only one, important love-affair, extending from 1846 to 1854--that
with Mme. Louise Colet, a woman of letters, whose difficult
relations with Flaubert are sympathetically touched upon in Pater's
celebrated essay on "Style." When by the death of his father, in
1845, he succeeded to the family-seat at Croisset, near Rouen, he
settled himself in a studious solitude to the pursuit of letters,
which he followed for thirty-four years with anguish of spirit and
dogged persistence.

Flaubert probably loved glory as much as any man; but he desired to
receive it only on his own terms. He profoundly appeals to writers
endowed with "the artistic conscience" as "the martyr of literary
style." In morals something of a libertine, in matters of art he
exhibited the intolerance of weakness in others and the remorseless
self-examination and self-torment commonly attributed to the
Puritan. His friend Maxime Du Camp, who tried to bring him out and
teach him the arts of popularity, he rebuffed with deliberate
insult. He developed an aversion to any interruption of his work,
and such tension and excitability of nerves that he shunned a day's
outing or a chat with an old companion, lest it distract him for a
month afterward. His mistress he seems to have estranged by an ill-
concealed preference to her of his exacting Muse. To illustrate his
"monkish" consecration to his craft we cannot do better than
reproduce a passage, quoted by Pater, from his letters to Madame
Colet:

"I must scold you for one thing, which shocks, scandalises me, the
small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regards glory
be it so--there I approve. But for art!--the one thing in life that
is good and real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--prefer