A Gueuloir of One’s Own: Computing the Acoustic Signature of Flaubert

Can the traces of an ear-driven literary practice be detected in prose? This paper addresses the question through the case of Gustave Flaubert, whose gueuloir, his habit of declaiming sentences aloud and revising them by ear, has long been assumed to shape his writing. We compare Flaubert’s novels against those of three contemporaries (Aimard, Chevalier, Ponson du Terrail). We first show that phonetic transcriptions consistently outperform orthographic versions of the texts for authorship attribution, suggesting that French spelling obscures part of the authorial signal and that phonemes are more reliable stylometric features than graphemes. Building on this finding, we examine different dimensions of the acoustic signal to characterise each author’s signature. At the phonemic level, Flaubert displays a higher cluster density, a lower vowel-to-consonant ratio, and a reduced bigram entropy. Rhythmically, his writing is also distinctive, with sparser stresses, longer unstressed runs, and more predictable local sequences, though rhythm alone provides a weaker basis for attribution. These results demonstrate that the gueuloir is characterised by a consonantal texture and a monotonous flow. More broadly, they make a case for phonetic-based stylometry as a method for studying acoustic phenomena in prose composition, especially for French.