Gustave Flaubert

(1821 - 1880)

Studying law in Paris as a young man, Gustave Flaubert became distracted by “the bitter poetry of prostitution.” Soon after Flaubert published Madame Bovary in 1857, he was put on trial for public depravity charges. In his fifties, he suffered from several venereal diseases and was dead at the age of fifty-eight.