41). In a passage whose cadences echo a Nike ad targeted toward female consumers (“You decide to be president. You decide to be a veterinarian. You decide to be the president’s veterinarian”), Emma “wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris” (p. 59). Exiled in Tostes, she lived in a state of perpetual torpor.

And what, argues Flaubert, through the immaculate construction that is Madame Bovary, could be more real than illusion?

Double Lives

In fact, the novel’s characters, emotional atmosphere, and plot were derived from a multiplicity of sources. Flaubert scholars agree that Madame Bovary’s literal plot outline was drawn from the story of Eugene and Delphine Delamare, a local scandal. According to Flaubert’s first American biographer, Francis Steegmuller, Delphine, a country girl who had been educated at a Rouen convent, married Eugene when she was seventeen and died of an overdose of poison nine years later. Bored with her marriage to an adoring, unambitious husband, she had numerous affairs and amused herself by buying clothes and decorating. These pastimes resulted in an avalanche of debt. When the bills came due, afraid of facing ruin, she killed herself by taking poison. Delphine’s death occurred in Ry in 1848, the year of the “second” French revolution. (Fifty years after Delphine’s death, Eleanor Marx Aveling, Madame Bovary’s first English translator, would kill herself in exactly the same way in London; she was forty-three when she ingested prussic acid.) In 1848 the activist and writer Amelie Bosquet, who would become Flaubert’s friend and correspondent, was giving fiery speeches about women’s rights at revolutionary rallies. Twenty-one years later, Flaubert would ridicule Bosquet through the character of La Vatnaz, the ugly feminist hack who couldn’t get a man, in his novel A Sentimental Education.

In fact, Flaubert had vaguely known the Delamares, or at least known of them. Eugene had been a medical student of Gustave’s father, Achille Flaubert, who was chief physician at the Rouen hospital. During their early childhood, Flaubert and his sister, Caroline, had lived with their parents in an apartment at the hospital. Their childhood games included hiding in the morgue and spying on all kinds of medical procedures. Like Charles, Eugene Delamare became an officer of public health after failing to pass all his medical exams. Throughout his marriage, he had been blissfully unaware of Delphine’s lovers and indebtedness. He idolized her. After Delphine’s suicide, Eugene also died by his own hand, leaving behind their young daughter.

This tabloid subject matter was suggested to Flaubert by his friend Louis Bouilhet. Returning home in May 1851 from a two-year trip to the Near East with his friend Maxime du Camp, a trip on which he had spent a large part of his inheritance, Flaubert was oscillating between despair and panic. Now thirty years old, he had dropped out of law school in Paris (at his father’s advice, and to Flaubert’s great relief) when he experienced a series of epileptic attacks at age twenty-two. For the next six years before he left on his travels he had lived with his mother and young niece at the family estate in Croisset.

While still at college and during his first year of law school, he had already written one novel, November, and started another, a nascent version of A Sentimental Education (1869), which he would finally rewrite and publish nearly three decades later. While there probably would have been a market for this early work in the thriving mid-century Parisian literary world, Flaubert recoiled from ordinary ambition. His aspirations were grander. He wanted his debut to be a “thunderclap”; he wanted to be a great writer, not a toadying hack. He wanted to live in the company of literary heroes like Shakespeare, Corneille, and Chateaubriand; he craved immortality, and these two books wouldn’t do it.

Three years after abandoning his studies, installed at the family home in Croisset, he had written what he believed to be his first “real” work, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Inspired by the Pieter Brueghel painting of that title, it was a visually rich, ambitious, and grotesquely overwritten story about a fourth-century monk, told in a lurid prose style borrowed from his Romantic predecessors. Three weeks before leaving for Egypt, Flaubert invited Du Camp and Bouilhet to Croisset for a long weekend. He read the novel to them (this would take three days) and awaited their judgment.