Word: flaubert
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LETTERS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (248 pp.] Edited by Richard Rumbold-Philosophical Library...
...Gustave Flaubert was a great novelist, but a slapdash correspondent. These letters, most of them published in English for the first time, have none of the depth and polish of Madame Bovary. Often, in fact, they seem to have been written in tired irritation, as if his quest for the right word in his novels had sapped him of energy for anything else. They reflect a dull life but a dedicated...
...Flaubert's great passion was work: the endless quest for verbal perfection. Often he spent weeks on a single page. To his young protégé, Guy de Maupassant, he wrote: "You must-believe me, young man-you must do more work. I am coming to suspect you of being somewhat of an idler. Too many tarts, too much rowing and too much exercise. A cultured man has not as much need of exertion as doctors pretend...
...from My Cradle." Flaubert was right about Maupassant, but he suffered from excesses of his own. At 25, he wrote with the weariness of a septuagenarian: "Beneath my youthful exterior lies a strange senility. I do not know what it was that made me old from my cradle, and disgusted me with happiness even before I had tasted...
...never married, had only one important love affair: with Louise Colet, a literary beauty with considerable experience as the mistress of authors. A large part of the affair, for Flaubert, seems to have consisted in writing her dismally joyless letters: "Maybe it is my heart that is impotent. This deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my own doubts." He kept going back to the theme: "I have never been able to give myself up to love; there is something so ridiculous about it. Sometimes I have wanted to please some woman, but I have been...