Gustave Flaubert was inspired to write Madame Bovary by a brief notice he read in a provincial newspaper: the wife of a public health officer by the name of Delamarre poisoned herself. What in the world could have driven a middle-class woman out in the sticks to take her own life? True, she’d been carrying on an adulterous affair and was deeply in debt, but Flaubert found it incongruous for the wife of a public health officer—not even a doctor!—to harbor self-destructive impulses.



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