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

provides him with both a sentimental and a social education, appeared in the eighteenth century and is not rare in Romantic literature—one thinks of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Balzac’s Le Lys dans la Vállée (1836; The Lily in the halley), or Charles Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté (1834; Sensual Pleasure). In all these novels, the older woman is in competition with one or several younger females, and her child’s disease holds her back from adulterous, and symbolically incestuous, temptation. In our text as in those, Marie is the object of the deepest, and the most forbidden, desire. When Frédéric meets her on the boat on his way back to Madame Moreau’s, she sits like a Madonna with child; in the epilogue, she kisses him “on the forehead, like a mother” (p. 474). No one may emulate her in that role: Whereas her maternity is sublime—as when she sacrifices her first and only rendezvous with Frédéric to look after her sick child, and the child survives—Rosanette’s unwanted maternity, which she uses to retain Frédéric, is slightly grotesque, and her baby dies.
    Starting with the initial “apparition” of the Beloved on the boat, the sentimental novel recycles the clichés of courtly and Romantic love. This love, however, entails neither chivalric prowess nor grandiose despair, not even suicide, as in the case of Madame Bovary. Madame Arnoux resembles “the women of whom he had read in romances” (p. 13)—but bears the prosaic patronymic of Arnoux, a name that sounds like that of the famous demimondaine Sophie Arnould. She looks wonderfully Andalusian, but she is from Chartres, not far from Paris. She represents an ethereal figure, but she is soiled by money problems and conjugal squabbles. She becomes the “center” of Frédéric’s existence; the Paris of his perambulations, his daily occupations, the people he frequents—everything revolves around her. For her sake he arranges his attire, his apartments, his activities. For her sake he associates with her husband and his vulgar acquaintances, squandering his financial resources. He projects her image everywhere: “All women brought her to mind, either from the effect of their resemblance to her or by the violent contrast” (p. 78). Frédéric stands in ecstasy before a lighted window—but it is not hers! He elaborates words, gestures, scenarios—which do not come to pass. When, while being posted to the National Guard in 1848 at the same time as Jacques Arnoux, he fathomed that the sleeping Arnoux could be disposed of by an accidental bullet, “images passed through his mind in endless succession. He saw himself with her at night in a coach, then on a river’s bank on a summer’s evening, and under the reflection of a lamp at home in their own house.... Frédéric brooded over this idea like a playwright in the creative act” (p. 354). But whereas Madame Bovary was poisoned by books before poisoning herself with arsenic, Madame Arnoux “did not display much enthusiasm about literature” (p. 163). What she represents is, in fact, a vacuous center, around which the mesmerized suitor turns in vain. The final formula of the sentimental novel is “we will have loved each other so much” (p. 471)—a phrase in the future perfect tense in which the present of love has evaporated in the conjunction of posteriority and anteriority, expectation, and nostalgia. Here too, circularity and entropy dominate.
    In the second to last chapter, which can be considered a first epilogue, after years of paralyzed adoration at the foot of Madame Arnoux’s “immovable skirt,” and more years of episodic and always unsatisfying affairs with stand-ins, Frédéric is surprised finally to see his beloved come to his house. This visit is an echo of a previous one, which also had a pecuniary motive. On her first visit, Madame Arnoux solicits his help; this time, she pays back a loan. Then it was day, now night falls. Marie’s intentions are not quite clear: