Gustave Flaubert – 19th-century French novelist, author of Madame Bovary and Salammbô, a stylistic perfectionist who deeply influenced Maupassant. His works became milestones of realism. Famous for his search for le mot juste (“the exact word”), he explored banality, irony and illusions, paving the way for the modern novel.
📖 Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary, endlessly rewriting passages. 🖋 He championed the idea of le mot juste – “the exact word”. 👨🎓 As a young man, he befriended Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo. ⚖️ He was tried for “immorality” over Madame Bovary but was acquitted. 📚 His style shaped Joyce, Proust and Kafka. 🌋 Salammbô sparked a fashion for antiquity in French art. 💌 His witty, ironic letters are considered literary works in their own right. ✍️ Maupassant called Flaubert his “master and spiritual father”. 🚢 Travels in Egypt inspired his exotic settings. 🏛 Manuscripts often contained dozens of variants of a single paragraph. 😂 Curiosity: during readings he would suddenly shout excerpts of his novels. 😄 Amusing fact: friends joked he “lived as if writing a novel about himself”.