Which French novelist wrote Madame Bovary?

Flaubert, who was prosecuted for it. The French state charged him with offences against public morality in 1857 over a novel about a provincial doctor's wife having affairs and dying badly - and the prosecution's complaint was less the adultery than that the book declined to condemn it. He was acquitted, and the trial made it a bestseller.

His method was pathological. He hunted for le mot juste, the exact word, working at a rate of a few sentences a day and reading everything aloud to test the rhythm - he wrote of spending a whole day putting in a comma and the next taking it out. The result is a prose style that essentially invented literary realism and free indirect discourse, in which the narration slides into a character's thoughts without announcing it.

The refusal to moralise is the point. Emma is foolish, self-deceiving and destructive, and the novel neither punishes her nor excuses her; it simply describes, with the same flat attention given to a hat or a wedding cake. Flaubert's supposed remark that Madame Bovary is himself is unverified and has been repeated for a century and a half, largely because it fits.