There are very few women I have not stripped naked in my imagination. I have savoured the flesh as an artist and I know it well. As for love, it has been the great preoccupation of my whole life. Whatever I have not given to pure art has all gone into love, and the heart I have observed is my own.

Gustave Flaubert, in a letter

Women are taught to lie shamelessly. An apprenticeship that lasts all their lives. From their first chambermaid down to the last lover who survives them, everyone does their bit to make them treacherous and then they raise a great outcry over it. Puritanism, prudery, bigotry, the whole system of strict confinement distorts and destroys in its prime the Good Lord's most charming creation.

Gustave Flaubert, in a letter

WHO IS EMMA BOVARY?

A farmer's daughter, educated in a convent where she learnt embroidery, the piano and pious submission but also acquired a taste for crazy romantic fiction. Married young to the local doctor. Deeply discontented since the birth of her daughter Berthe. Spends far too much on dresses, curtains and beautiful useless trinkets. Bored by her dull adoring husband. Begins an affair with Rodolphe, the local squire. Plans to elope with him to some faraway place, but Rodolphe gets cold feet and ditches her. Outraged, she falls ill, hallucinates, recovers, spends most of adoring husband's money begins an affair with a young lawyer, falls deeper and deeper into debt, swallows arsenic powder and dies horribly before the eyes of puzzled adoring husband.

WHO IS GUSTAVE FLAUBERT?

Pampered second son of a super-wealthy doctor. A great blonde giant of a man with green eyes and a splendid actor's voice. Lives quietly at home with his widowed mother, writing wonderful novels at a rate of five words an hour. Escapes regularly, from the age of fifteen, for miscellaneous wild unhygienic antics in brothels. Favourite reading: the Marquis de Sade. A great traveller (Corsica, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Morocco) and a great connoisseur of courtesans, actresses, dancing girls, acrobats, gypsies, idiots and simpletons of every stripe. Detests his respectable, provincial neighbours. Refers to them as the bourgeoisie. Usually to be found laid out on a white bearskin rug in front of a great fire, simply dreaming. Otherwise, pacing the room, waving his arms, sweat pouring down his face, bellowing out his latest sentence, a whole afternoon's work, his green eyes ablaze with excitement. Enjoys an immense but totally bogus local reputation for writing immoral books. Nice people avoid his company and he – very boisterously - returns the compliment.

THE REAL EMMA

It's just a love story. A superb French love story with an unhappy ending. A familiar sad lyrical small-town story about a woman who wants more. More love, more pleasure, more passion than real life can give her. Her name is Emma Bovary and she's the great nineteenth century heroine: reckless, dreamy, voluptuous, discontented, and marked out for a most unromantic early death. She's also one of the most magically erotic characters in modern fiction. We discover Emma's body through the delighted desiring eyes of her lovers. We're seduced as we read, seduced with relentless and exquisite skill by a writer who knows how body and soul are so gloriously tangled up in each other. It's one of the great pleasures of reading Madame Bovary. But then we also explore Emma's mind. As the story unfolds we go inside her head. We find ourselves somewhere under her skin, feeling a strange confused mixture of desire, tenderness, pity, sympathy, frustration and cold greedy impatience. It's a dangerous, exciting, shadowy place, Emma's mind. The anxious public guardians of nineteenth-century French morality found Emma's mind too shocking to contemplate. They immediately prosecuted Flaubert for outrage to public morality and religion.

But women often used to write to Flaubert. They were fascinated by his heroine. "I recognised her, I loved her, as if she had been a close friend. This story can't be made up, it must be true, this woman must be real..." How had he managed it? How had he, a mere man, found out such things about the female heart? But mainly they wanted to know who this extraordinary Emma was? Who was the model, the original? He usually gave them the same puzzling, throw-away answer: Madame Bovary, c'est moi. She's just me. An answer which is wonderfully clever and quotable, but not strictly true.   The real answer is even more interesting. The trail that leads to Emma Bovary will take us from a grave in a quiet country church-yard in the depths of Normandy, all the way to the dazzling decadent heart of nineteenth-century Parisian high society. Along the way, in search of the real Emma, there will be secret debts, bedroom scenes, furious husbands, a double suicide, and a collection of superb but ridiculously expensive dresses. Though whether Emma's story is a comedy, a tragedy, or a sweet dizzying mixture of both, remains to be seen.

These days the quiet little country village of Ry is only a fifteen-minute drive away from the busy centre of Rouen. Ten minutes in my Irish friend's beat-up black BMW. There, in the rich damp Normandy earth, only a few feet from the door of the church, the best position in the graveyard, lies the body of the young woman who was the original Madame Bovary. Here she is. If an imaginary woman can have a real grave, this must be it. Her name is Delphine Delamare. She died in 1848, at the age of twenty-seven, her name wrapped in a little poison-cloud of local scandal. People said that Delphine Delamare killed herself. But Delphine's head-stone looks nearly new. It can't possibly be nearly 150 years old. The helpful official leaflet tells me that in 1990 she got a new tombstone, paid for by the local literary society and the chamber of commerce. The neat black lettering on the yellow slab leaves no room for doubt. Delphine Delamare nee Couturier. Then, carved below the real name, there are just the words "Madame Bovary". It's a clever move. The village that once gossiped Delphine Delamare into an early grave now earns a good living from cultivating her memory. There's the Museum of Automata, housed in a big old barn. For ten francs you can see Emma's Wedding: fifty life-sized moving figures in authentic nineteenth-century costume. There's a thriving florist's shop called Emma's Garden. How she would have loved such a sweetly lucrative confusion of art and life.

