[Up: Flaubert] MBov Salam SentimE StAnt 3Tales B&P [home]
mainly based on Henri Troyat's 1988 'Flaubert' (ht)
1 franc in 1850 was equal to about $4 today
1821: 12Dec: Gustave Flaubert born in Rouen [map] ditto [birth cert]
1825: Caroline 'Julie' Hebert hired as nurse (inspiration for Simple Soul)
1831: starts at Latin-oriented dayschool (boards after March 1832); sees himself as superior/different, views others ironically
"From the time I entered school I was melancholy, restless, seething with desires... I dreamed of passions and wanted to experience them all."
1840: Oct: Mediterranean tour, loses virginity in Marseilles to 35yo Creole Eulalie Foucaud (4-day affair fictionalised in 'November')
"Someday I must buy myself a slave in Constantinople, a Georgian girl-- a man who doesn't own a slave is a blockhead; is there anything more stupid than equality? ...I have nothing but immense, insatiable desires, frightful boredom and incessant yawns."
brief flirtation with Christian mysticism
"Every day I admire the poets more and more... I have in mind three novels... each requiring a particular way of writing. That will suffice to prove to myself whether I have talent or not."
1845: begins research for St Antoine
"Happiness is in the idea, and nowhere else."
1847: writes 1st St Anthony
"St Antoine did not require a quarter of the concentration which Madame Bovary demands of me. It was an 'outfall'; I experienced only pleasure in writing it, and the eighteen months that I passed writing those 500 pages were most deeply voluptuous of all my life." GF, 1853 [French]
1849: Du Camp and Bouilhet condemn 'Anthony' after marathon reading by GF
1849: Nov: travels around eastern Mediterranean until April 1851 [map] [French] [naughty bits] [bkrev] (epileptic attacks; catches syphilis)
"Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultrascrewed by filthy pricks!" [FiE213]
1850: 14Nov: [FiE216]
"Speaking of subjects, I have three, which are perhaps one and the same, and that worries me considerably. 1st, Une Nuit de Don Juan, which I thought of in the lazaretto at Rhodes: 2nd, the story of Anubis-- the woman who wants to be laid by the god. That is the loftiest, but involves atrocious difficulties; 3rd, my Flemish novel about the girl who dies a virgin and mystic, having lived with her father and mother in a small provincial town, at the foot of a garden planted with cabbages and fruit-trees, beside a stream the size of the Robec. What troubles me is the way these three ideas are related. In the first, insatiable love in the two forms, earthly and mystical. In the second the same, except there is fucking involved, and the earthly love is the less elevated for being more specific. In the third, they are both combined in the same person, and one leads to the other; only my heroine dies of religious masturbation...My metaphysical clarity terrifies me... I must know what my domain can and cannot be expected to produce, before beginning to till it."
1851: Apr? "Back in Croisset I shall probably bog myself down in India and the great explorations of Asia... I need poetic orgies. What I have seen has made me hard to please. The Don Juan goes ahead slowly; from time to time a few sections are 'set down in writing'." [FiE217]
1860: Jan: praises de Sade again
"He is the spirit of the Inquisition, the spirit of torture, the spirit of the medieval Church, the hatred of nature. There is not one tree in de Sade, not one animal." [ht173]
Goncourts on GF: 'One has the vague sense that he undertook all his great travels partly to astonish the people of Rouen.' [ht174]
1866: 29Sep: GF to GS [ht211]
"I possess memories that go back to the Pharaohs. I see myself at different periods of history very clearly... Many things would be explained if we could know our real genealogy."
1875: Feb: letter to George Sand [cite]
"I feel old, stale, and disgusted with everything. I expect nothing more from life than sheet upon sheet of paper to be darkened with my scribble."
1875: 27Mar: "I lose myself in memories of childhood like an old man..." [ht283]
1875: Jul: niece's financial crisis; GF sells farm
1875: Aug? GF conceives St Julian [ht287] inspired by stained glass window in Rouen cathedral
1875: Sep: five months writing St Julian "little piece of medieval nonsense which will come to no more than 30 pages" [ht289]
1875: 11Dec: next novel? "I should like to do something compact and violent." [ht289]
1876: 19Jun: "L'Histoire d'un coeur simple is just the account of an obscure life, the life of a poor country girl, who is pious but mystical, quietly devoted, and as tender as fresh bread. She loves successively a man, her mistress's children, a nephew, an old man she is taking care of, then her parrot. When the parrot dies she has him stuffed, and when she herself is dying, she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. It's not at all ironic, as you suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to arouse people's pity, to make sensitive souls weep, since I am one myself." [ht291]
1876: Apr: plans Herodias "Herod's nastiness toward Herodias excites me." [ht291]
1876: 19Jun: expects to finish Simple Soul in two months [ht293]
1876: Jul: borrows stuffed parrot [ht294]
1876: 07Aug: finishing Soul; 15-18hr days "I have to make a splendid end for my Felicite." [ht294] "I have felt a kind of brightening of late... as if a fog were lifting" [ht295] (getting over mother's death
1876: 16Aug: finishes Soul after 900 hours of work; Turgenev translates Soul and Julian
research for Herodias "I see the surface of the Dead Sea sparkling in the sun; Herod and his wife are on a balcony from which one can see the gilded tiles of the Temple" [ht295]
"I'm afraid of repeating the effects produced by Salammbo, for my characters are of the same race and the setting is quite similar." [ht297]
1876: Nov: begins Herodias (finished Feb 1877)
1876: 31Dec: "Something is missing. I don't know what." [ht298]
"The thought of Salome's dance inspires me with such terror that I am sick at the prospect." [FiE222]
1877: spring: Soul and Herodias in Le Moniteur; Julian in Le Bien public [ht301]
1877: Apr? gives ms to Edmond Laporte [ht302]
1877: 24Apr: Trois Contes published, near-unanimous praise but disappointing sales, four printings by 1880
1879: Jun: deluxe Julian with no illustration but stained glass window [ht322]
1880: 08May: dies suddenly of stroke
sources: [overview] [website] [bio] [bio] World&I, bk-rev, ditto, ditto, short, Barron's, Bibliomania, short, Babelfished, quotes, philosophy, bibliog
French: website, timeline, ditto, etexts, ditto, works
other: Dutch
search: French
French: etext
English: PGut txt, BlackMask, Bibliomania
French: etext
inspired by Rouen stained-glass window: links [French w/pic] ditto [pending?]
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