Aux pieds du maître: le jeune Gustave Flaubert admirateur de Chateaubriand

In his twenties Flaubert had an almost unbounded enthusiasm for Chateaubriand, as his earliest fiction demonstrates. His contributions to Par les champs et par les grèves (1847) include a lyrical, and on the whole equitable, appreciation of the older author occasioned by a visit to Combourg and St-Malo. While Flaubert's return from the Near East in 1851 is generally taken as marking the novelist's break with Romanticism, an observation to the Goncourt brothers as well as evidence in L'Education sentimentale show that, though he founded literary realism, he was willing in later life to use Chateaubriand as a model. (HRJr.)