“It is strange,” wrote Flaubert, aged twenty-five, to his friend Maxime du Camp, “how I was born with little faith in happiness. While still very young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like a nauseating smell of cooking escaping through a ventilator; you don’t have to eat it to know how it would make you vomit.” Put that side by side with a remark of Baudelaire’s in his journals: “When I was still quite small I would experience two quite contradictory sensations: the horror of life, and the ecstasy of life. Just the thing for a lazy hypochondriac.” Baudelaire’s words are less concrete, much less emphatic, more balanced—and they carry the sting of detached self-criticism. After all, what faith can one be born with? An imaginative capacity for joy, gaiety, and comedy may have nothing to do with happiness, can even be a creative substitute for mere personal happiness. But Flaubert was never to see it that way. Life as a bad, stale smell was to be flouted, escaped from—or else, with a mighty effort of will, to be confronted, studied, analyzed, always with a carefully suppressed sense of nausea.

In a letter written a year or two later Flaubert comes more to grips with himself, and his Laocoöntine problem. “In me,” he writes “there are two distinct persons, one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase, and another who digs and burrows . . . who likes to treat a