The New Yorker published a piece by a staff writer called Judith Thurman last week that is really quite special.

It is a review of a new biography of Gustave Flaubert, who is known to freshmen college students the world over for Madame Bovary, perhaps the first modern novel to acknowledge that women are complex, three-dimensional humans beings.

Ms Thurman is as keen as mustard about Flaubert, but a little lukewarm about the book, “Flaubert: A Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Geoffrey Wall. She says Mr Wall “has a penchant for the pastoral ‘we’, and... occasionally succumbs to what, for a Flaubertian, is the fatal pitfall of solemnity.”

This is a pitfall into which Ms Thurman, obviously also a Flaubertian, does not fall... between the lines of her review, I detect a long, low, musical chuckle, probably inspired by the life of this very talented, but very naughty man.

André Gide said it was unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Croix de la Légion d’honneur, and he might well have had Flaubert in mind.

I have my own reasons for liking him. One of them is that he wrote a wonderfully lush book called Salammb|0xf4|. It deals with the siege of Carthage by mercenaries in 240-237 BC, and it makes Star Wars and the comic fables of Heavy Metal look limp.

It’s a book that would be extraordinary enough if it had been published yesterday. But in 1862? It must have left the critics open-mouthed, speechless, gasping for air.

The clincher for me, though, has to be the fact that M Flaubert wrote a dictionary during his life, and deliberately left out all the words between Cognac and Coitus, so that the one might follow the other without unnatural delay or interruption. You have to love him for that.

Ms Thurman quotes a little piece from Madame Bovary that she describes as a rare editorial aside from the author. Our heroine has begun to bore her lover with what Ms Thurman describes as “romantic effusions”.

Flaubert comments: “As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.”

Not surprisingly, Ms Thurman liked that. And she warned, as a result, that “Anyone foolhardy enough to enter the lists with Flaubert must submit to the ordeal-by-humiliation of sharing a page with his sentences.” D’accord.

But it is that struggle to make language provide a precisely exact measure that unites everyone who writes — from the youngest child scribbling first words on a piece of ruled paper, all the way up the ladder to someone of Gustave Flaubert’s calibre.

It is, for those who enjoy it, the most absorbing, thrilling, satisfying game there is. No business deal, no big game hunt, no hook-sinking can measure up to a successful stalk for the elusive quarry. Hard for some to understand, I know (and especially hard, perhaps, for those who haven’t bothered to learn very many words during their wretched, misspent lives), but there it is.

Those who write in English are lucky. It is the most powerful language in the world. It contains so many words that it is capable of communicating nuances of meaning that might be impossible in another language. The choice of one word over another, the choice of one type of sentence construction over another — these are the sinews of English, that a practised writer builds with to create muscular prose, prose with colour and flavour, prose that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The supple nature of English makes one wonder what it must be like, trying to push a more rigid language around, in an attempt to create meaning. Take German, for example. Mark Twain said: “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.” That verb-at-the-end-of-the-sentence business seems more suited to the parade square than asking someone to pass the sugar.

It is worth remembering that much of the power of English, and its ability to aspire to beauty, derives from French, in fact, the language of the eloquent M Flaubert.

The English don’t like to talk about it much, but England was conquered by the French at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and ruled by them for 200 years.

Harold, who was done in at Hastings by what Stanley Holloway used to call “an eye full of arrer”, was the last English-speaking King on the throne for nearly three hundred years. In the meantime, the French purged English officialdom of English, and the English, and substituted French, and the French.

As a result, England became a strange place — religion, law, science and literature were all conducted in French and Latin, not English. Imagine how an English speaking defendant must have felt, taken to court for, say, driving his cart under the influence, and not being able to understand a word of the proceedings. French was the language of the élite, and to use French in speech became a sign of sophistication.

You would have thought that in these circumstances, use of English might die out completely. But it did not, partly, perhaps, because class stratification meant there was little mixing of French speakers with English-speaking commoners, and partly because the language, fused as it was with Scandanavian languages, had already become too hardy and too useful to abandon.

In fact, the first recorded post-Conquest occasion on which an English word was used in an official document involved a court case brought by Henry III against some of his citizens. The clerk of the court, trained in Latin, couldn’t think of the correct word to describe the King’s suit, so he borrowed from English, and used the word nameless, or pointless, as we would say today.

Eventually, the French left, but the English language would never be the same again. French was the first language of many who belonged to the English upper classes. To this day, some Englishmen are able to guess about the class to which people belong according to the words they choose, when there are two for the same thing, one with an English root and one with a French.

They can also make guesses about background from the way certain words, borrowed from the French, are pronounced. Envelope is a good example... if you want to be classy, the first syllable should rhyme with don, not ten.

The late Sir Compton Mackenzie was once asked to name the ten most beautiful words in the English language. He named 20 — a first and a second team — and ran them into blank verse.

Carnation, azure, peril, moon, forlorn, heart, silence, shadow, April, apricot.

Damask and damson, doom and harlequin and fire, autumn, vanity, flame, nectarine, desire.

He had good taste. But of these, how many have Old English or Scandanavian roots? I make it five — forlorn, heart, shadow, doom and fire. The rest are mostly French, with some Latin, and a little German and Greek thrown in for good measure.

The numbers tell the tale. To the extent that we who speak English have a shot at being able to move the stars to pity, our greatest debt is to the language of M Flaubert.gshorto[AT]ibl.bm.