Gustave Flaubert Biography Quotes 58 Report mistakes

Early Life
Gustave Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen, in Normandy, the son of a prominent hospital surgeon and a devoted mother who kept a steady household. His childhood unfolded in a residence tied to the hospital, where the sights and routines of clinical practice left a lasting impression on his sense of observation. At school he read voraciously, formed early friendships with fellow Normans such as Louis Bouilhet, and began to draft stories and dramatic pieces that foreshadowed the discipline and ambition of his later work.

As a young man he moved to Paris to study law, but the city, its social life, and the demands of the profession never appealed to him. After a serious nervous crisis in his early twenties, he abandoned the legal career and returned to the family property at Croisset, near Rouen, to devote himself wholly to literature. From that decision forward, he organized his days with strict regularity, cultivating the impersonal stance and relentless precision that would define his art.

Formative Travels and Early Projects
In 1849 Flaubert set off with his close friend Maxime Du Camp on a long journey through Egypt, the Middle East, and parts of the Mediterranean. The expedition filled notebooks with scenes, sensations, and descriptions that, once refined by memory, fed the textures of his later fiction. Around the same time he toiled over The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a visionary project he first read aloud to Du Camp and Bouilhet. Their frank counsel persuaded him to set it aside for a time and to attempt a more strictly observed contemporary subject.

That turn led to Madame Bovary. Encouraged by Bouilhet, and drawing on reports of provincial life, Flaubert began the painstaking work in 1851. He advanced line by line, polishing each sentence for rhythm and exactness, a practice he called the quest for le mot juste. He tested his pages by declaiming them in what he jokingly referred to as his gueuloir, a ritual of sound meant to expose any imperfection of cadence or tone.

Madame Bovary and the Trial
Madame Bovary appeared in 1856 in the Revue de Paris and provoked official scrutiny for its unflinching depiction of adultery and provincial mores. The following year the state brought an obscenity case against Flaubert, his publisher, and the periodical. The prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, pressed the charge; the defense was conducted by Jules Senard, whose performance in court secured an acquittal. The book was then published in volume form in 1857 and quickly established Flaubert as a major new voice. The scandal of the trial and the cool, meticulous prose of the novel brought him notoriety and, among writers, respect bordering on awe.

As the debates unfolded, Flaubert moved among Parisian circles while spending the bulk of his time at Croisset. He exchanged advice and arguments with friends such as Bouilhet and Du Camp, and he maintained a passionate, often turbulent correspondence with the poet Louise Colet. He preferred solitude for composition, but he also frequented salons where he met critics like Sainte-Beuve, writers such as Theophile Gautier and the Goncourt brothers, and foreign visitors including Ivan Turgenev. He admired and defended artistic independence even when it put him at odds with prevailing taste.

Historical Novels, Education, and Late Mastery
After Madame Bovary, Flaubert turned to a remote historical subject and produced Salammbo (1862), set in ancient Carthage. The novel demonstrated the same hunger for exactitude: he scoured sources and travelled to gather impressions, striving to give a sensuous, archaeologically convincing vision of the past. He then returned to the modern world with Sentimental Education (1869), a work that traced youth, desire, and disillusionment through the political and social convulsions of mid-century France. Its irony, breadth, and refusal of melodrama baffled some readers, yet it later came to be seen as one of his most influential achievements.

The project he had once set aside, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, reemerged in a new form and finally appeared in 1874. His artistry in shorter modes yielded Trois contes (1877), three perfectly balanced narratives that include Un coeur simple, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, and Herodias. In these tales he blended austerity with compassion, showing the reach of his method beyond the long novel.

Work Habits, Ideas, and Correspondence
Flaubert's letters record a theory of art defined by impersonality and rigor. He distrusted rhetoric and personal intrusion, seeking instead the exact word, the exact cadence, the exact structure to make a scene live with objective intensity. Critics later pointed to his use of free indirect style as a decisive innovation, one that allowed readers to inhabit the minds of characters without the author's voice declaring itself. Behind this technical purity stood a temperament constantly wrestling with the limits of language and the pressures of society.

Among those who prized his counsel was Guy de Maupassant, a younger Norman whom Flaubert encouraged and guided with stern affection. He also corresponded warmly and combatively with George Sand, whose different temperament and convictions drew forth illuminating exchanges on art, politics, and morality. His salons and friendships brought him into contact with many figures who shaped the century, from Turgenev to the Goncourts, and he followed the fortunes of contemporaries such as Charles Baudelaire, who, like him, faced prosecution from the same legal authorities.

War, Hardship, and Final Years
The Franco-Prussian War and the occupation of Rouen darkened his middle years, intensifying his skepticism about politics and human folly. Family losses altered the household at Croisset, and he devoted time and resources to the welfare of his niece, whose difficulties, together with business failures around her, strained his finances. Friends tried to ease the burden, and admirers rallied to his name, but he kept writing with undiminished severity of purpose.

His last sustained undertaking was Bouvard et Pecuchet, an encyclopedic satire about two copyists who attempt to master all branches of knowledge and fail repeatedly. The work's vast dossier of notes and the parallel plan for a Dictionary of Received Ideas testify to his determination to anatomize the banalities and illusions of modern life. He did not live to finish it; after years of labor he died suddenly in 1880 at Croisset.

Reputation and Legacy
Flaubert's reputation rests not only on the subjects he chose but on the standard he set for prose itself. His novels and tales, his trial, his battles over style, and his demanding letters offer a portrait of an artist for whom form was an ethical commitment. Writers as different as Maupassant, Turgenev, and later novelists across Europe recognized in him a model of artistic conscience. In the decades after his death, Madame Bovary became a touchstone for narrative technique, Sentimental Education a measure of social and psychological realism, and Salammbo a benchmark for the historical imagination.

He left behind the Croisset study, the image of a solitary figure pacing and declaiming to test a cadence, the memory of affectionate quarrels with friends like George Sand, and the rescue of a young talent like Maupassant. If his ideal of impersonal art sometimes struck others as austere, the living humanity of his characters, and the quiet radiance of his best pages, ensured a continuing influence that has seldom wavered since 1880.

Our collection contains 58 quotes who is written by Gustave, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.

Other people realated to Gustave: Jean-Paul Sartre (Philosopher), Honore de Balzac (Novelist), Henry James (Writer), Miguel de Cervantes (Novelist), Emile Zola (Novelist), Edmond De Goncourt (Writer), George A. Moore (Novelist)

• 1877 Three Tales (Novellas)
• 1869 Sentimental Education (Novel)
• 1857 Madame Bovary (Novel)

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