For ten years our lives were less mingled, save for the month of April in 1871. When I returned from England where I had passed some months, I found him much changed. The war had made a profound impression upon him; his "old Latin blood" had revolted at this return to barbarity. Obliged to flee from his house,--for he would not for anything in the world be under the necessity of speaking to a Prussian,--he took refuge in Rouen in a little lodging near the Havre quay where he was badly housed. This seemed to be a bereavement; my grandmother, now aged, no longer occupied herself with the management of the household, and instead of transporting their furniture and necessary objects from the country to the town (and that would have been easy to do), they left all at Croisset, where a score of men, officers and soldiers, had established themselves.
The fatal lack of employment that a disturbed life brings, the thought of his study, his books, his home soiled by the presence of the enemy, brought to my uncle's heart and mind frightful anxiety and grief. The arts appeared to him dead. Why? Was it possible? Could it be that an intelligent country would cause these billows of blood? But there were scholars who were holding Paris in siege, and hurling projectiles against the monuments!
He thought that he should return to his house to find nothing there. He was deceived; save some trifling objects without value, such as cards, a penknife, or a paper-cutter, they had respected absolutely all that belonged to him. One thing only about the return was suffocating,--the odour of the Prussian, as the French call it, an odour of greased boots. The walls were impregnated with it, through their stay there of three long months, and it was necessary to paint and redecorate the rooms in order to get rid of it.
Six months passed without my uncle being able to write, and finally, he was at my house at Neuville when, yielding to my supplications, he began again, this time finishing _The Temptation of Saint Antony_.
There was in Gustave Flaubert's nature a sort of impossibility of being happy, and a tendency continually to turn back in order to compare and analyse. Even at the age of the most absolute joys, he dissected them so that he saw nothing in them but the skeleton of pleasure.