But they waited for it in vain, for nothing further was heard from him. Years passed, and he still remained silent. Finally, after the lapse of seven years, he appeared before the public with a new novel, and the reading world proclaimed aloud its astonishment. This new book bore the reader far away from the villages of Normandy and the nineteenth century. The vanished author of "Madame Bovary" was found again amid the ruins of ancient Carthage. He represented, in "Salammbô," nothing more or less than Carthage in the days of Hamilcar; a city and a civilization of which people had scarcely any reliable knowledge,--a war between Carthage and the hireling troops of the city, which did not so much as offer general historic, or even so-called ideal interest. A Parisian novel, whose plot centred in violated marriage vows, had been looked for, and in its stead was received one whose scenes were laid amid ancient Punic culture, Tanit's worship, and Moloch adoration, sieges and battles, terrors without number or measure, the death of an entire army by starvation, and the slow martyrdom of an imprisoned Lybian chieftain. And the strangest part of it was that all this subject-matter, about which no one knew anything, or could in the least control, this whole extinct barbaric world, was produced with a clearness and a minute accuracy that was in no respect inferior to that of "Madame Bovary." People discovered that Flaubert's methods were in no wise dependent upon the character of his materials, that they were the same in regard to this colossal, foreign subject as they had been in dealing with his former commonplace theme. He had played a prank on the public, manifesting in a striking manner how little he had been understood. Any one who had looked upon him as a realist servilely bound to the clod, could now learn how thoroughly at home Flaubert felt in tropical lands. Any one who had thought that the petty affairs of every-day life, in their ugliness and their absurdity, were the sole objects that had power to captivate him, must now discover that Flaubert in his youth had shared the enthusiasms of the men of 1830, and that he, as well as they, had been attracted by primitive passions and barbaric customs. Yet to how great a degree Flaubert actually entered into the sympathies and naïveté of the extreme romantic school, very few had the most remote idea, even after reading "Salammbô." The sun of Africa and the life of the Orient had been made hallowed to him by Byron and Victor Hugo, and his personal impressions in the Orient had only confirmed the poetic ones. The aroma of coffee gave him hallucinations of wandering caravans, and he swallowed the most horrible dishes with a sense of piety, if they but had an exotic name.