I said that some journeys were the main events of his life. Women have taken less place in it than in the lives of most men. He had, when he was twenty years old, loved them as a troubadour. At that time he had repeatedly walked several miles in order to kiss the muzzle of a Newfoundland dog that a lady he admired was in the habit of caressing. Later he accustomed himself to a more matter-of-fact mode of contemplation and practice in erotic matters. He was a friend of anecdotes and stories of the manner of Rabelais, and in his books the erotic illusion was grasped by him with quite as hardy hands as all other illusions. Nevertheless, in this point, as in so many others in the character of Flaubert, there was an abiding duality. He, the old bachelor, the passionate tobacco-smoker, who held intimate, friendly relations with men alone, and who felt at ease in no other female society than in that of certain pretty but not over-fastidious ladies,--held the belief, apparently the result of personal experience as well as of a deeply rooted abstract conviction, that it was the natural, so to say proper, thing for man to cherish for life one grand amatory passion, which must forever remain unrequited. Fully in accord with this, we find in a letter to a lady, dating from the last year of Flaubert's life, the playful, yet at the same time mournfully true, words: "We poor laborers of literature! Why is that denied to us which is so readily granted to commonplace people? They have a heart! We have none at all! So I repeat to you once again that I, for my part, am an uncomprehended soul, the last _grisette,_ the sole survivor of the old race of troubadours." This "uncomprehended soul," however, was not in the habit of turning to women for comprehension. He dreaded love as a danger and a burden. Friendship alone was to him a religion, and among his friends there was no one who stood so near to him as that first and enduring friend, Bouilhet. I do not exactly know if there have been times that were especially propitious to independent minds. But this much I do know: these two young men, who stepped forth into life when the _bourgeoisie_ under Louis Philippe had gained the dominion and acquired a poetic expression partly from the feeble and righteously inclined _École de bon sens_, and partly from the "Vaudevilles" of Scribe, found the period it was their destiny to live in, the worst of all times. The romantic school had outlived itself and produced its own caricature. It was the fashion everywhere to praise common sense and to deride poesy. Inspiration and passion were out of date, and consequently laughable. Everything that was not commonplace was found tiresome. The two youths conceived the age in which they lived to be that of the sway of mediocrity and of the commonplace; they saw the victorious mediocrity, like a monstrous black water-spout, absorb all things, and whirl all things away with it.