All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Madame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her husband, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips like a slithery grass snake as she undressed in the hotel room in Rouen, the blinds of the cab that hid her and Leon as they made love. In a letter he made clear the state of mind in which he wrote. That day he had been doing the scene of the horseback ride, when Rodolphe seduces Emma in the woods. “What a delicious thing writing is—not to be you any more but to move through the whole universe you’re talking about. Take me today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were already heavy with passion.” It is hard to imagine another great novelist—Stendhal, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Balzac—who would conceive of the act of writing as a rapturous loss of identity. Poets have often expressed the wish for otherness, for fusion—to be their mistress’ sparrow or her girdle or the breeze that caressed her temples and wantoned with her ribbons, but Flaubert was the first to realize this wish in prose, in the disguise of a realistic story. The climax of the horseback ride was, of course, a coupling, in which all of Nature joined in a gigantic, throbbing partouze while Flaubert’s pen flew. He was writing a book, and yet from his account you would think he was reading one. “What a delicious thing reading is—not to be you any more but to flow through the whole universe you’re reading about...” etc., etc.