A life so wholly concerned with intangible things seems too intellectual for humanity. I am glad to turn aside from it for a moment to remember the Flaubert who was loved by those who spent their days with him; the uncle who taught her letters to his little niece, and who would, as she says, have done anything imaginable to enliven her when sad or ill. 'One of his greatest pleasures was the amusement of those about him,' although he never saw a woman without thinking of her skeleton, a child without remembering that it would one day be old, or a cradle without finding in it the promise of a grave. He was one of the men who love their friends the dearer for their dislike of mankind in general. He never shaved without laughing at 'the intrinsic absurdity of human life,' and yet he lived out his own share in it with steadfast purpose, 'yoking himself to his work like an ox to the plough.' The result of his incessant labour divides itself into four kinds; novels of the bourgeoisie, a novel of the East, three short stories, and two other books that are, as it were, twin keys to the whole. [_Salammbo._] _Madame Bovary_ and _L'Éducation Sentimentale_ are the novels of the bourgeoisie, novels with an entirely new quality of vision, due to the sustained contrast between his own articulate habit of mind and the unconsciously inarticulate minds of his characters; these are the books commonly described as his contributions to Realism by men too ready to set him on their own level. Opposed to these two books there is _Salammbo_, an Oriental and ancient romance, a reposeful dream for him, in which move characters whose feelings and expressions are no more blurred than his own. All these books offer more delight at each re-reading, although the last, considered as an example of narrative, is almost a failure. The Romantics too often miss the trees for the wood. Flaubert's method makes it rather easy to miss the wood for the trees. But his trees are of such interest and beauty that we are ready to examine them singly. In writing _Madame Bovary_, his subject was close within his reach. Madame was too near to allow him to cover her up with a library of knowledge about his own times. But in _Salammbo_ he was so anxious to be true to the life that he did not know, that he read until he knew too much. The book is made of perfect sentences, perfect descriptions, while the story itself is buried beneath a dust-heap of antiquity. Cartloads after cartloads of gorgeous things are emptied on the top of each other, until the whole is a glittering mass with here and there some splendid detail shining so brilliantly among the rest that we would like to remove it for a museum. The mass stirs: there are movements within it; but they are too heavily laden to shake themselves free and become visible and intelligible. [_Trois Contes._]