George Sand and Her French Style 3 



"Haunted by this absolute belief that there exists but one 

 ■way of expressing a thing, one word to name it, one adjective 

 to qualify it, one verb to animate it, he [Flaubert] would devote 

 himself to superhuman efforts to discover for every phrase that 

 word, that epithet, that verb. In this way he believed in a mys- 

 terious harmony of expressions, and when a word otherwise 

 suitable seemed to him to lack euphony, he would go on search- 

 ing for another with invincible patience, sure that he had not 

 yet found the true, the unique word. 



"For him writing was a redoubtable undertaking, full of tor- 

 ment, peril, and weariness. He would seat himself at his table 

 in fear and love of that dear distracting business 



"Then he would begin to write slowly, stopping again and 

 again, beginning over and over, erasing, interlining, filling the 

 margins, criss-crossing, spoiling twenty pages for one he fin- 

 ished, and groaning with the effort of thought like a wood- 

 sawyer. 



"Sometimes, tossing his pen into a great oriental pewter tray 

 which he kept full of carefully cut goose quills, he would seize 

 his sheet of paper, raise it to the level of his eyes, and leaning 

 on his elbow, begin to declaim in a loud rasping voice, listening 

 the while to the rhythm of his prose, pausing to catch a fugitive 

 reverberation, combining the tones, separating the assonances, 

 and disposing commas cunningly like resting places on a long 

 road. 



"A thousand preoccupations would beset him at once, but 

 this desperate certainty always remained fixed in his mind : 

 'Among all these phrases, forms, and turns of expression there 

 is but one phrase, one form, one turn of expression to represent 

 what I want to say.' 



"And, red in the face, with swollen cheeks and neck, his mus- 

 cles tense like a straining athlete's, he would struggle frantically 

 with idea and expression, coupling them in spite of themselves, 

 holding them indissolubly together by the force of his will, grasp- 

 ing the thought and subjugating it little by little with super- 



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