Even to those who have read little or nothing of Flaubert, it is well known that in the year 1856 he created an extraordinary sensation in Paris, and very soon throughout Europe, with a novel entitled "Madame Bovary." An absurd lawsuit,--the state attorney prosecuted both author and publisher, on the plea of the immoral tendencies of the work, and a unanimous verdict of acquittal on the part of the jury, could do little to increase the attention which the strongly individual new talent had excited. The book appeared singular and scandalous, as is apt to be the case with new attempts in literature. It was a token of opposition. People compared it with the literary productions of earlier times, and asked themselves if it was poetry. It was rather a reminder of surgery, of anatomy. Very much later, in Parisian literary circles where fidelity to a former conception of poetry was maintained, it was said: "Will you please excuse us from reading M. Flaubert's skeletons." The author was called an ultra-realist; people found in his novel only the merciless, inexorable physiology of every-day life in its sorrowful ugliness. In the first moment of excitement, people overlooked the fact that now and then there escaped from this physiologist a thoroughly impersonal, it is true, yet figurative, richly colored expression, which seemed freighted with a message from quite a different world than that of vulgar life. The half-cultured literary public did not perceive that these descriptions of simple provincial circumstances and provincial misfortunes, of pitiful errors and of a wretched death, were produced in a style which was at once as clear as a mirror and as pleasant to the ear as harmonious music. There lay buried in the book a lyric poet, and ever and anon there burst from the grave a word of flame.