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“... gets into its stride, it is sometimes forced to hop: Flaubert’s brilliant letters to Louise Colet were carefully preserved, but her replies were deliberately destroyed (by the writer’s niece, it seems), thus effectively disenfranchising her. The correspondence with Turgenev, largely complete, is probably the third most important exchange ...”

“... Faguet (1899; Englished in 1914), firmly and misleadingly declared that the writer’s affair with Louise Colet ‘may be considered as the only sentimental episode of any importance in Flaubert’s life’. In 1967 Enid Starkie prefaced her two-volume account with a portrait of ‘Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter’ – thereby managing to rip off ...”

“... of this book, that these relics, and in particular the letters, were evidence of his attachment to Louise Colet, his mistress in the late 1840s and early to mid-1850s. His letters to her, now in the Bibliothèque Municipale of Avignon, contain reports on the work in progress, which was to become Madame Bovary, together with remarks and maxims which form ...”

“... a page of my Bovary, one which I believe will be rather good.You are longing to meet again, dear Louise. So am I. I am yearning to embrace you and to hold you in my arms. By the end of next week, or thereabouts, I hope to be able to tell you exactly when we shall be able to see each other.I am going to be interrupted this week by the arrival of female ...”

“... Ex ungue leonem ... All Flaubert is in these first five pages of letters, in embryo. Writing to Louise Colet in 1846, he remarked: ‘I am ripe. Early ripe, it’s true, because I have lived in a hothouse.’ His hothouse was very largely him. The three big items among these letters, which the editor has knit together with an intelligent and succinct ...”

“... energy, You were my supreme moral emblem, and my perpetual edification. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 November 1852: Bouilhet and I, we spent the whole of our Sunday evening imagining scenes from our old age. We pictured ourselves elderly and wretched, in the hospice for the dying, sweeping the streets, in our soiled clothes, talking about ...”

“... the message or the individual. Kaufmann studies Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer, Flaubert’s to Louise Colet, Baudelaire’s to his mother, Proust’s to his many worldly correspondents. Artaud’s to his editor, Rilke’s to his several female guardian angels, and Mallarmé’s to his circle of literary acquaintances. In each case, the correspondence ...”

“... to detail, and by the freedom of its construction – the sudden irruption, for instance, of Louise Colet, allowed, after all the put-downs, to speak up for herself – and also by the certainty with which it hangs together, odd bundle that it seems at first to be. The wish to discover some sense, some personal relevance, in an archive of this sort ...”

“... In a letter of 1852, when he was working on Madame Bovary, Flaubert told his mistress Louise Colet that what he really wanted to write, what he saw as ‘the future of Art’, was ‘a book about nothing’, ‘a book without external attachments, supporting itself by the internal force of its style’. From the start of his career, the American novelist Padgett Powell seems to have had a similar ideal, compelling his readers’ attention not through character, narrative or ideas (or not predominantly through them), but through the lyrical drift of his sentences, their purchase on fleeting impressions and moods ...”

“... What a bitch of a thing prose is!’ Flaubert complained in a letter to Louise Colet while at work on Madame Bovary. ‘It is never finished; there is always something to be done over.’ Fanatical in his search for a style that, as he put it in another letter, was as ‘rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with a flame’, Flaubert devised a method for purging his sentences of unwanted repetitions ...”

“... want to cover you with love when I next see you, with caresses, with ecstasy,’ he wrote to Louise Colet. ‘I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, until you faint and die.’ Promises, promises. He only saw Louise a handful of times, and admitted: ‘I enjoy debauchery and I live like a ...”

“... du Camp and Louis Bouilhet. Alfred marries, and three weeks later Flaubert starts sleeping with Louise Colet: ‘a coincidence that is interesting but ultimately indecipherable’. Hmm: you can get away with a lot under the protection of that ‘ultimately’. Again, on Bouilhet’s mixed motives in breaking up the affair with ...”

“... with the pious goal of ordering a bust of his much lamented sister, he fell for the charming poet Louise Colet. They became lovers and wrote scores of passionate letters, but met only four times over the next two years. Colet wanted more but Flaubert protested his mother’s poor health and the importance of his ...”

“... impeccably … and the drawer is empty,’ he sounds like Flaubert in his famous 1852 letter to Louise Colet, in which he claims to want to write a book ‘about nothing’ which would hang together because of the ‘inner strength of its style’. Roussel is often linked to the surrealists – an affiliation he did not court, saying he found their ...”