“I have always put myself in what I have written. In place of Saint-Antoine, for example, it is I who am there; the Temptation has been for me and not for the reader.” It is only fair to add that, in this letter to Louise Colet, Flaubert alludes to the earliest version of La Tentation de Saint-Antoine; and that later letters, addressed to less intimate correspondents, stress the impersonality of his writing. Inevitably he is present, to a greater or lesser degree, in all of his creations; but the quoted example confirms our suspicion that there is more of him in Antoine than in any of his other characters—including Emma Bovary and Frederic Moreau. While L’Education sentimentale was harder to write than any of his other works, La Tentation de Sainit-Anitoine seems to have been easier—thereby confirming Flaubert’s own opinion that he was “born lyrical” and had disciplined himself to prose. Frédéric’s vocation, so lightly undertaken, so frequently shifted, has little in common with the great refusal and lifelong resistance of Flaubert’s career, except for certain dates and material details. Flaubert’s spiritual autobiography, from first to last, identifies itself with the ancient hermit. The Education parallels the Tentation, and differs from the other books, in completing a cycle of literary effort which extends from youth into middle age. But the Tentation was, conclusively and comprehensively, its author’s favorite: “the book of my whole lifetime.” It is a livre vécu on the mythical, rather than the literal, plane. It may not be history, but—in the fullest meaning of the word—it is legend.
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