DIARY OF A MADMAN - Gustave Flaubert

Diary of a madman is a brilliant demonstration of the difficulties and complexities inherent in writing. At first sight it could seem a frustrating and fool text. It might appear incoherent and crisis-ridden, but at the end the reader could hear the voice of a writer who is, slowly but surely, preparing himself for the world’s literary stage. 

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen, France on 12 December 1821, the fifth of six children in a family of doctors. .In the 1830s Flaubert attended the Collége Royal de Rouen, writing for its newspaper, reading Shakespeare, travelling extensively and at the age of fourteen began in earnest his own writings, inspired by his unconsummated love affair at this time with the much older and married Elisa Schlésinger, that inspired Diary of a madman. He unsuccessfully studied law in Paris, and after the death of his father, Flaubert lived in Rouen for the rest of his life. His malady of nervous fits (epilepsy started when he was around twenty-two years old) caused him to be sequestered at home much of the time, while allowing him the peace to continue his writings. Flaubert embarked on a trip to Egypt and the Far East in 1851. In 1857 he published Madame Bovary,a portrait of the young provincial Emma Bovary as fallen woman and her adulterous liaisons. It was criticised then banned for a period after its first release. In 1870 Flaubert became very sick, but continued to write. Afflicted by syphilis and rapidly declining health, Flaubert died on 8 May 1880 due a brain hemorrhage.

«I was in love.What it is to love, to feel young and full of tenderness, to feel the harmonies of nature palpitating within you, to need this reverie and this action of the heart, to feel happy on account of it! Oh! Those first beatings of a man’s heart, his first palpitations of love! How strange and gentle they are! And later, how trite, how stupid and ridiculous they seem! What a strange thing! There is at once both torment and joy in this sleeplessness.»