Gustave Flaubert

A hospital childhood, and a law degree abandoned

Flaubert was born on 12 December 1821 in the Hôtel-Dieu de Rouen — not a house but a hospital, the great charitable infirmary of the Norman city, where his family lived on the premises. Rouen sits on the Seine about eighty miles downstream from Paris, and the river connects the two ends of his life: he grew up beside it and he died beside it.

From 1841 to 1843 he was in Paris reading law, which he had no appetite for. In January 1844 the first of the nervous seizures that would recur for the rest of his life struck him down, and he went home to Rouen for good. It was the luckiest catastrophe of his career: the illness ended the legal profession as a possibility and left him, at twenty-two, with nothing to do but write.

On 21 May 1844 the family bought a house at Croisset, on the bank of the Seine just outside Rouen, and by May 1846 Flaubert had installed himself there. He kept that room for thirty-four years. From 1849 to 1851 he broke the pattern once, on a long journey through Egypt, the Levant and Greece with his friend the writer and photographer Maxime Du Camp, and came back to Croisset to begin the book about a doctor's wife in a Norman village — Madame Bovary.

The gueuloir, and le mot juste

What Flaubert did at Croisset was unlike ordinary authorship, and it is the reason writers still talk about him. He drafted, then corrected the drafts, then took them into a room set aside for the purpose and read them out loud at full voice — the gueuloir, from gueuler, French slang for to bawl or bellow. A sentence that could not be shouted without stumbling was a sentence with something wrong in it. He would keep a page for days.

The doctrine behind the method is usually named with the phrase le mot juste — 'the exact word', the belief that for any thing to be said there is precisely one right word and one right shape for the sentence carrying it, and that the writer's whole job is to find them. Flaubert put the principle more starkly: the idea, he held, exists only by virtue of its form. Style was not decoration laid over content; style was the content, and a badly made sentence was a false statement. He said he wanted to write a book about nothing, held together by the internal force of its style alone.

Madame Bovary in a Paris courtroom, 1857

Madame Bovary appeared first as a serial, in instalments in the Revue de Paris — a leading Paris literary magazine — between 1 October and 15 December 1856, and as a book in April 1857. It is the story of Emma Rouault, the daughter of a prosperous Norman farmer, who marries Charles Bovary — a decent, dull country doctor — finds provincial life unbearable, takes two lovers, ruins herself in debt, and kills herself with arsenic. Flaubert narrates all of it without ever once telling the reader what to feel, which is precisely what got him prosecuted.

The government of Napoleon III — nephew of the first Napoleon, elected president of the French republic and then, from 1852, emperor — charged Flaubert, the manager of the review and the printer with offending public morals and religion; the book, said the prosecution, glorified adultery. The case against him was argued by Ernest Pinard, the avocat impérial: the government's own advocate, the state prosecutor of the imperial courts. The defence answered that the novel does the opposite of glorifying anything — that showing the horror of vice is an argument for virtue — and in February 1857 the court acquitted all three men, praising the book's seriousness and its coherence. The trial made Flaubert famous overnight, which is the standard result of a failed prosecution and was not what the state had in mind.

The parallel case is worth setting beside it plainly, because the two are almost always confused. Later that same year, 1857, the 6th chamber of the Tribunal correctionnel de la Seine — the court that tried Paris misdemeanours, the same one that had just heard Madame Bovary — took up Les Fleurs du mal, 'The Flowers of Evil', the one book of poems by Charles Baudelaire, and condemned it. Six poems were ordered struck out of every copy, and the second edition of 1861 appeared without them. Same year, same courthouse, same charge of outraging public morals: the novelist walked free and the poet did not.

The Paris seasons: salons, and the pupil

After the acquittal, the hermit came to town. Flaubert began keeping a Paris apartment and spending the season in it, and he moved through the literary salons — the private drawing rooms where writers, editors and titled hosts met to talk, which in nineteenth-century Paris did the work that publishing parties and prize juries do now. He became close to the novelist George Sand, to the powerful critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, to the diarist brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of the emperor whose salon was the most useful address in Paris for a writer.

By the early 1870s his Paris flat was on the rue Murillo, a short street along the edge of the Parc Monceau in the 8th arrondissement, and the most consequential visitor to it was a young man from Normandy called Guy de Maupassant — the son of a childhood friend of Flaubert's, then a clerk in a government ministry and later the most famous short-story writer in the French language, who came regularly through 1873 and 1874 to be taught. Flaubert took the apprenticeship seriously for seven years: he corrected the young man's pages, kept him from publishing too early, told him that if a writer has an originality the first job is to dig it out, and used his own connections to move him into a better ministry post in 1878. Maupassant's breakthrough story Boule de Suif — 'Ball of Fat', in which respectable travellers press a prostitute to sleep with a Prussian officer and then shun her for it — appeared in April 1880; Flaubert lived to read it and died the following month.

L’Éducation sentimentale: Paris, 1848

Between Madame Bovary and his death Flaubert published Salammbô (1862), a violent, jewelled novel set in ancient Carthage, the North African city Rome destroyed, and then in 1869 the book that is his Paris book. L'Éducation sentimentale — 'Sentimental Education' — follows Frédéric Moreau from September 1840 to the spring of 1867: a provincial young man who arrives in the capital, sees a married woman named Marie Arnoux on a riverboat — 'it was like an apparition', the novel says — and spends the next twenty-seven years wanting her, starting a thousand projects and abandoning them.

Running underneath is the revolution of February 1848, when Parisians overthrew King Louis-Philippe and founded the Second Republic, and the June days that followed four months later, when the army crushed a workers' rising in the streets of Paris with thousands of dead. Flaubert's decision — the one that made the book strange in its own time and standard equipment for every modern novelist since — is that his hero follows the revolution only from a distance, wandering past history rather than into it. The novel is a sequence of missed chances and unfulfilled wants, life as a run of petty and disconnected events. Critics were hostile: the novelist and critic Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly dismissed it as a stroll through the insignificant, the vulgar and the abject. It is now generally read as the truest novel anyone wrote about the 1848 generation.

Ruin, three stories, and the last sentence

The last years went badly in the ordinary way. His niece and her husband were ruined in business, and Flaubert — who had lived on family money all his life so that he would never have to write for a market — spent much of his own to save them, and ended in serious financial trouble. He kept working. Trois contes ('Three Tales'), published in 1877, is three short pieces of almost inhuman polish and remains the shortest route into what he could do.

He was still writing Bouvard et Pécuchet — the comic novel about two copying-clerks that he never finished — when he died at Croisset on 8 May 1880, at fifty-eight. It was published incomplete in 1881. He had given roughly five years each to books other novelists would have written in one, and left behind the working principle that everyone after him had to answer: that a sentence is either exactly right or it is wrong, and that there is no third condition.