Flaubert, Gustave

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FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE

FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE (1821–1880), French novelist. If the nineteenth century is known in France for prolific writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert is a notable exception. His reputation as one of the century's greatest novelists is based on a handful of works, in particular Madame Bovary (1857), Sentimental Education (1869), and a collection of stories, Three Tales (1877). Through these and his other books—Salammbô (1862), The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), and the posthumous Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881)—Flaubert prefigured many of the key aesthetic and ethical issues of twentieth-century literature. He left a legacy of formal perfectionism to which many subsequent writers have turned for inspiration.

Flaubert was born in December 1821 into a prosperous middle-class family in Rouen; his father and older brother were both doctors. Flaubert was a law school dropout who essentially lived off his family's wealth, making relatively little money even from his successful books. In his twenties he took a formative trip to the Orient (1849–1851) that provided the impetus for several of his fictional works, and in 1857 he traveled for inspiration to Tunis, the site of his historical novel, Salammbô. He spent his later life in his family's country house in Croisset, near Rouen, with annual stays of up to a few months in Paris.

Although Flaubert composed several prose works in his youth, he did not gain recognition until the 1857 publication of Madame Bovary, a tale of a doctor's wife's adulterous affairs in a small Normandy town. The novel, considered by many to be the greatest ever written in French, was accused of immorality, and Flaubert suffered the indignity of a law trial but was acquitted in February 1857.

Madame Bovary, along with Sentimental Education, "A Simple Heart" (Three Tales), and Bouvard and Pécuchet, represents one of the two currents that characterized Flaubert's writings, that dealing with settings familiar to his readers. Sentimental Education, poorly received in 1869 but now considered by many a masterpiece equal to or greater than Madame Bovary, uses the Revolution of 1848 as the backdrop for a love story between a young man and an older, married woman, a character based on Flaubert's lifelong infatuation with Elise Schlésinger. In "A Simple Heart," the servant Félicité devotes herself first to an undeserving mistress, then to her beloved pet parrot, Loulou. Bouvard and Pécuchet, published in an incomplete form after Flaubert's death, tells of two middle-aged Parisian clerks who retire to the Normandy countryside and explore various aspects of human endeavor in the arts and the sciences, an enterprise that fails miserably.

The other, more exotic current of Flaubert's work involves historical and mythological materials. Salammbô, a historical novel set in ancient Carthage, is a mystical love story between the virginal Salammbô and the Libyan mercenary Mathô. The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a project Flaubert first conceived in 1845 when he saw Breughel's painting, is a loosely structured work presenting a series of mysterious, dreamlike tableaux, while "Saint Julian Hospitator" and "Hérodias" (Three Tales) are also based on Christian legends.

Flaubert focused on the subjectivity of his characters, believing that writers, like God, should remain invisible even though their presence is felt everywhere in their works. Preoccupied with style and precision, he was criticized for creating unsym-pathetic characters, including his most famous heroine, Emma Bovary. Flaubert was an extremely hard worker but a notoriously slow one, researching his projects for years and reading hundreds of books before starting to write. He was an obsessive reviser and could spend sixteen hours producing less than a single usable page. He read his texts aloud to himself as he composed them, and later to friends and fellow writers.

Flaubert never married nor had children but he had many lovers, most notably the writer Louise Colet, with whom he had a stormy liaison that lasted for seven years, yielding a lengthy correspondence. He helped raise his niece, Caroline Hamard (later Commanville), after his beloved sister died shortly after childbirth, and he remained a devoted uncle even when Caroline's husband created enormous financial hardships for Flaubert in his later years. Most of Flaubert's friends, including George Sand and Ivan Turgenev, were writers. He was often ill, subject to epileptic fits in early adulthood and later to various ailments exacerbated by overwork and unhealthy living. He died unexpectedly, probably of a stroke, in May 1880. His was a life of great solitude and suffering, and to the end he remained a confirmed pessimist who believed that literature was the only thing of lasting value.