[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
1812: 10Feb: 27yo Dr Achille-Cleophas Flaubert (anatomy teacher, anticlerical: head, ditto) marries ?18yo Anne-Caroline Fleuriot (orphan, overprotective as a mother)
![[unclear]](acf1830.jpg)
[pic source]
(Troyat calls her 'pretty', but the pic he includes at 36yo shows her monstrously fat. She and GF were almost inseparable until her death in 1872, but she didn't try to understand his art-- she just supported him doing as he pleased. GF's lovers tended to be ten years older than him; ditto Frederic and Mme Arnoux in Sentimental Education.)
1813: 09Feb: brother Achille born (next three births died young)
1815: father promoted to chief surgeon
1818: family moves into residential hospital wing (extremely morbid environment to grow up in)
1821: 12Dec: Gustave Flaubert born in Rouen [map] ditto [birth cert]
cf Charles Dickens (1812-70), Emily Bronte (1818-48), Karl Marx (1818-83), John Ruskin (1819-1900), Queen Victoria (1819-1901), GF (1821-80), Matthew Arnold (1822-88), Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82)
1824: 15Jul: sister Caroline born
1824: father elected to Academie Royale de Medecine
1825: Caroline 'Julie' Hebert hired as nurse (inspiration for Simple Soul)
GF seemed slow-witted; emotional inner life; passionate friendships
favorite book was abridged Don Quixote [cite] read aloud by neighbor
1830: 31Dec: 9yo GF launches writing career-- comedies featuring the "stupid things" a friend of his father says, an obscene essay on constipation (other planned titles: The Beautiful Andalusian, The Masked Ball, The Moorish Woman)
writes and performs plays (eg 'The Miserly Lover'); sees puppet show of St Anthony; intoxicated by theater
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."
reads Michelet, Froissart, Commynes, Brantome, Hugo, Dumas;
writes wildly romantic historical stories and plays
1834: attempts novel about Isabeau of Bavaria (15thC); publishes one-man 'review' called 'Art and Progress'; writing compensates for disgust with life's "cruel joke" (claims suicidal urges)
studies ancient history and English; reads Beaumarchais, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Scott
1834: summer: 1st puppy-love
writing-style becomes gothic: The Death of Marguerite de Bourgogne; A Journey to Hell; Two Hands on One Crown; A Secret of Philip the Wise; A Perfume to Breathe; The Woman of Fashion; The Plague of Florence; Bibliomania; Rage and Impotence; Norman Chronicle of the Tenth Century
"...to write is to seize hold of the world, of its prejudices and virtues..."
alter-ego 'the Boy' expresses vulgar rage at mediocrity; older friends (incl Louis Bouilhet) teach GF sexual cynicism (homosexual experiments?)
1835: publishes 'Voyage en enfer' [French]
1836: writes 'La Femme du monde' [French]
tall, slim, light brown hair, green eyes, direct gaze, athletic-looking
1836: falls in love with 26yo Elisa Schlesinger, mistress of 39yo music publisher; writes it up as Byronic 'Memoires d'un fou' [French]
writes Dream of Hell; Quidquid Volueris; A Lesson in Natural History: Genus Clerk [more]
1837: publishes 'Bibliomanie' [French]
1837: writes early variant of Madame Bovary, 'Passion et Vertu'
"To Mazza, virtue was a word, religion an illusion, reputation a deceptive mask..."
writes 'Loys XI'; The Dance of the Dead; Drunk and Dead
1838: writes autobiographical 'Agonies' [French] and finishes 'Fou' [French] ditto PDF-biling
"...an abyss behind me, an abyss ahead..." (Agonies)"Woe to men, who have made me corrupt and evil, I who was good and pure! ...Woe to the aridity of civilisation...!" (Fou)
1838: Oct: junior year at lycee as day-student (not boarder) "this goddamn blasted shitty nut house"
favors Rabelais, Byron, Hugo, Montaigne
[Rabelais and Byron are] "the only two who have written in a spirit of malice toward the human race and with the intention of laughing in its face."
writes The Arts and Commerce; The Funeral of Dr Mathurin; Rabelais; Mademoiselle Rachel; Rome and the Caesars
1839: writes medieval mystery play 'Smarh' (early variant of 'St Anthony') [French] ditto, ditto
"...this mad enterprise in which my mind was stretched to the limit."
