‘The Story of a Simple Heart’, he explained,

is quite simply the tale of the obscure life of a poor country girl, devout but not given to mysticism, devoted in a quiet sober way and soft as newly baked bread. One after the other she loves a man, her mistress's children, a nephew, an old man she nurses, then her parrot; when the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she is on her deathbed she takes the parrot for the Holy Ghost. It is in no way ironic (though you might suppose it to be so) but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move my readers to pity, I want to make sensitive souls weep, being one myself.15

Flaubert's denial of ironic intention is persuasive, but also amusingly devious. He wants to protect this icon of mother-love from attack, even though he knows it's a bit ridiculous. This makes for delicate tension in the texture of his story. The writing invites us to renounce the agreeable intellectual aggression that we call irony. Are we too clever, it asks us, to sit down quietly among the simple-hearted? Is their silence too much for us? Is our cherished irony just a bad habit? Is the head censoring the heart? Flaubert always leaves such questions unspoken, but they mark out a serious imaginative problem for realist art and for democratic politics. How can we represent the dispossessed, the illiterate and the powerless? Yes, we give them a voice. But whose voice is it to be? Their voice, or our version of their voice?

Flaubert had glanced at this problem once before. In the middle of Madame Bovary, there is a village agricultural show. The local elite are sitting up on the platform, announcing prizes. They summon before them ‘a little old woman’. For a lifetime of agricultural labour, she is to receive a silver medal. She is a vision of compliant servitude.

Then was seen stepping on to the platform a little old woman, moving timidly, and apparently cringing deep into her shabby clothes. On her feet she had great wooden clogs, and, around her hips, a large blue apron. Her thin face, swathed in a simple hood, was more creased and wrinkled than a withered russet apple, and from the sleeves of her red camisole there dangled a pair of long hands, with bony knuckles. The dust from the barn, the soda for washing and the grease from wool had made them crusted, cracked, calloused, so that they looked grimy even though they had been rinsed in fresh water; and, from long service, they stayed half unclasped, almost as though to set forth of themselves the simple testimony of so much affliction endured. A hint of monastic rigidity intensified the look on her face. No touch of sadness or affection softened that pale gaze. Living close to the animals, she had assumed their wordless placid state of being. It was the first time she had found herself in the midst of such a large gathering; and, inwardly terrified by the flags, by the drums, by the gentlemen in frock coats, and by the councillor's Legion of Honour medal, she stood quite still not knowing whether to step forwards or to run away, nor why the crowd were pushing her on and the judges smiling at her. There she stood, before these flourishing bourgeois, this half-century of servitude.16

In this strange antithetical figure Flaubert sketches out something quite remarkable, though at this point he is not yet sure what he wants to do with it artistically. As the contemporary (though scarcely the admirer) of the realist painter Gustave Courbet, Flaubert wanted to push at the legal limits of realism. Others may write compassionately of the poor. Such anguished compassion is a nineteeth-century speciality. But how is this to be done without idealizing the wretched? Without turning them into angels of virtue, or monsters of vice?

Flaubert has a special interest which serves him well. Always ready to adopt weaker vessels as his protagonists – there is nothing exemplary, nothing special, about his Emma or his Frédéric in Sentimental Education – he is satirically but authentically fascinated by idiots, by their ‘wordless placid state of being’, ‘close to the animals’. The saintly stupidity of Félicité, servant-heroine of ‘A Simple Heart’, will draw out the superior cleverness of those all around her. Surviving every loss, every insult, without serious complaint, without fine phrases, she can display a primitive moral grandeur which is teasingly instructive.

Flaubert had installed a stuffed parrot on his writing desk, to assist him in the composition of ‘A Simple Heart’.