, however—even among those who acknowledge the Holy Ghost as Flaubert's central concern in the tale. Frederic Shepler, agreeing with Nykrog that the Trinity is the unifying principle of the three stories, sees “divine hope” in “Hérodias” and “the hand of God” in “La Légende,” but concludes, with specific reference to Loulou, that “God is moribund in “Un Coeur simple” (414).⁸ James Mall goes so far as to write that God is “absent” (45) in the tale. But interpreting it as a story of divine grace operating actively in the life of Félicité—grace increasingly embodied in her close attachment to Loulou—helps us to make better sense of continuities among the three stories that their grouping seems intentionally to suggest. For it is hardly likely that Flaubert, notoriously a devotee of formal integrity, would deliberately plan a series of three stories without special attention to their unity and connectedness. It should be recalled that the novelist decided to write “Un Coeur simple” immediately after finishing his work on Saint Julian, a tale in which Christ, in the guise of a leper, visits the repentant sinner in his ferry boat and carries him off to heaven; and also that the ending of “Hérodias” finds John the Baptist proclaiming the advent of Christ. Both tales conclude on a note of spiritual triumph. To suggest that Flaubert would end his third story on the life and death of Félicité by portraying a merely illusory connection with the divine or a failed and essentially empty belief in a deteriorating parrot—a merely pathetic or inadequate metaphor for the Holy Spirit in the mind of an ignorant servant—would be to convict the author of a jarring inconsistency of tone and theme.

Doubtless the masterfully constructed story of Félicité and her life of faith will continue to be read in a variety of ways as has been the case heretofore. Indeed the richness of Flaubert's art consists partly in the very diversity of interpretive perspectives that the story seems to encourage. Latterly, with the popularity of deconstructivist and linguistically theorized approaches to literary analysis, critics have been turning away from interpretations rooted in Flaubert's biography, especially in his personal resistance to Christian orthodoxy, and have been readier to explore, if not actually to embrace, the transcendent experiences of his fictional characters in a way that allows ontology to balance or even counteract his famous protective irony. But a major obstacle in coming to settled conclusions about what the tale finally offers us is still the huge divide that sunders our sense of Flaubert's personal experiences and beliefs from those of his heroine. George Willenbrink stops short of accusing the author of hostile feelings toward organized religion in “Un Coeur simple”: “Religion,” he admits, “escapes Flaubert's mockery in this story because his heroine's lack of education permits him to ignore the one aspect of it he found distasteful—dogma” (245). But Willenbrink also observes that Flaubert and Félicité live in entirely different worlds when it comes to matters of spirituality, especially when Loulou enters the equation. Regarding Félicité's deathbed vision of the parrot, he writes: “Not only is it the climax of [her] love, but also its reward—the only reward that Flaubert, in his unbelief, can offer his heroine” (244). Summarizing what he sees as the double role played by Loulou in the story, Brombert speaks of the parrot as being simultaneously a mystical fetish for the character and an instrument of irony for the author (Chambre, 80). Following up on Brombert's useful insight, we may affirm, then, that two opposing perspectives are operative in the story. Flaubert would seem to be juxtaposing his well-known disdain for the bourgeoisie with a complex and ambiguous attitude to matters spiritual. This juxtaposition allows him to treat Félicité with the utmost sympathy and to portray her progress to sanctification with a lively sense of her holy calling and peaceful acceptance in a world the author personally detests. It is probable that Flaubert, as skeptic, may have regarded Félicité's final vision of the parrot as a laughable, if not indeed meaningless, hallucination, while, as imaginative participant in the maidservant's inner world, he simultaneously treated it as an authentic apotheosis. Narratalogically speaking, we might even say that the two perspectives exist finally in unresolved tension with each other.

