But what is all this when compared with the magnificent idiocy of Du Camp, who asserted that if Flaubert had not suffered from epilepsy _he would have become a genius! Hénaurme!_ as the man who made such masterpieces as Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Temptation of Saint Antony, the Three Tales, Bouvard et Pécuchet, had a comical habit of exclaiming. Enormous, too, was Guy de Maupassant's manner of avenging his master's memory. In the final edition--eight volumes long--Maupassant, with the unerring eye of hatred, affixed an introduction to Bouvard et Pécuchet. Therein he printed Maxime du Camp's letters to Flaubert during the period when Madame Bovary was appearing in the _Revue de Paris_. Du Camp was one of its editors. He urged Flaubert to cut the novel--the concision of which is so admirable, the organic quality of which is absolute. Worse still remains. If Flaubert couldn't perform the operation himself, then the aforesaid Du Camp would hire some experienced hack to do it for the sensitive author; wounded vanity Du Camp believed to be the cause of indignant remonstrances. They eliminated the scene of the agricultural fair and the operation on the hostler's foot--one scene as marvellous as a _genre_ painting by Teniers with its study of the old farm servant, and psychologically more profound; the other necessary to the development of the story. Thus Madame Bovary was slaughtered serially by a man ignorant of art, that Madame Bovary which is one of the glories of French literature, as Mr. James truly says. Flaubert scribbled on Du Camp's letters another of his favourite expletives, _Gigantesque!_ Flaubert never forgave him, but they were apparently reconciled years later. Du Camp went into the Academy; Flaubert refused to consider a candidacy, though Victor Hugo--wittily nicknamed by Jules Laforgue "Aristides the Just"--urged him to do so. Even the mighty Balzac was too avid of glory and gold for Flaubert, to whom art and its consolations were all-sufficing. III