A few years later he toyed briefly with the idea of marriage but never again seriously considered it. The young man was sent to Paris to study law, where his desultory efforts were largely unsuccessful. He had easy access to what he called "the bitter poetry of prostitution," and this led to venereal disease, from which he never recovered. His attitudes toward women were colored by these experiences, and the subject of love became an obsessive focal issue in his works. He early linked sexuality to religion, which he felt was a similar longing for certainty always frustrated by doubt. Both areas brought him notions of doom, death, and annihilation.
In 1845 Flaubert had his first attack of temporal-lobe epilepsy. He was helplessly crippled by his seizures, which became hideous terror for him and recurred at intervals throughout his life. In 1846 he had to face the deaths of his father and his beloved sister. He abandoned his legal studies, since any emotional excitement brought on an attack of his malady. He must, he felt, become an observer of life and not a participant in it; thereafter he gave himself fully only to his writing.
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