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“... was complicated, as one might expect. In 1853 he explained it to – of all people – his lover Louise Colet: It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those women in low-cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain, just as ...”

“... various ‘stories’ and one ‘rant’ drawn from Flaubert’s letters, most of them written to Louise Colet when he was working on Madame Bovary (of which Davis has published a translation). These are reliably sharper in tone and more highly coloured than anything Davis provides on her own account. In ‘The Funeral’, for instance, Flaubert ...”

“... of his prose. Flaubert had only the one more than passing sexual liaison in his life, with Louise Colet, and Brown covers it beautifully: how better to sum up the writer’s state as he backed away from this demanding and theatrical woman than as one of ‘sepulchral detachment’? This is a biography, praise be, that sees no need to speculate as ...”

“... without ever dominating this third volume as the wonderful letters Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet dominated the second. The hectic and intrusive Colet is by this date gone from Flaubert’s life, a ‘bonne Muse’ no longer requiring to be fended off by letter but sacrificed once and for all to the ...”

“... his biographer Frederick Brown put it, he had a ‘penchant for remote intimacy’. He once told Louise Colet that when two people loved one another, they could go ten years without seeing each other, and without suffering from it. Since they lived only a train ride apart, she was unimpressed by this; equally, by his advice that she marry the ...”

“... Flaubert enjoyed an easy access to these states of mind outside his writing life, but he scolded Louise Colet (in a letter that Roth quotes in My Life as a Man) for a poem in which personal emotion distorted her judgment: ‘You have turned art into an outlet for passion, a kind of chamberpot to catch an outflow. It smells bad; it smells of ...”