The Perfect Word

On a September afternoon in 1856, Gustave Flaubert sat in his study at Croisset, staring at a single sentence he had written that morning. Outside, the Seine flowed past his windows, boats heading for Rouen visible through the lime trees. Inside, time had stopped. The sentence—describing Emma Bovary's boredom during a country dinner—had thirteen words. He had been working on it for six hours.

"Her boredom, like a spider, wove its web in the shadows..." No. Too obvious. He crossed it out.

"The conversation dragged on like a cart with a broken wheel..." Better, but the simile called attention to itself. The whole point was to make the reader feel Emma's boredom without announcing it. He needed to become invisible, to disappear into his prose like God in creation—everywhere present and nowhere visible.

His friend Louis Bouilhet would arrive soon for their Sunday session of reading aloud and ruthless criticism. Flaubert had been working on "Madame Bovary" for five years, and was barely halfway through. At this rate, he would be sixty before finishing. His mother, elsewhere in the house, worried about his health, his isolation, his obsessive perfectionism. His Parisian friends mocked his hermit existence. But Flaubert knew that something new was being born in this room—a novel that would change literature forever.

He stood and walked to the window, watching the eternal river. Tomorrow he would spend another day searching for le mot juste—the exactly right word. He would test each sentence by shouting it in his "gueuloir," his bellowing-place, listening for false notes. He would cut every unnecessary adjective, every authorial intrusion, every concession to sentiment or moral judgment.

Because that was his discovery, his torture, and his glory: that prose could achieve the perfection of poetry, that a novel about a provincial adulteress could become a work of art as pure as a Greek statue. Style wasn't decoration but thought itself, the only morality that mattered. In an age of industrial literature, mass production of novels, Flaubert was crafting sentences like a medieval monk illuminating manuscripts. He was, he knew, probably mad. But from this madness would come a new kind of beauty, a new possibility for prose fiction. The perfect word existed. He would find it, even if it killed him.