Add to ORKGThe present article studies the relation between autobiography and fiction in Flaubert’s Memoirs of a Madman, elucidating the characteristics of madness as this work’s main theme and also as a bond permitting the fusion of these two elements in a dichotomy, applicable in fact to Flaubert’s entire opus. Analyzing the novelist’s attitude towards truth and beauty as deduced from Memoirs and also from later works, the author perceives this dualism as a quest for the credibility of beauty, and explains the particularities of Flaubert’s autobiographical presence. He stresses out the paradox of Flaubert glorifying Cartesian reason and simultaneously proclaiming himself as a madman in order to fictionalize and make overwhelming and passionate what ...