Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet

Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880) was a novelist born in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, in the Haute-Normandie Region of France.

His novels are perhaps the most well-crafted of any of the French realists. (Compare Honoré de Balzac and Guy de Maupassant.) He would occasionally spend an entire night writing to find that he had only composed a few sentences. This explains his exceedingly small output.

His most famous work is Madame Bovary (1857), which describes the disenchantment of the French bourgeois. Other noted works include Salammbo (1862), a historical novel set in ancient Carthage, L'Education Sentimentale (1869), La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874), Trois Contes (1877), and Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881, posthumous).

He can be said to have made cynicism into an art-form, as evinced by this observation from 1846: To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Among his friends were writers George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt.

Gustave Flaubert died in 1880 and was interred in the Rouen Cemetery, Rouen, France.

Gustave Flaubert wrote this letter to his wife Louise Colet.

August 15, 1846

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge yu with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.