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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Bouvard & Pécuchet', Gustave Flaubert explores the themes of knowledge and ignorance through the comedic misadventures of two middle-aged clerks who attempt to educate themselves in various subjects with disastrous results. This satirical novel shines a spotlight on the absurdity of human ambition and the limitations of intellect. Flaubert's precise prose and detailed descriptions create a vivid portrait of 19th-century French society, making the reader both laugh and reflect on the folly of the characters' pursuits. Set against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, this work serves as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of overreaching in pursuit of knowledge. Flaubert's innovative use of irony and wit sets 'Bouvard & Pécuchet' apart as a masterpiece of comedy and social criticism. Gustave Flaubert, known for his meticulous attention to detail and dedication to realism, was inspired to write 'Bouvard & Pécuchet' by his own frustrations with the educational system and society at large. His commitment to portraying the truth of human nature and society shines through in this work, as he exposes the absurdity of the characters' attempts to better themselves. Flaubert's deep understanding of human psychology and his keen observations of social dynamics make 'Bouvard & Pécuchet' a compelling and thought-provoking read. I highly recommend 'Bouvard & Pécuchet' to readers who enjoy sharp satire, philosophical musings, and intricate character studies. Flaubert's wit and insight make this novel a timeless classic that continues to resonate with contemporary audiences, inviting us to question our own pursuits of knowledge and self-improvement. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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BOUVARD & PÉCUCHET
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Two humble copy clerks set out to devour the sum of human knowledge and, propelled by zeal and method, repeatedly collide with the world’s unruly particulars, exposing the comedy, pathos, and vanity that haunt every grand system of understanding.
Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education, devoted his final years to Bouvard & Pécuchet. Composed chiefly in the 1870s and left unfinished at his death in 1880, it first appeared posthumously in 1881. This late project distills Flaubert’s lifelong pursuit of precision and irony into a uniquely ambitious design. Many editions present the narrative alongside his scenarios and notes, sometimes with the satirical Dictionnaire des idées reçues, underscoring the novel’s hybrid stature as both story and intellectual dossier. Its origins in meticulous research and deliberate incompletion are essential to its distinctive presence in literary history.
The premise is disarmingly simple: two Parisian copyists meet, form an immediate bond, and, after a change in fortune, retire to the countryside to remake themselves through study. Convinced that knowledge confers dignity and mastery, they turn to one domain after another—agriculture, history, science, the arts—seeking in books and experiments a reliable path to truth. Their enthusiasm is real, their method earnest, and their results persistently unsettled. Flaubert builds the narrative from cycles of inquiry and revision, showing how theory strains against experience without revealing outcomes beyond this restless, comic pursuit of learning and self-transformation.
Bouvard & Pécuchet holds classic status because it restages the nineteenth century’s faith in progress as a drama of form. Flaubert welds realist observation to an encyclopedic impulse, crafting a novel that behaves like a cabinet of disciplines while preserving the rigor of impersonal style. The result is a work that tests the limits of the traditional plot, exchanging linear destiny for cumulative investigation. Its influence radiates through twentieth-century fiction that experiments with catalogs, pastiche, and documentary texture, while its exacting prose and structural audacity secure its place alongside the great monuments of European realism and its reinventions.
Flaubert’s satire is not a dismissal of knowledge but a forensic inquiry into how knowledge is made. Bouvard and Pécuchet confront the stubborn gap between classification and life, where neat schemes falter before ambiguity, contradiction, and chance. The book interrogates the authority of experts, the allure of systems, and the comfort of ready-made explanations—a timely meditation in any era of intellectual fashion. It also reflects the nineteenth century’s proliferation of manuals and popular science, capturing the exhilaration and confusion that accompany expanding access to information and the dream of universal education.
Copying sits at the center of this vision. As professional scribes, the protagonists have spent their lives reproducing the words of others; their attempt to become authors of their own knowledge thus carries a poignant, comic charge. Flaubert turns duplication into metaphor: the circulation of ideas, the recycling of clichés, the endless relay between sources and practice. The novel continually asks whether originality is possible amid a torrent of preexisting discourse, and whether the act of copying can itself become a creative, critical stance toward culture’s vast archive.
The book’s method is deliberately polyphonic. Flaubert read and excerpted treatises, manuals, histories, and period journals to supply his protagonists with competing authorities. The narrative adopts, tests, and subverts these voices, shifting from expository calm to comic deflation with surgical timing. Lists, summaries, and experiments punctuate the story, yet the prose remains economical and exact. This careful orchestration allows the reader to feel the seduction of tidy explanations while observing their collapse, not through overt authorial judgment but through the friction between text and world that Flaubert so patiently stages.
Upon publication after Flaubert’s death, Bouvard & Pécuchet puzzled some readers and fascinated others, a fate common to books that arrive ahead of their critical apparatus. Over time, it has been recognized as a visionary exploration of the novel’s capacity to incorporate, parody, and interrogate the discourses of its day. Scholars prize its documentary depth and structural daring; general readers savor its mordant humor and crisp scenes of provincial life. Its posthumous status invites engagement with drafts and notes, encouraging a rare transparency about literary process, intention, and the open-endedness of artistic design.
The novel’s reach extends far beyond its century. It has been recognized as a precursor to twentieth- and twenty-first-century works that mix narrative with essay, catalog, and collage, and to experiments that interrogate how knowledge is organized. Writers and critics have returned to it for its portrayal of intellectual ambition entangled with human limitation, and for its cool, lucid ironies. Its comedy of method—of how procedures, rules, and experiments promise control yet produce surprise—speaks to traditions of modern and postmodern storytelling that explore the porous boundary between literature and the encyclopedia.
Reading Bouvard & Pécuchet is to encounter Flaubert’s famously exacting standard—each sentence poised between elegance and mockery. The humor is never broad; its sharpness lies in measure, timing, and the refusal to sentimentalize or condemn. The protagonists are treated with a curious compassion, their dreams granted full seriousness even as their trials reveal error and excess. This tonal balance allows the book to avoid didacticism. Instead, it invites readers to experience the tug-of-war between system and reality, to feel how language both clarifies and distorts when confronted with ordinary life.
For contemporary audiences, the novel feels startlingly current. The age of manuals and salons has given way to search engines and forums, yet the condition it depicts—abundant information, fervent self-improvement, contested expertise—remains familiar. The protagonists’ oscillation between fields mirrors our own migrations across tutorials, think pieces, and data dashboards. Their challenges raise questions central to today’s discourse: How do we weigh evidence? What role do communities and tools play in shaping knowledge? When does curiosity become credulity? Flaubert’s cool gaze illuminates the exhilarations and traps of an information-saturated culture.
