As a young man, away from home for the first time, Flaubert was ‘imperiously possessed’ by the idea of castrating himself. ‘In the midst of all my vexation in Paris… I wanted to do it.’ He would stare at mutilated male statues in museums, struggling with the impulse to mutilate himself.6 He resisted the ‘mystic mania‘, as he called it, and chose instead to avoid ‘seeing women’, a resolution that lasted for several years.7

What was it, the problem to which castration seemed to be the imperative solution? We do not know, and nor did Flaubert. We do know that a traumatic experience of sacred horror is at the heart of his ‘exotic’ works. We may wonder at the mature artist's abiding impulse to play with fire. Flaubert's finest characters are visionaries, passionately materialized. They are not quite of this world, though the mud of the real will cling thick and heavy to their boots. Like their creator, they are pestered, tormented, amazed and bewildered by their visions. Unlike their creator, they are finally consumed by the power of what they see.

Flaubert improvised many ingenious solutions to this problem. In the middle of writing Madame Bovary, kicking against the constraints of the genre, he had envisaged ‘a large fantastical loudmouth metaphysical novel’8 which would prove that ‘happiness is in the imagination’. In real life the hero would be reviled, imprisoned, and ultimately thrown into a lunatic asylum; but in his imagined life he would achieve a triumphant serenity. The story would be called ‘La Spirale’. It evolved over many years, in the background, as ‘a novel about madness, or rather about the way in which you go mad’.9 Yet ‘La Spirale’ remained unwritten: ‘because it is a subject that frightens me, for health reasons, I shall have to wait until I am far enough away from those experiences to be able to induce them in myself artificially, ideally, and therefore without risk to myself or to my work.’10 A loudmouth metaphysical novel about madness would be too close to home.

Fear of madness had preyed upon Flaubert's mind ever since a singular episode that took place one evening in his student days. The story of that evening explains much of Flaubert's persistent interest in other worlds of experience, and it is offered here, as a biographical preface to his Three Tales.

One January evening (let the year be 1844) two young men were driving along a French country road in a lightweight two-wheeled cabriolet. Gustave Flaubert, the younger and the sturdier of the pair, was holding the reins. Sitting beside him was his slender, red-bearded elder brother, Achille, a man whom Flaubert rather disliked. The moonless winter night was unusually dark and the puddles in the ditches were growing a fragile skin of ice. ‘It was so dark,’ he said, ‘you couldn't even see the horse's ears’ – a real, cave-black, supernatural, nineteenth-century pre-electric dark, with only the light of a distant inn to dispel the perfect illusion of nothingness.

The little cabriolet turned a corner and the brothers heard a rumbling and a jingling coming towards them. It was the iron-bound wheels of a big wagon carrying a single night-lantern up in front. The bright flame of the lantern on the wagon moved slowly across their field of vision, away from the distant light of the inn. The conjunction of the two lights, near and far, moving and stationary, sparked something inside the skull of the big man holding the reins of the cabriolet. It was, he said, like an explosion behind his eyes, ‘like being swept away in a torrent of flames… sudden as lightning… an instantaneous irruption of memory… a letting go of its entire contents. You feel the images pouring out of you like a stream of blood… as if everything in your head is going off at once like a thousand fireworks.’11 Gustave Flaubert fell to the floor of the cabriolet and lay there as if he were dead. He was 22 years old.

His family hoped that it was all an accident, unlikely to happen again. But it was no accident. It came back. In the course of the next two weeks Flaubert had four further attacks. What had happened to him? What name could medical science give to the golden fire that had burnt such a dark hole in the fabric of his life? Was it epilepsy? Apoplexy? Hysteria? Or was it simply ‘nerves’?

For Flaubert himself, there was no word for it. ‘Never’, said his friend Maxime Du Camp, ‘did I hear him speak the name of his malady. He said, “my nervous attacks”, and that was all.’12 Such reluctance is not surprising. Epilepsy was not understood.