Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of the chief surgeon of the city hospital, and grew up in the hospital's living quarters. At his father's wish he went to Paris to study law, but at twenty-two he was struck by a nervous illness resembling epilepsy, gave up his studies and returned to Croisset, a house on the Seine near Rouen, where he lived with his mother and niece and spent almost his whole life writing in seclusion. Seeking 'le mot juste', the one right word, he would often spend a whole day on a single sentence, read each finished page aloud and revise it again and again, so that a novel took him five or six years. After Madame Bovary appeared he was prosecuted for 'offence to public morals' and acquitted. Teacher of Maupassant and close friend of George Sand, Turgenev and Zola, he is regarded as a founder of the modern novel.