For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion the author of Madame Bovary was tried for -offenses against morality and religion.- What shocks us today about Flaubert s devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis Steegmuller) and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as vital as its doomed heroine. In reading Madame Bovary one experiences a work that remains genuinely revolutionary almost a century and a half after its creation.