Five years for Madame Bovary—and a trial for immorality
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), Rouen-born son of a hospital surgeon, became French realism’s emblem. Madame Bovary took five years, appeared in the Revue de Paris in 1856, and landed author and publisher in an immorality trial they ultimately survived.
Flaubert grew up the second son of the chief surgeon at Rouen’s main hospital and reportedly wrote from about the age of eight. He left the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in 1840 for law school in Paris, a city he disliked and a course he pursued without enthusiasm, though he did meet Victor Hugo. An epileptic attack in 1846 ended his legal studies, and he withdrew to Croisset on the Seine near Rouen, where he spent the rest of his life apart from trips to Paris and England.
His early efforts were rocky. After finishing the novella November in 1842, he completed a first Temptation of Saint Anthony in 1849 and read it to Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp across four days without letting them speak. Their verdict was to burn it and write about ordinary life instead. He travelled through Greece and Egypt in 1849 and 1850, then started Madame Bovary; the prosecution for immorality that followed its serialisation ended in acquittal, and the book edition was warmly received.
Later work came slowly. Salammbô, researched on a visit to Carthage in 1858, took four years, and Sentimental Education, following young Frédéric Moreau around the 1848 revolution, took seven and was his last finished novel. In the 1870s he wrote a failed play, published a revised Saint Anthony and produced Three Tales between 1875 and 1877 while toiling on Bouvard et Pécuchet. That decade also brought Prussian troops billeted in his house, his mother’s death in 1872 and money troubles; he died of a cerebral haemorrhage at Croisset in 1880, aged 58.
His method was the hunt for le mot juste, the exact word, sometimes spending a week on a single page and shunning clichés. He never approached the novel-a-year pace of Balzac or Zola, and Walter Pater called him the martyr of style. Guy de Maupassant was his protégé, and his lean precision shaped Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee.
Source: Gustave Flaubert