Bouvard & Pécuchet endures because it transforms a period curiosity into a timeless parable of learning, error, and the dignity of persistence. As a late work by a major novelist, it consolidates decades of stylistic rigor while pointing toward new forms of narrative inquiry. As a satire, it entertains without condescension. As a meditation on knowledge, it asks readers to examine their own habits of reading, testing, and believing. In an era that prizes quick mastery and instant synthesis, Flaubert’s novel offers a bracing, humane reminder of complexity—and of the strange, enduring comedy of our attempts to make sense of the world.
Synopsis
Gustave Flaubert’s BOUVARD & PÉCUCHET, published posthumously in 1881, is an unfinished satirical novel about two Parisian copy clerks who decide to devote themselves to knowledge. Meeting by chance and recognizing a kindred zeal, they embark on a grand experiment in self-education. An unexpected inheritance frees them from office life and finances their retreat to the countryside, where they hope to test the truths found in books. The narrative proceeds as a sequence of attempts to master one domain after another, turning the pair’s enthusiasm into an inquiry about modern learning itself: its promises, its contradictions, and its frequently comic collisions with reality.
Their first ambition is to improve the land they acquire, transforming a modest property into a rational, productive model farm. Armed with agricultural manuals, they reorganize fields, experiment with crop rotations, prune orchards, and adopt the latest horticultural advice. Seasons, soils, pests, and local customs push back. Counsel from neighbors contradicts what the treatises prescribe, and each failure leads to a new method, a new purchase, or a new theory. The episodes highlight the gap between printed expertise and practical know-how, while the protagonists’ sincerity and perseverance keep propelling them into ever more elaborate schemes.
Turning to the natural sciences, they convert rooms into makeshift laboratories and cabinets of curiosities. They collect specimens, attempt chemical reactions, calibrate instruments, and chase after definitive laws that might explain everything they observe. Each authoritative source clashes with another, and every controlled trial is upset by variables they neither foresee nor manage. Mishaps and baffling results accumulate, not through malice but through the stubborn complexity of the world they seek to measure. The book’s episodic structure emphasizes a central dilemma: when evidence and doctrine diverge, which should prevail, and how does a layperson choose among competing truths?
From science they move to the past, embracing archaeology and history. Enthralled by relics and ruins, they attempt excavations and survey local sites, hoping to piece together origins from fragments. Soon the seductions of historical narrative beckon: they try to write history in a grand synthesis, only to be overwhelmed by divergent schools, rival chronologies, and irreconcilable interpretations. Facts refuse to cohere into a single, satisfying plot. Footnotes multiply as conviction dwindles. Their struggle dramatizes historiography’s core tension: the desire for a seamless account versus the unruly units of evidence, each inviting comparison, contradiction, and endless revision.
Philosophy and religion follow. They read theologians, skeptics, moralists, and mystics, alternating between dogma and doubt. Conversations with representatives of belief and reason in their community intensify the dialectic. They test systems—metaphysics, deism, materialism—and dabble in fashionable curiosities such as magnetism and spiritualism, hoping for a proof that bypasses argument altogether. None supplies durable certainty. The pair’s oscillations avoid caricature by tracking a genuine need for coherence, even as the abundance of doctrines thins conviction. Flaubert’s satire targets not faith or disbelief alone, but the credulous haste with which systems promise clarity where experience supplies ambiguity.
Health becomes another field for reform. They consult a physician and read medical compendia, then subject themselves to regimens, cures, and hygienic regimes touted as scientific. Diets change, devices are tried, and symptoms—real or imagined—become data points in amateur clinical trials. Conflicts between traditional medicine and competing therapies lay bare professional rivalries as much as methodological disputes. Their bodies turn into testing grounds for principles that keep failing to replicate. The scenes underscore the difficulty of distinguishing careful observation from self-deception, especially when anxiety, hope, and fashion color what counts as evidence and what counts as a cure.
Public life and education also entice them. Political theory offers visions of justice and progress, which they attempt to apply in local debates and civic projects, only to encounter entrenched interests and theoretical inconsistencies. Their educational experiments aim to form rational, virtuous citizens through enlightened instruction; instead, they confront the stubbornness of habit, boredom, and the clash between ideal curricula and real learners. These episodes probe how institutions conserve themselves against reform, and how abstract concepts—rights, duties, sovereignty—fracture when translated into procedures, punishments, and pedagogy.
They finally turn to literature and the arts, seeking in aesthetics the unity denied by facts. They imitate models, test genres, and try their hand at criticism, only to discover that taste, like truth, refuses to settle. Drafts proliferate, echoes outweigh voices, and the temptation to compile excerpts grows. Copying—once a humble occupation—reappears as a strangely dignified refuge, a means to gather the world without pretending to master it. The mass of notes they accumulate gestures toward a vast compendium of commonplaces and contradictions, in which the spectacle of learning itself becomes the subject, and classification threatens to replace creation.
Across its kaleidoscopic episodes, the novel satirizes the nineteenth century’s confidence in systems while honoring the restless curiosity that sustains inquiry. It frames knowledge as a moving target: abundant, contentious, partial, and dependent on context. By showing how theory repeatedly founders on practice—and how practice invites new theories—Flaubert asks what intellectual integrity might look like when certainty is scarce. The unfinished state leaves the central questions open, yet the work endures as a lucid comedy of method and a caution about information without judgment, offering a modern-seeming portrait of minds overwhelmed and animated by the very riches they pursue.
Historical Context
Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard & Pécuchet is set in nineteenth-century France, moving from Paris to a fictional Norman village. The narrative unfolds within a centralized nation-state built by Napoleonic institutions and sustained by prefects, mayors, notaries, parish priests, and schoolmasters. Civil law, codified in the Code Napoléon, organizes property and family life. The Concordat era leaves the Catholic Church entrenched in rituals, education, and local charity. A growing bureaucracy regulates daily existence while learned authorities—scientists, doctors, engineers, agronomists—claim new prestige. The story’s frame is thus a landscape of officialdom and expertise, in which ordinary people encounter a flood of doctrines said to explain nature, society, and moral conduct.
The book was written late in Flaubert’s life (he worked on it in the 1870s) and published posthumously in 1881, after his death in 1880. Born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a hospital surgeon, Flaubert knew Normandy’s provincial society intimately and kept a house at Croisset on the Seine. His lifelong hostility to cliché and intellectual pretension—visible in earlier works—shapes this final project. He designed the novel to catalog the age’s ideas through two ordinary men who pursue knowledge across disciplines. Although unfinished, the work reflects the late nineteenth-century moment in which faith in progress and science mixed with frustration at their practical limits and cultural consequences.
French politics between 1830 and 1880 were turbulent. The July Monarchy (1830–1848) tempered monarchy with bourgeois liberalism; the 1848 Revolution proclaimed a democratic Republic, introduced universal male suffrage, and witnessed the violent June Days. The Second Republic (1848–1852) gave way to Napoleon III’s authoritarian Second Empire (1852–1870), which later liberalized. The Franco‑Prussian War (1870–1871) toppled the Empire, bringing the Paris Commune and the Third Republic. Bouvard & Pécuchet reflects how such upheavals filtered into provincial life—through local politics, electoral rituals, and shifting allegiances—while satirizing the fickleness and credulity that mass politics and political journalism could encourage far from Paris.
