the Rouen hospital library and read for weeks about the effects of arsenic. He spent one afternoon wandering around the Norman countryside and looking at the fields through colored glass.

Still, he found, it would take more than all of this to write the novel Madame Bovary.

Cosmopolitan

Gustave Flaubert and Louise Colet met in Paris, where she was posing in the studio of James Pradier. Pradier was a renowned and well-connected sculptor, and Flaubert had taken the train into the city on a mission for his family: to have a marble bust produced in memory of his sister.

Flaubert was twenty-four years old and living with his mother. Except for a brief encounter with his mother’s maid and an unrequited passion for an older, married woman, all his sexual experiences so far had taken place in brothels. Colet was thirty-six. Married to a music teacher, Hippolyte Colet, she had twice been honored for her poetry by the Academie Française. For the past six years she had been lovers with Victor Cousin, seventeen years her senior; a well-known critic and philosopher, he had worked his way up from poverty to become a peer of France and director of the Ecole Normale. Though she remained married to Hippolyte, it was understood that Cousin was the father of Colet’s daughter. Cousin extended his protection not only to Louise and to their daughter, but to her husband, helping him get a better teaching job.

Flaubert’s friend Du Camp boasted in letters about having fabulous sex with Mme. Valentine Delassert, wife of the Paris prefect of police (she would later show up as Mme. Dambreuse in A Sentimental Education): “She squirms ... she screams.” While “adultery” (or a multiplicity of sexual friendships and relationships) may be the source of shame and scandal in the provincial world of Charles and Emma Bovary, in the intellectual and society worlds of Paris it was very much the norm.

At Pradier‘s, Flaubert and Colet chatted. The next night, he showed up at her apartment, and they discussed their favorite books, her poetry, and his ambitions. One day later their affair began. Since Flaubert was not about to move to Paris, and he did not want her visiting his family home, their relationship would be conducted in two phases over seven years, and mostly through the mail. “In the deepest and most comprehensive sense, [their correspondence] was the source of Madame Bovary,” writes biographer Geoffrey Wall. After their first meeting, they corresponded for two years before Flaubert left for the Near East. During this time, Flaubert began a simultaneous affair with Louise Pradier, wife of the sculptor, and went on a four-month walking tour of Brittany with Maxime du Camp. Colet had a concurrent Polish lover, got pregnant by him, and would later lose the baby.

But Louise Colet was the only lover Flaubert wrote to on an extended basis, or about literature and art. From the very start, his side of the correspondence functioned as a kind of diary. Late at night, when the Croisset household was in bed, Flaubert took out his relics of Louise—a miniature portrait, a blood-stained handkerchief, a lock of her blonde hair, a pair of her slippers—and arranged them on his desk. This was, perhaps, Flaubert’s first experience of writing as a performance. “Twelve hours ago we were still together. Yesterday at this very hour I still held you in my arms.... Do you remember ? Your little slippers are here even as I write, facing me, I stare at them.... I would like to offer you only joy.... So, a kiss, a quick one, you know what kind, and one more, and oh again still more, and still more under your chin, in that spot I love on your very soft skin, and on your chest where I place my heart” (Gray, p. 139.)

She fell in love with him. Who wouldn’t? As their meetings became less frequent, his addiction to the correspondence grew. Just as Emma Bovary created a universal lover in her letters to Leon, Colet became Flaubert’s universal listener for his thoughts on literature. “Bah!” Colet once complained. “Gustave only writes to me about himself, and art.”

Though she is variously described by Flaubert’s biographers as “a pest,” “impossible,” “a nymphomaniac,” and “an incurably minor poet,” Colet was a considerable person of her time. She published more than twenty books of poetry and fiction, and wrote for most of France’s leading journals. She was a champion of feminism and an enemy of Catholicism and colonialism; the things for