Volume 29, Number 20 · December 16, 1982
In Flaubert's Laboratory
By Stuart Hampshire
The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1857-1880
selected, edited, and translated by Francis Steegmuller
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 309 pp., $15.00
The second volume of Mr. Steegmuller's selection from Flaubert's letters shows Flaubert's thought and character in the years after Madame Bovary and up to his death. In these years Flaubert was living secluded in his mother's house at Croisset in Normandy, making occasional visits to Paris, attending the Magny dinners, and talking there to the Goncourts, Turgenev, Maupassant, Hugo, visiting and being visited by George Sand, who became an intimate friend in 1866. Writing to her, he defined his own philosophy against her humanism. The volume also includes the famous clairvoyant letters about the Franco-Prussian War and the German occupation. To Turgenev he wrote, 'I feel barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth'; and to George Sand, 'These officers who smash your mirrors with white-gloved hands, who know Sanskrit and fling themselves on your champagne,…they horrify me more than Cannibals.'
Review, 2358 words
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