remains the lesson and the important, the delightful thing, remains above all the drama that moves slowly to its climax. It is what we come back to for the sake of what it shows us. We see—from the present to the past indeed, never alas from the present to the future—how a classic almost inveterately grows. Unimportant, unnoticed, or, so far as noticed, contested, unrelated, alien, it has a cradle round which the fairies but scantly flock and is waited on in general by scarce a hint of significance. The significance comes by a process slow and small, the fact only that one perceptive private reader after another discovers at his convenience that the book is rare. The addition of the perceptive private readers is no quick affair, and would doubtless be a vain one did they not—while plenty of other much more remarkable books come and go—accumulate and count. They count by their quality and continuity of attention; so they have gathered for “Madame Bovary,” and so they are held. That is really once more the great circumstance. It is always in order for us to feel yet again what it is we are held by. Such is my reason, definitely, for speaking of Flaubert as the novelist’s novelist. Are we not moreover—and let it pass this time as a happy hope!—pretty well all novelists now? ----- Footnote 2: On the occasion of these prefatory remarks to a translation of “Madame Bovary,” appearing in A Century of French Romance, under the auspices of Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. William Heinemann, in 1902. Footnote 3: It was true, delightfully true, that, extravagance in this province of his life, though apparently in no other, being Flaubert’s necessity and law, he deliberated and hung fire, wrestled, retreated and returned, indulged generally in a tragi-comedy of waste; which I recall a charming expression of on the lips of Edmond de Goncourt, who quite recognised the heroic legend, but prettily qualified it: “Il faut vous dire qu’il y avait là-dedans beaucoup de coucheries et d’école buissonière.” And he related how on the occasion of a stay with his friend under the roof of the Princess Mathilde, the friend, missed during the middle hours of a fine afternoon, was found to have undressed himself and gone to bed to think! HONORÉ DE BALZAC 1902 I