Excerpt from Madame Bovary: A Study of Provincial Life

On a youth of Flaubert's intellect and temperament this narrowness produced a sense of grievance. Re ¿ected in his letters of that period (vol. VIII), which resulted in his setting his instructors at defiance and plunging into all sorts of literature, some of which was hardlv suited to his tender age. He read Rabe lais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Byron, and Victor Hugo before he was eighteen, and sets forth an emphatic conviction that in true literature there is no such thing as indecency. In reading his correspondence with his most intimate friends, one should alwavs bear in mind that none of these letters was written with anv idea that even one of them would ever see the light in print, and that therefore their freedom of expression and vio lent phrases should be regarded and excused as the natural outpourings of a warm and imaginative mind in the confidential privacy of intimate friendship.

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