Ebook: Salammbo

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, the younger son of a provincial doctor, was born in the town of Rouen in 1821. While still a schoolboy, full of romantic scorn for the bourgeois world, he professed himself ‘disgusted with life’. At the age of eighteen he was sent to study law in Paris, but had no regrets when a mysterious nervous ailment interrupted this career after only three years. Flaubert retired to live with his widowed mother in the family home at Croisset, on the banks of the river Seine, near Rouen. Supported by a private income, he devoted himself to his writing.
In his early work, particularly The Temptation of Saint Antony, he gave free rein to his flamboyant imagination, but on the advice of his friends he subsequently disciplined this romantic exuberance in an effort to achieve artistic objectivity and a harmonious prose style. This perfectionism cost him enormous toil and brought him only limited success in his own lifetime. After the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 he was prosecuted for offending public morals; his exotic novel, Salammbô (1862), was criticized for its encrustations of archaeological detail; Sentimental Education (1869), intended as the moral history of his generation, was largely misunderstood by the critics; and the political play The Candidate (1874) was a disastrous failure. Only Three Tales (1877) was an unqualified success, but it appeared when Flaubert’s spirits, health and finances were at their lowest ebb.
After his death in 1880 Flaubert’s fame and reputation grew steadily, strengthened by the publication of his unfinished comic masterpiece Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) and the many remarkable volumes of his Correspondence.