National audience “It’s the work of all my life”, says Flaubert, referring to La Tentation de saint Antoine. Over almost thirty years, manuscripts record the development of the writer and his time, aesthetic and epistemological transformations. Mr Flaubert wrote a first version before Ms Bovary and he did not publish the last text until 1874, six years before his death. The transcription, ranking and presentation of the scenarios written in the late 1840s and early 1870s give access to the lab of a work that addresses the major issues of his time on religions, morals and the origin of life, sometimes using contemporary scientific knowledge. The reader will discover both Flaubert’s working methods and the formation of an atypical, erudite and oniric work that explores the unconscious nature of a turbulent ermite of desires and anxieties. It is another romantic and pre-symbolist Flaubert that the scenarios of La Tentation de Saint Antoine will give the readers of Ms Bovary and L’Education sentimental. He wanted to leave everything out of his own to his audience, but he lends to saint Antoine a taste of strange, a fascination for the exuberant images and the excentricities of antiquity he shares with his character. Saint Antoine is he? Let the reader judge.