Toward the end of Flaubert’s uneven but compelling work, we come around at last to that comfortable and well-worn theme, the consolations of age and experience. The older Frederic is somewhat more comfortable with himself, and marginally more attractive to the reader. After a lifetime of being motivated by the wrong sorts of things—money and vanity—Frederic finds that it is, at last, too late to achieve what he wanted, and in that takes a strange kind of relief, making some peace with his conflicted motives.
In the final pages, he and lifelong friend Deslauriers try to face themselves squarely. “They had both failed, one to realize his dreams of love, the other to fulfill his dreams of power.” (Penguin Classic Edition, p.458).
Frederic, the lover, spent a lifetime pining for Mme. Arnoux, but “‘didn’t steer a straight course,'” as he himself says, always taking the opportunity to devalue the importance of love in favor of some more trivial, short-term aim, tangling himself in relationships with women who flattered and soothed his insecure nature.
The poignancy of his loss is captured in the book’s penultimate chapter, when he and Mme. Arnoux meet for the last time, and we see what is perhaps Flaubert’s central theme in the novel: character is destiny and, character does not, really, ever change.
In this final encounter, with nothing to lose, Frederic, as always, evades the reality of the moment, inwardly put off by the fading of Arnoux’s physical beauty while outwardly singing her praises yet again. “Frederic, drunk with his own eloquence, began to believe what he was saying.” (p. 454). This is Frederic’s default mode, the sentiment of the book’s title, a self-love that mistakes itself for deep feeling.
Frederic, certainly narcissistic and self-deluding to the end, is perhaps redeemed a bit by a kind of Keatsian obsession with an untarnished ideal that has always been at odds with his “frenzied, rabid lust.” (p. 455). That final meeting does not feel like a love scene, but Frederic conjures up a passionate scene in his mind and tosses the fantasy away, all in an instant, repeating the pattern of his life up until the end. He is restrained by “the fear of being disgusted later. Besides, what a nuisance it would be!” Ah, this is the essential Frederic, precursor to Eliot’s Prufrock (“Would it have been worth it after all”), building his lifetime of regrets up until the very last.
And, partly out of prudence, and partly to avoid degrading his ideal, he turned on his heel and started rolling a cigarette.
She gazed at him admiringly.
‘How considerate you are! There’s nobody like you! There’s nobody like you!’ (p. 455)
Indeed!