For years, the writer flirted and exchanged ideas with Amélie Bosquet—until her ideas threatened his work. Madame Bovary, c’est moi. The phrase, often attributed to Gustave Flaubert, may be better known than any line in his novels.
But many scholars consider the remark to be apocryphal. It has trickled down through history thirdhand, first appearing in a footnote to a study of Flaubert by the scholar René Descharmes, in 1909. Descharmes reported that, according to someone he knew who was “intimately” acquainted with one of Flaubert’s women friends, it was to her that the writer uttered the phrase.
That friend could easily be assumed to be Flaubert’s early lover, Louise Colet, the poet, novelist, and salonnière who was his main correspondent when he was composing “ Madame Bovary ,” in the eighteen-fifties. But, in fact, the woman Descharmes cited was a novelist, folklorist, and socialist feminist activist who, like Flaubert, hailed from Rouen. Her name—known today to careful readers of Flaubert’s letters, if few others—was Amélie Bosquet.
Almost all Bosquet’s letters to and from various nineteenth-century writers and intellectuals remain unpublished; nearly all her exchanges with Flaubert are untranslated. As these letters reveal, throughout the eighteen-sixties, Flaubert and Bosquet maintained a flirtatious (though by all accounts platonic) friendship. Then, suddenly and definitively, the correspondence broke off.
Their rupture was no lover’s.