1839: Dec: withdrawn from school to avoid expulsion after student rebellion; continues disciplined studies at home (mostly Greek)
"I have such need of a mistress, of an angel!"
(this isolated intellectual self-discipline became the pattern of his adult career)
1840: Aug: graduates
1840: 15Sep: opening date of final 'Sentimental Education'
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."
1842: Jan: studies law in Paris (more often home in Rouen)
"I can see nothing stupider than the law... I work at it with extreme repugnance, and it leaves me with no heart or mind for anything else.""I go to bed at night with the brute satisfaction of the ox that has plowed well..."
tall, loud, and (increasingly) fat; swims in Seine for recreation
"I affect a manner that is preoccupied, gloomy and casual all at once."
1842: 28Dec: passes 1st-year exams
"How can one complain of life when there is still a brothel where one can console oneself for love, and a bottle of wine with which to lose one's senses..."
begins 'November' ("That work was the end of my youth.")
"Why is the heart of man so large and life so small?"
befriends sculptor James Pradier [eg] and his flirtatious wife; meets Hugo at party, spends evening chatting; renews friendship with Schlesingers ("dreams of winning fame for her sake")
1843-1845? no sex for two years
meets Maxime Du Camp [pic]
1843: fails law exams; begins 1st 'Sentimental Education'
"I am a bear and I want to stay a bear in my den, in my cave, in my skin, in my old bearskin, nice and quiet and far from the bourgeois of both sexes."
1844: Jan: 1st epileptic seizure (extreme dizziness then unconscious); seizures increase when he tries to return to classes; moves with parents to Croisset [pix] [tourism] (Croisset bought for 90k francs/ $360k today; 2 miles west of Rouen, on Seine)
theorizes of "An artist who was truly an artist, working for himself alone..."
1845? finishes first Sent Ed but never considers publishing it [info-French] [extract-French] [Amazon]
story of Jules the isolated artist and Henry the adventurous law student, and Henry's mistress Emilie Renaud
"[No one knows why, but] poetry is indispensable to the human soul."
"I can't think of anything in the world that is better than a nice, well-heated room, with the books one loves and all the leisure one wants."
1845: Mar: sister marries wealthy-but-unstable Emile Hamard; family tours south; GF in Genoa sees Breughel of St Anthony (wishes he owned it, imagines staging it as play)
"I feel incapable of living the same life as everyone else, of sharing family pleasures..."
1845: May: reflections on Voltaire [French]
begins research for St Antoine
"Happiness is in the idea, and nowhere else... For a thing to be interesting, you need only look at it for a long time." (Sep 1845)
1846: 15Jan: death of father (tumor in thigh), leaving 500k francs ($2M today)
1846: 21Jan: birth of niece Caroline
1846: 22Mar: death of sister of puerperal fever [bust] (Hamard begins going mad)
"I like the idea of a jolly fellow who would publish nothing until the age of fifty and who, all of a sudden, one fine day, would bring out his complete works and leave it at that..." (Apr 1846)
1846: Jul: meets 36yo self-promoting poetess Louise Colet, begins correspondence in August [French w/pic]
1847: walking tour of the Loire and Brittany's coast; Par les champs et par les greves [French] [Amazon]
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]
1848: experiences of revolution will be used in Sentimental Education
1848: death of Delphine Couturier Delamare, model for Emma Bovary
1849: Du Camp and Bouilhet condemn 'Anthony' after marathon reading by GF
1849: 26Oct: first letter after leaving mother [FiE22]
"Think, poor darling, of how terrible my remorse would be if this trip were distressing to you... I love you with all my heart: it is full of you."
1849: 04Nov-15Nov: steamship 'Nil' from Marseilles to Alexandria [FiE27]
"I'm on top of the world. I don't know why, but I'm adored on board."
1849: Nov: travels around eastern Mediterranean until April 1851 [map] [French] [naughty bits] [bkrev] (epileptic attacks; catches syphilis)
mother approved $100k budget (27.5k francs)
Maxime Du Camp took photos [info] [Sphinx]
1849: 25Nov: "Such rapture! I awoke before Maxime; in waking, he stretched out his left hand instinctively, to see if I was there." [FiE36]
1849: 01Dec: "My head is completely shaved except for one lock at the occiput (by which Mohammed lifts you up on Judgment Day) and adorned with a tarboosh of screaming red..."
