It’s the birthday of French realist novelist Gustav Flaubert (1821-1880), whose novel Madame Bovary (1857) was so realistic it landed Flaubert in court on charges of immorality.

Flaubert was born in Rouen, France, to a father who was a chief surgeon at a hospital and a mother who was a doctor’s daughter. Coming as he did from strong middle class roots, he began to disdain the bourgeois at an impressively young age. He initially studied law in Paris but then appeared to have epilepsy, and therefore quit law, moved back home, and focused on his writing. After the deaths of his father and sister in 1846, Flaubert moved to a large family home in nearby Croisset with his mother and baby niece, and mostly stayed there for life.

Flaubert never married and never had children—though he was very fond of visiting prostitutes,which may explain his syphilis and other venereal diseases—but he did around this same time have the only real love affair of his life, with the poet Louise Colet; it lasted about nine years. But it was an earlier and unrequited love that inspired his writing even as a teenager: an older married woman, Elisa Schlésinger, who didn’t know about his passion for her until she was widowed many years later. He wrote a manuscript about her, Memoirs of a Madman (1838), when he was 16, and much later she was the model for a character in his novel L’Education sentimentale, 1869.

Flaubert also worked and reworked the novel La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) for many years; when he read it to a couple friends in 1849,they panned it mercilessly and told him to throw it in the fire, and then advised him to write about something more “down-to-earth,” like the true story of a doctor, Eugène Delamare, whose adulterous wife killed herself—and the idea for Madame Bovary was born.

Flaubert was famously painstaking in his writing: he worked at Madame Bovary for five years,sometimes at the rate of a page a week, writing from 1:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.every day and smoking like a chimney the whole time. His determination to get every detail, every sentence, absolutely perfect not only resulted in a masterpiece but literally changed the way novels have been written ever since. In 2010, Lydia Davis came out with a new translation of Madame Bovary that is supposed to be terrific, so think about treating yourself. (Find it here.)

Fun fact: Flaubert was something of a father figure and mentor to fellow famous writer Guy de Maupassant (#diedtooyoung), who also, as it happens, had a thing for visiting prostitutes, and who died of syphilis. Which I guess isn’t that much fun, making this more of a public health sort of fact. Flaubert himself died of a stroke at the age of 58.

Have a good clean wholesome Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.