Great temples and fortresses dominate the human scene. Subject to Rome, the Jewish people are smouldering with messianic hopes of liberation. Herod Antipas, their puppet-king, and the protagonist of ‘Herodias’, is scheming to ensure his own political survival. The king must urgently decide what to do with his prisoner, a man referred to in the tale as Jokanaan, though better known to posterity as John the Baptist. (Flaubert's trick, here and elsewhere, is to divulge the familiar name just once and then to suppress it, to make it strange again, to tell the story in tight close-up, from within the narrow, anxious mind of the king, a mind clouded by intrigue and perfectly ignorant of the coming of Jesus.)

Herod Antipas (21 BC–AD 39) became Tetrarch (ruler appointed by Rome) of Galilee and ruled throughout Jesus' ministry. Herod Antipas is often referred to in the story as the Tetrarch, or as Antipas. He divorced his first wife, daughter of the king of the desert kingdom adjoining his own, to marry his niece Herodias, formerly the wife of his half-brother. The marriage offended his former father-in-law and alienated his Jewish subjects. John the Baptist reproached Herod for this marriage, as a transgression of Mosaic law. Herodias has goaded her husband into imprisoning him. This is the point at which Flaubert's tale begins.

‘Herodias’ reverses the larger pattern of ‘The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator’. In this tale there is no parricide and no reconciliation. The Father-King has had the Son-Prophet imprisoned for denouncing his sexual-political corruption. Yet the prophet's voice rises up from the deep hole in the ground, condemning the king in the name of the moral law. The prophet is murdered, at the king's command. This time there is no twist, no supernatural escape from the prosaic reality of death and mutilation. With the cruel humour of the folk tale, the decapitation of Jokanaan is a trick played on the king, a gruesome detumescent joke at his expense, brought about because he has lusted helplessly after a girl young enough to be his daughter. We are left gazing at this severed head, a ‘gruesome object on the plate among the remains of the banquet’. The faithful will assert that the spirit of the prophet has ‘gone down among the dead to proclaim the coming of Christ’, but this severed head still poses a stubbornly practical problem for his disciples. They set off with it, in the direction of Galilee. ‘Because the head was very heavy,’ so says the last line of the story, ‘they took it in turns to carry it.’ A conclusion quite inscrutably prosaic.

Three Tales was surprisingly well reviewed in 1877. Here was recognition at last, though it came several years too late to assuage Flaubert's bitter sense of having been disregarded for so long. Here was a conspiracy of approval, gratifying of course, but also slightly embarrassing to an author who had been so resolutely misunderstood for the last ten years.

His reviewers praised the eloquent diversity of the collection. ‘A Simple Heart’ was wholesome and profoundly moving, something for the common reader. ‘The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator’ offered the darker pleasures of the conte fantastique, so central to French romantic writing. ‘Herodias’ was the grand finale, a ripe autumnal specimen of the conte orientale, something for the connoisseur, cruel and magnificent, like a painting by Delacroix.

After Madame Bovary, this remains Flaubert's most immediately rewarding work. On the evidence of his Three Tales, Flaubert could plausibly claim to have reinvented the short story as well as the novel. His influence has been so pervasive that lists of his followers soon begin to look dubiously inflated. Here is my own dubious scratch crew of Flaubertistes: Guy de Maupassant, Emile Zola, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, George Moore, Paul Valéry, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene, Albert Camus, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Lowell, Jean Rhys, Bruce Chatwin, Angela Carter and Raymond Carver. The list is not yet closed, because Flaubert remains our contemporary.