Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bovary, he attempts suicide, the bridge parapet proves too wide. His dream-already somewhat out of fashion in the 1840s—was to become the French Walter Scott. But the narrative relating “How Messire Brokars de Fenestranges and the Bishop of Troyes attacked Messire Eustache d’Ambrecicourt” (p. 477) is forever torn between the past (the Middles Ages inspired by the fourteenth-century chronicler Jean Froissart) and the future (the perpetual postponement of the task of writing). Unlike Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions, Frédéric does not produce a historical novel. And the romance he envisions—a series of wonderful adventures set in Venice, which would transpose his great love—discourages him by its triteness.
    In their youth, Charles Deslauriers, a little older than his friend and a bit imperious by nature, poses as Frédéric’s master. He ends up being more like his double, a double oscillating between sensual intimacy, economic parasitism, and erotic rivalry. Frédéric imagines that “a man of this sort was worth all the women in the world” (p. 50). Deslauriers is sensitive to his comrade’s “quasi-feminine charm,” and they plan to share their existence. But their social status stands in the way: Deslauriers lives off his roommate, while the latter prefers to pay Arnoux’s debts rather than help found a newspaper. Competition prevails in relation to women: Deslauriers becomes an adviser to Madame Dambreuse, tries to seduce Madame Arnoux, tastes Rosanette’s charms, and finally supplants Frédéric in marrying Louise Roque in Nogent. Yet friendship—an important element in Flaubert’s own life—survives the two characters’ rifts and their long separation. When they are reunited in the last pages, Frédéric has squandered most of his fortune and lives as a petit-bourgeois; whatever wisdom this “man prone to every foible” (p. 336) has gleaned is negative: to not trust people, to not believe in ideas, to stay away from politics. Deslauriers has followed a more scattered and declining trajectory: He has renounced his former convictions and fallen from a prefect to a secretary of a pasha to a publicist and petty employee. Betrayed by Louise, he remains alone, like Frédéric. But then, all the characters who achieve success are despicable, most of all Baptiste Martinon, a fellow student of peasant origin and pliable character, who weds the banker Dambreuse’s illegitimate daughter and is promoted to senator under the Empire. Humbled, isolated, and yet lucid, the two aging friends are not that far from the satirical pair of Bouvard and Pécuchet.
     
    In his sentimental novel, Frédéric fluctuates among four women: a Romantic idol, a well-endowed heiress, an upper-class socialite, and a prostitute. He courts one for lack of the other, is loved by one while thinking of another—and lets them all escape. Significantly, Madame Arnoux, the idol, occupies the beginning and the end of the text. The second in order of appearance, and the last but one to disappear, is heiress Louise Roque, the provincial neighbor who at first seems unacceptable because of her father’s questionable morals, but then is highly desirable because of her father’s fortune; the only one candidly to confess her love for Frédéric, Louise nevertheless marries Deslauriers, before running off with yet another man. Further along in the plot appear two courtesans: Rosanette, a professional, and the socialite Madame Dambreuse, who hides behind a sham respectability and proves less difficult to conquer than the prostitute; the frivolous Rosanette takes on Fr6d6ric’s sexual education, while the greedy, cold-hearted, and well-connected Madame Dambreuse should insure Frédéric’s worldly success. In the end, he sacrifices them both to Madame Arnoux’s memory.
    Madame Arnoux’s first name is Marie, the name of the Virgin Mother. The theme of the young man in love with a maternal figure, often with children of her own, who