Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was the French novelist of Madame Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education and Three Tales. Famous for his obsessive search for the perfect word, he spent years on each book in his house at Croisset, near Rouen, and became a model of artistic integrity for generations of novelists.
Rouen
Gustave Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen, in Normandy, where his father was chief surgeon of the city hospital; the family lived in a wing of the building. He began writing as a boy and studied law in Paris without enthusiasm.
In January 1844, at twenty-two, he suffered a violent nervous attack, probably epilepsy, that ended his legal studies. He retired to the family property at Croisset, on the Seine near Rouen, where he would spend most of his life writing.
Madame Bovary
After a long journey to Egypt and the Middle East with his friend Maxime Du Camp from 1849 to 1851, Flaubert began Madame Bovary, the story of a doctor's wife in a Norman village whose romantic dreams lead her to adultery, debt and death. He worked on it for nearly five years.
Published in instalments in 1856, the novel led to a trial for offending public morals in January 1857. Flaubert was acquitted, and the scandal made the book a best-seller. Salammbô (1862), set in ancient Carthage, followed after years of research.
The hermit of Croisset
Sentimental Education (1869), about a young man's hopeless love in the Paris of 1848, was badly received. Flaubert was ruined in 1875 when he saved his niece's husband from bankruptcy. He then wrote Three Tales (1877), including A Simple Heart.
His friendship with George Sand, Turgenev and the young Maupassant, whom he trained, brightened his last years. He died suddenly at Croisset in May 1880, leaving unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet, the story of two clerks who try to master all human knowledge.
Anecdotes
The gueuloir
Flaubert tested his sentences by shouting them aloud in a room he called his gueuloir, his shouting place. A sentence that did not sound right when bellowed had to be rewritten, and he sometimes spent a week on a single page.
Madame Bovary, c'est moi
Flaubert is often quoted as saying that he was Madame Bovary himself. There is no trace of the phrase in his writings; it was reported long after his death by a woman who said she had heard it from a friend of his.
Frequently asked questions
What are Flaubert's most famous works?
Madame Bovary (1857), Salammbô (1862), Sentimental Education (1869), The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) and Three Tales (1877).
Why was Flaubert put on trial?
In 1857 he was prosecuted for offending public morals and religion with Madame Bovary; he was acquitted.
Which translation of Madame Bovary is quoted on Guesseo?
The translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, daughter of Karl Marx, published in 1886.