(A Sentimental Education). His beloved sister, Caroline, marries.

1846 Flaubert’s father dies in January, and Caroline dies in March. Devastated, Flaubert sets up house in Croisset with his mother and Caroline’s infant daughter—a living arrange ment that will persist for the next twenty-five years. During a visit to Paris, Flaubert meets the poet Louise Colet, who becomes his mistress.

1847 Flaubert and writer and photographer Maxime du Camp take a walking tour along the River Loire and the Brittany coast. The journal Flaubert keeps during this tour will be published posthumously (1886) as Par les champs et par les grèves (Over the Fields and Over the Shores).

1848 In Paris, Flaubert witnesses the Revolution and the estab lishment of the French Second Republic. After some months of political turmoil, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte is elected president.

1849 The manuscript of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) is criticized by Flaubert’s friends for its overly Romantic style. Later in the year, Flaubert journeys to the Near East with du Camp.

1850 Eugène Delacroix paints the ceiling of the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon (Gallery of Apollo).

1851 Back in Croisset, Flaubert begins writing Madame Bovary—a painstaking process that will last almost five years. Gérard de Nerval’s Voyage en Orient (Voyage to the East) is published.

1852 Having staged a coup late in 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bona parte seizes the monarchy as Napoleon III and establishes the French Second Empire.

1853 Georges Haussmann begins redesigning the streets, parks, and other physical aspects of Paris.

1855 Flaubert and Louise Colet end their relationship.

1856 Late in the year, Madame Bovary appears in installments in the Revue de Paris.

1857 Flaubert is brought to trial for the novel’s alleged moral indecency but is exonerated. Madame Bovary is published in book form. Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) is published; Baudelaire is tried and fined for the content of his work.

1858 A trip to Tunisia provides Flaubert with inspiration for Salammbô, a novel about ancient Carthage.

1862 Salammbô is published. Flaubert begins to spend more time in Paris, cultivating friendships with George Sand, Emile Zola, and Ivan Turgenev. Hugo’s Les Miserables is published.

1866 Respected by the court of Napoleon III, Flaubert is made a knight in the French Legion of Honor.

1867 The mother of the young Guy de Maupassant is a friend of Flaubert and introduces her son to the author.

1869 L‘Education sentimentale is published.

1870 1871 The Franco-Prussian War leads to the end of the French Second Empire and establishment of the Third Republic. When de Maupassant returns from military service in the war, he begins a literary apprenticeship with Flaubert, who coaches him in his writing and introduces him to other lead ing writers.

1872 Flaubert’s mother dies.

1873 Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) and Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) are published.

1874 The production of Flaubert’s play Le Candidat (The Candi date) is a failure. La Tentation de Saint Antoine is published.

1877 Trois Contes (Three Stories) is published. Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop or The Drunkard) is published.

1880 Gustave Flaubert dies, suddenly and unexpectedly, in Crois set on May 8.

1881 The novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, unfinished when Flaubert died, is published.

INTRODUCTION

A joke is the most powerful thing there is, the most terrible: it is irresistible... Great pity for people who believe in the seriousness of life.

—Gustave Flaubert, Intimate Notebooks

What Is Reality?

Flaubert has often been credited as being the Father of Realism. Madame Bovary, his first and most classically plot-driven novel, has been labeled as “realist” because of—as many critics would have it—the author’s choice to depict “mediocre” and “vulgar” protagonists circling around a subject as “trite” as adultery. Like much criticism, these readings tell us a great deal more about the critics than the novel. Implicit in such statements are the assumptions (a) that there is anything “trite” about the conflict between human desire and the social demand for monogamy—which, as we will see, was applied selectively in Flaubert’s time to the lower reaches of the French middle class; and (b) that the author himself was immune to the trashy and fickle illusions embraced by his characters.

Writing in 1964, critic and novelist Mary McCarthy describes Emma Bovary as “a very ordinary middle-class woman with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of human feeling” (“Foreword”; see “For Further Reading”). Sensing, perhaps, a need to distance herself from the proto-feminist implications of Emma’s dilemma, the brilliant, prolific