 Brought to you by Penguin. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, read by Fiona Glasscott. New listeners are advised that the introduction makes the details of the plot explicit. Introduction. The Author. Born in 1821, Flaubert was the son of a highly successful provincial doctor, the director and chief surgeon of the municipal hospital in the town of Rouen. His family lived in the gloomy residential wing of the hospital in the midst of blood and death, as Flaubert always remembered it. Just over the wall of the garden where he played as a child there were corpses laid out in the dissecting room. He and his sister would peep over the wall to observe their father with his sleeves rolled up, probing and slicing, pausing to wave them angrily away from the forbidden spectacle. Because he was merely the younger son, Gustave Flaubert was to be a lawyer. He began the training for his allotted profession with a heavy heart. But then, in 1844, when he was 23, the first of a series of disasters struck his family. On the very threshold of his adult career, he experienced the first of his so-called nervous attacks. Stricken by convulsions and hallucinations, he fell into a coma followed by days of drowsiness and weeks of exhaustion. It was like an epileptic fit, though never conclusively diagnosed. But it was enough to keep him at home. He now had to abandon the legal studies he so detested. Henceforth he could enjoy the unmolested leisure of the convalescent. This was exactly what he wanted. Time to write. Time to savor the world. In the following year, 1845, his sister Caroline, three years his junior, and still an adored companion, was married. In Flaubert's opinion, the man of her choice was Mediocrity incarnate, quite the stupidest of all his contemporaries. In November, 1845, Flaubert's father fell ill with an abscess on his leg. He died of gangrene after weeks of agony. Six days later, Caroline gave birth to a daughter in that same house where her father had just died. She caught pure puerle fever and died six weeks later. The premature deaths of his father and sister, along with the marriage of his elder brother, left Flaubert aged 25 at the head of a strange and sorrowful family. Mother and son, both of them twice bereft, set up house together along with the motherless infant daughter of Caroline. The arrangement lasted for most of Flaubert's adult life. It was a family of sorts, a man and a woman and a child. In 1849, after a decent interval had elapsed, Flaubert set off on an 18-month tour of the Near East. The letters he wrote from Egypt chronicle in exuberant detail the delights of temples and brothels. The grotesque conjunction of the sacred and the profane pleased him deeply. He spent a large part of his inheritance and he caught syphilis. He returned to France in 1851. That autumn, in the month before his 30th birthday, he began work on Madame Bovary. He had promised himself and his friends that his first book would be a thunderclap. His debut was indeed to be his masterpiece. For his subject, Flaubert took the unheroic, mediocre, provincial, everyday heart of Putti Bourgeois village life. He listened intently to the language of his class. He mimicked unerringly the pompous rhythms of paternal cliché as they sounded benignly from the lips of the doctor, the lawyer, the journalist and the priest. He had been listening since childhood and he had a connoisseur's ear. He kept a scrapbook entitled The Dictionary of Received Ideas in which he collected and classified the choicest specimens. He marked the different voices, the public and the private, all the rival major dialects of medicine and science, romanticism and religion. Gustave Flaubert, the contemporary of Baudelaire, Marx and George Eliot, never attempted any conspicuous escape from the constraints of his class. On the contrary, he stayed at home most of his life, an awkward, disenchanted, mocking, loyal member of the Bourgeoisie. He saw that there was little point in attacking them openly. In 18... Sample complete. Ready to continue?