Rouen (AFP)

A Gustave Flaubert on an expedition to Carthage to defend with flamboyance the "barbarians": the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen offers a dive into "Salammbô" through archaeological objects from Tunis and many works of art that the novel inspired.

"Instead of showing, as for example Michelet, a war of civilizations between Rome and Carthage, Flaubert shows the barbarism of Carthage, yet so refined", explains Sylvain Amic, co-curator of the exhibition presented until September 19 in Rouen before leaving for Marseille then Tunis.

Through the story of impossible love between the warrior Mâtho and Salammbô, an imaginary character, daughter of Hamilcar, locked up in her Carthaginian palace, Flaubert's second novel traces the revolt of the mercenaries against Carthage.

Two major pieces from the Tunis Heritage Institute set the scene: the bust of a Carthaginian warrior from the 3rd-2nd century BC, and the cover of the so-called "winged priestess" sarcophagus, from the 4th-3rd century BC , delicately draped with vulture wings on its polychrome slab.

This tribute to Isis, who inspired Salammbô costumes in the 20th century, has been on display since Wednesday in Rouen, where the writer was born 200 years ago.

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"The mercenaries fought for Carthage against Rome. We do not pay them. So they revolt. It is not at all the fight of civilizations", continues Mr. Amic who directs the Rouen museum.

Six years before leaving for Carthage in 1858, Gustave Flaubert even wrote to his great love Louise Colet: "I am a barbarian. I have muscular apathy, nervous languor (...) the impetus, the stubbornness".

The Carthage of Flaubert thus engages in the sacrifices of children.

The mercenaries attend.

"Flaubert tells us that they are + gaping in horror. + So in fact, who is the barbarian? The mercenaries or this so refined Carthage who sacrifices children?", Continues the curator.

At the heart of the exhibition, one of the many paintings by Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse, a painter whose "destiny was to illustrate Salammbô", shows this scene, "one of the most important of this novel", moreover "extremely shimmering", according to Mr. Amic.

- "Disgusted with the modern world" -

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Its impact will cross the centuries, since the question of whether the sacrifice of children was a Carthaginian practice is still not settled.

"Flaubert is constantly polluting the imagination and scientific thinking", emphasizes Sylvain Amic.

Barely recovered from the lawsuit that "Madame Bovary" earned him, "disgusted", "tired" by the "modern world" as he wrote in a letter to a friend, Flaubert invested himself wholeheartedly in his research for "Salammbô".

"He has read more than a hundred books, looked at endless documents", explains to AFP Myriam Morel, chief curator of Mucem (Museum of Civilizations and the Mediterranean) and co-curator of the exhibition.

Result, "he had a kind of anticipatory vision of archaeological objects which could have enabled him to describe Carthage, which were discovered 50 to 60 years after his novel", and of which several are presented in the exhibition, continues the archaeologist. .

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The writer "extrapolated" from archaeological excavations, particularly in Lebanon and Syria, which had already been carried out in his time.

"The chapter on the sacrifice of children is very powerful in writing, very frightening; it may have impressed certain archaeologists at the start of the 20th century" who, when in 1921 children's bones were found, concluded that Flaubert had seen fair, explains Ms. Morel.

But nothing says that these children did not die of disease, underlines the historian.

From there to saying that "Salammbô" appeared in 1862 "triggered the great excavations of Carthage", there is a step taken by Sylvain Amic, but which Mrs. Morel firmly refuses to take.

"For the white fathers who began the first major excavations in Carthage, around 1875, Flaubert was not very popular", underlines the archaeologist.

The fact remains that from Max Ernst to contemporary comics, including cinema and several operas, the novel has "opened up the imaginaries", summarizes Mr. Amic.

© 2021 AFP