Comfort Cabbage
Flaubert, French residence, French children with sticks, and the end of chapter 2 of Foghorn
In this letter I’ll wrap up chapter 2 of Foghorn, and share some sketches, and next month, there will be new adventures of Terrible Father, and they will be pretty wild.
I’m writing this from the comics jail of Angouleme. Other than cartooning, I’ve been walking around alone lots, and it’s been lovely. During the Sunday/Monday lull, the town can feel completely frozen—there’s hardly any movement or noise, to the extent that your footsteps begin to sound intrusive.
On these walks I’ve been listening to an audiobook of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, one of my most beloved novels. The first time I read it was during my first stay in Angouleme, back in 2017, and it took me a good while to get through it, because I couldn’t help re-reading each other sentence a few times.
I’d argue that the famed perfection of Flaubert’s style is so much more than mere technical virtuosity—it is the thing that gives his work extended life, that elevates his subjects, and his stories. There’s little nobility in these characters, otherwise.
I’ve always felt confused by the commonly lukewarm reception of this book—it’s often seen as a more boring counterpart to Mme. Bovary, but I think it’s so much more than that. Both novels have deliberate misleading titles and premises, both have subtle depths, but, to me, Sentimental Education is the perfect satire, in a sense that it transcends what we expect from the genre.
The petty characters of Flaubert’s time are as alive today as they were more than a century ago—in fact, I’d say their depictions are far more incisive and relevant to modern-day pretensions than any contemporary attempts at skewering this or that art scene (naming no names). Here’s a particularly vicious paragraph, introducing Pellerin:
He blamed the weather, his nerves, his studio, went out into the street to find inspiration there, quivered with delight at the thought that he had caught it, then abandoned the work in which he was engaged, and dreamed of another which should be finer. Thus, tormented by the desire for glory, and wasting his days in discussions, believing in a thousand fooleries—in systems, in criticisms, in the importance of a regulation or a reform in the domain of Art—he had at fifty as yet turned out nothing save mere sketches.
And here’s Sénécal, speaking for the masses in a rather familiar tone:
Arnoux was for him the representative of a world which he considered fatal to democracy. An austere Republican, he suspected that there was something corrupt in every form of elegance, and the more so as he wanted nothing and was inflexible in his integrity.
The thing that I feel is undersung about Flaubert’s grotesque, is its subtler side. Rodolphe’s florid seductions set against the announcement of the prize for best manure is one of the highlights of Bovary, and there’s plenty of that stuff in Sentimental Education, but I’m more fond of little details like these:
“…the inventor of Oriental landscape, the famous Dittmer, wore a knitted shirt under his waistcoat, and went home in the omnibus.”
This small unexaggerated detail that doesn’t seem to do much, but adds up when you read the whole book, like one of those seemingly accidental strokes in a perfectly unpolished painting. It’s so easy to imagine this kind of sentence ‘punched up’ for greater effect, but that’s the real vitality of Flaubert’s humor—his ability to restrain himself, as well as push things into absurdity. You never know which one you’ll get, and often they intermingle, creating this hypnotic, uncanny atmosphere.
As a reminder, the English edition of my last French book is up for preorder, and the release date, it seems, has been updated to February 24, 2026.
I also went back on instagram, suffering from a predictable case of cabin fever, and started doing daily minute-long vlogs, in gibberish French. It has been an amusing morning ritual, and we’ll see how long I’ll keep it up.
Also, there’s also a couple of new episode of Two Librans, in which we discuss an absolutely banging Fall song, and a very weird Fall song, and, as always, a bunch of other nonsense.
And now, the final installment of the second chapter of Foghorn! Instead of posting a bunch of links to previous installments, I made a foghorn tag on substack so you can view all posts with serialized installments chronologically. I only included posts starting with chapter 2, since the first one was pretty heavily revised from the initial posts, and you can now read the (relatively) finalized chapter 1 in full on my website.
(continued concluded beyond the paywall)
