Their advice: “We think you should throw it into the fire, and never speak of it again.”

Flaubert was devastated. During the first several months of his travels in Egypt—a trip he had dreamed of since childhood—he asked himself, What is the point? “I saw everything through the veil of sorrow that this disappointment had cast over me, and I kept saying to myself, ‘What’s the use?’” (Wall, Gustave Flaubert, p. 157). But this unhappiness did not stop him from keeping a notebook. Throughout the trip, when he was not brooding about his future as a writer, Flaubert took stark descriptive notes about what he saw. Determined not to editorialize, not to embroider, he did his best to keep an accurate record of the landscape, people, and customs he knew he would not see again. “Return to Wadi Halfa in the dinghy, with Maxime. Little Mohammed is as he was this morning. Rocked by the wind and the waves; night falls; the waves slap the bow of our dinghy, and it pitches; the moon rises. In the position in which I am sitting, it was shining on my right leg and the portion of my white sock that was between my trouser and my shoe” (Flaubert in Egypt, p. 136).

As Steegmuller suggests, it was in this way that Flaubert arrived at the seemingly detached, descriptive style he would use when writing Madame Bovary. Compare that journal entry to this (one of many) evocatively spare descriptive passage in the novel. Recalling Charles’s student days, Flaubert writes:

On fine summer evenings, at the time when the close streets are empty, when the servants are playing shuttlecock at the doors, he opened his window and leaned out. The river, that makes this part of Rouen a wretched little Venice, flowed beneath him, between the bridges and the railings, yellow, violet, or blue (p. 13).

Here, Flaubert’s writing is as luminous and presciently modern as the paintings of Vermeer. The passage evokes a whole century, yet it feels suspended and timeless. In the literary atmosphere of late Romanticism that was still current in Flaubert’s time, with its emphasis on “self-expression,” he is as cool and deliberate as a surgeon. Traveling in Egypt, Flaubert was far from unaware of what was happening. Answering a letter from his mother in which she wonders if he plans to find “a little job” after his travels, he reminds her that his “job” will be writing. “Is Saint Anthony good or bad? That is what I often ask myself... However, I worry very little about any of this; I live like a plant, filling myself with sun and light, with colors and fresh air. I keep eating, so to speak; afterwards the digesting will have to be done, then the shitting; and the shit had better be good!” (Flaubert in Egypt, pp. 74-75).

In 1851 Flaubert returned to Croisset and there he would stay, except for spending some winters in Paris. Unlike his friend Du Camp, Flaubert’s family was not extremely rich; they were merely well-off: He and his brother, like other children of the haute bourgeoisie, were expected to enter professions. He could never have afforded living full-time in Paris without being a lawyer, or writing quickly and prolifically for money, two things he refused to do.

But even though he would be thirty-five before Madame Bovary was published, Flaubert hadn’t wasted his time before starting the novel. Everything he would go on to publish was begun during his late teens and twenties; he remained incredibly faithful to his young self. His Dictionary of Received Ideas, a hilarious compendium of bourgeois truisms published after his death, was an extension of an alter-ego called le garçon that he created with a high-school friend; “the boy” spoke exclusively in clichés. As Steegmuller notes, “More consciously and more exclusively than most novelists, he used the feelings and experiences of his early years as the basis of his creations” (Intimate Notebook, p. 10).

Flaubert made up very little. Beginning with Madame Bovary, he became a prodigious appropriationist and researcher, a habit that would metastasize with time. He confessed to taking notes on 1,500 books in preparation for Bouvard and Pécuchet, his last published novel.