It is typical of Flaubert's general manner of representing ‘real people’ that references to the ‘code of character’ should ironically intensify, rather than undermine, the illusion of their reality. Consider the difference between the almost eighteenth-century aesthetic of self-consciousness followed in the 1845 L'Éducation sentimentale, and the heightening of the illusion of character in the final work, Bouvard et Pécuchet. In 1845 Flaubert pretends not to know everything about his characters: ‘M. Dubois avait une redingote bleue, c'est tout ce que je peux en dire, ne l'ayant jamais vu que par derrière le dos’ (I, p. 286); ‘Mme Renaud a-t-elle eu un autre amant? c'est ce que j'ignore’ (p. 371). He then inserts a final heavy-handed ‘rangeons en rond tous les personnages au fond de la scène’ (p. 371). In Bouvard et Pécuchet, the inclusion of the phrenology episode offers a fine illustration of his mature method. In a series of breathtaking successes in the art of ‘cranioscopie’, Bouvard and Pécuchet, turned amateur phrenologists, accurately read the characters of Victor and Victorine, Marcel, and most of the local villagers. As might be expected, Flaubert interpolates an argument with the local priest over the dangers of encouraging moral fatalism: ‘Le voleur, l'assassin, l'adultère, n'ont plus qu'à rejeter leurs crimes sur la faute de leurs bosses’ (II, p. 290).