About:
According to Sartre’s version of Flaubert’s early life, he was humiliated by his father as a young boy when his father’s attempt to teach him to read failed and he was pigeonholed as the dunce of the family, and Sartre characterises much of Flaubert’s long journey towards genius as a carefully constructed act of vengeance. He was certainly destined to grow up as professionally morose. His father was one of the surgeons at the general hospital in Rouen, Northern France where Flaubert was born, his mother was the daughter of an equally eminent local physician and most of his youth was spent battling the bourgeois establishment and the expectations of a ‘serious career’ held up for him by his family. Indeed it was not until his increasingly weak health was diagnosed as a fully blown nervous disease (possibly epilepsy) in 1844 that he was allowed to stop the legal training in Paris into which he had been dragooned and begin his life as a writer.
Following the death of his father in 1846 he returned to the family house on the banks of the river Seine at Croisset, near Rouen and lived there, with his mother, for the next twenty five years, furious with the bourgeoisie, the literary establishment and most of the rest of humankind, indeed his misanthropy was such that he became known as the ‘hermit of Croisset’. However, contrary to the indications of his closeted existence, Flaubert in fact led a life of intense love affairs, deep and lasting friendships, remarkably adventurous foreign travel and of course vast, and crucially, popular literary success.
Flaubert has become known for the conscious excellence of his literary style, and he undertook his writing with an almost penitential fervour, spending years writing each book, slavishly searching for the perfect phraseology, ‘le mot juste’. Whilst battling with his first novel – L’Education Sentimentale – in 1846, he began his first great affair when he fell in love with the writer Louise Collet, with whom he would have a long and frequently long distance relationship until they finally parted in 1855.
His habit of travelling had begin in 1845, when he visited Italy and the next ten years of his life would be interspersed with long and adventurous travels, mostly accompanied by his close friend the writer Maxime du Camp. He visited Brittany in 1847, spent much of the tumultuous summer of 1848 witnessing the immense revolt in Paris and between 1849 and 1851 visited Palestine, Syria and Egypt where it took six Egyptians to help him up the Great Pyramid as he was over six foot and overweight.
Without publishing his first novel he had begun work on a second in 1849 – La Tentation de Saint Antoine - and having finished a first version of it and returned from the most recent of his travels, he sat down in 1851 to begin work on the novel which was to make his fame, and infamy.
Madame Bovary was written, mostly at night, over five years. The penultimate year of this period was to witness the end of his relationship with Collet and his passion for her is woven throughout the novel. It was published in serial form in du Camp’s literary magazine, Revue de Paris, in 1856 and unleashed pandemonium. The sympathetic treatment of an adulterous affair, alongside the overt (and gloriously realistic) descriptions of Emma Bovary’s indiscretions raised a typhoon of protest which resulted in a prosecution for immorality. The prosecution was unsuccessful, the novel of course consequentially sold vastly and Flaubert became the darling of the new avant garde, amongst them the highly influential Princess Mathilde, niece of Emperor Napoleon III, to whose court Flaubert became a frequent visitor.
His next two novels, Salammbô (1862, vastly successful but difficult) and a second and totally different version of L’Education Sentimentale (1869, inaccessible but seminal to some, including Sigmund Freud) returned to the historical subjects he preferred and that he had been diverted from for Madame Bovary. His contentedly miserable and hermetic existence continued, mildly interrupted by further great travels and fêting in Paris, until his beloved mother died in 1872.
He continued to write, garnering further public adoration with the publication of the popular and easier Trois Contes in 1877, but the syphilis his predilection for prostitutes had given him, along with the loneliness of the closeted life when not eased by his mother and several financial disasters made for a more morose existence than usual. Flaubert died of a sudden brain haemorrhage in 1880, at his desk, wrangling the final chapters of his last novel Bouvard et Pécuchet. What his mother had once witheringly called his ‘rage des phrases’ had finally, as she had prophesied, consumed him.