‘There are in me, literarily speaking, two distinct persons,” Gustave Flaubert wrote to his lover, the poet Louise Colet. One was “infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of ...

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Chapter thirteen of Gustave Flaubert’s North African fever-dream novel Salammbô is titled “Moloch.” The book, a strange reverie about a priestess of ancient Carthage, isn’t the type of exoticism we ...

IN his essay on Gustave Flaubert Mr. Henry James, Jr., states the undisputed fact that Madame Bovary, the author’s first novel, has remained altogether his best. As for Salammbô, La Tentation de Saint ...

The last time I tried to “teach” Madame Bovary was in an advanced undergraduate course at a London university, and I had expected better results. The students either hated it or found it “boring,” and ...

NOT long ago, AN there appeared in new translations three works by Gustave Flaubert—a volume of “Selected Letter,” edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller (Farrar, Straus & Young); his last, ...