8 May 1880 … Amidst the numerous faux débuts which might be said to have inaugurated the fin de siècle, perhaps none has the capacity to engage scholars of French literary and cultural studies alike more productively than the death of Gustave Flaubert. Indeed, few names resonate more profoundly in the echo chamber of nineteenth-century family life (and the fictional representation of its discontents). A point of rupture which was at the time far more conspicuous in its public splendour, and towards which present-day cultural analysts and readers of poetry might turn more immediately, is the burial of Victor Hugo on 1 June 1885, not least because this facilitated the self-liberation of Mallarmé's Crise de vers. In Roger Shattuck's words, ‘By this orgiastic ceremony France unburdened itself of a man, a literary movement, and a century’.

However, critics of the novel, not least those whose reading responds in varying ways to the paradigm of bourgeois fiction enunciated in Tony Tanner's classic account of Adultery in the Novel, will need little persuasion about the importance of Flaubert for the generation of Naturalist novelists who published in Paris in the final decades of the century.