From Chapter Two:

One night towards eleven o'clock they were awakened by the noise of a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant opened the garret-window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below. He came for the doctor, had a letter for him. Natasie came downstairs shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left his horse, and, following the servant, sud-denly came in behind her. He pulled out from his wool cap with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in a rag and presented it gingerly to Charles, who rested on his elbow on the pillow to...

Following Emma Rouault's marriage to a dull, provincial doctor, she gives up on her dreams of a wonderful life. She finds solace in sentimental novels, but her escape is only brief; Flaubert's most well-known novel, it has lasted the test of time for good reason.

Gustave Flaubert was a French writer considered one of the best novelists of his time during the 19th century, and today critics remember him for being a perfectionist. However, most readers today remember him as the author of Madame Bovary, a story about a doctor's wife who tries to escape her mundane life through a string of adulterous affairs. In its day, Madame Bovary was criticized for being obscene, but that only helped it become a bestseller, and today it is praised as one of the best works of Realism.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many classics that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

The story of this novel by Gustave Flaubert focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published as a single volume. The novel is now considered Flaubert's...

Madame Bovary scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857. And the story itself remains as fresh today as when it was first written, a work that remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. It tells the tragic story of the romantic but empty-headed Emma Rouault. When Emma marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is an ordinary country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her...