The protagonists begin as Paris copy clerks, a profession that grew with nineteenth-century administration and commerce. From ministries to private firms, the demand for copying, filing, and compiling multiplied as the state standardized procedures, produced statistics, and expanded record‑keeping. This clerical world depended on legibility, repetition, and obedience to form—habits that Flaubert turns into metaphors for how knowledge was handled more generally. Copying manuals and reproducing arguments becomes both their method and their fate, mirroring the bureaucratic reproduction of documents and the period’s reverence for paperwork as guarantor of truth and order.
The provincial Normandy to which they retire was dominated by small and medium landholders, a legacy of revolutionary sales and the Civil Code’s partible inheritance, which fractured estates across generations. Notaries mediated property transfers, while mayors and gendarmes enforced centralized authority. The region’s mixed farming, dairy production, and cider orchards formed a sturdy but conservative rural economy. Local elites—landowners, priests, doctors, schoolteachers—organized sociability, charitable committees, and elections. Flaubert’s fictional village condenses this world: a tight web of neighbors and notables where reputations matter, communal opinions crystallize quickly, and national debates arrive filtered through gossip, pamphlets, and provincial newspapers.
Mid-century France promoted “scientific agriculture.” Agronomic societies, demonstration farms, and agricultural fairs sought to modernize cultivation. Theories of soil chemistry, associated with Justus von Liebig, circulated widely; imported guano and mineral fertilizers promised higher yields; improved rotations, drainage, and new implements were urged by journals and advisers. In practice, adoption was uneven, constrained by capital and tradition. Bouvard & Pécuchet draws on this milieu of treatises and advice, staging the collision between prescriptive agronomy and stubborn reality. The pair’s reliance on printed authorities, conflicting and sometimes inapplicable, mirrors the genuine confusion farmers faced when expert recommendations outpaced local knowledge and means.
The nineteenth century experienced an unprecedented explosion of print. Steam presses, stereotyping, and expanding distribution networks lowered costs. A flood of manuals, encyclopedias, and popular science handbooks—such as the “Manuels Roret”—promised practical mastery of every subject. Éditions Hachette developed railway bookstalls in the 1850s, while inexpensive series made portable libraries for a widening public. Rising literacy, especially after the 1833 Guizot Law, expanded the audience for instruction. Bouvard & Pécuchet is inseparable from this print culture: the protagonists’ omnivorous reading, their trust in compendia, and their method of excerpting epitomize both the democratization of knowledge and its overwhelming, contradictory abundance.
Education policy was a central battleground. The Guizot Law of 1833 required each commune to maintain a primary school for boys and trained teachers in normal schools. The Falloux Law of 1850 broadened the Church’s role and allowed religious congregations to teach. Under Minister Duruy in 1867, girls’ education advanced and curricula expanded. In the early Third Republic, the Ferry Laws (1881–1882) made primary schooling free, compulsory, and secular. Flaubert’s novel touches this contentious terrain in its treatment of pedagogy and moral instruction, dramatizing the friction between catechism, civic education, and competing theories of how and what ordinary people should learn.
The Catholic revival, visible since the Restoration, remained deeply rooted in rural France. Pilgrimages, confraternities, and parish missions coexisted with anticlerical currents, especially among republican professionals and freethinkers. Ultramontane positions strengthened after the 1850s, culminating in the First Vatican Council’s decree on papal infallibility (1870). Conflicts over funerals, schooling, and church property punctuated provincial life. Bouvard & Pécuchet reflects these tensions through portrayals of curés and parishioners, showing how scientific and moral debates were inseparable from confessional loyalties, and how even practical questions—health, burial, charity—were entangled with religious authority and its critics.
The prestige of science grew markedly. Auguste Comte’s positivism (developed from the 1830s) proposed that empirical science would unify knowledge and guide society. Professionalization advanced in laboratories, societies, and journals, while public lectures popularized discoveries. Yet the spread of “scientific” rhetoric encouraged system‑building of variable rigor. Flaubert tracks this ambivalence: his characters embrace experiments, classifications, and surveys, only to collide with methodological limits and contradictory schools. The novel thus echoes a historical moment when science inspired both genuine advances and a fashion for explanation that could harden into dogma or dissolve into confusion outside specialized communities.
Natural history debates were particularly heated. Georges Cuvier’s comparative anatomy and catastrophism shaped early nineteenth-century discourse; Lamarck’s transformism, long marginal, persisted; Charles Lyell’s geology emphasized gradual change. After 1859, Darwin’s theory of natural selection, translated into French in the early 1860s by Clémence‑Auguste Royer, catalyzed controversies across universities, salons, and the clergy. Museums, botanical gardens, and provincial learned societies disseminated these ideas to non‑specialists. In the novel, excursions into botany, geology, and evolutionist speculation reflect how such debates penetrated everyday culture, where eclectic reading often outran experimental competence and generated both wonder and bewilderment.
Alongside orthodox science, pseudosciences flourished. Mesmerism, or animal magnetism, had a long afterlife in therapeutic and entertainment settings; phrenology promised characterology via cranial bumps; homeopathy offered gentle remedies amid doubts about orthodox medicine. Spiritualism spread in France around 1853–1854 with table‑turning séances, widely reported and practiced in salons and provincial parlors. These phenomena attracted believers and skeptics alike, including prominent writers and officials. Flaubert’s satire of credulity and fashion draws on this environment, in which the desire for immediate, spectacular truth often trumped patient inquiry, and where novelty in methods seemed to guarantee insight regardless of evidentiary standards.
Antiquarianism and historical preservation also expanded. The Commission des monuments historiques was established in 1837, and Prosper Mérimée served as inspector of historical monuments, encouraging inventories and restorations. Provincial sociétés savantes multiplied, organizing lectures, digs, and journals. Amateur archaeologists collected coins, shards, and inscriptions, sometimes with minimal method. Local history offered prestige to notables and towns. Bouvard & Pécuchet mirrors this moment through its protagonists’ zeal for excavation and classification, highlighting how a genuine desire to rescue the past could become a display of vanity or naïveté when rigorous methods were absent or conflicting authorities vied for legitimacy.
Public health crises punctuated the century. Cholera struck France in 1832, 1849, and 1866, provoking fear, scapegoating, and disputes between miasma and contagion theories. Vaccination campaigns (for smallpox) expanded unevenly. Louis Pasteur’s work in the 1850s–1870s on fermentation, contagion, and vaccination began to reshape medicine, though acceptance was gradual. Rural practice often relied on traditional remedies, itinerant healers, and limited facilities. The novel’s forays into medical reading and experiment evoke the era’s transition: a world where authoritative treatises and village experience collided, and where therapeutic pluralism thrived because definitive explanations and treatments were still contested in both clinics and kitchens.
