Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen, in Normandy, where his father was chief surgeon at the city hospital; the family lived in an apartment inside it, and as a boy Gustave and his sister would climb up to peer through a window into the dissecting room. He was sent to Paris to study law, which he hated, and in 1844 he suffered a sudden seizure, perhaps epilepsy, that ended his legal career. His family moved to a house at Croisset, beside the Seine near Rouen, and he lived and wrote there for most of his life.

His first big project was a wild, exotic prose poem about the temptations of Saint Anthony. When he had finished a draft, he read it aloud to two friends over four days, eight hours a day. At the end they told him to throw it in the fire and write about something ordinary instead. One of them suggested a local story: a country doctor’s wife who had made a disastrous marriage and died young.

It took him from 1851 to 1856. Emma Bovary, a farmer’s daughter raised on romantic novels, marries a dull, kind country doctor and slowly destroys herself through boredom, debt and two love affairs. Flaubert worked on it with ferocious slowness, hunting for le mot juste, the exactly right word, and testing every sentence by bellowing it out loud. Some weeks he managed a page; his letters are full of complaints about the agony of style.

The novel was published in installments in 1856, and the next year Flaubert, his editor and his printer were put on trial for offending public morals and religion. They were acquitted, and the scandal made the book a bestseller. Its cool, precise realism, with the author nowhere visible and every detail chosen, changed the novel for good.

He went on to write Salammbô, Sentimental Education and Three Tales, and thousands of extraordinary letters about writing. One famous line credited to him, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” appears nowhere in his writings, and he may never have said it. He died at Croisset in 1880, leaving a comic novel about two clerks unfinished.