Three Tales

THREE TALES

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, the younger son of a provincial doctor, was born in the town of Rouen in 1821. While still a schoolboy, full of romantic scorn for the bourgeois world, he professed himself ‘disgusted with life’. At the age of eighteen he was sent to study law in Paris, but had no regrets when a mysterious nervous ailment interrupted this career after only three years. Flaubert retired to live with his widowed mother in the family home at Croisset, on the banks of the river Seine, near Rouen. Supported by a private income, he devoted himself to his writing.

In his early work, particularly The Temptation of Saint Antony, he gave free rein to his flamboyant imagination, but on the advice of his friends he subsequently disciplined this romantic exuberance in an effort to achieve artistic objectivity and a harmonious prose style. This perfectionism cost him enormous toil and brought him only limited success in his own lifetime. After the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 he was prosecuted for offending public morals; his exotic novel Salammbô (1862) was criticized for its encrustations of archaeological detail; Sentimental Education (1869), intended as the moral history of his generation, was largely misunderstood by the critics; and the political play The Candidate (1874) was a disastrous failure. Only Three Tales (1877) was an unqualified success, but it appeared when Flaubert's spirits, health and finances were all at their lowest ebb.

After his death in 1880 Flaubert's fame and reputation grew steadily, strengthened by the publication of his unfinished comic masterpiece Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) and the many remarkable volumes of his correspondence.

ROGER WHITEHOUSE studied French at Oxford and at the University of Warwick, specializing in Renaissance studies. He taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne, and from 1970 to 2000 at Bolton Institute. He was for many years Head of Literary Studies there and since 2000 has been a research fellow. He is currently working on a translation of Zola's La Bête humaine and is editing an anthology of the work of Emile Verhaeren.

GEOFFREY WALL is a literary biographer, travel writer and translator. His biography of Flaubert was published to great acclaim in 2001. His translations of Flaubert, published by Penguin Books, include Madame Bovary (1992), The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1994), Selected Letters (1996) and Sentimental Education (2004). He is currently writing a biography of Napoleon.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Three Tales

Translated by ROGER WHITEHOUSE
With an Introduction and Notes by
GEOFFREY WALL

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First published as Trois contes 1877

First published in Penguin Classics 2005

5

Translation copyright © Roger Whitehouse, 2005

Editorial material copyright © Geoffrey Wall, 2005

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101490945

Contents

Chronology

Introduction

Further Reading

Translator's Note

A SIMPLE HEART

THE LEGEND OF SAINT JULIAN HOSPITATOR

HERODIAS

Notes

Chronology

1802 Achille Flaubert, Gustave's father, arrives in Paris to study medicine.

1810 Achille Flaubert moves to Rouen to work as deputy head of the hospital (known as the Hôtel-Dieu).

1812 Achille Flaubert marries the adopted daughter of the head of the Hôtel-Dieu.

1813 Birth of Achille-Cléophas, Gustave's brother.

1819 Achille Flaubert appointed head of Hôtel-Dieu on the death of his superior. The family moves to the residential wing of the hospital.

1820 Achille Flaubert begins to buy parcels of land and property outside Rouen.

1821 December: birth of Gustave Flaubert.

1824 July: birth of Caroline Flaubert, Gustave's sister.

1825 The servant ‘Julie’ enters the service of the Flaubert family.

1830 First surviving letter by Flaubert.

1832 Enters College de Rouen as a boarder. Creation of Le Garçon, an anarchic Rabelaisian joker.

1835 Summer holidays on the coast, at Trouville. Meets the Collier family.

1836 First encounter with Elisa Schlésinger, on the beach at Trouville.

1839 Elder brother qualifies in medicine and marries.

1840 Passes final school examinations; voyage to Corsica with Jules Cloquet. Amour de voyage, in Marseille, with Eulalie Foucaud.

1841 November: registers as law student in Paris, though continues to live at home.

1842 July: moves to Paris. December: passes first-year law exams.

1843 February: writing early version of L'Education sentimentale (Sentimental Education). March: first meeting with Maxime Du Camp. August: fails second-year law exams.

1844 January: first nervous attack. April: father buys house at Croisset. June: Flaubert family moves to Croisset.

1845 March: sister marries Émile Hamard. April–June: family travelling in Italy. November: father falls ill.

1846 January: father dies; sister gives birth to a daughter. March: sister dies. July: first encounter with Louise Colet; marriage of Alfred Le Poittevin. August: begins friendship with Louis Bouilhet; first letter to Louise Colet.

1847 May – August: walking tour in Brittany with Maxime Du Camp.

1848 February: arrives in Paris, with Bouilhet, to see the street-fighting. April: death of Alfred Le Poittevin. May: begins work on first version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine ( The Temptation of Saint Antony).