Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born and raised in Rouen, the son of a wealthy, middle-class surgeon. A neighbor often read Don Quixote aloud to Flaubert when he was very young, and he knew Quixote’s story by heart. He attended school in Rouen and then law school in Paris, where he made many literary friends. After a few years, Flaubert left law school and moved to Croisset, a small town near Rouen, where he lived for the remainder of his life. In 1846, about the time he left Paris, he began the one important romantic relationship of his life – a literary and epistolary friendship with the poet Louise Colet. Between 1846 and 1850, when he began work on Madame Bovary, Flaubert travelled with friends through the Middle East. On that journey, he contracted venereal diseases that weakened him for the rest of his life. He had written two shorter works before Madame Bovary, a novella called November and a baroque, magical book called The Temptation of Saint Anthony; his literary friends advised him to stay away from the supernatural and the lyrical and to shift his focus onto daily life. From then on, he alternated between the two modes. Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, the Three Stories and the unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet describe the lives of his contemporaries, especially the petit bourgeoisie, but in the historical novel Salammbô, published just after Madame Bovary, he returns to the lurid style of his earlier work. Flaubert wrote slowly and painstakingly, and was much less prolific than many of his contemporaries. He devoted himself to the labor of creating a perfect sentence, and the accident of the perfect word (le mot juste). He died at home of a cerebral hemorrhage.