Something to Declare

“Work,” of course, meant work in its finished, final form, as perfect as Flaubert could make it. This rage to eliminate fault continued long after initial publication: for the 1879 edition of L'Education sentimentale he suppressed 125 examples of mais, thirty-nine alors, thirty-two et, thirty-one puis, twenty-three cependant, and so on.

Thus in November 1872, Flaubert writes to Turgenev, “I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.”

This is the advantage of letters over biography: letters exist in real time. We read them at about the speed at which they were written. Biography gives us the crane-shot, the time-elision, the astute selectivity.