1849: 08Dec: watches sunrise from top of Great Pyramid [FiE52]
"...as the sun climbed behind the Arabian chain the mist was torn into great shreds of filmy gauze..."
1850: late Jun: GF photographed in Cairo in Nubian costume with formidable black beard [FiE40]
"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]
1851: spring: entranced by Murillo's Virgin in Corsini Gallery [pic?] [more?]
1851: 19Sep: begins Madame Bovary
1851: 21Oct: "My youth steeped me in I know not what drug of apathy for the rest of my days. I detest life..."
1852: 16Jan: "What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to write, is a book about nothing... which would be held together only by the inner strength of its style... in which the subject would be almost invisible... there are neither beautiful nor ugly subjects"
1852: 03Apr: GF on children: "The notion that I might transmit life to another creature makes me roar with infernal rage in the depths of my heart." [ht120]
1852: 24Apr: 25 pages in six weeks "I have nothing to sustain me but a kind of permanent rage" "to recreate for aesthetics what Stoicism invented for ethics" "Prose is in its infancy... the forms of prose remain to be discovered."
"I am simply a bourgeois living retired in the country, occupying myself with literature and asking nothing of others" [ht122] "All of us Normans have a little cider in our veins: it's a bitter, fermented drink that sometimes bursts the bung."
"As for love, all my life it has been my great subject for reflection... the heart I studied was my own." [ht122]
"This will be the first time, I think, that a book makes fun of its leading lady and its leading man... The irony does not detract from the pathetic aspect, but rather intensifies it. In my third part, which will be full of farcical things, I want my readers to weep."
1852: conceives metaphysical novel, 'The Spiral' [French]
1853: Jul-Nov: polishing MB's scene of agricultural show [English]
"If the effects of a symphony have ever been conveyed in a book it will be in these pages. I want the reader to hear everything together in one great roar-- the bellowing of bulls, the sighing of lovers, the bombast of official oratory. The sun shines down on it all, and there are gusts of wind that threaten to blow off the women's big bonnets. I achieve dramatic effect simply by the interweaving of dialogue and by contrasts of character."
1855: final break with Louise Colet
1856: sells serial rights to MB for 2000 francs ($8000 today)
1856: rewriting St Anthony "it will be increasingly stranger than beautiful... I seek brutal effects" [French]
1856: Oct-Dec: Madame Bovary published serially
1856: Dec: sells MB to publisher for paltry 800 francs ($3200 today)
1857: obscenity trial (acquitted) [French]
"I have been attacked by the government, by the priests and by the newspapers. My triumph is complete."
1857: Apr: MB published as book (6600 copies); 500 francs ($2000) for 2nd edition of 15k copies
1857-1862: writing Salammbo
"As for what is called society, I never go into it. I don't know how to dance, or waltz, or play a single card game, or even how to make conversation in a salon, for everything that people say there strikes me as idiotic." [ht161]
1858: 12Apr-Jun: scouts locations in North Africa [map]
"I have been very chaste on this trip. But very gay, and glowing with health as strong as marble." [ht164]"What a stupid country France is!" [ht165]
"I find myself continually short of money, having in my heart of hearts the most extravagant desires..." [ht166]
"I have never felt better. I am in a good and hopeful mood." [ht166]
1859: Nov? Louise Colet skewers GF as 'Léonce' in novel Lui
"...served up in fine fashion... as a man who is insensitive, miserly, in short a gloomy imbecile... I laughed so hard I nearly split my sides." --GF 12Nov 1859)
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]
1860: Aug: praises Voltaire as a saint [ht176]
1863: friendship with 59yo George Sand [French-autobiog]
1863: writes play, The Castle of Hearts [cite]
1864-1869: writing Sentimental Education
1866: 23Jan: [ht206]
"What is important in history is a little band of men (three or four hundred in each century, perhaps) which has never varied from Plato's time to our own; they are the ones who have done everything and who are the conscience of the world. As for the lower orders of society, you will never lift them up."
