The Fruits of Love: An Image in Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, and Guy de Maupassant

The motif of the fruit that falls, or the fruit that clings, used to represent various aspects and stages of love, is traced through three nineteenth-century novels: Sand's La Mare au Diable, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Maupassant's Bel-Ami. In so doing, an apparently hitherto unrecorded early extract from the George Sand novel is identified. That passage was published in the Magasin Pittoresque in 1817. (RTC)