Flaubert or the absolute of writing

Gustave Flaubert's links with Normandy are manifold. As a child, the writer spent family vacations in Trouville-sur-Mer. In Deauville, his parents owned the "Ferme du Coteau", acquired in 1837, on the site of the Villa Strassburger.

Reflecting on his youthful works, Flaubert wrote Je suis né lyrique (I was born a lyric), a disheveled Romanticism that he would later constantly correct to achieve a writing absolute. The exuberant romantic and the cold clinician are inseparable in Flaubert's work: Madame Bovary proves this, masterfully ushering in the era of the modern novel, the era of suspicion and deception based on the refusal of literary conventions and the demand for a new novelistic style. Emma Bovary's aspiration to infinity, Frédéric Moreau's failed encounters with women and history, Bouvard et Pécuchet's encyclopedic delirium, Félicité's simplicity bordering on heroic stupidity... all these characters and works recall a world of failure and derision that has lost none of its relevance for today's reader.