It is now almost a commonplace that the best biography of Flaubert consists of his Correspondence. Biographers tell the facts; the letters reveal the man. Gide wrote that "for more than five years the Correspondence took the place of the Bible at my bedside. It was my reservoir of energy." Sartre, who fought Flaubert all his life, considered the letters a perfect example of free-association from the pre-Freudian couch. Even those who find the novels too perfect, too worked, often succumb to the directness, exuberance, wit, argumentativeness and unfettered intelligence of the letters.

                                                  It is now 30 years since the first volume of the Pleiade edition of
                                                  the Correspondence appeared. Three more followed at long and
                                                  unpredictable intervals. By the time the fifth and final one
                                                  appears, in a year or two's time, it will have taken a
                                                  century-and-a-quarter from the writer's death in 1880 to establish
                                                  as definitive a text of as many of the letters as has proved
                                                  possible. In charge of this work from the beginning was Jean
                                                  Bruneau, who died earlier this month with the end of his life's
                                                  work nearly in sight.

                                                  Bruneau was born in Nancy in 1922, the son of the grammarian
                                                  and lexicographer Charles Bruneau. At the age of 19 he joined
                                                  the Resistance, was arrested in the Jura in 1944 and deported
                                                  to Dachau. After the war he went to teach in America and began
                                                  dividing his time between chairs at Lyon University and Harvard.
                                                  In America he was on drinking terms with the pre-Lolita
                                                  Nabokov, and used to be summoned by Marguerite Yourcenar
                                                  whenever she felt the urge to have a conversation in Greek
                                                  (Bruneau's wife Lavinia would slip off into the Yourcenar garden,
                                                  which she grew to know well). In 1962 he published Les Debuts
                                                  litteraires de Gustave Flaubert, which led to his being invited, in
                                                  the mid-1960s, to edit the Pleiade Correspondence. The job was
                                                  frugally rewarded, and his academic life continued as before; but
                                                  from that point on the Bruneau dining table would have to be
                                                  cleared of Flaubert letters before the family could eat.

                                                  Flaubert's letters had first been given to the world by his niece
                                                  Caroline (who suppressed indecencies, corrected his
                                                  punctuation and tidied up his phrasing). Fuller editions followed,
                                                  but they were far from perfect; some had active misreadings
                                                  (Flaubert's handwriting is often hard to decipher); none had
                                                  adequate editorial backup. Bruneau established the text,
                                                  tracked down new letters, and provided a formidably detailed
                                                  critical apparatus: the appendices, notes and variants to Volume
                                                  Three, for instance, take up more pages than the text itself;
                                                  there are letters written in reply to Flaubert, excerpts from the
                                                  Goncourt Journal, third-party documents, historical background,
                                                  all of which bring amplification, corroboration, or, if necessary,
                                                  contradiction to the master's utterances. Flaubert only has to
                                                  mention in passing a book he might have dipped into for
                                                  Bruneau to give a succinct and pertinent summary of it. You
                                                  begin with words and you end up with a world. The editorial
                                                  knowledge and scholarship were unmatchable; but Bruneau also
                                                  had the perfect editorial temperament. He was modest yet
                                                  deeply tenacious; self-effacing yet filled with a drive for perfection
                                                  and completeness.

                                                  He had many successes - in 1974 he discovered Louise Colet's
                                                  then unpublished Mementoes in Avignon - and some inevitable
                                                  failures. Owners of letters could be reluctant to take the wider
                                                  view, suspecting (often rightly) that publication would reduce the
                                                  value of what they owned. Bruneau also came up against
                                                  narrow-mindedness and pig-headedness. For instance, Flaubert
                                                  wrote hundreds of letters to his publisher Michel Levy, many of
                                                  which appeared in the Conard edition (1926-33). Later, a further
                                                  102 turned up, published in 1965 in a tiny edition by Levy's
                                                  successor, Calmann-Levy. When Bruneau applied for
                                                  permission to reprint them, in his second volume (1980), he was
                                                  told he could cite the Conard letters in full, but use only the date
                                                  and first line of the 102 published 15 years previously. Such
                                                  situations require both tact and a holding of temper. Also a
                                                  continual optimism: believing that letters will turn up is often
                                                  necessary to making them turn up. To the end of his life,
                                                  Bruneau was convinced Flaubert's letters to the English
                                                  governess Juliet Herbert (and hers to him) would eventually
                                                  resurface.

                                                  The curmudgeonliness of proprietors contrasted sharply with the
                                                  generosity prevalent among Flaubert scholars. When Francis
                                                  Steegmuller was preparing his two-volume English edition of the
                                                  letters, Bruneau simply gave him free access to all that he knew
                                                  and held (so that some late letters appeared in English
                                                  translation before they did in French original). In 1981, Alphonse
                                                  Jacobs established the definitive text of the magnificent
                                                  exchange between Flaubert and George Sand; later, when
                                                  Bruneau got to that point in the Correspondence, Jacobs simply
                                                  allowed him to reproduce everything.

                                                  Much of this was down to Bruneau's personal as well as
                                                  professional qualities. The Flaubert website
                                                  (www.univ-rouen.fr/flaubert), announcing his death, described
                                                  him as "unassuming, straightforward and scrupulous", one who
                                                  never failed to acknowledge the tiniest article from the most
                                                  junior Flaubertiste. The only time I met him, he was already
                                                  aware that his mental powers were failing (a consequence, it is
                                                  thought, of his wartime treatment); he handled the situation with
                                                  exquisite courtesy and gentle regret. When it became clear that
                                                  he would be unable to finish the final volume, he handed over to
                                                  Yvan Leclerc, professor at Rouen University. By the time Leclerc
                                                  completes the final volume, he will have been at work for seven
                                                  or eight years; but in the true tradition of Flaubert editors, it is
                                                  Bruneau's name that he will place on the title-page.

                                                  The Flaubert website ended its announcement of Bruneau's
                                                  death with a quote from the first volume of the Correspondence.
                                                  The novelist, writing from Constantinople in 1850, on hearing of
                                                  the death of Balzac: "When a man we admire dies, we are
                                                  always sad." Many who never met Bruneau, but who learned
                                                  over decades to absorb his precise, humane and scholarly
                                                  presence through a trail of prefaces and square brackets and
                                                  notes and addenda and notes to addenda, will be saddened by
                                                  his death. When Alphonse Jacobs was dying in 1986, he wrote
                                                  to Bruneau: "Please do not pity me: I feel no pity for myself. I
                                                  think that my life has had a certain usefulness. I have done one
                                                  thing that I think will endure." Bruneau quoted these words when
                                                  he wrote Jacobs's obituary in Le Monde. Those who admired
                                                  Jean Bruneau will trust that he realised he had done one thing -
                                                  one very large thing - which will truly endure.