Flaubert’s Parrot
Julian Barnes, 18 August 1983
“... crosses, a telephone number and the words AMBULANCE FLAUBERT. The writer as healer? I remembered George Sand’s matronly rebuke to her younger colleague. ‘You produce desolation,’ she wrote, ‘and I produce consolation.’ The Peugeot should have read AMBULANCE GEORGE SAND. At the Hôtel-Dieu I was admitted by a ... ”