Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet

Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880) was a novelist born in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, in the Haute-Normandie Region of France.

His novels are perhaps the most well-crafted of any of the French realists. (Compare Honoré de Balzac and Guy de Maupassant.) He would occasionally spend an entire night writing to find that he had only composed a few sentences. This explains his exceedingly small output.

His most famous work is Madame Bovary (1857), which describes the disenchantment of the French bourgeois. Other noted works include Salammbo (1862), a historical novel set in ancient Carthage, L'Education Sentimentale (1869), La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874), Trois Contes (1877), and Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881, posthumous).

He can be said to have made cynicism into an art-form, as evinced by this observation from 1846: To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Among his friends were writers George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt.

Gustave Flaubert died in 1880 and was interred in the Rouen Cemetery, Rouen, France.

Gustave Flaubert wrote this letter to his wife Louise Colet.

August 21, 1853

Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me.

I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a storm cloud.

On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank.