He is the solid friend or the mustachioed uncle to whom we would sometimes like to turn to deplore with him the failings of the time, to unbolt, to tear off the masks, to talk literature at random. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), author of Madame Bovaryof Bouvard and Pécuchet, also author of one of the most formidable correspondences – in spite of the meticulous auto-da-fés – of the world literature, did not finish making ink flow. The French writer Régis Jauffret has just spent five years in his company. After Gustave Flaubert’s Last Bath (Seuil, 2021), the author of Microfiction gives us this time a Flaubert’s Love Dictionary. From the bathtub to Louise Colet (to whom he awarded the title of “most famous lover in the history of literature”), passing of course by Maxime Du Camp, the critics, Homais and tobacco, Jauffret, “novelist of the race of storytellers”, undertakes to tell Flaubert like a story, reframing a few myths in his own way.
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