French writer Gustave Flaubert was BOTD in 1821. Born in Rouen, he moved to Paris to study law, finding the subject and the city distasteful. After an attack of epilepsy, he abandoned his studies in 1846 and returned to Rouen, where he lived for the rest of his life, devoting himself to writing. He is best known for his 1856 novel Madame Bovary, a bleakly ironic drama about a bored provincial housewife whose double life of adultery and over-spending results in her suicide. Serialised in the Revue de Paris, the book caused a sensation for its frank treatment of extra-marital sex. Flaubert and his publisher were subsequently put on trial for immorality. Following their acquittal, the published book became a bestseller. He completed only two further novels: Salammbô, an historical novel based in Carthage, and L’éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education), about a young man’s clandestine affair with an older woman. An obsessive perfectionist, he famously avoided literary clichés, spending weeks searching for “le mot juste” (the right word) to express himself. A lifelong bachelor, he appears to have had only one romantic relationship, with Louise Colet, though he maintained friendships and extensive correspondence with fellow writers George Sand, Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. In his diaries and letters, he wrote frankly about his sex with female and male prostitutes on his travels in Egypt, Greece and Turkey, including “a pockmarked young rascal wearing a white turban“. After contracting syphilis, he spent much of his adult life in poor health, dying in 1880 at the age of 58. Now considered a giant of French literature, he is credited with developing the novel from its romantic and sensationalist forms into a psychologically complex and socially conscious art form. His colourful sexual life and famous exclamation “Madame Bovary, ce’est moi” (“Madame Bovary is me”) have prompted a number of queer readings of his work.