The creation of the medieval saints’ Lives, a specifically Christian type of legend-making, may be seen as but one manifestation of mankind’s age-old propensity for elaborating folklore. Of course legends are, as a general matter, both interesting to the literary scholar and frustrating to the historian, because they represent a nearly impenetrable mixture of traditions and inventions, of natural and un-natural. If we are to understand properly the nature and potentialities of the legendary sources available to Flaubert, however, and describe his use of these legends, we must first understand this legend-making process. Only a knowledge of what the legends...

The concepts we have proposed concerning the nature and development of hagiographical legends suggest two lines of inquiry which should be pursued before we address ourselves directly to the question of Flaubert’s use of legendary sources. The first is to determine why Flaubert, a highly successful author of narrative fiction, should have turned to the hagiographical legend; the second is to establish the canons to be observed in identifying his use of the traditional materials the past transmitted to him.

The reasons or urges behind Flaubert’s turning to the hagiographical legend in 1875 are not far to seek and have...

We may begin with the medieval origins of the Julian legend, whose earliest known forms arose, we recall, during the late twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. This age produced a series of legends about saints named Julian, to be added to the company of a not inconsiderable number of earlier saints of that name already in the Calendar. Among all of these, we shall have occasion to refer to only a few: Saint Julian of Le Mans, Saint Julian of Antioch, Saint Julian of Brioude, Saint Julianle Pauvre, and, of course, Saint Julian Hospitator. The enormously complex interrelationships among...

We have described how the Julian story grew by accretions. Our thesis is further illustrated by the examination of another of the medieval forms of the legend, represented by the Julian windows at Rouen and at Chartres. Flaubert himself points us toward the Rouen window, for he closes his Tale with the single-sentence paragraph (which we quote from his plan of 1856, even clearer than the later published form): ‘et voilà la légende de St. Julien L’Hospitalier telle qu’elle est racontée sur les vitraux de la cathédrale de ma ville natale.’¹ But he also wrote to his publisher, Georges Charpentier,...

We must consider a further nineteenth-century retelling of the medieval Julian legend. As if to underscore the complexity of the creative process, this one shows the direct influence of Langlois, and, in turn, it also influenced Flaubert.

To allow a clear presentation of this striking filiation, we shall reserve until the next chapter our presentation of the extra-textual evidence which shows when and how Flaubert came to read and to know this retelling. The Bibliothèque Municipale of Alençon possesses a manuscript volume (No. 27) containing,inter alia, one of the fifteen or so copies known today of the standard Old...

It remains to determine how and when Flaubert came to know Lecointre-Dupont. Flaubert worked on hisSaint Julienon two entirely separate occasions, the first in the summer of 1856 for a very brief period, the second in 1875-1876.¹ It is impossible to know certainly whether Flaubert read Lecointre-Dupont’s article in 1856. The means by which he came to know it – which we shall discuss in a moment – were as available to him then as they were later. However, a first plan for the story, drawn up at this time, shows little which could not have come from...

The task of explaining how Flaubert came into contact with the legendary sources of theLégende de Saint Julien I’Hospitalier, and of explaining the use he made of them, is essentially completed with the preceding chapter. We could proceed at once to present the necessary documentation in our Appendices, were it not that a wholly different approach to the history of Flaubert’s Tale has been current for some two decades: one which, being based on other premises, runs counter to our theses and leads to entirely other inferences and conclusions about Flaubert’s use of legendary material.

We have discussed at...

At the end of a necessarily long journey through the history of Flaubert’sLégende de Saint Julien I’Hospitalier, it is worth asking what we have seen that will help in understanding the Tale. There is at least one primary answer, from which the others flow. Flaubert left us a problem of genre in theSaint Julien. Its title implies that his work is a ‘legend,’ and yet he included the story in the collection everyone knows asTrois Contes. Aconte, or a novella, is not the same thing as a legend, as our early chapters show. It seems likely...