Transport and communications transformed daily life. From the 1840s, railways knit the country into a national market; the 1842 framework law and later imperial concessions spurred rapid expansion. The electric telegraph spread in the 1850s, accelerating news and administrative coordination. Postal reforms made correspondence cheaper and more regular. Book distribution rode these networks: Hachette’s railway bookstalls in the 1850s brought manuals and periodicals to small towns, while traveling salesmen and catalogues supplied instruments and seeds. Bouvard & Pécuchet presupposes this circulation: provincial readers can quickly obtain treatises and gadgets, making the village a relay for metropolitan fashions in knowledge and consumption.
The press and the courts shaped literary life. Under the Second Empire, press restrictions and prosecutions coexisted with a thriving publishing market; liberalization in the late 1860s widened debate. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, serialized in 1856, led to a trial in 1857 on charges of offending public morals; he was acquitted but reprimanded. The episode underscored the risks of challenging bourgeois proprieties. Bouvard & Pécuchet continues a critique of platitudes and moralizing, yet does so by exposing the bath of printed opinions saturating society. The novel’s method—assembling and testing received ideas—reflects a culture where authority often lay not in experience but in the citation of fashionable texts.
Literary movements contextualize Flaubert’s stance. Realism in the 1850s emphasized observation and social detail; naturalism in the 1860s–1870s, associated with Émile Zola and the Goncourts, stressed heredity, milieu, and documentation. Flaubert prized impersonal style and detested didacticism, refusing both moral preaching and facile sociological formulas. Bouvard & Pécuchet adopts the era’s documentary impulse—vast reading, notes, classification—yet turns it inward, displaying the chaos that results when disparate authorities are applied mechanically. The project thus engages the same ambitions of total knowledge that fuel encyclopedias like Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire universel (1866–1876), but with irony about their promises of completeness and coherence. The upheavals of 1870–1871 marked the environment in which Flaubert composed the book. France’s defeat in the Franco‑Prussian War, the siege of Paris, and the suppression of the Paris Commune left deep scars and fostered skepticism about political slogans of progress. The early Third Republic consolidated through compromise, anticlerical reforms, and colonial ambitions, while economic modernization continued. Flaubert’s correspondence reveals disillusionment with mass politics and rhetoric—attitudes that inform the novel’s suspicion of public opinion and panaceas. Bouvard & Pécuchet’s serial disappointments resonate with a society confronting the limits of yesterday’s certainties amid rapid, uneven change in knowledge, institutions, and everyday life. As a whole, Bouvard & Pécuchet functions as a mirror and critique of its century. It assembles the nineteenth century’s competing systems—scientific, religious, pedagogical, political—and shows how they are received, misunderstood, and repurposed by ordinary readers. The comedy rests on verifiable historical forces: expanding bureaucracy, mass print, educational reform, scientific authority, and provincial sociability. Without denying real progress, the book exposes the fragility of second‑hand convictions and the ease with which “received ideas” become a substitute for thought. Its posthumous publication in 1881, on the cusp of the Ferry school reforms, sealed it as a monument to the era’s ambitions and to the skepticism they invited.
Author Biography
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was a central figure of nineteenth-century French prose and a defining influence on literary realism. Working primarily in Normandy and Paris, he forged an exacting method that pursued le mot juste, the precisely right word, and cultivated an impersonal narrative stance. His fiction combined rigorous form with acute observation of manners, professions, and provincial and urban milieus. Flaubert’s innovations in free indirect discourse and tonal control altered the possibilities of the European novel, shaping later narrative technique. By resisting moralizing commentary and privileging style as an ethic, he helped shift the novel toward aesthetic autonomy that would echo through modernism.
Flaubert received a solid education in Rouen before spending part of the early 1840s in Paris studying law, a course he ultimately abandoned after a serious nervous illness. He committed himself to literature and maintained close ties to the capital’s literary circles while living much of his life in Normandy. Early reading steeped him in Romanticism, but he increasingly admired classical restraint and argued for an impersonal art that concealed the author. Two interlocutors, the poet Louis Bouilhet and the journalist Maxime Du Camp, served as trusted first readers, sharpening his sense of method and encouraging his relentless self-revision.
From early experiments in tales and prose fragments, Flaubert developed a famously arduous practice of composition, rehearsing sentences aloud in what he called the gueuloir. His first large-scale project, La Tentation de saint Antoine, occupied him for years; after reading an early version to friends in 1849, he was urged to set it aside and turn to contemporary life. This advice redirected his energies toward a meticulously observed provincial narrative that would become Madame Bovary. The episode crystallized his commitment to research, documentation, and stylistic austerity, even when engaging with dream, hallucination, or the exotic in later works.
Madame Bovary appeared in serial form in 1856 and as a book in 1857, immediately provoking public controversy. Prosecutors charged Flaubert and his publisher with offending public morality; after a widely watched trial, he was acquitted, and the notoriety helped establish his fame. The novel’s fusion of exact social detail, irony, and free indirect style exemplified his aesthetic of authorial impassivity while scrutinizing romantic illusions and everyday language. Critics were divided at first, but many recognized the arrival of a new form of psychological and social realism. Its disciplined prose and refusal of overt judgment influenced generations of novelists.
Extensive travels in 1849-1851 through parts of North Africa and the Middle East broadened Flaubert’s horizons and deepened his archival habits. He filled notebooks with observations, later channeling this material into historical and exotic fiction. Salammbô (1862), set in ancient Carthage, drew on scholarship and site visits to create a densely textured world, blending archaeological detail with dramatic spectacle. He continued to revise La Tentation de saint Antoine, eventually publishing a thoroughly reworked version in 1874. These projects reflected his belief that imaginative literature required painstaking documentation, even when it departed from contemporary settings or engaged with legend and ritual.
Flaubert’s later career balanced large canvases with concentrated forms. L’Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education, 1869) traced ambitions and disappointments amid the upheavals of the 1840s, including the Revolution of 1848; received coolly at first, it is now central to his legacy. Trois contes (Three Tales, 1877)—A Simple Heart, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, and Herodias—demonstrated crystalline economy. He devoted his final years to Bouvard et Pécuchet, a vast satire of knowledge systems, left unfinished at his death; its companion project, the Dictionnaire des idées reçues, extended his critique of clichés and received opinions in concise, caustic entries.
In his final decade Flaubert faced financial strain yet sustained an exacting daily discipline and an extensive correspondence that elaborated his aesthetics. Esteemed contemporaries, among them George Sand and Ivan Turgenev, engaged him in debates about art’s purpose and society. He died in 1880 at Croisset, near Rouen, leaving manuscripts that shaped posthumous editions of his work. Flaubert’s legacy endures in the modern novel’s concern with style, perspective, and the textures of ordinary life. Writers from Henry James to James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and beyond acknowledged debts to his art, and his novels remain widely read, translated, and studied.
BOUVARD & PÉCUCHET
Chapter I. Kindred Souls.
As there were thirty-three degrees of heat the Boulevard Bourdon was absolutely deserted[1q].
Farther down, the Canal St. Martin[1], confined by two locks, showed in a straight line its water black as ink. In the middle of it was a boat, filled with timber, and on the bank were two rows of casks.
Beyond the canal, between the houses which separated the timber-yards, the great pure sky was cut up into plates of ultramarine; and under the reverberating light of the sun, the white façades, the slate roofs, and the granite wharves glowed dazzlingly. In the distance arose a confused noise in the warm atmosphere; and the idleness of Sunday, as well as the melancholy engendered by the summer heat, seemed to shed around a universal languor.
Two men made their appearance.
One came from the direction of the Bastille[2]; the other from that of the Jardin des Plantes. The taller of the pair, arrayed in linen cloth, walked with his hat back, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his cravat in his hand. The smaller, whose form was covered with a maroon frock-coat, wore a cap with a pointed peak.
As soon as they reached the middle of the boulevard, they sat down, at the same moment, on the same seat.
In order to wipe their foreheads they took off their headgear, each placing his beside himself; and the little man saw “Bouvard” written in his neighbour’s hat, while the latter easily traced “Pécuchet” in the cap of the person who wore the frock-coat.
“Look here!” he said; “we have both had the same idea — to write our names in our head-coverings!”
“Yes, faith, for they might carry off mine from my desk.”
“‘Tis the same way with me. I am an employé.”
Then they gazed at each other. Bouvard’s agreeable visage quite charmed Pécuchet.
His blue eyes, always half-closed, smiled in his fresh-coloured face. His trousers, with big flaps, which creased at the end over beaver shoes, took the shape of his stomach, and made his shirt bulge out at the waist; and his fair hair, which of its own accord grew in tiny curls, gave him a somewhat childish look.
He kept whistling continually with the tips of his lips.
Bouvard was struck by the serious air of Pécuchet. One would have thought that he wore a wig, so flat and black were the locks which adorned his high skull. His face seemed entirely in profile, on account of his nose, which descended very low. His legs, confined in tight wrappings of lasting, were entirely out of proportion with the length of his bust. His voice was loud and hollow.
This exclamation escaped him:
“How pleasant it would be in the country!”
But, according to Bouvard, the suburbs were unendurable on account of the noise of the public-houses outside the city. Pécuchet was of the same opinion. Nevertheless, he was beginning to feel tired of the capital, and so was Bouvard.
And their eyes wandered over heaps of stones for building, over the hideous water in which a truss of straw was floating, over a factory chimney rising towards the horizon. Sewers sent forth their poisonous exhalations. They turned to the opposite side; and they had in front of them the walls of the Public Granary.
Decidedly (and Pécuchet was surprised at the fact), it was still warmer in the street than in his own house. Bouvard persuaded him to put down his overcoat. As for him, he laughed at what people might say about him.
Suddenly, a drunken man staggered along the footpath; and the pair began a political discussion on the subject of working-men. Their opinions were similar, though perhaps Bouvard was rather more liberal in his views.
A noise of wheels sounded on the pavement amid a whirlpool of dust. It turned out to be three hired carriages which were going towards Bercy, carrying a bride with her bouquet, citizens in white cravats, ladies with their petticoats huddled up so as almost to touch their armpits, two or three little girls, and a student.
The sight of this wedding-party led Bouvard and Pécuchet to talk about women, whom they declared to be frivolous, waspish, obstinate. In spite of this, they were often better than men; but at other times they were worse. In short, it was better to live without them. For his part, Pécuchet was a bachelor.
“As for me, I’m a widower,” said Bouvard, “and I have no children.”
“Perhaps you are lucky there. But, in the long run, solitude is very sad.”
Then, on the edge of the wharf, appeared a girl of the town with a soldier, — sallow, with black hair, and marked with smallpox. She leaned on the soldier’s arm, dragging her feet along, and swaying on her hips.
When she was a short distance from them, Bouvard indulged in a coarse remark. Pécuchet became very red in the face, and, no doubt to avoid answering, gave him a look to indicate the fact that a priest was coming in their direction.
The ecclesiastic slowly descended the avenue, along which lean elm trees were placed as landmarks, and Bouvard, when he no longer saw the priest’s three-cornered headpiece, expressed his relief; for he hated Jesuits. Pécuchet, without absolving them from blame, exhibited some respect for religion.
Meanwhile, the twilight was falling, and the window-blinds in front of them were raised. The passers-by became more numerous. Seven o’clock struck.
Their words rushed on in an inexhaustible stream; remarks succeeding to anecdotes, philosophic views to individual considerations. They disparaged the management of the bridges and causeways, the tobacco administration, the theatres, our marine, and the entire human race, like people who had undergone great mortifications. In listening to each other both found again some ideas which had long since slipped out of their minds; and though they had passed the age of simple emotions, they experienced a new pleasure, a kind of expansion, the tender charm associated with their first appearance on life’s stage.
Twenty times they had risen and sat down again, and had proceeded along the boulevard from the upper to the lower lock, each time intending to take their departure, but not having the strength to do so, held back by a kind of fascination.
However, they came to parting at last, and they had clasped each other’s hands, when Bouvard said all of a sudden:
“Faith! what do you say to our dining together?”
“I had the very same idea in my own head,” returned Pécuchet, “but I hadn’t the courage to propose it to you.”
And he allowed himself to be led towards a little restaurant facing the Hôtel de Ville, where they would be comfortable.
Bouvard called for the menu. Pécuchet was afraid of spices, as they might inflame his blood. This led to a medical discussion. Then they glorified the utility of science: how many things could be learned, how many researches one could make, if one had only time! Alas! earning one’s bread took up all one’s time; and they raised their arms in astonishment, and were near embracing each other over the table on discovering that they were both copyists, Bouvard in a commercial establishment, and Pécuchet in the Admiralty, which did not, however, prevent him from devoting a few spare moments each evening to study. He had noted faults in M. Thiers’s work, and he spoke with the utmost respect of a certain professor named Dumouchel.
Bouvard had the advantage of him in other ways. His hair watch-chain, and his manner of whipping-up the mustard-sauce, revealed the greybeard, full of experience; and he ate with the corners of his napkin under his armpits, giving utterance to things which made Pécuchet laugh. It was a peculiar laugh, one very low note, always the same, emitted at long intervals. Bouvard’s laugh was explosive, sonorous, uncovering his teeth, shaking his shoulders, and making the customers at the door turn round to stare at him.
