In January 1857 Gustave Flaubert stood in a Paris courtroom facing obscenity charges for his debut novel, and the prosecutors were offended less by adultery than by his unvarnished realism. This episode explores the mind behind Madame Bovary, beginning with Flaubert’s dream of writing a book about nothing held together purely by style, and the friend, Louis Bouilhet, who pushed him to anchor that ambition in the true story of a provincial health officer.

The conversation examines his agonizing pursuit of the exact word, sentences shouted in the garden to test their rhythm, and his contempt for the culturally hollow bourgeoisie he catalogued in a dictionary of cliches. It follows Emma Bovary’s romantic delusions, her debts, the botched club-foot surgery and her death by arsenic, the pharmacist rewarded with a Medal of Honor, and the trial where the state argued realism itself was dangerous. It ends with Flaubert’s doctrine of authorial invisibility, the disputed Madame Bovary is me quote, and his legacy in psychological realism.

• How a prompt about a country health officer became a stylistic masterpiece
• Why Flaubert spent up to a week on a single page
• Emma as a weapon against romanticism and a diagnosis of consumer society
• The prosecution’s claim that showing sin without preaching endorses it
• An author present everywhere but visible nowhere, and the acquittal that made a bestseller