He did have love affairs, but they were never central to his life; most important were his stormy affairs with the poet Louise Colet in 1846-1847 and again in 1851-1854 and his affectionate relationship with Juliet Herbert, the governess of his niece, which began in the mid-1850s and lasted to the end of his life.
In literature alone Flaubert found no unbearable conflict, for he had been slowly evolving away from his childhood romantic ideal of the writer caught up in wild emotion as he wrote. Even before his illness he was moving toward a concept of writing as "emotion recollected in tranquility," an esthetic of detachment easily concording with his physical state. It allowed quiet consideration of style, which he felt as essential to prose as it had long been considered to poetry. After several false starts he turned to writing The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the story of the desert hermit of Egypt, which was a convenient focus for his concerns with religion and sexuality and for giving scope to his enjoyment of erudite research. He completed the first version in 1849, but unfortunately it proved unpublishable. This was a bitter blow, and during the next 25 years he intermittently revised the work.
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