Excerpts from my conference « Cruel Games: Flaubert and the Melancholy of Childhood. » for the 51st Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, Oct. 30 – Nov. 1, 2025, Reno, Nevada. Flaubert’s youth, his first writings and the representations of childhood in his novels were my main subject of study. From the shy Berthe Bovary, who sadly plays in her own corner, to the life-size games of young Julian in Three Tales, in which he kills animals in a horrific way; or to the fatalistic views of Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert takes a cold, unkind look at childhood games. It’s a far cry from romantic clichés about the green paradise of childhood love. Nevertheless, in many of his stories, Flaubert, like a child again, uses the fantastic and the marvellous, and sometimes abandons himself to the charms of infinite naivety. “The storms that are so appealing in youth become tedious in middle age.” But probably we must hold on to them. “Farewell. God bless you, poor child!” as he wrote to his lover and soul mate Louise Colet. Childhood, which we’ve been deprived of for some reason, can be replayed, or rather played out for real, thanks to literature and the pleasure of playing with words, to the point of exhaustion. A belated childhood, so to speak, which still has a bitter taste, but which makes literature more than a game: a synonym for survival. #flaubert #frenchlitterature #NCFS #rouen #museeslitteraires #jeanbaptiste_chantoiseau