Wit & Attitude Quote by Gustave Flaubert

The line lands like a toast delivered with a scalpel: Flaubert stages “love at seventeen” not as a missed blessing but as a near-disaster, a shortcut to complacency. The first sentence is a deliberately indecent inversion of the romantic script. Instead of mourning youthful heartbreak, he fantasizes about youthful fulfillment as the thing that would have made him “an idiot” - not stupid in the IQ sense, but softened, domesticated, prematurely satisfied. It’s a self-mythology of the artist as someone forged by deprivation.

Then comes the punch: “Happiness is like smallpox.” The metaphor is brutally chosen. Smallpox is not a cute cold; it’s disfiguring, life-altering, historically fatal. By borrowing the language of infection and “constitution,” Flaubert treats happiness as a bodily force that can weaken the organism of the self if it arrives before you’ve built defenses. Subtext: early, easy emotional certainty can stunt curiosity, ambition, and that slightly feral restlessness that drives serious work.

Context matters. Flaubert’s worldview, shaped by bourgeois provincialism he spent his career anatomizing, distrusts comfort as a moral and aesthetic anesthetic. He’s pushing back against the 19th-century cult of sentiment - the idea that love redeems and completes you - by framing contentment as an illness that interrupts development. It’s also a sly confession: he needs the ache. Not because suffering is noble, but because it keeps him unseduced by the simple life his novels so coldly interrogate.