FLAUBERT ATTENDED A REAL-LIFE BALL JUST LIKE THE ONE EMMA BOVARY WENT TO. Following Flaubert's legal battle, Madame Bovary was published as a two-volume novel in 1857. The trial lasted for just one day, and Flaubert and La Revue de Paris were both acquitted a week later. While Emma ultimately gets her comeuppance, Flaubert’s frank descriptions of adultery scandalized French readers and led to an obscenity trial. In pursuit of passionate love and luxurious possessions, Emma engages in extramarital affairs and squanders her husband’s money. Emma swiftly grows disillusioned with both her husband and their provincial ways, especially after she attends a ball thrown by one of her husband’s aristocratic patients. Madame Bovary tells the story of Emma, a peasant who marries an older doctor, Charles Bovary, to escape the dullness of rural life. MADAME BOVARY SHOCKED FRANCE WITH ITS EXPLICIT DESCRIPTIONS OF ADULTERY. Read on to learn more about Flaubert's inspiration for the character of Emma Bovary, his painstaking creative process, and the obscenity trial that threatened the novel's publication. His debut novel Madame Bovary, originally serialized in the French literary magazine La Revue de Paris in late 1856, established Flaubert as a master of French realism. A diagnosis of epilepsy forced him to abandon his legal education, which conveniently gave him the opportunity to pursue a literary career. French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) studied law, but he was born to be a novelist.

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