Gustave (ɡystav). 1821–80, French novelist and short-story writer, regarded as a leader of the 19th-century naturalist school. His most famous novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for which he was prosecuted (and acquitted) on charges of immorality, and L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) deal with the conflict of romantic attitudes and bourgeois society. His other major works include Salammbô (1862), La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874), and Trois contes (1877)