Gustave scrambled up the rocks which formed the perimeter of the island. He had been in good spirits as he had walked out to this small rock a hundred yards offshore at St Malo. At low tide the island jutted out from the expanse of gleaming, wet sand. When he reached the top he collapsed giggling on the grass. Another superb day on the three-month walking trip beckoned. 

   Gustave made an effort to compose himself. There it was. Chateaubriand’s tomb. It was empty of course. Chateaubriand had had it built 23 years earlier and thereby had unwittingly created a popular tourist site. Gustave lay back on the damp grass, closed his eyes and let his mind wander through the events of the great adventure.

   He had made a deliberate choice to start the trip by walking across Paris before taking the train to the Loire. There was an element of play-acting; he was a vagabond, a gypsy, happy and free. 

  His first stopping place on the Loire was the town of Blois. He spent the day climbing the narrow streets from the river to the castle at the top of the hill. It was Sunday; the houses were shuttered and the streets silent. There were literary associations everywhere. This was where Hugo had grown up as a boy and one of the places from which Balzac had drawn inspiration. 

   Gustave imagined the people sequestered behind the shutters. He began to focus in particular on what it must be like for a woman who may already be trapped in a loveless marriage; one who, like him, had read everyone’s Romantic hero, Chateaubriand. A book was forming in his mind. He had tried before, unsatisfactorily, to express his feelings about the disappearance of the Romantic promise of the turn of the century. How bourgeois reality had dashed those hopes and dreams.

  When Gustave opened his eyes and stood up on Chateaubriand’s rock he felt fully alive. Later he would remember returning to St Malo “animated, moved, almost furious”. As he walked slowly on the sand a name popped into Gustave’s mind.

He would call her Emma; Emma Bovary