Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary (Chp. 3):
But suddenly one day, in a revelation almost as instantaneous as his conversion at the Comédie Française, the scales fell from his eyes and he saw the inanity of the life he was leading. Making a package of his most loved books – his Plutarch and Rabelais, Montaigne, Hugo, and Musset – he fled from Paris to a farm owned by his grandmother in the Sarthe, and there he stayed alone, with only an old peasant woman for cook and housekeeper, for six months, reading, meditating, riding in the forest, and, above all, plotting in detail the itinerary of a journey to Asia Minor.
On his coming of age he returned to Paris to take over his estate, and then again temporarily quitting his grandmother’s apartment in the fashionable Place de la Madeleine he moved into a garret in the Latin Quarter, where he studied “the institutions of Europe,” thinking it wise to know them better than he did before exploring Asia. Philology interested him particularly, and as his intimacy with Flaubert progressed the two friends talked of undertaking together a vast philological dictionary of European words, to be called Les Transmigrations du Latin. But after Christmas Flaubert did not return to Paris and Max left for the Orient in April as his friend lay convalescent in Rouen.
