4 pics one word answers level 1821
He returned via Greece and Italy, the classical lands whose esthetic, with its insistence on simplicity, control, and serenity, formed a further focus in his work. He had studied Egypt and the Holy Land for Saint Anthony, and their familiarity upon first sight confirmed his view that art could conjure up reality. This was a bitter blow, and during the next 25 years he intermittently revised the work.Īfter this failure Flaubert left immediately for a longplanned 20-month journey through the eastern Mediterranean, accompanied by his lifelong friend Maxime Du Camp. He completed the first version in 1849, but unfortunately it proved unpublishable. After several false starts he turned to writing The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the story of the desert hermit of Egypt, which was a convenient focus for his concerns with religion and sexuality and for giving scope to his enjoyment of erudite research. It allowed quiet consideration of style, which he felt as essential to prose as it had long been considered to poetry. Even before his illness he was moving toward a concept of writing as "emotion recollected in tranquility," an esthetic of detachment easily concording with his physical state. In literature alone Flaubert found no unbearable conflict, for he had been slowly evolving away from his childhood romantic ideal of the writer caught up in wild emotion as he wrote. He did have love affairs, but they were never central to his life most important were his stormy affairs with the poet Louise Colet in 1846-1847 and again in 1851-1854 and his affectionate relationship with Juliet Herbert, the governess of his niece, which began in the mid-1850s and lasted to the end of his life.
He must, he felt, become an observer of life and not a participant in it thereafter he gave himself fully only to his writing. He abandoned his legal studies, since any emotional excitement brought on an attack of his malady. In 1846 he had to face the deaths of his father and his beloved sister. He was helplessly crippled by his seizures, which became hideous terror for him and recurred at intervals throughout his life. In 1845 Flaubert had his first attack of temporal-lobe epilepsy. Both areas brought him notions of doom, death, and annihilation. He early linked sexuality to religion, which he felt was a similar longing for certainty always frustrated by doubt. His attitudes toward women were colored by these experiences, and the subject of love became an obsessive focal issue in his works. He had easy access to what he called "the bitter poetry of prostitution," and this led to venereal disease, from which he never recovered. The young man was sent to Paris to study law, where his desultory efforts were largely unsuccessful. A few years later he toyed briefly with the idea of marriage but never again seriously considered it.
He was tied to her by bonds of love and exasperation, which he never fully understood.Īs an adolescent of 15, Flaubert fell platonically in love with an older married woman, Elisa Schlésinger, and remembered her ever after as a pure and unsullied love. His sister died in childbirth when Flaubert was 24, but his mother lived (usually with him) until his fiftieth year. Fearing his father, he found outlets for his overflowing affections in his mother and younger sister.
Rouen's medieval charm, the bustle of its business (which revolted him), and the comfortable bourgeois ease that flowed from his father's position as chief surgeon at the municipal hospital marked the sensitive child.