Gustave Flaubert spent five years writing Madame Bovary and hated every page — not because the novel was bad, but because he wanted each sentence to be the only one possible. He hunted for le mot juste, the exact word, and could not stop until he found it.
He was born in Rouen in 1821. His father was a surgeon; childhood passed beside the hospital, amid the smell of carbolic and talk of death. It did not make him a cynic, but it taught him to look at human beings without illusions.
Madame Bovary appeared in 1857 and promptly landed in court for "offending public morals." Flaubert was acquitted. Emma Bovary — a provincial doctor's wife dreaming of passions that do not exist — came to be read all over Europe. Tolstoy held the novel up as a model; Joyce learned from it sentence by sentence.
Sentimental Education, Salammbo, The Temptation of Saint Anthony — Flaubert worked slowly and produced little. But each of his books is an experiment: what happens if you take the most banal material and work it so carefully that it turns into art? He died in 1880, at his writing desk, of a cerebral hemorrhage.