In L'Education Sentimentale, roman d'un jeune homme, published in 1869, Flaubert returns momentarily to the style which brought him such rapid and deserved celebrity. In 1877 appeared Trois Contes, three short stories written in the impersonal style of Salammbô, contrasting strangely with La Legende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier and Herodias, wherein Flaubert shows himself supreme in the art of word-painting.
Death came to him on May 8, 1880, as he was writing the last chapters of a new work, Bouvard et Pecuchet, which was published in part after he died and later appeared in book form (1881).
At the age of twenty-five, Flaubert met the only woman who in any way entered his sentimental life. She was an author, the wife of Lucien Colet, and the "Madame X" of the Correspondence. Their friendship lasted eight years and ended unpleasantly, Flaubert being too absorbed by his worship for art to let passion sway him.
He remained unmarried because his love for his mother and family made calls upon him that he would not neglect. He was indifferent to women, treated them with paternal indulgence, and often avowed that "woman is the undoing of the just." Yet a warm friendship existed between him and George Sand, and many of his letters are addressed to her, touching upon various questions in art, literature, and politics.
The misanthropy which haunted Flaubert, of which so much has been said, was not innate, but was acquired through the constant contemplation of human folly. It was natural for him to be cheerful and kind-hearted, and of his generosity and disinterestedness not enough can be said. At the close of his life financial difficulties assailed him, for he had given a great part of his fortune to the support of a niece, restricting his own expenses and living as modestly as possible. In 1879, M. Jules Ferry, then Minister of Public Instruction, offered him a place in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, but the appointment was not confirmed.
Flaubert's method of production was slow and laborious. Sometimes weeks were required to write a few pages, for he accumulated masses of notes and, it must be said, so much erudition as at times to impede action. He thought no toil too great, did it but aid him in his pursuit of literary perfection, and when the work that called for such expenditure of strength and thought was finished, he looked for no reward save that of a satisfied soul. Alien to business wisdom, he believed that to set a price upon his work disparaged it.
In Flaubert, a Romanticist and a Naturalist at first were blended. But the latter tendency was fostered and acknowledged, while the former was repressed. He was an ardent advocate of the impersonal in art, declaring that an author should not in a page, a line, or a word, express the smallest part of an opinion. To him a writer was a mirror, but a mirror that reflected life while adding that divine effulgence which is Art. Of him a French Romanticist still living says:
"Imagination was espoused by Unremitting-Toil-in-Faith and bore Flaubert. France fed the child, but Art stepped in and gave him to the Nations as a Beacon for the worshippers of Truth-in-Letters-and-in-Life."
The city of Rouen reared a monument to Flaubert's memory, but on the spot where he breathed his last are reared the chimneys and the buildings of a factory, a tribute—possibly unconscious—to reality in life.
Before writing Madame Bovary Flaubert had tested himself, and an idea of the scope and variety of his ideas may be gained from the following list of inedited and unfinished fragments: