After doggedly working like a galley slave for six years Gustave Flaubert published Salammbô in Paris near the close of 1862. He was then forty-one years old, in the prime of his laborious and picturesque life, recluse, man of the world, traveller, and one of the most devoted of sons. In 1849, with Maxime du Camp—who later imprudently lifted the curtain on the sad secret of his friend’s life—Flaubert made a journey up the Nile, through Egypt, Nubia, by the Red Sea, through Palestine and Syria, into Cyprus, Rhodes, Asia Minor, Turkey in Europe, and Greece. Before Dr. Schliemann, the great Flaubert dug in Mycenæ, and from the “trenches of Herculaneum, on to the rocks of Cape Misenum,” he explored, furiously obsessed by a fantastic idea. In 1850 we find him in Phœnicia, a wanderer and an excavator of buried pasts. During 1858 he went to Tunis, and to the ruins of Carthage. From these delvings was born the epical romance of Salammbô, a book full of sonorous lines like the sweeping harmonies of Wagner, a book of mad dreams, blood, lust, cruelty, and love faithful unto death. Following the publication of this story Flaubert, a lion in literary Paris since his artistic and legal victories with Madame Bovary, found himself the centre of many attacks by historians, archæologists, pedants, and the critical small fry of the town. To one adversary the blond giant of Croisset deigned a reply. It was M. Froehner, then editor of the _Revue Contemporaine_, and an expert in archæology—that is, an expert until Flaubert answered his arguments and literally blew them off the globe. He admitted having created Salammbô; that the aqueduct which Mathô and Spendius traversed the night Salammbô first saw the Zäimph was also an invention; that Hanno was really crucified in Sardinia; and a few other minor changes. Then to Froehner’s animadversions he gave text for text, authority for authority, and when a question of topography arose, Flaubert clinched his answer with: “Is it to shine by trying to make the dunces believe that I do not distinguish between Cappadocia and Asia Minor? But I know it, sir; I have seen it, I have taken walks in it.” If the question was consecrating apes to the moon, or whether beards covered in bags in sign of mourning are in Cahen [Ezekiel xxiv. 17] and on the chins of Egyptian colossi—any doubtful fact, be it ethnic, archæologic, ethic, æsthetic, or historic, was met by a volley of answers, a flood of learning, a wealth of reading, that simply overwhelmed his antagonist. The affair was tremendously diverting for the lookers-on, but it is to be doubted if art was benefited. For two dusty German professors such a controversy might have proved useful; in it Flaubert simply wasted his glorious powers.