Bouvard and Pecuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas.
In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is "a kind of encyclopedia made...

A book that deeply influenced the young Freud and was the inspiration for many artists, The Temptation of Saint Anthony was Flaubert's lifelong work, thirty years in the making. Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it is a fantastical rendering of one night during which Anthony is besieged by carnal temptations and philosophical doubt.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic reproduces the distinguished Lafcadio Hearn translation, which translator Richard Sieburth calls "a splendid period piece from one of...

An acknowledged master of translation, Francis Steegmuller has given us by far the most generous and varied selection of Flaubert's letters in English. He presents these with an engrossing narrative that places them in the context of the writer's life and times. Throughout this exposition in Flaubert's own words of his views on life, literature, and the passions, readers of his novels will be powerfully reminded of the fertility of his genius, and delighted by his poetic enthusiasm. Flaubert's letters are documents of life and art; lovers of literature and of the literary adventure can...

For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for -offenses against morality and religion.- What shocks us today about Flaubert's devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis Steegmuller), and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as vital as its doomed heroine. In reading Madame Bovary,...

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes' Flaubert s Parrot, Felicite, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert's "great saint" endures loss after loss by embracing the rich, true rhythms of life: the comfort of domesticity, the solace of the Church, and the depth of memory. This novella showcases Flaubert's perfectly honed realism: a delicate counterpoint of daily events with their psychological repercussions. "Flaubert is...

A classic novel relating the story of a young country doctor's wife who seeks escape from the boredom of her existence in love affairs and romantic yearnings, and who is doomed to disillusionment.

Purchase one of 1st World Librarys Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. 1st World Library-Literary Society is a non-profit educational organization. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - For half a century the housewives of Pont-lEveque had envied Madame Aubain her servant Felicite. For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did the housework, washed, ironed, mended, harnessed the horse, fattened the poultry, made the butter and remained faithful to her mistress - although the latter was by no means an agreeable person. ...

We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work. The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice - "Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care; hell be in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one of the upper classes, as becomes his age." The "new fellow,"...