When they had dined they went to take coffee in another establishment. Pécuchet, on contemplating the gas-burners, groaned over the spreading torrent of luxury; then, with an imperious movement, he flung aside the newspapers. Bouvard was more indulgent on this point. He liked all authors indiscriminately, having been disposed in his youth to go on the stage.
He had a fancy for trying balancing feats with a billiard-cue and two ivory balls, such as Barberou, one of his friends, had performed. They invariably fell, and, rolling along the floor between people’s legs, got lost in some distant corner. The waiter, who had to rise every time to search for them on all-fours under the benches, ended by making complaints. Pécuchet picked a quarrel with him; the coffee-house keeper came on the scene, but Pécuchet would listen to no excuses, and even cavilled over the amount consumed.
He then proposed to finish the evening quietly at his own abode, which was quite near, in the Rue St. Martin. As soon as they had entered he put on a kind of cotton nightgown, and did the honours of his apartment.
A deal desk, placed exactly in the centre of the room caused inconvenience by its sharp corners; and all around, on the boards, on the three chairs, on the old armchair, and in the corners, were scattered pellmell a number of volumes of the “Roret Encyclopædia[3],” “The Magnetiser’s Manual,” a Fénelon, and other old books, with heaps of waste paper, two cocoanuts, various medals, a Turkish cap, and shells brought back from Havre by Dumouchel. A layer of dust velveted the walls, which otherwise had been painted yellow. The shoe-brush was lying at the side of the bed, the coverings of which hung down. On the ceiling could be seen a big black stain, produced by the smoke of the lamp.
Bouvard, on account of the smell no doubt, asked permission to open the window.
“The papers will fly away!” cried Pécuchet, who was more afraid of the currents of air.
However, he panted for breath in this little room, heated since morning by the slates of the roof.
Bouvard said to him: “If I were in your place, I would remove my flannel.”
“What!” And Pécuchet cast down his head, frightened at the idea of no longer having his healthful flannel waistcoat.
“Let me take the business in hand,” resumed Bouvard; “the air from outside will refresh you.”
At last Pécuchet put on his boots again, muttering, “Upon my honour, you are bewitching me.” And, notwithstanding the distance, he accompanied Bouvard as far as the latter’s house at the corner of the Rue de Béthune, opposite the Pont de la Tournelle.
Bouvard’s room, the floor of which was well waxed, and which had curtains of cotton cambric and mahogany furniture, had the advantage of a balcony overlooking the river. The two principal ornaments were a liqueur-frame in the middle of the chest of drawers, and, in a row beside the glass, daguerreotypes representing his friends. An oil painting occupied the alcove.
“My uncle!” said Bouvard. And the taper which he held in his hand shed its light on the portrait of a gentleman.
Red whiskers enlarged his visage, which was surmounted by a forelock curling at its ends. His huge cravat, with the triple collar of his shirt, and his velvet waistcoat and black coat, appeared to cramp him. You would have imagined there were diamonds on his shirt-frill. His eyes seemed fastened to his cheekbones, and he smiled with a cunning little air.
Pécuchet could not keep from saying, “One would rather take him for your father!”
“He is my godfather,” replied Bouvard carelessly, adding that his baptismal name was François-Denys-Bartholemée.
Pécuchet’s baptismal name was Juste-Romain-Cyrille, and their ages were identical — forty-seven years. This coincidence caused them satisfaction, but surprised them, each having thought the other much older. They next vented their admiration for Providence, whose combinations are sometimes marvellous.
“For, in fact, if we had not gone out a while ago to take a walk we might have died before knowing each other.”
And having given each other their employers’ addresses, they exchanged a cordial “good night.”
“Don’t go to see the women!” cried Bouvard on the stairs.
Pécuchet descended the steps without answering this coarse jest.
Next day, in the space in front of the establishment of MM. Descambos Brothers, manufacturers of Alsatian tissues, 92, Rue Hautefeuille, a voice called out:
“Bouvard! Monsieur Bouvard!”
The latter glanced through the windowpanes and recognised Pécuchet, who articulated more loudly:
“I am not ill! I have remained away!”
“Why, though?”
“This!” said Pécuchet, pointing at his breast.
All the talk of the day before, together with the temperature of the apartment and the labours of digestion, had prevented him from sleeping, so much so that, unable to stand it any longer, he had flung off his flannel waistcoat. In the morning he recalled his action, which fortunately had no serious consequences, and he came to inform Bouvard about it, showing him in this way that he had placed him very high in his esteem.
He was a small shopkeeper’s son, and had no recollection of his mother, who died while he was very young. At fifteen he had been taken away from a boarding-school to be sent into the employment of a process-server. The gendarmes invaded his employer’s residence one day, and that worthy was sent off to the galleys — a stern history which still caused him a thrill of terror. Then he had attempted many callings — apothecary’s apprentice, usher, bookkeeper in a packet-boat on the Upper Seine. At length, a head of a department in the Admiralty, smitten by his handwriting, had employed him as a copying-clerk; but the consciousness of a defective education, with the intellectual needs engendered by it, irritated his temper, and so he lived altogether alone, without relatives, without a mistress. His only distraction was to go out on Sunday to inspect public works.
The earliest recollections of Bouvard carried him back across the banks of the Loire into a farmyard. A man who was his uncle had brought him to Paris to teach him commerce. At his majority, he got a few thousand francs. Then he took a wife, and opened a confectioner’s shop. Six months later his wife disappeared, carrying off the cash-box. Friends, good cheer, and above all, idleness, had speedily accomplished his ruin. But he was inspired by the notion of utilising his beautiful chirography, and for the past twelve years he had clung to the same post in the establishment of MM. Descambos Brothers, manufacturers of tissues, 92, Rue Hautefeuille. As for his uncle, who formerly had sent him the celebrated portrait as a memento, Bouvard did not even know his residence, and expected nothing more from him. Fifteen hundred francs a year and his salary as copying-clerk enabled him every evening to take a nap at a coffee-house. Thus their meeting had the importance of an adventure. They were at once drawn together by secret fibres. Besides, how can we explain sympathies? Why does a certain peculiarity, a certain imperfection, indifferent or hateful in one person, prove a fascination in another? That which we call the thunderbolt is true as regards all the passions.
Before the month was over they “thou’d” and “thee’d” each other.
Frequently they came to see each other at their respective offices. As soon as one made his appearance, the other shut up his writing-desk, and they went off together into the streets. Bouvard walked with long strides, whilst Pécuchet, taking innumerable steps, with his frock-coat flapping at his heels, seemed to slip along on rollers. In the same way, their peculiar tastes were in harmony. Bouvard smoked his pipe, loved cheese, regularly took his half-glass of brandy. Pécuchet snuffed, at dessert ate only preserves, and soaked a piece of sugar in his coffee. One was self-confident, flighty, generous; the other prudent, thoughtful, and thrifty.
