'I love history, madly. I find the dead more agreeable than the living. Where does the seductiveness of the past come from?' ['J'aime l'histoire, follement. Les morts m'agréent plus que les vivants. D'o ù vient cette séduction du passé?' (Cor. iii 95)] The fascination with history that Flaubert evokes in this letter of 1860 lasted throughout his life and colours all his work. Although at first sight his writings may seem to fall neatly into two categories - those set firmly in the France of his own time (Madame Bovary, both versions of L'Education sentimentale, Un coeur simple, Bouvard et Pécuchet) and those set in the distant past (most of his juvenilia, Salammbô, La Tentation de saint Antoine, La Légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier, Hérodias) - this chapter will argue that a concern with the past, and how we make sense of it, runs through all of them. If he was seduced by the past, Flaubert also recognised that historians, like novelists, must sift and shape their material and find a perspective through which to view and reconstruct the world. He was acutely aware of the fluid and subjective nature of history, and his gradually evolving views on how to represent the historical past are fundamental to his conception of the creative process.