Each of the canonical realist novelists - Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola - takes a pessimistic view of human happiness. Flaubert stands out as the one who shows no belief in a progress narrative. His characters fail repeatedly and decline. Each of his works is a construct of insufficiencies on the level of the plot and in the formation of character; the depicted world, while arguably realist, often seems a slightly lesser version of the real world. His characters' foibles are seldom explored with sympathy: there will be no tragedy here, just a kind of de-dramatised apathy marking time.

A glance at the correspondence might provide us with a way to think about failure in Flaubert’s work and the failure of Flaubert’s work, which are by and large the same thing (and with the caveat that an author is certainly no guarantor of the meaning of his own texts). Flaubert struggles while trying to produce what will become his first masterpiece, Madame Bovary. In a letter to Louise Colet, dated 24 April 1852, he complains about his slow pace, and indicates that he has written only twenty-five pages in the six weeks since he last saw her (Cor. ii 75). His general plan is in place for the novel and he indicates that he will start to write the ball scene on Monday. The process is problematic, for the slowness of the progress is producing a kind of lassitude in him, a sort of self-defeat, as he says that he is ‘annoyed/disappointed at not advancing’ [‘ennuyéde ne pas avancer’]. So it is more than just disappointment, but ennui, a boredom and a Weltschmerz (or world-weariness) that weigh heavily on him. Failure then is always imminent, if even progress can produce this feeling.