acter of Hussonnet. At last an hour would come when, as Flaubert put it, he would feel the "need of writing":
When he began the work of composition he would first write quite rapidly a piece consisting of a whole episode, five or six pages at most. Sometimes, when the right word would not come, he would leave it blank. Then he would start in again with this same piece, and it would be a matter of two or three weeks, sometimes more, of impassioned labour over those five or six pages. He wanted them perfect, and I assure you that perfection to him was not a simple matter. He weighed each word, examining not only the meaning but the conformation as well. Avoidance of repetitions, of rhymes, of harsh sounds was merely the rough beginning of his task. He went so far as not to allow the same syllables to recur in a phrase; sometimes a single letter got on his nerves and he would search for words in which it did not occur; then again he sometimes had need of a definite number of r's to give a rolling effect to a sentence.
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