September: begins writing ‘La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier’.

1876 March: death of Louise Colet. June: death of George Sand. August: finishes writing ‘Un Coeur simple‘. November: begins work on ‘Hérodias’.

1877 April: publication of Trois contes (Three Tales).

1879 October: awarded official pension.

1880 February: Du Camp elected to the Académie française. May: death of Flaubert.

1881 House at Croisset is sold and subsequently demolished to make way for a distillery.

1882 January: death of brother, Achille Flaubert. Du Camp publishes his Souvenirs littéraires.

1884 Publication of first volume of Flaubert's letters.

Introduction

(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the details of the plot explicit.)

What kind of writer is Flaubert? A satirist, like Voltaire and De Sade? A realist, like Joyce and Kafka? Or a romantic, like Byron and Victor Hugo? More to the point, why are there no real artists, no official representatives of dishevelled genius in any of his books?

Consider Flaubert at the age of 25, as revealed in his letters. He is mildly grandiose, magnificently dishevelled and perfectly confident. Though still unpublished, he knows the kind of writer he wants to be and already he can project a splendidly intense romantic persona. Here he is, in October 1846, writing to his new lover, Louise Colet: ‘I am the obscure, tenacious pearl-diver who explores the lower depths and surfaces empty-handed, his face turning blue. A fatal attraction pulls me towards the dark places of the mind, down into the inner deep, so perpetually enticing to the stout-hearted.’1

The lower depths? That was the place to begin.

Written three decades later, in the mid-18 70s, Flaubert's Three Tales display the final glistening catch. This is what the pearl-diver has retrieved from those lower depths, after a lifetime of staring heroically into the dark. Yet Flaubert's earliest French readers may have felt slightly puzzled by this new offering. In their daily paper, Le Moniteur universel, on the morning of 12 April 1877, they came upon the opening section of ‘A Simple Heart’. Like most serial fiction of the day, it was displayed in a prominent position, spread across the lower portion of the front page, in close competition with the news from the Balkans where Russia was still uttering threats against Turkey.

Flaubert was a name long familiar to the discerning. Was this to be another spacious chronicle of modern life, like Sentimental Education? Or was it some exotic fantasy with a girl and big snake. Another Salammbô? It was neither. It appeared to be a story about a loyal family servant of rather limited imagination and intelligence. But surely Balzac had done all this long ago. Could it be that the champion of contemporary realism had grown weary of his larger ambitions? Was this some autumnal jeu d’esprit from the author of Madame Bovary? A lamentable subsiding into middle age?

On the contrary. Flaubert's Three Tales are his impulsive and triumphant finale. ‘The best thing you've ever written‘, according to the author's sceptical, worldly wise older brother, Achille.

Yet it was a most improbable triumph, if we consider the dismal facts that stand just behind the writing of Three Tales. In his early fifties, Flaubert's tranquil, contemplative, daily life had been turned upside down. His troubles began in the autumn of 1870, when France suffered a ruinous military defeat at the hands of Prussia. In his large house by the river Seine, Flaubert soon found himself playing host to half a dozen victorious Prussian officers and their horses. The Prussian officers required the author of Madame Bovary to go out foraging for hay. They requisitioned his wine-cellar. They squandered his winter store of firewood. Worst of all, they left behind them a faint but troubling smell of riding-boots.

The next few years piled ever greater injuries upon his head. In 1872, bewildered by the war, Flaubert's fragile domineering mother died. She left the lovely big house (his lovely big house) to her penny-wise niece, Caroline, rather than her spendthrift son.