They’ll have to hire a girl. The father knows why. The daughter will no longer tolerate any housework that gets her hands dirty. She gives excuses the father doesn’t ­believe, but he doesn’t argue.

Gustave flaubert’s niece, Caroline Franklin Grout, once made note of a habit he had “of writing out his most profound impressions for himself alone, at the moment of experiencing them, then placing them in sealed envelopes.” He did this, she recalled, at the deaths of his friends Alfred Le Poittevin and Louis Bouilhet, and perhaps also at the death of his sister.