At the time, George Sand was the celebrity, a retired amorist and noted cross-dresser new publishing without strain two or three novels a year of the improving, marketable kind. Flaubert, too, had had an episode of scandal, when he and Madame Bovary were taken to court in 1857 for obscenity; but he by now was labouring retentively away once again in the service of Apollo, the Olympian specially refurbished by him as 'the god of crossings-out'. Sand's oeuvre was enormous on its way to filling 77 volumes in the collected edition; Flaubert's was heroically small, some six books in all by the end of his life, a costive bequest but one that was to be gloriously increased later on by the volumes in which the Apollonian toiler is released on parole, to indulge himself with Dionysiac abandon and create the most uninterruptedly enjoyable correspondence of any French writer: Flaubert's masterpiece, as André Gide rightly thought it.

LRB 27 May 1993 | PDF Download