tells the story of medieval French king Louis X’s wife, Marguerite de Bourgogne, whose lover was killed by one of her sons. The play became the subject of a popular series of etchings during Flaubert’s time.

INSPIRED BY MADAME BOVARY

I am always thinking of my poor Flaubert, and I say to myself that I should like to die if I were sure that anyone would think of me in the same manner.

—Guy de Maupassant

Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) was a law student when he was called for military service in the Franco-Prussian War. When the war ended in 1871 and Maupassant returned to Paris, he began a literary apprenticeship with Flaubert—an experience that would become a life-defining one for Maupassant. Flaubert introduced the young man to the leading authors of the day—Edmond Goncourt, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, Émile Zola—and encouraged Maupassant in his writing. In his study of Maupassant, Pol Neveux observed :

Without ever becoming despondent, silent and persistent, [Maupassant] accumulated manuscripts, poetry, criticisms, plays, romances and novels. Every week he docilely submitted his work to the great Flaubert, the childhood friend of his mother and his uncle Alfred Le Poittevin. The master had consented to assist the young man, to reveal to him the secrets that make chefs-d‘oeuvre immortal. It was he who compelled him to make copious research and to use direct observation and who inculcated in him a horror of vulgarity and a contempt for facility.... The worship of Flaubert was a religion from which nothing could distract him, neither work, nor glory, nor slow moving waves, nor balmy nights (Oeuvres completes de Guy de Maupassant, vol. 3, Paris: Louis Conard, 1908-1910).

Maupassant adopted from Flaubert his class sensibility, his French nationalism, and his brutal realism, including the frank portrayal of sexuality that characterizes Madame Bovary. “The sexual impulse,” wrote Henry James in the Fortnightly Review (March 1888), “is ... the wire that moves almost all M. de Maupassant’s puppets, and as he has not hidden it, I cannot see that he has eliminated analysis or made a sacrifice to discretion. His pages are studded with that particular analysis; he is constantly peeping behind the curtain, telling us what he discovers there.” Joseph Conrad, who described Maupassant as “a very splendid sinner,” championed Flaubert’s disciple in Notes on Life and Letters (1921): “He looks with an eye of profound pity upon [mankind‘s] troubles, deceptions and misery. But he looks at them all. He sees—and does not turn his head.”

Maupassant wrote novels, plays, travel sketches, and more than 300 short stories; of the latter, among the best known are “Boule de suif” (“Tallow Ball”), “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”), and “La Parure” (“The Necklace”). Maupassant’s masterful short fiction—his most memorable legacy—has itself inspired the work of Kate Chopin, W. Somerset Maugham, and O. Henry, among others.

Flaubert’s Parrot

“Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well enough alone? Why aren’t the books enough?” So wrote British novelist Julian Barnes in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). Described as a “puzzler,” Flaubert’s Parrot is narrated by Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor, who embarks on a desperate search for a stuffed parrot Flaubert is thought to have kept on his desk for inspiration. As Braithwaite embarks on a detail-embroidered historical adventure, he compulsively attempts to discover the real Flaubert: “Gustave imagined he was a wild beast—he loved to think of himself as a polar bear, distant, savage and solitary. I went along with this, I even called him a wild buffalo of the American prairie; but perhaps he was really just a parrot.” As Braithwaite delves more deeply, he begins to analyze his process of discovery, realizing that his eccentric obsessions are a way of quantifying and documenting human life—an impulse provoked by his wife’s suicide.

In a review of Flaubert’s Parrot, Frank Kermode remarked “Wit, charm, fantasy are [Barnes‘s] instruments”; add to this an adroit juggling of historical facts and insight, as well as a distinctly British sensibility. Flaubert’s Parrot was shortlisted for the Booker Mc-Connell Prize in 1984, and it won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1985 and the Prix Médicis in 1986. In addition to his numerous novels, Barnes has written Something to Declare (2002), a book of essays, including many about Gustave Flaubert.

Film

In every film adaptation of Madame Bovary, an actress, and perhaps even a director, is given the chance to metaphorically repeat Flaubert’s dictum “Madame Bovary, c‘est moi.” Of several versions for theaters and television, three are most convincing. The first is legendary French filmmaker