1866: Aug: Sand dedicates Le Dernier Amour to GF, visits Croisset [ht209] GF reads her 1856 St Antoine
GS to GF: "You are a good, kind boy, for all that you are a grown man, and I love you with all my heart." [ht210]
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."
1866: 12Nov: GF to GS: "I don't know what to call the feeling I have for you: it's a very particular kind of affection, such as I have never felt for anyone until now." [ht211]
1867? mother sells Courtavant farm for 15.5 k francs ($62k) [ht214]
Turgenev visits Croisset [ht214]
1867: 17Mar: GF to GS [ht215]
"Hatred of the Bourgeois is the beginning of virtue... It is we-- the educated-- who are the People, or, to put it better, the tradition of Humanity."
GF wears red dressing gown around Croisset; feared and reviled as anarchist by locals? [ht217]
praises Zola's 'Therese Raquin' [ht220]
1869: Jan: GF to GS: [ht224]
"As to my mania for work, I'll compare it to an itchy rash. I keep scratching myself and screaming. It's a pleasure and a torment at the same time."
no-date: GF to GS: [F&J184]
"In a work whose parts fit precisely, which is composed of rare elements, whose surface is polished, and which is a harmonious whole, is there not an intrinsic virtue, a kind of divine force, something as eternal as a principle? ...If this were not so, why should the right word be necessarily the musical word? Or why should great compression of thought always result in a line of poetry? Feelings and images are thus governed by the law of numbers, and what seems to be outward form is actually essence."
1869: Dec: visits George Sand at Nohant [site]
1872: death of mother
1872: letter to the municipality of Rouen [French]
1872: begins Bouvard and Pecuchet
1872: Sep: gets greyhound puppy named Julio [ht260]
1872: Sep: refers to Levy as "son of Jacob" [ht261] (traitor, swindler: ht271)
1872: edits Bouilhet's 'Last Songs' [French]
1873: 01Jan: GF regains rights to MB and Salammbo but chooses not to reprint them [ht264]
"I want only one thing: to die. I don't have the energy to kill myself. I am so outraged over everything that I sometimes have palpitations that almost suffocate me." [ht264]
1873: 20Jun: sells rights to MB and Salammbo [ht270]
1873: Jul-Nov: writes political comedy (play), The Candidate [French]
1874: four perfomances of The Candidate [cite]
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: 10May: "I have eaten the best part first, and old age doesn't present itself in the gayest of colors!" [ht285]
1875: Sep: five months writing St Julian
1875: Dec: GF to GS: [ht289]
"I am bursting with suppressed anger and indignation. But according to my ideal of Art, one should not reveal any of these personal feelings, and the artist should no more appear in his work than God does in nature... I reject all schools a priori... Phrases that make me swoon seem very ordinary to [Turgenev, Zola, Daudet, Goncourt, Maupassant]."
1876: 14Mar: GF to GS: [ht290]
"This concern with external beauty that you reproach me for is a method for me. When I discover a disagreeable assonance or a repetition in one of my sentences, I can be sure that I'm floundering around in something false. By dint of searching, I find the right expression, which was the only one all along, and at the same time the harmonious one. The word is never lacking when one is in possession of the idea."
1876: writes Simple Soul and begins Herodias (finished Feb 1877)
"The thought of Salome's dance inspires me with such terror that I am sick at the prospect." [FiE222]
1876: 04Oct: GF re Zola: "To be truthful does not seem to me to be the first requirement for art. The main thing is to aim for beauty, and to attain it if you can." [ht296]
"It's not just a question of seeing; you have to arrange and combine the things you have seen. Reality, in my opinion, should only be a springboard." [ht296]
1876: 09Dec: "With me, memories never fade." [ht297]
1880: praises 'War and Peace' (French translation)
1880: 08May: dies suddenly of stroke [deathmask] [tomb]
1971: JP Sartre's 2800pg biography, 'The Family Idiot' (Idiot de la famille)
sources: [overview] [website] [bio] [bio] World&I, bk-rev, ditto, ditto, short, Barron's, Bibliomania, short, Babelfished, quotes, philosophy, bibliog
French: illustrated, website, timeline, ditto, etexts, ditto, ditto, works
other: Dutch
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