which she was criticized most harshly—her use of personal experience and “poetry of the human body”—have long since passed into acceptability. While Flaubert responded to scenes of human slavery witnessed on his travels by comparing the skin-tones of the Nubian women to the color of the earth (Flaubert in Egypt, p. 103), Colet saw the same things in Egypt decades later and expressed her outrage. “Brutes,” wrote Flaubert, “take these things as a matter of course.” It is tempting to overlook the race and gender bigotry of great writers like Flaubert as endemic to their century. But in that same century, writers like Colet, Bosquet, and Eleanor Marx Aveling were speaking passionately against those bigotries. Their works are rarely studied. Nor has Colet’s part of this great correspondence been read or studied. Her letters to Flaubert were lost or destroyed.

“The truly mad are not content with merely telling stories: they have to act them out,” writes Fanny Howe in her novel Indivisible. Flaubert was notoriously slow in writing his four novels not just because he sought the perfect cadence for his sentences, but because to some extent he had to live them. Writing to a friend in 1869, Flaubert confided, “When I was writing the poisoning of Emma Bovary, I had such a strong taste of arsenic in my mouth, I had poisoned myself so badly, that I suffered two attacks of indigestion, two very real attacks, for I vomited up all my dinner” (Vargas Llosa, The Perpetual Orgy, p. 73). Flaubert scholars find it no coincidence that in 1851, three weeks before he started Madame Bovary, he chose to resume relations with Colet.

Cosmos

“What I would like to do is write a book about nothing,” Flaubert wrote to Colet, four months into Madame Bovary. “A book with no external attachment, one which would hold together by the internal strength of its style, as the earth floats in the air unsupported, a book that would have no subject at all, or at least one in which the subject would be almost invisible” (Wall, p. 203).

As we have seen, Madame Bovary could hardly be described as being “about nothing.” It was meticulously researched, and drawn from numerous primary sources within Flaubert’s life and the lives of those around him. And yet the feeling of the book is that it is suspended, floating, caught in time like Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion photographs or a painting by Vermeer. “Everything one invents is true,” Flaubert wrote to Colet as he entered his second year of working on the novel. “Poetry is just as precise as geometry. Induction is as valid as deduction, and after a certain point, one is never wrong about matters of the soul.” How does Flaubert do this?

In his book-length essay about Flaubert and Madame Bovary, novelist Mario Vargas Llosa describes Flaubert’s invention of a literary form known as indirect free style. In this form, the “omniscent narrator” of the classic story-driven novel moves so close to his characters that the reader can no longer be sure who is speaking. (T. S. Eliot’s original title for early sections of The Waste Land was “He Do the Police in Different Voices.”)

In Madame Bovary, the point of view shifts constantly among the speakers. For example, in part one, chapter three, while seeming objectively to describe the brief negotiation between Charles and Pere Rouault of Emma’s marriage, Flaubert slips effortlessly into Rouault’s head: “He certainly thought him a little meagre, and not quite the son-in-law he would have liked, but he was said to be well-conducted, economical, very learned.... Now, as old Rouault would soon be forced to sell twenty-two acres of‘his property,’ as he owed a good deal to the mason, to the harnessmaker, and as the shaft of the cider-press wanted renewing, ‘If he asks for her,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll give her to him’” (p. 26).

As Vargas Llosa notes, Flaubert makes good use of the interrogative. The characters question themselves, unleashing interior monologues. In part one, chapter five, describing Charles’s happiness, Flaubert lets Charles ask himself: “Until now what good had he had of his life?” When Rodolphe enters in part two, chapter seven, the rhythm of the “objective” narrative becomes suddenly as terse and brutally direct as Rodolphe himself.

Yet this technique, so crucial to twentieth-century modern literature, did not entirely originate with Flaubert. During their first night of flirtation, Colet read him her translation of The Tempest. Flaubert himself studied, read, and translated Shakespeare, and would return to Shakespeare’s plays throughout