French novelist best known for “Madame Bovary,” which ranks as one of the world’s greatest novels. A cheerless pessimist, he worked tirelessly to create an exact and realistic style; it took him years to perfect a novel.
The son of a prominent doctor in Rouen, Flaubert was sent to Paris to study law between 1840 and 1843. He had an illness which left him incapacitated, presumably a type of epilepsy. His protective mother spent her entire life catering to his every whim, anticipating his financial needs before he even expressed them. Flaubert was fond of the financial and physical security of his family home and eventually returned there to spend the rest of his life writing. Daily life in his mother’s house was conducted in hushed whispers until he awoke close to noon. Mme. Flaubert then rushed to his bedside for a long chat, after which he arose, ate a huge lunch and spent the afternoon getting ready to work on his writing until far into the night.
Flaubert spent a lifetime torn between the crude appetites of the flesh and the seraphic aspirations of the soul, between the gutter and the radiant heavens, between the reality and the dream. He attended prostitutes and mistresses to satisfy his carnal desires, most notably poet Louise Colet, a twice-awarded winner of the prestigious poetry prize by the Academie Francaise. They met in 1846 and she published her account of their relationship in “Lui,” 1859. When he could no longer resist the pleas of his mistress, he would go to Paris for several weeks of hyper sexuality until he felt the need to return to “Poor old darling,” which he called his mother.
After the death of both his parents he moved to the family’s country home near Rouen. Flaubert’s relationship with Collet ended in 1855. From November 1849 to April 1851 he traveled with the writer Maxime du Camp in North Africa, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. On his return Flaubert started to work on Madame Bovary, which appeared first in the Revue, 1856 and in book form the year after. The realistic depiction of adultery was condemned as immoral : Flaubert was prosecuted, though he escaped conviction, which was not a common result during the official censorship of the Second Empire.
In the 1860s Flaubert enjoyed success as a writer and as an intellectual at the court of Napoleon III. Among Flaubert’s later major works are “Salammbô,” 1862, and “The Temptation of Saint Antony,” 1874.
On 5/8/1880 he died in Croisset, France. Rumours circulated that he had somehow strangled himself in the bathtub, however, it is more probable that he had just stepped out of the bathtub when he suffered a stroke.
Link to Wikipedia biography