Gustave Flaubert 1821-1880

Flaubert
Colour portrait by Eugène Giraud

You may wonder why Flaubert is included in the Lyndon web site, the reason is that Juliet Herbert, his English mistress, was a governess to the Conant family and letters about her still exist.

Below is a letter from Catherine Conant, that mentions Flaubert and two letters from Juliet Herbert to Eva Fowkes nee Conant .
Both women were daughters of Edward Nathaniel Conant 1820 - 1901

In 1980 the book
"Flaubert and an English Governess The Quest for Juliet Herbert"
by Hermia Oliver was published by Oxford University Press.

Hermia Oliver did some of her research at Lyndon Hall.

From the Times Literary Supplement March 12, 2008 Gustave Flaubert's last letters Julian Barnes reads between the lines of Flaubert's letters on sex, art, bankruptcy and cliffs

The case of Juliet Herbert is particularly instructive. Thirty years ago, the governess who tutored Flaubert’s niece Caroline was just a fleeting presence in the letters; she was the subject of a few laddish remarks between Flaubert and Louis Bouilhet, and also known to have completed the first (now lost) translation of Madame Bovary, which she worked on side by side with the author. But not a single letter between them has survived; nor has any photograph of Miss Herbert ever surfaced. In 1980 Hermia Oliver, in Flaubert and an English Governess, proposed that Juliet was a greater and more continuing presence in Flaubert’s life than previously assumed. And now the relationship is taken as not just lifelong but enduringly sexual, so that when in 1878 – two decades after Juliet ceased work at Croisset – Flaubert signs off to Laporte from Paris, “Je vous embrasse. Votre GEANT (qui f . . . comme un âne)”, the Pléiade edition soberly notes, “Perhaps an allusion to Juliet Herbert”. It is hard not to wonder what the Herbert family would have made of this.