He could be a servant girl, a pious old woman, a warrior prince, a hermit in a hovel, a tyrant in a palace, a prophet in a dungeon. The pattern of these chosen reincarnations is interesting. They start very low and they end very high. The protagonists all go mad, and each tale ends with strange images of death. It's almost preposterous to encompass so much within three tales. Three is of course the superlative fairy-tale number. Three is just-enough-and-no-more, the number of repetition with variation. This three-ness lends the collection its compact and evocative shape. The audacious simplicity of their running title – Three Tales… nothing more! – suggests completeness. In each tale the surface details are reassuringly plausible. By these strong, invisible threads, each tale draws us towards the dark and fearful places of the mind.

Flaubert had already travelled this way twice before. First with his Carthaginian novel, Salammbô, and then with his closet-drama, The Temptation of Saint Antony. These efforts had foundered in a lavish but stagnant exoticism, like so many earnest nineteenth-century visions of the pre-bourgeois. Yet Flaubert was sure that a great fictional subject was to be found somewhere hereabouts. ‘I am convinced’, he wrote in 1859,

that the most furious material appetites are expressed unknowingly by flights of idealism, just as the most sordidly extravagant sexual acts are engendered by a pure desire for the impossible, an ethereal aspiration after sovereign joy. I do not know (nobody knows) the meaning of the words body and soul, where the one ends and the other begins. We feel the play of energy and that is all… The anatomy of the human heart has not yet been done… recently I have come back to those psycho-medical studies which I found so fascinating ten years ago… There are treasures yet to be found in all of that.3

Within forty years, the new science of psychoanalysis would confirm Flaubert's sketchmap of the unconscious.

The younger son of a renowned man of science, Flaubert had long cultivated a mildly perverse taste for the supernatural. He acquired it in his earliest years, before he could read, from his peasant-nursemaid, Julie. Though regarded as a simple daughter of the people, Julie was exceptionally intelligent and well read. Fortunately for the child in her care, she was also more spontaneously affectionate than his natural mother, the melancholy Madame Flaubert. Julie sat the boy by the kitchen fire and told him wonderful stories, stories that took him far away from Rouen, back into an older rural world. Here was a night-world where the giant Gargantua walked the earth, where druid stones came alive and great snakes lay coiled asleep in dark pools. Julie knew all about talking animals, elves and changeling children, goblins, werewolves, witches and – most memorable of all – decapitated saints, the kind that were found wandering along lonely country roads carrying their own heads in little baskets.

Here was something wonderful, something more nourishing than the desiccated rationalism that shaped all significant conversation within the municipal hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, that temple of science where his father, the compassionate, omnipotent, Monsieur Flaubert, presided so illustriously.

Though he avoided writing about childhood, Flaubert never abandoned the high kingdom of miracles and prodigies that had so precociously excited his imagination. ‘Early impressions‘, he wrote, ‘never fade… We carry our past within us; all our lives we still smell of our nurse's milk.’4 The memory of Julie, the generous smiling story-teller who warmed the cold hours of his boyhood, lay preserved in his mind. Loyal to these early visions, Flaubert accumulated a vast leisurely adult erudition on the subject of saints, heretics and goddesses. The supernatural was his second home, though he arrived there through a door marked science.

Imagination, for all its idle splendours, doesn't pay the bills. The great city of Rouen was energetic testimony to this simple fact. As the younger son of a great man, Gustave Flaubert was expected to add lustre to the family name. The medical profession had already been allocated to Achille, the eldest son. Gustave would therefore be directed into the study of the law. At this point, on the threshold of everything sensible, bourgeois and masculine, his problems began.

‘Studying Law‘, Flaubert soon complained, ‘leaves me in a state of moral castration which is almost inconceivable.’5 The phrase was not lightly chosen.