Flaubert’s Bottle

Julian Barnes

  • Flaubert: A Biography by Herbert Lottman
    Methuen, 396 pp, £17.95, April 1989, ISBN 0 413 41770 0

Alcoholism softens the flesh – or at least, the 19th-century French variety did. When Verlaine died, Mallarmé watched a cast being taken of the face of this staunchly self-destructive drinker. He reported to the poet Georges Rodenbach that he would never forget ‘the wet, soggy sound made by the removal of the death-mask from his face, an operation in which part of his beard and mouth had come away too’.

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