When, in 1866, after a literary dinner at Magny’s restaurant in Paris, the petite George Sand (née Aurore Dupin) confessed to a particular sympathy for a toweringly tall bachelor fellow guest, Gustave Flaubert, she was sixty-two, while he was in his early forties, a mere two years older than Maurice, her only son. True, her affections—and indeed passions—had frequently been engaged by men young enough to be Maurice’s siblings. Three years before, much to Flaubert’s gratification, she had written a laudatory review of his Carthaginian novel, Salammbô, whose gory exoticism had bemused the public. She knew he was a genius. Soon, she was invited to stay with Flaubert and his mother at their house at Croisset, outside Rouen—a rare privilege. In his study overlooking the Seine, they smoked, read to each other from their work in progress, and discussed literature (his favorite subject) into the small hours, when, feeling hungry, they descended to the kitchen to partake of cold chicken.

In the following ten years, until George Sand’s death in 1876, the two troubadours, as they liked to call themselves, were to meet from time to time in Paris; she would revisit Croisset, while Flaubert (though urged repeatedly) would stay rarely at her country mansion at Nohant. They pursued through letters—with constant protestations of mutual affection and regard, and with offers of assistance in times of trouble—their conversation about writing, politics, society, humanity, and the state of the world. On very few topics did they actually