“Everyone thinks I am in love with reality,” wrote Gustave Flaubert, in a letter about the response to his most famous book. “Actually I detest it. It was hatred of realism that I undertook this book.”
Madame Bovary was set in the place he hated most: his home. He was born 200 years ago, in Normandy, to the distinguished and fabulously named doctor Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, and his saturnine wife Caroline. The region is famous for the Franco-Viking rovers who conquered England and Sicily; exquisite Gothic architecture; and the city where Joan of Arc was put to death. But it’s also a maritime region connected to the English Channel: wet, windy and grey. It is a place that is both exotic and drab, dramatic and domestic.
This second son got struck with nerves and epilepsy and instead of becoming a lawyer, became one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century. “Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible,” according to James Wood, one of Britain’s foremost literary critics.
But Flaubert was also a luminous stylist. “The morality of art”, he wrote in a letter, “consists in its beauty, and I value style even above truth.” It is odd that an author best known for realism emphasised style above truth. Finding “le mot juste” was his priority. And this subordination of the world as it is to a perfect expression of it points to an important paradox in Flaubert. He became the father of realism by accident.
Flaubert hated the world, mediocre and imperfect as it is, and wanted to transfigure it through his beautiful art. But, in order to do this, he needed to dirty his smooth fingers. Madame Bovary was accused of obscenity, because it was too realistic for the time, but was later acquitted by a French court. “The entire value of my book if there is any,” Flaubert wrote, “will consist in having been able to proceed straight on a hair suspended over the double abyss of lyricism and vulgarity.” This letter was addressed to a woman who played a pivotal role in his life.
In the summer of 1846, the 24-year-old Flaubert, briefly staying in Paris, met Louise Colet. She was a catch: beautiful, 11 years older, a prize-winning poet, and the mistress of the famous philosopher and statesman, Victor Cousin. Over the next ten years, their romance would consist of pregnancy scares and a rich trove — the ones that weren’t destroyed — of erotic, philosophical and literary letters. These letters, like his novel, would seesaw between the lyrical and the vulgar.
By the time he started Madame Bovary, when he was 29, Flaubert had been travelling through the East for two years. He had grown fatter and clumps of hair had fallen from his head. His face was distinguished by his blonde, drooping moustache. He wanted to write a novel about the classical world, or about the East, something with a flavour of otherness. But his best friend, Louis Broilhet, told him about an old lady he had met in Normandy. She was visiting Flaubert’s mother.
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