Flaubert clearly saw the real, the devastating emptiness of men’s hopes and dreams and aims and plans as they so often work out. What he did not always sufficiently convey directly in the path of realistic truthfulness is a sense of the fact that people may have a very good time, may really heartily enjoy their depressingly commonplace actions, as seen from other points of view – actions undistinguished, vulgar, stupid, and in the long run utterly futile even in respect to the pitifully worthless ambitions which inspired them – actions of which the one redeeming virtue is perhaps the very fact that their futility was not realized and the enjoyment of them thus made possible.

— John Garber Palache