In order to please him, Bouvard desired to introduce Pécuchet to Barberou. He was an ex-commercial traveller, and now a purse-maker — a good fellow, a patriot, a ladies’ man, and one who affected the language of the faubourgs. Pécuchet did not care for him, and he brought Bouvard to the residence of Dumouchel. This author (for he had published a little work on mnemonics) gave lessons in literature at a young ladies’ boarding-school, and had orthodox opinions and a grave deportment. He bored Bouvard.
Neither of the two friends concealed his opinion from the other. Each recognised the correctness of the other’s view. They altered their habits, they quitting their humdrum lodgings, and ended by dining together every day.
They made observations on the plays at the theatre, on the government, the dearness of living, and the frauds of commerce. From time to time, the history of Collier or the trial of Fualdès turned up in their conversations; and then they sought for the causes of the Revolution.
They lounged along by the old curiosity shops. They visited the School of Arts and Crafts, St. Denis, the Gobelins, the Invalides, and all the public collections.
When they were asked for their passports, they made pretence of having lost them, passing themselves off as two strangers, two Englishmen.
In the galleries of the Museum, they viewed the stuffed quadrupeds with amazement, the butterflies with delight, and the metals with indifference; the fossils made them dream; the conchological specimens bored them. They examined the hot-houses through the glass, and groaned at the thought that all these leaves distilled poisons. What they admired about the cedar was that it had been brought over in a hat.
At the Louvre they tried to get enthusiastic about Raphael. At the great library they desired to know the exact number of volumes.
On one occasion they attended at a lecture on Arabic at the College of France, and the professor was astonished to see these two unknown persons attempting to take notes. Thanks to Barberou, they penetrated into the green-room of a little theatre. Dumouchel got them tickets for a sitting at the Academy. They inquired about discoveries, read the prospectuses, and this curiosity developed their intelligence. At the end of a horizon, growing every day more remote, they perceived things at the same time confused and marvellous.
When they admired an old piece of furniture they regretted that they had not lived at the period when it was used, though they were absolutely ignorant of what period it was. In accordance with certain names, they imagined countries only the more beautiful in proportion to their utter lack of definite information about them. The works of which the titles were to them unintelligible, appeared to their minds to contain some mysterious knowledge.
And the more ideas they had, the more they suffered. When a mail-coach crossed them in the street, they felt the need of going off with it. The Quay of Flowers made them sigh for the country.
One Sunday they started for a walking tour early in the morning, and, passing through Meudon, Bellevue, Suresnes, and Auteuil, they wandered about all day amongst the vineyards, tore up wild poppies by the sides of fields, slept on the grass, drank milk, ate under the acacias in the gardens of country inns, and got home very late — dusty, worn-out, and enchanted.
They often renewed these walks. They felt so sad next day that they ended by depriving themselves of them.
The monotony of the desk became odious to them. Always the eraser and the sandarac, the same inkstand, the same pens, and the same companions. Looking on the latter as stupid fellows, they talked to them less and less. This cost them some annoyances. They came after the regular hour every day, and received reprimands.
Formerly they had been almost happy, but their occupation humiliated them since they had begun to set a higher value on themselves, and their disgust increased while they were mutually glorifying and spoiling each other. Pécuchet contracted Bouvard’s bluntness, and Bouvard assumed a little of Pécuchet’s moroseness.
“I have a mind to become a mountebank in the streets!” said one to the other.
“As well to be a rag-picker!” exclaimed his friend.
What an abominable situation! And no way out of it. Not even the hope of it!
One afternoon (it was the 20th of January, 1839) Bouvard, while at his desk, received a letter left by the postman.
He lifted up both hands; then his head slowly fell back, and he sank on the floor in a swoon.
The clerks rushed forward; they took off his cravat; they sent for a physician. He reopened his eyes; then, in answer to the questions they put to him:
“Ah! the fact is — — the fact is — — A little air will relieve me. No; let me alone. Kindly give me leave to go out.”
And, in spite of his corpulence, he rushed, all breathless, to the Admiralty office, and asked for Pécuchet.
Pécuchet appeared.
“My uncle is dead! I am his heir!”
“It isn’t possible!”
Bouvard showed him the following lines:
OFFICE OF MAÎTRE TARDIVEL, NOTARY.
Savigny-en-Septaine, 14th January, 1839.
Sir, — I beg of you to call at my office in order to take notice there of the will of your natural father, M. François-Denys-Bartholomée Bouvard, ex-merchant in the town of Nantes, who died in this parish on the 10th of the present month. This will contains a very important disposition in your favour.
Tardivel, Notary.
Pécuchet was obliged to sit down on a boundary-stone in the courtyard outside the office.
Then he returned the paper, saying slowly:
“Provided that this is not — some practical joke.”
“You think it is a farce!” replied Bouvard, in a stifled voice like the rattling in the throat of a dying man.
But the postmark, the name of the notary’s office in printed characters, the notary’s own signature, all proved the genuineness of the news; and they regarded each other with a trembling at the corners of their mouths and tears in their staring eyes.
They wanted space to breathe freely. They went to the Arc de Triomphe, came back by the water’s edge, and passed beyond Nôtre Dame. Bouvard was very flushed. He gave Pécuchet blows with his fist in the back, and for five minutes talked utter nonsense.
They chuckled in spite of themselves. This inheritance, surely, ought to mount up — — ?
“Ah! that would be too much of a good thing. Let’s talk no more about it.”
They did talk again about it. There was nothing to prevent them from immediately demanding explanations. Bouvard wrote to the notary with that view.
The notary sent a copy of the will, which ended thus:
“Consequently, I give to François-Denys-Bartholemée Bouvard, my recognised natural son, the portion of my property disposable by law.”
The old fellow had got this son in his youthful days, but he had carefully kept it dark, making him pass for a nephew; and the “nephew” had always called him “my uncle,” though he had his own idea on the matter. When he was about forty, M. Bouvard married; then he was left a widower. His two legitimate sons having gone against his wishes, remorse took possession of him for the desertion of his other child during a long period of years. He would have even sent for the lad but for the influence of his female cook. She left him, thanks to the manœuvres of the family, and in his isolation, when death drew nigh, he wished to repair the wrongs he had done by bequeathing to the fruit of his early love all that he could of his fortune. It ran up to half a million francs, thus giving the copying-clerk two hundred and fifty thousand francs. The eldest of the brothers, M. Étienne, had announced that he would respect the will.
Bouvard fell into a kind of stupefied condition. He kept repeating in a low tone, smiling with the peaceful smile of drunkards: “An income of fifteen thousand livres!” — and Pécuchet, whose head, however, was stronger, was not able to get over it.
