Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to his publisher of October 1862, and after two other grumbles about the typesetting on the page-proofs of his new book: '3° The circumflex accent on Salammbô has no profile. Nothing could be less Punic. I demand a more open one.' To demand with Flaubert was to get: within a few days he had an accent that straddled its underlying vowel in the comprehensive way that he wanted, and gave the name of the heroine of his Carthaginian novel a suitably Punic appearance on the title-page. Or it would be truer to say that it gave her a suitably alien appearance, because to a French reader Salammbô's terminal chapeau comes as a shock, occurring as it does in a position where no circumflex has any business being.

LRB 4 January 1996 | PDF Download