138

VII. A WOMAN'S WHIMS 154

VIII. A VILLAGE FESTIVAL 165

IX. A WOODLAND IDYLL 193

X. LOVERS' VOWS 206

XI. AN EXPERIMENT AND A FAILURE 217

XII. PREPARATIONS FOR FLIGHT 233

XIII. DESERTED 251

XIV. RELIGIOUS FERVOR 264

XV. A NEW DELIGHT 278

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

_Domi mansit, lanam fecit:_ "He remained at home and wrote," is the
first thing that should be said of Gustave Flaubert. This trait, which
he shares with many of the writers of his generation,--Renan, Taine,
Leconte de Lisle and Dumas _fils_,--distinguishes them and distinguishes
him from those of the preceding generation, who voluntarily sought
inspiration in disorder and agitation,--Balzac and George Sand, for
instance (to speak only of romance writers), and the elder Dumas or
Eugene Sue. Flaubert, indeed, had no "outward life;" he lived only for
his art.

A second trait of his character, and of his genius as a writer, is that
of seeing in his art only the art itself--and art alone, without the
mingling of any vision of fortune or success. A competency,--which he
had inherited from the great surgeon, his father,--and moderate tastes,
infinitely more _bourgeois_ than his literature,--permitted him to shun
the great stumbling-block of the professional man of letters, which, in
our day, and doubtless in the United States as well as in France, is the
temptation to coin money with the pen. Never was writer more
disinterested than Flaubert; and the story is that _Madame Bovary_
brought him 300 francs--in debts.

A third trait, which helps not only to characterise but to individualise
him, is his subordination not only of his own existence, but of life in
general, to his conception of art. It is not enough to say that he lived
for his art: he saw nothing in the world or in life but material for
that art,--_Hostis quid aliud quam perpetua materia gloriae?_--and if it
be true that others have died of their ambition, it could literally be
said of Flaubert that he was killed by his art.

It is this point that I should like to bring out in this
Introduction,--where we need not speak of his Norman origin, or (as his
friend Ducamp has written in his _Literary Souvenirs_ with a
disagreeable persistence, and so uselessly!) of his nervousness