Although scholars have pursued a variety of routes to the deeper significances of “Un Coeur simple,” this study has sought to concentrate on Félicité's spiritual odyssey from the viewpoint of her own subjective experience with relation to certain axioms of traditional Christianity. Perhaps the central tenet here is the teaching that all God's children, no matter how naive, unlettered, or intellectually impaired, are eligible for full participation in the kingdom through the constant presence and intervention of the Holy Spirit in their lives; and a corollary implication is that such interventions may appear incongruous, absurd, or even crazy to observers from outside the sphere of belief. For what is Christianity, after all, but a religion of irony that flies radically in the face of conventional expectations and assumptions, based, as it is, on an outlaw who claims divinity, who preaches unqualified love and the dignity of the poor, who challenges human power-structures, and who is finally put to death for his uncompromising resistance to them? To believe that an important legacy of Christ is comfort offered through companionship with an invisible presence, the Paraclete, has traditionally tested the credulity even of those who claim the gift of faith. It is little wonder, then, that in the proliferation of scholarly commentary on Flaubert's important tale, the most notable omission thus far has been any true understanding of the theological nature and function of the Holy Ghost together with a recognition of His peculiar gifts. As we have seen, however, certain relevant passages from the Bible provide a clearer understanding of such benefits as the Holy Ghost can confer. These include the courage to act rightly in dangerous and difficult circumstances and to allay fear, the hunger to serve others, the power of the defenseless to forgive those who have victimized them, the profoundest kind of spiritual companionship available to the lonely and forgotten of the world, and the fortifying acceptance of divine presence to the dying. Félicité is portrayed as a character on whom these gifts have been liberally bestowed and who, on account of them, lives unusually close to God—especially when she is leaving life on earth. It is within this context that the bizarre prominence of Loulou makes logical sense, becoming, as the bird ultimately does for her, Félicité's tangible proof of her special relationship with her Maker.

Such a reading in no way invalidates the ironic, ambiguous, and at times even acrid or satirical take on Félicité's story that Flaubert perhaps reserved to himself and the more agnostic of his readers. But it has the advantage of allowing interpreters of a narrative that is so often associated with malaise or a jaundiced attitude toward the world of Pont-l'Évêque to cross a “threshold,” as Culler puts it, and to find “a kind of order” (210) in which reconciliation between the decomposing carcass of a bird and saintly miracle finally becomes possible. Flaubert invites us into a world where a focus on Félicité's Otherness, the transcendent world of her inner simplicity, can ultimately displace the tale's honest recognition of bourgeois vulgarity, pretension, and superstition. Moreover, a willing entry into this higher, more mystical space can subtly convict the reader of his or her narrowness, self-protective smugness, or intolerant judgmentalism; and this too would seem to have been part of the author's final purpose. Whatever his private reservations might be, Flaubert created in Félicité a character defined and sustained by a rich inner core of unself-conscious spirituality. Among its many other excellences, “Un Coeur simple” enables us movingly to share a sense of that inner realm, to enter through Flaubert's subtle manipulations of tone and voice into his heroine's simple heart without equivocation or embarrassment.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, the version of scripture cited throughout is The New Oxford Annotated Bible.

2. I must acknowledge at the outset that this essay builds upon assumptions, cogently defended by Christopher Wise, which align Flaubert's religious discourse with the traditional “ontotheological basis of Western thought” rather than with the deconstructionist, post-modern, and materialist approaches of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and other like-minded critics. By rejecting orthodox belief in the reality of Christ as the Word made flesh, these latter writers “displace ontology in favor of textuality” in their interpretive methodologies and thereby engage in what amounts to “an attack on the Christian faith itself” (Wise 37). I should also like to thank Professor Charles R. Forker of Indiana University, who assisted me materially with the documentation of this article.

3. Page and volume references to Flaubert's correspondence are to the edition in Oeuvres complètes; the translations into English are my own. For quotations from and references to “Un Coeur simple,” I give first the page number from Trois Contes, also in Oeuvres complètes (vol. 4), then, separated by a virgule, the page number from Baldick's English translation.

4. I translate here from Chateaubriand's French.

5. See Robert Baldick's introduction to his translation of Trois Contes, 9-11. Baldick later points out, for instance, that Flaubert was so wedded to accuracy of representation that he “even borrowed a stuffed parrot from Rouen Museum to serve as a model for Loulou,” installing it “in a place of honour” on his “work-table, like Loulou in Félicité's bedroom” (13). Julian Barnes' witty novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), makes this incident the basis of his title; in its opening chapter the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, perceptively describes Loulou as a “controlled example of the Flaubertian grotesque” and characterizes Félicité's identification of her pet with the Holy Ghost as “neither satirical, sentimental, nor blasphemous” (17). He then goes on to suggest that the talking bird symbolizes not only the Holy Ghost, “the giver of tongues,” but also Flaubert's own power of articulation or “voice” (18) as an artist.

6. In analyzing the true meaning of Félicité's vision, we must not forget what the Bible teaches us about the Holy Ghost, namely that, although on one occasion He appeared in the form of a bird, He is ordinarily invisible to human perception. Stoltzfus, when he alleges that Félicité's vision is the result merely of “delirium” because she confuses a parrot with a dove (22), betrays a considerable degree of theological naiveté. The Holy Ghost, being an aspect of God, can represent himself in any form He chooses, not excluding a gigantic parrot.

7. I translate here from Nykrog's French.

8. I translate here from Shepler's French.

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