Flaubert, who held Chateaubriand a master, was the friend of Gautier, and the director in his art of Guy de Maupassant, who wrote with one hand _Madame Bovary_ and with the other _Salammbo_, who put in the same book _St. Julien l'Hospitalier_ and _Un Cœur Simple_, is, on a far grander scale than Mérimée, an illustration as well as a reason of the development of romanticism into realism. Flaubert's passionate care for the truth, would, if he had lived before the Romantic movement, have confined itself to the elaboration of a very scrupulous prose. But after the discovery of local colour, after the surprising discovery of the variety that exists in things, as great as the variety that exists in words and in their combinations, it was sure to apply itself not only to the writing but also to those external things that had suggested the ideas the writing was to embody. It would try to make the sentences true to their author; it would also try to make them true to the life they were to represent. It was Flaubert who said to De Maupassant as they passed a cabstand, 'Young man, describe that horse in one sentence so as to distinguish him from every other horse in the world, and I shall begin to believe that you have possibilities as a writer.' This demand for accurate portraiture turned the romantic realism of Balzac's _Comédie Humaine_ into the other realism of _Madame Bovary_. [_Madame Bovary._] Balzac had his models, yes, as hints in the back of his head, but he made his characters alive with his own energy and his own brain. As I have already pointed out, they are all too alive to be true. But Flaubert, true to himself in his manner, wished to be true to life in his matter. Madame Bovary, that second-rate, ordinary, foolish, weak, little provincial wife, has no atmosphere about her but her own. She has not been inoculated with the blood of Flaubert, as all the veins of all the characters of Balzac have been scorched with fire from those of that 'joyful wild boar.' When Flaubert wrote that everything in the book was outside himself, he was saying no more than the truth. He was as honest towards her and her life as he was towards his own ideas. She talks like herself. Now the older writers, like Fielding and Smollett, are content to let their people talk as men and women should talk to be fit for good literature. Even the characters of men like Balzac or Hugo say what they think, as nearly as their creators are themselves able to express it. Flaubert is infinitely more scrupulous. The Bovary never says what she thinks. Flaubert knew well enough what she was thinking, but sought out exactly those phrases and sentences beneath which she would have hidden her thought, those horrible bourgeois inaccuracies that it was torture for him to hear.