While reading Michel Winock’s biography of Flaubert (Gallimard, 2013), I came across these reflections:
The trip Flaubert undertook in Brittany with his friend Du Camp proves that, when he wanted to free himself from his mother’s control, Gustave did so – even though, during this journey of more than three months, Mme Flaubert, accompanied by her granddaughter and a nurse, came to spend a few days with the travelers in Brest.
To Louise Colet, this trip was both a confession and a betrayal. But might not Flaubert’s taste for friendship, even intimacy, with young men (yesterday Le Poittevin, today Du Camp, soon Bouilhet) point to a homosexual tendency?
It is true that, in his youthful correspondence and later still – during his journey to the Orient – Flaubert alludes to homosexual experiences.
In the imagined confession of Louise Colet, created by Julian Barnes in Flaubert’s Parrot, Louise speaks of Du Camp – perhaps out of spite – as Gustave’s ‘ambitious favorite.’ We also know that, by mutual agreement, Flaubert and Du Camp burned most of their early correspondence, which might have compromised them.So? What is certain is that Flaubert, like most men of his time, preferred male company: separation of the sexes was the rule, and school habits created complicities among young men where sex no doubt played a part, but more often in the form of bawdy stories, pornographic jokes, or gossip about exploits in brothels.
And this:
Several passages from letters to Bouilhet once again raise the question of Flaubert’s homosexuality. He recounts that in Egypt sodomy is a ‘fashionable’ practice, everyone speaks of it as something natural. It takes place in the baths, for ‘all the bath attendants are catamites.’
Flaubert confides that he wants to try it, and in a letter of June 2, 1850, he informs Bouilhet: ‘You ask me if I have consummated the affair of the baths. Yes, with a strapping fellow pockmarked from smallpox, wearing a huge white turban. It only made me laugh, that’s all. But I’ll do it again. For an experiment to be valid, it must be repeated.’
This experience has sometimes led to conclusions about Flaubert’s homosexuality – but that is a rather short step. In his earlier correspondence, going far back into his youth, one finds phrases that might lead one to think so, as in letters from Alfred Le Poittevin: ‘I’ll come see you Monday without fail, around 1 o’clock. Are you hard?’ – ‘Goodbye, old pederast!’ – ‘I kiss your Priapus’ – ‘Goodbye, dear old friend, I kiss you while Socratizing you.’
Sartre gave his opinion on this: ‘It seems to me that the epistolary use of these “turns of phrase” makes it clear they did not refer to any actual practice.’ We are in the register of ‘joking,’ he writes, not without reminding us – Flaubert himself wrote to Louise Colet – that at the time of his friendship with Alfred he was ‘reputed to be a pederast’ (September 18, 1852).
Jacques-Louis Douchin adds: ‘Homosexuality? No. Pederasty? Yes, but only at a certain time and under specific circumstances. […] It was during his journey to the Orient that Flaubert was initiated into pederasty, and in my opinion purely out of curiosity, and also “to do as everyone else did.” Curiosity, amusement, a taste for the picturesque and for local color explain Flaubert’s behavior – “and that’s all,” as he himself wrote. His “ethnological” curiosity knew no bounds.’
The supposed homosexuality of Flaubert does not convince me. There is no latent homosexuality in his books. The situation with Caillebotte is quite different. After visiting the exhibition devoted to him in Chicago last July, I discovered Amaury Chardeau’s book Caillebotte: Painting Is a Serious Game (Norma éditions, 2024), published both in French and English. It is an excellent presentation of his life and work. It includes the astonishing photograph of Caillebotte in his late teens, posing in a woman’s dress with a wig.
We know very little about Caillebotte’s intimate life, and many of his personal papers were destroyed after his death by his sister-in-law. Charlotte is a constant and mysterious presence in Caillebotte’s life starting in the early 1880s. She lived with him until his death and he left her a house and a pension in his will. Amaury Chardeau:
Even while Charlotte was still alive, her disappearance had already begun… As on that day when Martial, visiting Petit-Gennevilliers with his camera, captured the image of his brother sitting on the garden bench. In the two small ‘carte de visite’ – sized photographs kept in the family album, one sees the painter, looking tired, Charlotte’s little dog on his lap, and a woman’s hat beside him. But of Charlotte herself, no trace. Looking closely at the photos, one notices a crude montage: her presence, to the painter’s right, has been cut away, leaving only her accessories and a scrap of dress behind her companion’s leg, floating like a specter.
This erasure seems singularly brutal.
The probable conservatism of a sister-in-law and this silence have, moreover, produced a paradoxical result: the emergence, in American academic circles in the 2000s, of the hypothesis of a homosexual Caillebotte.
It is true that all his life, Gustave was surrounded mainly by men. From his brothers, his schoolboy years, his comrades-in-arms during the war of 1870, his artistic friendships among the Impressionists, or among fellow rowers, he was a man among men. This male overrepresentation is mechanically reflected in his work, where men appear four times more often than women.However, apart from the undeniable eroticism of the spectacular Man at His Bath or the playful gender-bending of his student cross-dressing, no archival evidence seriously supports the hypothesis of a lived or repressed homosexuality.
So, what remains is his work itself. And that work radiates an obvious homoeroticism – for those who are sensitive to it. See the essay by André Dombrowski and Jonathan D. Katz in the catalogue of the exhibition, if you need to be convinced.
