Flaubert’s Trois contes (1877) is a medieval stained-glass window in a cathedral depicting the legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller flanked by a modern saint whose virtue exemplifies that of Julian, and by John the Baptist, whose martyrdom is the archaic fact generating Julian and Félicité. The design of this work allows for resonances among the three stories of such a symbolic and aesthetic richness that the reading of them helplessly becomes a meditation. We see that the three stories are somehow one story. The whole art of narrative is before us, inviting but not demanding attention. The perspective leads us to the cathedral window: it is a text for the illiterate, to be interpreted in sermons and religious instruction, as Flaubert shows us in the scene of Virginia’s first communion in the first story, Un cocur simple, and as he himself translates one window into narrative in St.-Julien. Another window supplies the matter of the third story, Hérodias.
The triumph of these three stories is in each of them being shaped by a different power of the imagination, requiring a different style and tone. Flaubert was preparing the ground for Joyce’s polyphony as well as for Proust’s harmonizing of diverse narrative tactics into one magnificent maneuver.
Flaubert’s three styles are: a painterly realism, for which we can find an analogue in Pissarro or Courbet (sharing their preoccupation with roads, villages, and farms); the style used for saints’ lives in the Legenda Aurea(from which the