They were rudely shaken by a letter from Tardivel. The other son, M. Alexandre, declared his intention to have the entire matter decided by law, and even to question the legacy, if he could, requiring, first of all, to have everything sealed, and to have an inventory taken and a sequestrator appointed, etc. Bouvard got a bilious attack in consequence. Scarcely had he recovered when he started for Savigny, from which place he returned without having brought the matter nearer to a settlement, and he could only grumble about having gone to the expense of a journey for nothing. Then followed sleepless nights, alternations of rage and hope, of exaltation and despondency. Finally, after the lapse of six months, his lordship Alexandre was appeased, and Bouvard entered into possession of his inheritance.
His first exclamation was: “We will retire into the country!” And this phrase, which bound up his friend with his good fortune, Pécuchet had found quite natural. For the union of these two men was absolute and profound. But, as he did not wish to live at Bouvard’s expense, he would not go before he got his retiring pension. Two years more; no matter! He remained inflexible, and the thing was decided.
In order to know where to settle down, they passed in review all the provinces. The north was fertile, but too cold; the south delightful, so far as the climate was concerned, but inconvenient because of the mosquitoes; and the middle portion of the country, in truth, had nothing about it to excite curiosity. Brittany would have suited them, were it not for the bigoted tendency of its inhabitants. As for the regions of the east, on account of the Germanic patois they could not dream of it. But there were other places. For instance, what about Forez, Bugey, and Rumois? The maps said nothing about them. Besides, whether their house happened to be in one place or in another, the important thing was to have one. Already they saw themselves in their shirt-sleeves, at the edge of a plat-band, pruning rose trees, and digging, dressing, settling the ground, growing tulips in pots. They would awaken at the singing of the lark to follow the plough; they would go with baskets to gather apples, would look on at butter-making, the thrashing of corn, sheep-shearing, bee-culture, and would feel delight in the lowing of cows and in the scent of new-mown hay. No more writing! No more heads of departments! No more even quarters’ rent to pay! For they had a dwelling-house of their own! And they would eat the hens of their own poultry-yard, the vegetables of their own garden, and would dine without taking off their wooden shoes! “We’ll do whatever we like! We’ll let our beards grow!”
They would purchase horticultural implements, then a heap of things “that might perhaps be useful,” such as a tool-chest (there was always need of one in a house), next, scales, a land-surveyor’s chain, a bathing-tub in case they got ill, a thermometer, and even a barometer, “on the Gay-Lussac system,” for physical experiences, if they took a fancy that way. It would not be a bad thing either (for a person cannot always be working out of doors), to have some good literary works; and they looked out for them, very embarrassed sometimes to know if such a book was really “a library book.”
Bouvard settled the question. “Oh! we shall not want a library. Besides, I have my own.”
They prepared their plans beforehand. Bouvard would bring his furniture, Pécuchet his big black table; they would turn the curtains to account; and, with a few kitchen utensils, this would be quite sufficient. They swore to keep silent about all this, but their faces spoke volumes. So their colleagues thought them funny. Bouvard, who wrote spread over his desk, with his elbows out, in order the better to round his letters, gave vent to a kind of whistle while half-closing his heavy eyelids with a waggish air. Pécuchet, squatted on a big straw footstool, was always carefully forming the pot-hooks of his large handwriting, but all the while swelling his nostrils and pressing his lips together, as if he were afraid of letting his secret slip.
After eighteen months of inquiries, they had discovered nothing. They made journeys in all the outskirts of Paris, both from Amiens to Evreux, and from Fontainebleau to Havre. They wanted a country place which would be a thorough country place, without exactly insisting on a picturesque site; but a limited horizon saddened them.
They fled from the vicinity of habitations, and only redoubled their solitude.
Sometimes they made up their minds; then, fearing they would repent later, they changed their opinion, the place having appeared unhealthy, or exposed to the sea-breeze, or too close to a factory, or difficult of access.
Barberou came to their rescue. He knew what their dream was, and one fine day he called on them to let them know that he had been told about an estate at Chavignolles, between Caen and Falaise. This comprised a farm of thirty-eight hectares, with a kind of château, and a garden in a very productive state.
They proceeded to Calvados, and were quite enraptured. For the farm, together with the house (one would not be sold without the other), only a hundred and forty-three thousand francs were asked. Bouvard did not want to give more than a hundred and twenty thousand.
Pécuchet combated his obstinacy, begged of him to give way, and finally declared that he would make up the surplus himself. This was his entire fortune, coming from his mother’s patrimony and his own savings. Never had he breathed a word, reserving this capital for a great occasion.
The entire amount was paid up about the end of 1840, six months before his retirement.
Bouvard was no longer a copying-clerk. At first he had continued his functions through distrust of the future; but he had resigned once he was certain of his inheritance. However, he willingly went back to MM. Descambos; and the night before his departure he stood drinks to all the clerks.
Pécuchet, on the contrary, was morose towards his colleagues, and went off, on the last day, roughly clapping the door behind him.
He had to look after the packing, to do a heap of commissions, then to make purchases, and to take leave of Dumouchel.
The professor proposed to him an epistolary interchange between them, of which he would make use to keep Pécuchet well up in literature; and, after fresh felicitations, wished him good health.
Barberou exhibited more sensibility in taking leave of Bouvard. He expressly gave up a domino-party, promised to go to see him “over there,” ordered two aniseed cordials, and embraced him.
Bouvard, when he got home, inhaled over the balcony a deep breath of air, saying to himself, “At last!” The lights along the quays quivered in the water, the rolling of omnibuses in the distance gradually ceased. He recalled happy days spent in this great city, supper-parties at restaurants, evenings at the theatre, gossips with his portress, all his habitual associations; and he experienced a sinking of the heart, a sadness which he dared not acknowledge even to himself.
Pécuchet was walking in his room up to two o’clock in the morning. He would come back there no more: so much the better! And yet, in order to leave behind something of himself, he printed his name on the plaster over the chimney-piece.
The larger portion of the baggage was gone since the night before. The garden implements, the bedsteads, the mattresses, the tables, the chairs, a cooking apparatus, and three casks of Burgundy would go by the Seine, as far as Havre, and would be despatched thence to Caen, where Bouvard, who would wait for them, would have them brought on to Chavignolles.
But his father’s portrait, the armchairs the liqueur-case, the old books, the timepiece, all the precious objects were put into a furniture waggon, which would proceed through Nonancourt, Verneuil, and Falaise. Pécuchet was to accompany it.
He installed himself beside the conductor, upon a seat, and, wrapped up in his oldest frock-coat, with a comforter, mittens, and his office footwarmer, on Sunday, the 20th of March, at daybreak, he set forth from the capital.
The movement and the novelty of the journey occupied his attention during the first few hours. Then the horses slackened their pace, which led to disputes between the conductor and the driver. They selected execrable inns, and, though they were accountable for everything, Pécuchet, through excess of prudence, slept in the same lodgings.
