It is a holy and wholesome thing to visit the graves of genius, for the memories aroused may serve as an inspiration and a consolation in the spiritually arid tracts of daily and doleful existence. But as the emotions aroused at the sight of great men’s relics are profound only to the individual—they seldom make interesting reading—so more than a record of the fact that I have visited Rouen several times to view the tomb of Gustave Flaubert is not of burning importance. I cannot help protesting, however, at the tardy official recognition accorded one of the greatest prose masters France can boast, and one of the great world novelists. In the Solferino Gardens there is the marble memorial by the sculptor Chapu, and up on the heights of the Monumental Cemetery lie his remains in the Flaubert family plot, not very far from the Joan of Arc monument. The Government has done nothing, though it has erected marble quarries to mediocrities not worthy to unlatch the shoes of Flaubert. Guy de Maupassant is remembered in the Solferino Gardens by a statue _vis-à-vis_ to the master whom he loved and to whom he owed so much. At Paris another loving memorial stands in the Parc Monceau; yet for Flaubert, a giant when compared to the unhappy writer of the Contes, there is nothing—not even a commemorative tablet. The least reparation for this neglect that the French Government can offer is the purchase and preservation of the little house in which Madame Bovary was composed with such painful travail. It still stands, though fast crumbling into decay, on the bank of the Seine at Croisset about half an hour below Rouen. The paternal house has vanished, and occupying part of the little park is a dismantled manufactory. Abbé Prévost is said to have written Manon Lescaut in the old house—at least, Flaubert believed the story. The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert household, keeps a small café near his former home, and is always ready to talk of the master and of his mother, Madame Flaubert. For two seasons I vainly tried to get from Colange a photograph of this mother. To me the mothers of great men are of extraordinary interest. No money could tempt the old man, though he might have had the picture reproduced and sold the copies. With his phrase uttered at Flaubert’s grave, M. François Coppée fastened more firmly to history the name of that noble artist, “The Beethoven of French Prose.” VII VERDI AND BOÏTO