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

Is she offering herself? She has discovered literature: “ ‘When I read love passages in books, it is as if you were here before me’ ” (p. 471). However, whereas Frédéric gave her a rose during the first visit, she now cuts a lock of hair for him as a token of love, but it is white. In part repulsed by a quasi-incestuous contract, in part attempting to preserve his ideal, and in part because of prudence—“what an inconvenience it would be!” (p. 473)-Frédéric lets Marie go. She who “appeared” at the beginning finally “disappears” in a cab: “And that was all” (p. 474).
    Madame Arnoux is constantly perceived through her admirer’s eyes, which gives her an enigmatic character and a mysterious aura. Frédéric often refers to her as to “the Other”: How could such a magnified third person be incarnated as a “you”? Always unattainable, she propels an infinite desire, stimulated less by her presence than by imagination and memory. No mistress can rival her; Frédéric cries during his first night with Rosanette, and his engagement to Madame Dambreuse satisfies primarily his vanity. Yet is this “Other” so incommensurate with all “others”? Are not all “others” somehow the same; are not all women somehow interchangeable?
    If Madame Arnoux happened merely to touch him with her finger, the image of the other [Rosanette] immediately presented itself as an object of desire, because in her case his chances were better, and, when his heart happened to be touched while in Rosanette’s company, he remembered his great love (pp. 163-164).
    This confusion is prompted by the similarity of the two women’s furniture and knickknacks, provided by Madame Arnoux’s husband, who is also Rosanette’s lover. Later, the reminiscence of his “old love” helps Frédéric court Madame Dambreuse. And he sarcastically cultivates the confusion between Madame Dambreuse and Rosanette: “He would repeat to one the oath which he had just uttered to the other, send them both identical bouquets, write to them at the same time ... and the more he deceived one of the two, no matter which, the fonder of him she grew” (p. 434). The four women are gathered only once, at a Dambreuse reception not all that different in its formality from the Arnoux dinners and even the orgies at Rosanette’s, since many male guests are the same; the courtesan is represented only by her portrait—but Frédéric spends the night with her, while dreaming of the Other.
    To reassert the difference and superiority of that Other, Frédéric finally rejects all her rivals. At the auction following Arnoux’s bankruptcy and Madame Arnoux’s departure from Paris, Rosanette and Madame Dambreuse compete for the spoils of the vanished idol: a Renaissance casket metaphorically linked to her person. It evokes her beauty, her thrift, her chastity (for the casket is closed, like her body), and perhaps the emptiness of her phantasmagoric figure. Frédéric forgets that he saw it in Rosanette’s apartment and that it contained Arnoux’s extravagant bills. Buying it is tantamount to profaning his Beloved. When Madame Dambreuse places the highest bid, Frédéric breaks up with her: This one magnanimous gesture and decisive action in his sentimental life leaves him annihilated.
    The Story of a Young Man is also, according to Flaubert, “the moral history of the men of my generation.” Hence his deliberately selective and sketchy (albeit extremely precise) recording of the events of the 1848 period. Flaubert was in Paris in February with his friend Maxime du Camp, who took notes, and he apprehended the riots “from the point of view of art.” Later, pushing the realist taste for exact documentation to its limit, he spent long hours in libraries; consulted and annotated entire volumes and collections of newspapers about the revolution; read the socialist thinkers; informed himself about engraving, crockery, horse racing, restaurant menus, and the