Gustave Flaubert

Overview

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist, author of Madame Bovary (1857) and Bouvard et Pécuchet (published posthumously, 1881), and literary mentor ("patron") to Guy de Maupassant — Maupassant met Zola, Turgenev, and other realist/naturalist writers at Flaubert's home, and is often described as Flaubert's protégé.

Relevance to Marie

On 15 July 1884 (para 105.0214), amid a long meditation on Maupassant's writing and its obsessive focus on sex, Marie writes: "Si je meurs jamais ce sera d'indignation devant la bêtise humaine qui est infinie comme dit Flaubert, feu le patron de cette vache de, non de ce taureau de Maupassant" — "If I ever die it will be of indignation at human stupidity, which is infinite, as Flaubert says — the late master/mentor of that ... bull of a Maupassant." Marie is invoking Flaubert's famously scathing, exhausted view of human stupidity (la bêtise humaine) — a recurring preoccupation of his later work, above all the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, an encyclopedic satire of human folly, and his Dictionnaire des idées reçues. By 1884 Flaubert had been dead four years; Marie's phrase "feu le patron" (the late master/patron) marks both his death and his role as literary godfather to Maupassant's generation of naturalists.

References in Diary

• 1884-07-15 (para 105.0214)