How did he become what in his first novel we learned him to be?
His father was a celebrated surgeon in Rouen, a strictly upright, and kind-hearted man, who brought up his son independently and well. That his first home was the house of a physician is felt in his books. He studied medicine himself for a little while, later took up the study of law, but even in his school-days cast himself passionately into literature; and in this enthusiasm of his he met a friend of his own age, who became a friend for life,—the poet Louis Bouilhet. Without doubt there are autobiographical elements in the description of the friendship between Frédéric and Deslauriers in his novel, "L'éducation sentimentale." Flaubert, like Frédéric, went to Paris when nineteen years old, to pursue his studies. His father purchased the villa Croisset at Rouen, which he afterward inherited; he passed his life alternately in Rouen and in Paris, a life in which there were but two external events,—a journey to the Orient, which he undertook when he was thirty years of age, and a later journey to northern Africa, which preceded the completion of "Salammbô." In Rouen he took delight in shutting himself up for months at a time, to study and to write; in Paris he chiefly sought diversion. He was in youth persevering in his labors and violent in his pleasures.
His temperament corresponded to his exterior. I only saw him in his later years, and then I had but a cursory view of him. But no one could forget this large-eyed, blue-eyed Hercules, with his rosy-hued complexion, his high, bald brow, and his long mustache, which concealed the large mouth and the vigorous jaws. He carried his head high and slightly thrown back; his abdomen protruded somewhat. He was not fond of walking; but he inclined to violent gestures; and he beat the air wildly with his arms, when hurling forth monstrous paradoxes in tones of thunder. Like all blustering giants, he was good-natured. His wrath, says one of his friends, boiled over and fell like milk.
He had, indeed, grown up at the time when the French romantic school was in its prime. He had received his first stamp from this school, and retained traces of it in his style and in his manner of abusing the bourgeoisie, which recalled Théophile Gautier's "truculent" form of speech, as well as in his mode of dress. He was fond of wearing large, broad-brimmed hats, enormously wide pantaloons, and coats that were made to fit tight at the waist. In the summer time he went about his own dwelling in broad, white and red striped breeches, and a sort of jacket that made him resemble a Turk. There was a report among his friends that the citizens of Rouen, when preparing for Sunday excursions into the country, would promise their children to let them see M. Flaubert in his garden if they were good.
I said that some journeys were the main events of his life. Women have taken less place in it than in the lives of most men. He had, when he was twenty years old, loved them as a troubadour. At that time he had repeatedly walked several miles in order to kiss the muzzle of a Newfoundland dog that a lady he admired was in the habit of caressing. Later he accustomed himself to a more matter-of-fact mode of contemplation and practice in erotic matters. He was a friend of anecdotes and stories of the manner of Rabelais, and in his books the erotic illusion was grasped by him with quite as hardy hands as all other illusions.
Nevertheless, in this point, as in so many others in the character of Flaubert, there was an abiding duality. He, the old bachelor, the passionate tobacco-smoker, who held intimate, friendly relations with men alone, and who felt at ease in no other female society than in that of certain pretty but not over-fastidious ladies,—held the belief, apparently the result of personal experience as well as of a deeply rooted abstract conviction, that it was the natural, so to say proper, thing for man to cherish for life one grand amatory passion, which must forever remain unrequited.
Fully in accord with this, we find in a letter to a lady, dating from the last year of Flaubert's life, the playful, yet at the same time mournfully true, words: "We poor laborers of literature! Why is that denied to us which is so readily granted to commonplace people? They have a heart! We have none at all! So I repeat to you once again that I, for my part, am an uncomprehended soul, the last grisette, the sole survivor of the old race of troubadours."
This "uncomprehended soul," however, was not in the habit of turning to women for comprehension. He dreaded love as a danger and a burden. Friendship alone was to him a religion, and among his friends there was no one who stood so near to him as that first and enduring friend, Bouilhet.
I do not exactly know if there have been times that were especially propitious to independent minds. But this much I do know: these two young men, who stepped forth into life when the bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe had gained the dominion and acquired a poetic expression partly from the feeble and righteously inclined École de bon sens, and partly from the "Vaudevilles" of Scribe, found the period it was their destiny to live in, the worst of all times. The romantic school had outlived itself and produced its own caricature. It was the fashion everywhere to praise common sense and to deride poesy. Inspiration and passion were out of date, and consequently laughable. Everything that was not commonplace was found tiresome. The two youths conceived the age in which they lived to be that of the sway of mediocrity and of the commonplace; they saw the victorious mediocrity, like a monstrous black water-spout, absorb all things, and whirl all things away with it.
This gave them both a fund of melancholy and deep earnestness, an under-current of contempt for humanity, a sensation of spiritual isolation, and through it an inclination for productions of an impersonal, objective kind.