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With outstretched arm he showed the gate of human generation in the Ram, and that of the return to the gods in Capricorn; and Salammbo strove to see them, for she took these conceptions for realities; she accepted pure symbols and even manners of speech as being true in themselves, a distinction not always very clear even to the priest.
Salammbo is indeed a work of erudition; years were spent in getting up its archaeological details. But Madame Bovary is also a work of erudition, and Bouvard and Pecuchet is a work of enormous erudition; a thousand volumes were read for the notes of the first volume and Flaubert is said to have killed himself by the labor of his unfinished investigations.
I have just made a resume in a few pages of my impressions as a landscape painter, gathered in Normandy: it has not much importance, but I was able to quote three lines from Salammbo, which seemed to me to depict the country better than all my phrases, and which had always struck me as a stroke from a master brush.
Countess Castiglione, the famous beauty, was dressed as Salammbo in a costume remarkable for its lack of stuff, the idea taken from the new Carthaginian novel of Gustave Flaubert.
"My bridal!" repeated Salammbo; she was musing with her elbow resting upon the ivory chair. But Taanach set up before her a copper mirror, which was so broad and high that she could see herself completely in it. Then she rose, and with a light touch of her finger raised a lock of her hair which was falling too low.
And that purpose and meaning are not a whit less personal to Flaubert than the purpose and meaning of Indiana, let us say, are personal to George Sand. The "meaning" of Madame Bovary and Salammbo is, broadly speaking, Flaubert's sense of the significance or, rather, of the insignificance of human life; and the "purpose" of the books is to express it.
The most lyrical of idealists can do no more to reveal herself. The demonstration afforded by a comparison of Salammbo and Madame Bovary is particularly striking because the subject-matters are superficially so unlike.
The king of the Numidians was depending upon her; he awaited the wedding with impatience, and, as it was to follow the victory, Salammbo made him this present to stimulate his courage. Then his distress vanished, and he thought only of the happiness of possessing so beautiful a woman.
Her face was covered with a white scarf, which, passing over her mouth and forehead, allowed only her eyes to be seen; but her lips shone in the transparency of the tissue like the gems on her fingers, for Salammbo had both her hands wrapped up, and did not make a gesture during the whole conversation. Narr' Havas announced the defeat of the Barbarians to her.
Suddenly lofty feather fans rose above the heads, behind the Mappalian district. It was Salammbo leaving her palace; a sigh of relief found vent. But the procession was long in coming; it marched with deliberation.
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