"C'Esf Moi"

INTIMATE NOTEBOOK 1840-1841 by Gustave Flaubert. 68 pages. Doubleday. $4.

If the parents of 17-year-old Gustave Flaubert had sneaked a look at their son's private journal, they might never have urged him to study for the law. Fortunately for Flaubert, and for his future readers, he defied his parents and chose to keep on writing.

The journal that traces the origins of that choice has long since disappeared. But in 1960, a grandniece of Flaubert's produced a copy that she had transcribed years before. This first English translation by Flaubert Scholar Francis Steegmuller makes it clear once more that even in his callow teens Flaubert was headed for literary greatness.

Despairing Challenge. "I remember that before I was ten I had already begun to write," the young Flaubert reminds himself. "I dreamed of the splendors of genius, a lighted hall, applause, wreaths--if you knew what my vanity is--what a savage vulture, how it eats my heart." He agonizes over "the poverty of languages, which have scarcely one word for a hundred thoughts." And he asks: "Do you ever utter a sentence just as you think it? Will you write a novel as you have conceived it?"

To be sure, many aspiring young writers hurl such despairing challenges at themselves, brood majestically over the paradoxes of life and mistake old mysteries for freshly discovered insights:"The history of the world is a farce," announces Flaubert. "I believe that humanity has but one objective: to suffer."

Ingenuous Fountain. Having failed at the law, Flaubert immersed himself in an anchorite's life. He remained a resolute bachelor. Except for his novels--Novembre, L'Education Sentimentale, Madame Bovary, Salammbo--he scarcely existed at all. His books became his life, and he built them almost entirely from the impressions so passionately and imperfectly recorded in his diary.

As Steegmuller notes, the themes of Flaubert's mature novels "are themes that had already engrossed him in his youthful writings." So too with his experiences. "Emma Bovary's great night of dancing at the C'ateau de la Vaubyessard," for example, is directly traceable to the journal, in which Flaubert reminisces briefly about a ball at the chateau of the Marquis de Pomereu.

"Everything I do, I do to please myself," the young diarist wrote. "If I write something, it is to be able to read myself; if I dress, it is to look well in my own eyes; I smile at myself in the mirror to be amiable to myself. Ah! My pride, my pride."

Flaubert never erased that self-appraisal. Its vanity, its self-obsession would later be reflected in the tragic contours of the woman of whom her creator liked to say: "Emma Bovary --c'est moi."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.