The Secret Lives of Used Books (Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert)
When I was reading Madame Bovary (for the first and thus far only time, in my early forties), I met up with a friend and former colleague for lunch in Cambridge. Greeting me in Harvard Square, he asked what book I was holding, and after seeing what it was, casually informed me that he’d read the book in the original French, in high school.
He and I went to different high schools.
Carl E. Melugin, the original owner of my Modern Library edition of Flaubert’s 1857 classic, was something of a sickly prep-school student (poor eyesight, facial paralysis) before being taken in — circa 1909 — by, in his words, a “kind lady, a Christian Scientist, under whose hospitable rooftree I was afterward to make my home for six years while finishing my preparatory and collegiate courses.” In the fullness of time, his own embrace of Christian Science “brought many beautiful unfoldments, increased blessings, and proofs innumerable that progress is essentially spiritual and joyous when Love guides the affections and motives.” Not for nothing did his college yearbook — the University of Idaho’s 1916 Gem of the Mountains, for which he was the editor in chief — reveal that his nickname was “Happy.”
Around the time that he inscribed this copy of Madame Bovary, he was a practitioner at something called the “Art of Calmness” training school in San Francisco, though he apparently lived down on the peninsula, in Atherton, in a home he called “Casa Juan Carlos” — presumably a play on his name and that of his wife, Juanita. “Happy” didn’t just accentuate the positive, however. As a man of spiritual leanings, he investigated the dark side as well. Another book from his former collection, a second edition of 1827’s Demonologia, or Natural Knowledge Revealed, is available from a specialty collector in Oakland, California, for just shy of a thousand dollars. Written by J. S. Forsyth, Demonologia is “an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology . . . witchcraft, &c.”
But for the location being Boston instead of Atherton, that book’s inscription closely matches the one from my copy of Madame Bovary, right down to the little Chinese stamps, or “chops,” that decorate the inscription page. I sought clarification from native Chinese speakers and learned, at least, that the upper chop on each inscription page contains three characters in simplified Chinese script: mei, lu, and zhen. More wordplay from the man of Casa Juan Carlos, whose last name is Melugin, or — transliterated into simplified Chinese — Meiluzhen.
