[Gustave Flaubert and his double, or the dialectic of the hemispheres in artistic creation]

Paul Girard was intrigued by Gustave Flaubert, author of the famous French novel Madame Bovary, because of the relationship between the author's style and his left temporal epilepsy. Gustave Flaubert led a double life; a highly appreciated guest at the best of Parisian soirées, he spent much of his life at Croisset as a hermit. He spoke little, yet he wrote in an extremely elaborate literary style. These contrasts cannot be explained solely on the grounds of an intercritical behaviour syndrome due to temporal epilepsy. For Flaubert, writing was a mean of compensating for an unbalanced hemispheric activation, his rigorous attention to style taming his overabundant imagination.