‘At the moment,’ he told his niece, ‘I'm writing with an “Amazon” standing on my writing table, his beak askew, gazing at me with his glass eyes. [… ] The sight of the thing is beginning to annoy me. But I'm keeping him there, to fill my mind with the idea of parrothood.’17 The parrot in Flaubert's story would be called Loulou, a name which undoubtedly had a certain resonance for the author. Loulou was the pet-name for his niece, Caroline. And Caroline was a name that went back three generations. Loulou meant love and affection, happy domesticity, the unbroken maternal line.

Flaubert's parrot has overshadowed the other figure who contributed significantly to ‘A Simple Heart’. Frail and ancient, the family servant Julie was still in service in the spring of 1876 when Flaubert began writing his tale. After the death of his mother, the solitary grieving son had given Julie a selection of the dresses that had once belonged to her, thus creating for himself a ghostly composite figure of the maternal virtues. It is interesting, though it may be mere coincidence, that Julie arrived in Croisset in the same week as the more famous parrot. We catch sight of Julie in Flaubert's letters. Thin and frail, delighted to be in Croisset ‘for the country air’, she is now completely blind and a child is employed to lead her around the garden.18

Invigorated by the extraordinary August heat, Flaubert worked on ‘A Simple Heart’ with a singular passion. On his table, alongside the stuffed parrot, he had laid out the raw materials for his story's ending: a medical treatise on pneumonia, a breviary and a collection of prayer-books.19 He had entered a realm of mysterious intellectual exaltation. He was working his phrases while swimming in the Seine and then in his sleep the words were still coming to him: ‘In the night the sentences go rolling through my mind, like the chariots of some Roman emperor, and they wake me with a start by their jolting and their endless rumbling.’20 He was often writing all through the night, with the windows open, in his shirt sleeves, ‘bellowing like a fiend, in the silence of my study’, bellowing until his lungs were hurting and he saw the dawn. ‘One day,’ he joked, ‘I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.’21

‘A Simple Heart’ celebrates the maternal virtues. In Madame Aubain's damp and half-empty house, paternal authority has withered away and now Monsieur is no more than a memory, an old portrait on display in a room upstairs. The two subsequent tales investigate what happens when we call Father back from oblivion. Resurrected in the outsized garments of fantasy, Father now assumes two contrasting forms, one weak and one strong. In ‘The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator’ he is a medieval lord, whose son will accidentally kill him. In ‘Herodias’ he is an Oriental patriarch, who will be tricked into killing the man who mocks his authority. In both tales, clearly visible just below the flamboyantly archaic surface, there is a twisted sexual motive driving the plot. For this is a world of lethal erotic caprice, massacre, mutilation, accidental parricide and decapitation. Obviously Oedipal, we say, staring our author in the eye. Yet this is an Oedipus with a difference. For Flaubert treats his crew of saints, prophets and patriarchs with a thoroughly modern ambivalence, subjecting their visions to the mildly corrosive secular action of the realist style.

‘The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator’ culminates in a miraculous, intimate, deathly reconciliation with the father. Assuming the form of a decomposing leper, the father arrives from nowhere and demands from his son the signs of love: food and drink, a warm bed, a comforting embrace, a contaminating kiss. It is too much, an impossible moment. Touching the father inspires a powerful sexual disgust in his son, tinged with terror and yet rewarded with a surprise-ticket to heaven. At this point Flaubert famously breaks the frame of his story, abruptly disavowing the scene he has imagined: ‘And that is the story of Saint Julian Hospitator almost exactly as you will find it told in a stained-glass window in a church near to where I was born.’

Nowhere else, in all his fiction, does Flaubert ever show his hand in this way. He is professionally invisible. What are we to make of this bizarre exception?

There is indeed a Saint Julian window in the cathedral at Rouen, and the cathedral is indeed only half a mile from the house where Flaubert was born.