Anthony Zielonka

Flaubert and the Centrality of Literature: An Analysis of the Correspondence with Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie

For a total of twenty years (1856–76), Gustave Flaubert corresponded with a woman whom he would never meet and who had first written to him to express her admiration for his novel, Madame Bovary. These forty-five letters are among the most fascinating and important that he was to write, reflecting on his life, on art and esthetics, and on his determined dedication to the practice of writing. The letters to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie occupy a central role in Flauberts Correspondence, between the long series of letters he wrote to two other women, Louise Colet and George Sand. They are all dominated by the idea of the centrality of art, literature, and the activity of writing, and of the subordinate status of all other experiences and interests.

Flaubert in Egypt: Confronting the Exotic

ustave Flaubert arrived in Egypt with Maxime Du Camp, on the first stage of his “Voyage en Orient,” on November 15, 1849, and stayed there until July 17, 1850, when the two friends set sail from Alexandria for Lebanon. They spent most of those eight months traveling within Egypt, from Alexandria to Cairo and then south by sailboat or cangia up the Nile, past Aswan and into Nubia, going as far as Wadi Halfa, on the northern border of present-day Sudan. It was on the boat journey back down the Nile that they visited the ancient monuments and historical sites of Egypt, exploring Thebes, Luxor, and Karnak. The boat trip up and then back down the Nile took four-and-a-half months, from February to June 1850. For the journey they hired a two-masted cangia with a captain and twelve crewmen.2 Flaubert’s experiences in Egypt and his meditations on the land in which he was confronting the Orient for the first time in his life were to have a lasting impact on him, as is revealed by his Correspondence of subsequent years, as well as Salammbô, the final version of La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and even key passages in L’Education sentimentale. The Egyptian journey is documented in a series of letters Flaubert wrote to his mother, to other members of his family, and his close friend Louis Bouilhet, as well as by the narrative account known as the Voyage en Egypte, written up from