Like Emma, Delphine Delamare was the unhappy wife of a none-too-successful village doctor. Like Emma, she had expensive tastes, a gullible adoring husband, a procession of lovers, and a secret festering pile of debts. Like Emma she met an early and ignominious death, probably at her own hand. Unlike Emma, Delphine Delamare was nothing special. Plump and pale, and rather plain, with dull blonde hair and a blotchy complexion. But she oozed sex. According to one witness Delphine had a sliding, sinuous walk, a caressing voice and wonderful beseeching eyes that seemed to change colour with the light. Were they grey, green or blue? Emma's eyes change colour too. But it's difficult to sort out the real Delphine. Everyone has embellished her story to make it fit the novel. Delphine Delamare now lies buried deep under a great mound of fantasy.

Louise Pradier, the other woman who went into the making of Madame Bovary, came from a world very different. Louise had everything that Delphine Delamare could only imagine: great beauty, great wealth, a talented successful husband and a house in the heart of Paris where the famous of the day were delighted to gather. But Louise Pradier's life makes a sad story.

At the age of eighteen, to escape from her father, she married James Pradier, the most successful sculptor of the day, a man old enough to be her father. From their luxurious house on the Quai Voltaire she presided over a salon that brought together poets, painters and musicians, as well as the merely fashionable. "Beauty is de rigueur" Louise wrote on her party invitations. The entertainment she supplied to her guests was always memorably lavish. There were musicians dressed in antique costume. There were fancy-dress processions of gods and goddesses. The high point of the evening was the appearance of Venus, embodied in the divinely voluptuous person of Louise Pradier herself, making her entrance in a diaphanous classical tunic held together by a large diamond. With her tight amber-red curls, her dazzling blue eyes, her powerful shoulders and the curious golden down on her breasts, Louise Pradier was a woman who could plausibly play the goddess.

Unlike Emma Bovary, Louise Pradier was allowed to stage her dreams and live out her passions. But luxury did her no good. It left her bleakly unsatisfied. Like Emma, Louise was eventually destroyed by a combination of debt and her own scandalous legendary promiscuity. Her husband lost patience with her and cast her off. Flaubert began to take an interest in her at this point. He was fascinated, artistically and erotically, by the superlative drama of the fallen woman. Louise was, in his words, "a whole orchestra of female sentiments. " He became one of her many lovers and later, when writing Madame Bovary, he borrowed many details from an unpublished manuscript history of Louise Pradier's hectic and unhappy life.

Flaubert turned the real lives of Delphine Delamare and Louise Pradier into the imagined life of Emma Bovary. But why did he go such lengths to hide the double face of his most celebrated character? There is a third woman who is also part of Emma's story: Flaubert's adored younger sister, Caroline. She was great companion of his childhood, his loyal ally in family every family dispute. A fragile, sickly, sensitive, affectionate woman, she married a loathsome local mediocrity and then died in childbirth, after many months of slow agony, at the age of twenty-two. For Flaubert the loss of Caroline was unspeakable. He seemed to feel only a kind of blank desolation. On the morning of his sister's funeral he took a plaster cast of her face and from this death-mask a life-size white marble bust was carved. The effigy of this dead sister was there in the room, like a ghostly memory of love, all through the years that Madame Bovary was being written.

In a letter to his Parisian mistress Flaubert wrote, "You talk about the unhappiness of women. That's the world I'm in at the moment. You'll see how deep I shall go down into the well of feeling. If my book works, it will gently tickle many a feminine wound. Many will smile as they recognise themselves. O I will have known your sufferings, you poor obscure souls, damp from your stifled sorrows, like your provincial backgardens where the moss is growing all down the walls." The potent sorrow of Caroline Flaubert's death seeped into the story of Emma

Bovary, flowing through between the lines. It was the memory of her that inspired Flaubert's marvellously lucid tenderness towards the sufferings, the dreams and the thwarted desires of women.

A SHORT PASSAGE FROM MADAME BOVARY

He couldn't stop himself continually touching her comb, her rings, her scarf. Sometimes he gave her big wet kisses on the cheek, sometimes a string of little kisses along her bare arm, from her fingertips to her shoulder; and she held him away, half laughing and half annoyed, as if he were a clinging child. Before her wedding day she had thought she was in love. But since she did not feel any of the happiness that comes from love she thought she must be mistaken. And Emma tried to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words that seemed so fine on the pages of books: felicity, passion and rapture.