SOURCE: Marsh, Leonard. “Of Walls and the Window: Charting Textual Markers in Flaubert's ‘Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier.’” Modern Language Studies 30, no. 1 (spring 2000): 157-65.

In the following essay, Marsh offers a stylistic analysis of Flaubert's “La légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier.”

The “Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier” is quite different in origin from its two adjacent tales in Flaubert's Trois Contes. Whereas the story of Félicité in “Un Coeur simple” is a fictional narrative and the subject of John the Baptist in “Hérodias” is already documented in the scriptures, the story of Julien is a hagiographic legend, an accretion of details and events over the centuries. As such, it is an admixture of various strains of stories containing personages with similar names and biographical details, both real and fictive. While recognizing the patchwork development of the legend, one critic posits Flaubert's own imposition...