Then in 1874 Flaubert's long-cherished closet-drama, The Temptation of Saint Antony, was published to a general chorus of mockery and misunderstanding. His other achievement, a topical political comedy, The Candidate, was simultaneously jeered off the Paris stage. Finally, in 1875, most of Flaubert's inherited capital vanished in noble but entirely futile efforts to save his niece's husband from bankruptcy. Meanwhile his current project, a novel about two copy clerks called Bouvard and Pécuchet, was going very badly.

What was he to do, now that the material conditions of his insidiously exquisite style had melted into the air? He needed something simple, to restore his morale and propel him forwards. Some thirty years before, he had worked on a little medieval tale about Saint Julian, a story sparked by the contemplation of a stained-glass window in a local church. That was the way to go. A collection of stories to connect with a new audience. He could sell them to the newspapers. He might make some money.

Prompted by adversity, the tales came quickly. Yet they are wonderfully impersonal in their chronicle of profit and loss. Their undeclared theme is abjection and all the ambiguous visions that crowd upon the mind as it falls into the dark. They each portray a certain religious experience, but they do this in the contemporary secular idiom of the novel. Like Frazer's The Golden Bough, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, all published around the end of the century, Flaubert's Three Tales show how the sacred survives, oddly disguised, even in the century of wide-awake bourgeois techno-miracles.

Discreetly but cheerfully defying the sober imperatives of the age, Flaubert was the provincial bourgeois who lived a hundred lives. Cet original de Monsieur Flaubert – ‘that peculiar Monsieur Flaubert’. That was how citizens of Rouen referred to him, if they could bring themselves to speak his name. More charitable than his contemporaries, we might see him sitting at his large circular writing-table, with his dish of quills, hammering and polishing his sentences into shape, hour after hour. Or he is sprawled on his green morocco leather couch, like some voluptuously indolent deity riding on a great cloud, picturing his creatures, fashioning a world for them. Yet he is never perfectly at home in any of these worlds. He is always divided between the imagined and the real, flitting between the ramparts of ancient Carthage and the boulevards of industrial Rouen. Such reckless mobility. It was a curse. A visionary talent. Or perhaps it was just a joke.

When Flaubert described his agreeably nomadic condition to George Sand, it looked a mixture of all three. ‘I feel as if I've existed for ever,’ he told her in 1866.

I possess memories that go back to the Pharaohs. I can see myself very clearly at different moments in history, following different trades, according to my luck. My present self is the outcome of all my extinct selves. I was a boatman on the Nile, a pimp in Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then a Greek orator in Suburra where I was devoured by bed-bugs. I died during the Crusades from eating too many grapes on a beach in Syria. I have been a pirate and a monk, an acrobat and a coachman. Emperor of the Orient too perhaps?2

These three tales allowed Flaubert to arrange an assortment of these ‘extinct selves’ within a clear frame.