<p>As a provocative tale of passion and complacency, ideals and self-delusions, Madame Bovary (1857) remains a milestone in European fiction. In telling his story of Emma Bovary?a farmer's daughter who, with girlhood dreams fuelled by sensational novels, marries a provincial doctor?Flaubert inaugurated a literary mode that would be called Realism. But so exacting were Flaubert's standards of authenticity that his portrayal of the breakd...