"It is a curious thing, which does honor to them both, that Flaubert
and George Sand should have become loving friends towards the end of
their lives. At the beginning, Flaubert might have been looked upon
by George Sand as a furious enemy. Emma [Madame Bovary] is George
Sand's heroine with all the poetry turned into ridicule. Flaubert
seems to say in every page of his work: 'Do you want to know what is
the real Valentine, the real Indiana, the real Lelia? Here she is,
it is Emma Roualt.' 'And do you want to know what becomes of a woman
whose education has consisted in George Sand's books? Here she is,
Emma Roualt.' So that the terrible mocker of the bourgeois has
written a book which is directly inspired by the spirit of the 1840
bourgeois. Their recriminations against romanticism 'which
rehabilitates and poetises the courtesan,' against George Sand, the
Muse of Adultery, are to be found in acts and facts in Madame
Bovary."

Now, the largest interest of this correspondence depends precisely
upon the continuance, beneath an affectionate personal relationship,
of a fundamental antagonism of interests and beliefs, resolutely
maintained on both sides. George Sand, with her lifelong passion for
propaganda and reformation, labors earnestly to bring Flaubert to
her point of view, to remould him nearer to her heart's desire. He,
with a playful deference to the sex and years of his friend,
addresses her in his letters as "Dear Master." Yet in the essentials
of the conflict, though she never gives over her effort, he never
budges a jot; he has taken his ground, and in his last unfinished
work, Bouvard and Pecuchet, he dies stubbornly fortifying his
position. To the last she speaks from a temperament lyrical,
sanguine, imaginative, optimistic and sympathetic; he from a