From the highly acclaimed author of Zola: A Life comes the definitive biography of Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), whose Madame Bovary outraged the right-thinking bourgeoisie, is now brought to life as the singular person and artist he was. As Frederick Brown reveals, Flaubert was fraught with contradiction - a sedentary man who took epic voyages through Egypt and the Middle East; a man of genius who could be flamboyantly uncouth, but was fanatically devoted to beautifully cadenced prose.

While making much of his camaraderie with male friends, Flaubert depended upon the emotional nurture of maternal women, notably George Sand, with whom he engaged in a justly celebrated correspondence. His assorted mistresses - French, Egyptian, and English - fed both his richly erotic imagination and his fictional characters, and his letters provide a record of them.

Flaubert's time and place literally put him on trial for portraying lewd behavior in Madame Bovary. His milieu also made him a celebrity and, indirectly, brought about his financial ruin. Flaubert died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine, and soon afterward, his beloved retreat near Rouen was torn down and converted into a distillery to cover his niece's debts. He privately dreamed of popular success, which he in fact achieved with Madame Bovary, but never sacrificed to it his ideal of artistic integrity. Frederick Brown's magisterial biography honors his subject's life, times, and legacy.

Chapter 1

ACHILLE-CLÉOPHAS Flaubert hailed from a corner of Champagne bordering on the île-de-France where Flauberts, or "Floberts," as civil records often identify them, inhabited at least sixty villages. The epicenter of this swarm was Bagneux, a riverine hamlet situated between Troyes and Nogent-sur-Seine, one hundred kilometers southeast of Paris. Had he concerned himself with genealogy, Achille-Cléophas could have traced his line back to seventeenth-century syndics who represented the community before royal deputies. But he undoubtedly knew little of any past more remote than his paternal grandfather, Constant-Jean-Baptiste, a maréchal-expert by trade - that is, a farrier, or combination blacksmith-veterinarian - and the father of three sons destined also to earn their livelihoods treating sick animals.

In his sons, Constant had not fathered pious apprentices, as he would surely have done several decades earlier. All three belonged to a generation that profited from the influence of the Enlightenment on rural mores. After 1750, animal husbandry was increasingly coupled with farming in a political economics that held land to be the fount of national wealth; government ministers who invoked this creed, men known as physiocrats, envisioned science as agriculture's handmaiden. Science became urgently relevant during the second half of the century, when cattle plague, or rinderpest, swept across France like mad cow disease. By 1766 two veterinary programs had been established, one at Alfort, near Paris, for training a professional cadre whose expertise would benefit domestic animals. The aim was to supplant the guild of maréchaux-experts, which considered the horse alone truly worth a farrier's ministrations and schooled apprentices in that feudal bias, but also to rescue beasts of the field from folk doctors - so-called empirics - applying remedies of every grotesque description.

The new curriculum was based upon the same precepts that had begun to transform the study of human medicine. At the recently chartered Collège de chirurgie (formerly the Collège de Saint-Côme) in Paris - where an amphitheater, from which barber wig makers were banned, often overflowed with students who found the operations performed by surgeons of note more captivating than the lectures on Galen recited at the Medical Faculty - observation was the watchword. So too was it at Alfort. To learn about sick bodies, one looked inside them, and at the veterinary school, anatomy lessons counted for a great deal. To be sure, Galen's or any other systematic theory of disease would have ill served country boys whose peasant clientele, if they succeeded in acquiring one, regarded with great suspicion all medicine except familiar local nostrums. Indeed, Alfort's first director kept instruction basic, lest excessively sophisticated alumni flee the hinterland from which they had already been uprooted and yield to the temptation of practicing human medicine, or surgery, in Paris. Even so, a ladder had been planted in rural France for boys impelled, like Stendhal's Julien Sorel, by dreams of elevation. Science, however modest his provision of it, set the state-educated veterinarian's son - the artiste-vétérinaire - apart from his farrier father, rather as Julien's small Latin distinguished him from his illiterate siblings. And that intellectual distance, despite efforts to thwart its consequences, fostered social mobility.

More common than the arrivistes who clambered up to Paris were the graduates suspended in midair, who found themselves, on returning home from Alfort, shunned as alien by entrenched craft guilds and superstitious peasants. But more common still, perhaps, were artistes-vétérinaires who, successful or not in their practice, helped hoist the next generation out of country wallows. Such was the case with Constant-Jean-Baptiste's middle son, Nicolas. Known in the provincial administration (which hired him to treat horses at a state-owned stud farm) for his exorbitant fees as much as for his undoubted competence, and perhaps even for his 726-page herbal describing plants ordinarily used in animal medicine, Nicolas spent some considerable portion of his income on tuition at the Collège de Sens in Burgundy, where his own son, Achille-Cléophas, studied academic subjects between 1795, when he was eleven, and 1800.

This commitment may seem especially remarkable in light of the fact that Nicolas had languished in a Paris jail throughout 1794 after the Revolutionary Tribunal convicted him of making "counter-revolutionary pronouncements."* It was undoubtedly some time before he reestablished himself at Nogent-sur-Seine. The stigma of political incorrectness hung over him. And it didn't help to have a mildly deranged sister-in-law, nicknamed "la mère Théos," who preached against the godless republic on village squares and stood proxy for banished priests in conducting Sunday church service, singing the Latin hymns and baptizing newborns until threatened with long imprisonment or worse.

By July 1800, when Achille-Cléophas left the Collège de Sens at age fifteen, Nicolas had petitioned the communal subprefect for financial assistance on behalf of his son. Only the commonweal could justify any such request, and so he declared that he, virtuous father that he was, had impoverished himself to make the boy a "useful" citizen. Well-grounded in mathematics, as well as in those other "primary" sciences that "form the basis of a solid education," Achille-Cléophas would soldier through life with a burden of gratuitous knowledge unless the state paid his way at Alfort or Polytechnique. It would be an "act of justice," wrote Nicolas. The subprefect concurred and urged Paris to let Achille-Cléophas compete, after his sixteenth birthday, for entrance to Polytechnique (the prestigious school of military engineering) or to admit him at Alfort as a scholarship nominee from the Aube region.

How Achille-Cléophas came to reject these alternatives and at whose expense he entered medical school are unanswered questions. Although the Revolutionary government had decreed in 1794 that every district should select an élève de la patrie for the reorganized medical school, our one archival source indicates only that the young man was admitted on scholarship to Alfort. It is possible that a second scholarship was awarded or that Nicolas Flaubert, with his heart set on having a son study medicine in Paris, acknowledged Achille-Cléophas's own strong inclination and somehow raised enough to pay tuition.

Copyright © 2006 by Frederick Brown

About the Author

Frederick Brown is the author of An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau; Père-Lachaise, Theater and Revolution; and Zola: A Life. Twice the recipient of both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, he lives in New York City.