II.

Life and Career

Born the son of a prosperous doctor in Rouen, Normandy (Normandie), Flaubert spent much of his childhood in an apartment in the hospital where his father was chief surgeon. He was thus exposed daily to suffering and death, and his experiences reinforced a predisposition to pessimism about human existence. Flaubert attended the prestigious Collège Royal in Rouen, where he received a solid education in the literary works of ancient Greece and Rome. As a young man he was a passionate reader of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of Germany, Lord Byron of England, and François Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo of France. All of these writers were associated with romanticism, a movement that championed individualism, emotion, and imagination.

At the age of 14, Flaubert met Madame Elisa Schlésinger, a 26-year-old married woman who dazzled Flaubert and became the great love of his life. Schlésinger profoundly influenced his work. She inspired the character of Emma Bovary in part, was Madame Renaude in an early version of L’éducation sentimentale, and was immortalized as the lovely Madame Arnoux in the final version of L’éducation sentimentale.

In 1840 Flaubert began law studies in Paris. After failing his second-year examinations, he experienced a seizure while traveling by carriage. What Flaubert termed his “nervous disease” and may have been epilepsy changed his life. Thenceforth he lived as the hermit of Croisset, an estate on the Seine River purchased by his father; his mother and his niece joined him there in 1846, after the deaths of his father and sister. A long journey to the Middle East and Greece from 1849 to 1851 and occasional visits to Paris marked his only considerable absences from Croisset until his death.

Flaubert devoted the remainder of his life to literature. In his correspondence with writers Louise Colet, George Sand, and others, he described what he called “the tortures of style” in his creative process. His six major works required an average of five years each to write. His exacting standards led him to write and rewrite sentences many times over, even yelling them to himself in his garden in an effort to hone and polish them. Flaubert’s pessimistic view of human existence led him to believe that there was no place in the world for ideals or perfection, even though human beings could conceive of them. Appropriately, human speech was an imperfect instrument on which imperfect people must “beat out songs for dancing bears when we would like to make the stars weep.” Flaubert believed that writers must discipline themselves to find the exact words to describe perceptions, to eliminate repetitions and awkwardness, and to discover just the right rhythm and sounds to communicate their vision.

Despite Flaubert’s reputation as a realist writer, Salammbô (1862; translated 1886), La tentation de Saint Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1910), and the short story “Hérodias” (1877; translated in Three Stories, 1910) are colorful and exuberant in their action and setting, and are thus to some degree romantic. His two acknowledged masterpieces, however, reflect the great conscious effort that Flaubert exerted to restrain his flights of fantasy and passion.