QUOTE : In 1872, when he was over fifty, Gustave Flaubert recalled the heady atmosphere of his youth in Rouen during the July Monarchy:<br />"I don’t know what the dreams of today’s students are, but ours were superbly extravagant—last expansions of the romanticism reaching us and which, compressed by the provincial milieu, produced a strange effervescence in our brains . . . enthusiastic hearts longed for dramatic amours with gondolas, black masks, and highborn ladies fainting in postal carriages in the middle of Calabria.