Flaubert lecteur de l’« Apologie de Raimond Sebond »

Abstract

The epistemological pessimism of the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ is often held to be a key presence in Flaubert’s early work, where the young novelist transmutes Montaigne’s doubt into an impassioned, anguished mode. Following the discovery of Flaubert’s reading notes on the Essais, we now have the chance to revisit this thesis. This article argues that the reading notes certainly reveal admiration for the ‘Apologie’: for its anti-rationalism, its denunciation of ‘bestise’, and what we might call its anti-modernity avant la lettre. But they also register a desire, widespread since the Enlightenment, to set a kind of limit on the essayist’s ‘que sçay-je?’. For Flaubert that limit was to be drawn on the geometrician’s ruler: as ‘la ligne droite géométrique’ that might lead to truth through fiction.

Keywords

• Flaubert Gustave
• Montaigne
• Apologie de Raimond Sebond
• reading notes
• doubt
• knowledge