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TO BE SIMPLE of heart is not necessarily to be simpleminded. A case in point is Félicité, the heroine of Flaubert's late tale, A Simple Heart (Un coeur simple, 1877), whose intelligence has been greatly undervalued, in my view, by readers who take her to be confusing the Holy Spirit with a parrot, when in fact she distinguishes quite clearly between them, and chooses the parrot. Flaubert wrote the story with a stuffed parrot sitting on his desk the entire time: that its ascendancy is no surrogate was his whole point.
Félicité, to begin at the beginning of the story, is the servant of a certain Madame Aubain, a widow with two children. Before coming to work for Mme Aubain, Félicité had first a difficult childhood, then a disappointing love affair. Her life as a servant has not been easy either: "For a hundred francs a year, she did the cooking and cleaning, sewed, did the laundry, ironed, knew how to bridle a horse, fatten fowl, churn butter, and remained loyal to her mistress -who, however, was not a pleasant person" (translation by Charlotte Mandell).
Félicité is loyal to her mistress and devoted to the children, Virginie and Paul. She lavishes her spinster's hopes and meager savings on her nephew, Victor, but he dies young on a distant shore. Virginie, always a worry because of her weak chest, also dies; Paul grows up good only at accumulating debts and is no comfort. Mme Aubain sighs a great deal as she sits at her sewing. Félicité works and mourns her dead, and is so deprived of life she hardly ages.
Then a wonderful thing happens: a departing neighbor leaves behind a South American parrot named Loulou. Mme Aubain gives the resplendent bird, green, pink, blue, and gold, to Félicité and it becomes for her "almost a son, a lover." Eventually, however, one cold winter dawn, Loulou is found dead; Félicité is inconsolable and Mme Aubain, finally losing patience, tells her to just get the parrot stuffed. Thereafter, installed on a shelf in her room, Loulou greets her every morning, "gorgeous, erect on a tree branch, which was screwed down on a mahogany pedestal, one foot in the air, his head tilted to the side, chewing on...