Something To Declare: Essays On France And French Culture - Plot & Excerpts
Recording the event, Goncourt compared Turgenev to some elderly, sweet-tempered spirit of forest or mountain; there was something of the druid about him, or perhaps of Friar Laurence from Romeo and Juliet. The Magny regulars awarded him an ovation. In reply, he discoursed on the state of Russian literature, and impressed his hosts with the very high rates paid by Russian magazines. Then the solitary Russian and the several Frenchmen sealed their mutual regard by praising a writer from a third country: Heinrich Heine.Goncourt makes no mention of Flaubert's presence or reaction to Turgenev that evening, but we may deduce their immediate attraction for one another: the next day Turgenev sent Flaubert two of his books and asked him to dinner. Thus began a friendship which lasted until Flaubert's death in 1880. When they met, Flaubert was forty-one and Turgenev forty-three; each had written the novel—Madame Bovary, Fathers and Sons—for which they are still best known. Though there were many books and years ahead, they already presented themselves as elderly men: Turgenev asserted that after the age of forty, the basis of life is renunciation.
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