The ensuing moral outrage in 1857 caused him to be (unsuccessfully) prosecuted on moral grounds. Nearly thirty years old now he then took the next five years to write Madame Bovary, working mostly at night, having it published in six instalments by Du Camp’s literary journal Revue de Paris. In 1848 the twenty-six year old Flaubert went to Paris with his good friend Louis Bouilhet to witness the Revolution.įlaubert embarked on a trip to Egypt and the Far East with fellow writer Maxime Du Camp in 1851, sending home a varied assortment of exotic souvenirs. His malady of nervous fits (which may have been epilepsy that started when he was around twenty-two years of age) caused him to be sequestered at home much of the time for treatments of it, while allowing him the peace to continue his writings, including the mock-epic Sentimental Education (1870) and The Temptation of St.

His spare yet exacting style of scrupulous use of le mot juste became one of his hallmarks.Īfter the death of his father Flaubert lived in Rouen for the rest of his life. He once wrote to Sand “The age of politics is over” and thus he began developing his philosophy of rejection of The State and Neo-Catholic political and social views of his time. In the 1830s Flaubert attended the Collége Royal de Rouen, writing for its newspaper, reading Shakespeare, travelling extensively and at the age of fourteen began in earnest his own writings, inspired by his unconsummated love affair at this time with the much older and married Elisa Schlésinger.Īfter unsuccessfully studying law in Paris in the early 1840s, the perfectionist in Flaubert (one of his maxims being: 'Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”) begins a brisk period of further Correspondence (1926-1933) with various family and friends, including Emile Zola and Georges Sand.

Gustave Flaubert by Gustave Flaubert