Flaubert's version of the hunting theme is explicitly sadistic. We are made to watch as Julian strangles a wounded pigeon, fainting with pleasure as he feels the creature's final convulsions. Yet Flaubert is infinitely more imaginative than any of De Sade's cartoon-like tormentors. In this tale he has the creatures turn against their persecutor, driving him into a state of impotent rage. In this condition he murders his father and mother, by mistake.

Where does it come from, the extraneous theme of Julian's sadism? Is it the sour exhalation of his creator? There is plausible evidence for this possibility. And yet Flaubert's sadism, if we must call it that, is uncomfortably complex, for it struggles with a benevolent compassion.

A dream dating from 1845, when Flaubert was in his early twenties, dramatizes this original ambivalence. The dream was written down, so Flaubert explained, three weeks after it had been dreamt. The delay hints at the persistent power of the dream. It also implies that the original material of the dream had been variously worked over, in the waking imagination, before Flaubert told himself to put it all in writing. Here is the text of the dream.

I was in a great forest full of monkeys; my mother was walking with me. The further we went the more there were; they were up in the branches, laughing and jumping about; they came across our path, lots of them, bigger and bigger, more and more of them. They were all looking at me and I began to feel frightened. They gathered around us in a circle; one of them wanted to stroke me and took my hand, I gave it a bullet in the shoulder that made it bleed and it made a dreadful howling noise. Then my mother said to me, ‘Why did you hurt him when he's your friend? What's he done to you? Can't you see that he loves you? He looks so like you!’ And the monkey was looking at me. It broke my heart and I woke up… feeling my own deep affinity with the animals, fraternising with them in a tender pantheistic union.22

The essential ingredients of the dream – the fear, the killing, the reproach, the sorrow, the reparation – have been preserved, elaborated and disguised in the story. Thirty years after the initiating dream, Flaubert was unusually careful to give nothing away about this his most darkly enigmatic work. In the letters that he wrote alongside ‘The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator’ he ridiculed the whole enterprise. It was merely ‘a little religioso-poetico-medievalesque-rococo storyette’, so delightfully edifying that its author will be suspected of lapsing into clericalism.23

The mockery is a way of saying Keep Out. Saint Julian was a subject he had chosen long ago. By the time Flaubert came to write about it, it had been with him for most of his life. Slowly and fondly elaborated, Flaubert's saint was a half-private creation, a secret thing of his own that might one day be passed off as a Saint Julian. Had he chosen it? Or had it chosen him? He sometimes confessed, jokingly, that it was probably the latter.

‘Herodias’, the final tale in the collection, is an exotic fable of sexual-political corruption, the grand finale of Flaubert's romantic orientalism, that unstable nineteenth-century compound of erotic reverie and conscientious erudition. The art market of Flaubert's day was already crowded with such exotica. The pre-bourgeois world furnished an ample supply of seductively colourful stuff, all available to be lucratively processed into grand opera, history painting, salon sculpture and fancy-dress fiction. By comparison with many of his contemporaries, Flaubert practises an exemplary sobriety. He works his large antique subject against the grain, avoiding the obvious, jumbling his rich narrative ingredients of religion and politics.

Readers of ‘Herodias’, however expert, will sometimes confess to a certain confusion. But these confusions are deliberate, a distinctive feature of the story. ‘Herodias' is such an uncommonly elliptical piece of story-telling that it requires at least a brief account of the larger political context to make it accessible to the modern reader. ‘Herodias’ is set in Judaea (southern Palestine), at the time of Christ's ministry. This is a world of priests and kings.