Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen on 12 December 1821. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was chief surgeon at the city's Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and the family lived in an apartment inside it; the boy grew up seeing illness and death as ordinary features of the day. He was already writing while still at school. At his family's wish he studied law in Paris, until a nervous seizure in 1844 — read by the doctors of the time as epilepsy — put an end to his studies. He withdrew to Croisset near Rouen and spent the rest of his life there at his desk. In 1849 he read The Temptation of Saint Anthony aloud to his friends Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp over four days; their verdict was that he should throw the manuscript in the fire and never mention it again. He left almost at once with Du Camp on a long journey through Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. When Madame Bovary was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856, the prosecution charged him with an offence against public morals; the trial opened in January 1857 and ended in acquittal in February, and the book became a bestseller when it appeared later that year. Salammbô and Sentimental Education, which followed, met a cold reception. Prussian soldiers moved into his house at Croisset in 1870, his mother died in 1872, and in 1875 the bankruptcy that struck his niece Caroline's family swallowed his fortune. He read his sentences aloud and rewrote them for months until he found the right word, le mot juste; by pulling the narrator back and letting a character's voice seep into the third person, he gave the modern novel one of its basic instruments. Three Tales, published in 1877, won his readers back, and Zola and Maupassant took him for their master. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage at Croisset on 8 May 1880, leaving Bouvard and Pécuchet unfinished.