BOOKS / The arc of affection: The correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, two lions of French literature, has been called 'perhaps the finest of all time'

GEORGE SAND and Gustave Flaubert first met in April 1857, shortly after the publication of Madame Bovary in book form; she was 53, he 35. They exchanged a few letters in 1863-4, and in 1866 began to meet at the famous weekly 'Magny' dinners for artists and writers organised by Sainte-Beuve and the Goncourt brothers in Paris. The Goncourts' journal records Sand's first appearance on 12 February 1866:

Mme Sand dines chez Magny. She sits beside me. With age, her fine, charming face is taking on a mulatto-like cast. She glances timidly round the table and murmurs to Flaubert: 'You're the only one here with whom I feel at ease.' Their correspondence takes off from here, and lasts until Sand's death 10 years later. There are more than 400 surviving letters, and a number are known to be lost, including all but one of an early, burlesque series to Flaubert from 'Goulard', a farcical male invented by Sand:

Monsieur Flobaire,

You must be a reel lout to have taken my name and wrote a letter to a lady once kindly disposed to me and have no dout been received in my sted . . . If you are glad to have writen Fanie (ie Madame Bovary) and Salkenpeau (ie Salammbo), I am glad not to have red them. Nothing to get pufed up about there . . . If I meat you with her which I hope not you will get a biff in the face.

It is often said that this is 'the finest correspondence of the past century, perhaps the finest of all time', but although these letters are far more interesting than the charming Flaubert-Turgenev letters, Flaubert's grandeur is not fully revealed in them. His literary creed, for example, is more fully worked out and more powerfully stated in his earlier letters to his friend Louis Bouilhet and his lover Louise Colet.

As a correspondent he is many things. He is - in Julian Barnes's words - laddish cocksman, seigneurial employer, mischievous gallant, profound friend, humble courtier, literary operator, affectionate confrere. His manner depends on his recipient, and when he is writing to his 'chere maitre', the extraordinarily prolific and internationally eminent Sand, who was over 17 years his senior, and whom he read as an adolescent, he is for a long time curbed, unable to show his full force. He seems checked not only by her age, sex and position, but also, more fundamentally, by the fact that he does not really greatly admire her work.

Only in their final exchange on the business of writing does he address Sand with all his intellectual heart. Here for the last time he resists her call for edification, for allowing good to triumph, for the moral presence of the author. He restates the principles of his cult of the sentence, his passionate commitment to authorial impersonality, and explains how 'the concern for external Beauty you deplore in me is for me a method'; roughly, for achieving truth.

Flaubert can also be fantastically tiresome. He is consumed by 'Hindignation', overpowered by rages, obscurely worked on by syphilis. He grumbles furiously about publishers and theatre directors, and rightly judges himself to be vache and unbearable. When the political content of the correspondence rises in response to the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-1, and the subsequent revolt and collapse of the Paris Commune, Flaubert - in fact the most soft- hearted of men - blows up. He rants against universal suffrage, loathes the masses, despises mercy as a travesty of justice.

He is violently dismissive of Sand's radical - communistic - republicanism, her deep faith in the upward progress of humanity, her belief in the power of love. 'Ah, chere bon maitre, if you could only hate] That is what you lack: Hate. Despite your great sphinx eyes, you have seen the world through a golden haze.'

Left-wing sentimentality is peculiarly unattractive, and Sand has a number of lapses. Flaubert's are equal and opposite. Secure in his gloom, he doesn't understand that hope holds a part of the truth. He fails to respond to Sand's smart- bomb suggestion that enthusiasm is a part of wisdom. With perceptiveness and gentleness she tries to draw him into other perspectives. She points out that his endless complaints about human stupidity are as stupid as

endless complaints about flies or rain. But he has set hard, and his second, post-war visit to her house at Nohant, where she lives so happily with her son and daughter-in-law and two granddaughters, does not go well (relevant extracts from Sand's diaries are included in this book). He monopolises the conversation and drowns out 'le bon Turgenev', who Sand finds 'much more interesting'.

This is the low point of their friendship. And yet she loves him, as does her family. The memory of his first visit in 1869, when he dressed up as a woman and danced the cachucha, is not obscured. And Sand's visits to Flaubert's house at Croisset, near Rouen, are a great success. They walk, in spite of Flaubert's dislike of physical exercise, and visit local sights. They stay up until 4am talking, smoking and raiding the kitchen. Anticipating a visit in 1866, Sand (aged 62) writes: 'I'll come and stay . . . but only on condition that you don't turn out of your own room . . . I can sleep anywhere - in the cinders or under a kitchen settle, like a watchdog. If the weather's fine I'll make you rush around. If it goes on raining we'll toast our shanks and tell one another our love problems. And the great river will run black or grey under the window . . .'

'Her serenity is contagious,' Flaubert writes after she has left. The letters flow fast that month. She argues that all great artists probably have 'a touch of the grocer', and sets herself against Flaubert's perfectionism: 'I have got a flaw. I like classification: I have a touch of the teacher. I like sewing and wiping babies' bottoms: I have a touch of the servant. I'm absent-minded and have a touch of the fool. And lastly, I wouldn't like perfection.'

Romantic love is opportunistic and has surprising forms. Flaubert and Sand disagree about many things, but their affinity is deep. Their letters form an arc of affection over France. Sand has worked Flaubert out from head to foot, and she keeps his hyperbolical grouching in proportion. She gives him a great deal of good advice, and probably doesn't make the mistake of supposing that he might act on it.

'Je t'aime de tout mon coeur,' she writes; 'the sadder you grow the more I love you.' 'Whenever I'm 'gloomy', I see your kind face . . . You are a kind of magic among my . . . autumnal friendships . . . there's a protectiveness, an infinite kindness about you.'

Flaubert is equally affectionate - 'you're like fresh bread,' he writes at one point - but his fondness is less analytical. He is not trying to counsel Sand, because her life is going so well. She criticises impersonality as an authorial ideal, but welcomes it increasingly as a spiritual condition: 'Impersonality, my special idiom, is making great progress. If I weren't so well I'd think it was an illness. If my old heart didn't grow more loving every day I'd think it was selfishness.' Pouring out novels, articles and plays, she judges old age to be 'the happiest and most propitious part of life' and is borne up by the love of her granddaughter Aurore.

'You are right to love me; it's only a fair exchange,' he writes at the beginning. 'Je t'aime et je t'embrasse de tout mon ame,' she writes at the end. They fall ill, do business, mourn the dead. He is her 'troubador', she is his. Their outspokenness is tenderness. Each is parent to the other. They argue at each other, knowing they won't persuade. Flaubert cries in the fine rain at her funeral. 'It seemed to me that I was burying my mother a second time.'

'Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence', ed Alphonse Jacobs, trs Francis Steegmuller and Barbara Bray, is published by Harvill at pounds 20

(Photographs omitted)