“It is another of my poor jokes,” says Ogi. “This is not the story of ‘Main Street,’ but of a famous French classic, ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert. You see, the themes of the two novels are identical, and so is the method; the difference lies in the temperaments of two races. The young man from Sauk Centre and the young man from Rouen alike call themselves “realists”; but one proceeds upon the assumption that it is possible to restrain passion, and on the whole, better to try, while the other proceeds upon the assumption that it is impossible to restrain passion, and that if you pretend to do it, you are a Puritan, and what is worse, a hypocrite. So at the end of Carol Kennicott’s story we find her still trying to introduce a little light into Gopher Prairie, while Emma Bovary is dead and the town of Yonville-l’Abbaye is exactly what it was before.” Flaubert is by many considered the greatest of all realists. He made his religion out of a theory of style; and he was absolutely certain that “Madame Bovary” was the final product of the “objective” method. He had coldly observed reality, and no predisposition had been allowed to interfere. My purpose in mixing him up with Main Street, Gopher Prairie, Minn., is to bring out the contention that “Madame Bovary” is as subjective as a lyric; from first to last an expression of its author’s personal, or shall we say racial conviction, that the sexual impulse dominates the lives of men and women. The great classic of realism is a legal brief, in which every detail has been carefully selected and arranged, and every sentence composed for the purpose of proving this argument. We have once more the old Greek tragedy with its lurking Nemesis; only this time the lurking-place is in the genital glands. Flaubert was born in 1821, so that he was a youngster to the group of writers we have been considering: Balzac, Hugo, Gautier, George Sand. He was a tall, lanky, provincial fellow, with drooping mustaches, looking like a dragoon. He was epileptic and hysterical, and suffered agonies of melancholy, for the most part over problems of style. He would pace the floor all night in torment seeking for a missing word; he records that he spent eight unhappy days in avoiding one dissonance. The action of all his life which he repented most was a phrase in “Madame Bovary.” Translated literally, this phrase is “a crown of flowers of orange-tree”; the unforgivable sin lying in the two “ofs.”