While still children, we fondle with a naive sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed woman, and mingle with her in her sleep); thus, woman was an alluring mystery for me, one that troubled my poor childish head. From the feelings that arose in me when a woman happened to fix her gaze on me, I already sensed that there was something fateful in that arousing glance, something that causes men's willpower to melt—-and it filled me simultaneously with fascination and fear.
— Gustave Flaubert, “November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style” (translated by Andrew Brown")
THE ADVENTURES OF B. AND P. IN LETTERS, 1873-1880.
“I have abandoned B. and P.,” Flaubert confessed to Turgenev in a letter signed “Your old wreck, G. Flaubert” on the evening of October 3, 1873. Flaubert’s schedule that day had included waking up at nine, “stuffing” himself with lobster, taking a nap, walking on the beach, going to bed at 10 PM, “reading nothing”, “living like an oyster” dedicated to indulging in “boundless melancholy” on a regular basis.
“I’m working on B. and P.'s geology and on Monday I start writing again,” Flaubert said Turgenev five years later, in a letter dated July 27, 1877.
On September 12th in the same year, Flaubert told Turgenev that he was starting B. and P.’s “archaeological and geological excursions.”
“Come and dine here, and I’ll read you what’s finished,” Flaubert wrote to Turgenev a year later in a letter dated June 26th, 1878.
On January 28th of 1879, Le Figaro announced that Flaubert had slipped on a patch of ice in his garden and broken a leg.
Two days later, Flaubert told Turgenev that he had broken his leg five minutes after reading a letter from Turgenev recommending that he walk more.
“I’m finishing B. and P. ’s Magic and I’m exhausted by it,” Flaubert told Turgenev on May 26th. “Unless the world comes to an end next week, I will see you in the middle of it,” he added. “In Paris.”
“B. and P. are wearing me out,” Flaubert told Turgenev on August 7. “On certain days it seems that all the blood is drained from my limbs, and my death is imminent.”
“B. and P. send their respects,” Flaubert said in a letter to Turgenev dated November 8.
“I wish B. and P. the necessary contrition for their great religious act – the more intense it is, the more vigorously they’ll rebel against it afterwards,” Turgenev wrote to Flaubert on November 13, 1879, in a letter that he signed as “Your, Iv. Turgenev”
“B. and P. are wearing me out,” Flaubert told Turgenev on December 2. “Frankly, I can’t take anymore.”
“B. and P. are not coming on very well,” Flaubert said to Turgenev on December 3rd. “And the weather is very sad,” he added.
“B. and P. are getting me down, I’m exhausted,” Flaubert said to Turgenev on April 15th in the year 1880. Among other things, Flaubert missed his friend. “How I’m longing to embrace you!” he wrote, and signed off as “Your old, G. Flaubert.” This was the last letter that Flaubert ever wrote to Turgenev.
“I’m darting about like a squirrel in a cage,” Turgenev wrote to Flaubert on May 6th of the same year. “I embrace you and I’ll see you soon,” Turgenev added in the last letter he ever sent to his old friend, Flaubert.