5/18/2023 0 Comments Flaubert education![]() ![]() The book was published in 1869, thirteen years after “Madame Bovary,” to excoriating reviews. I asked for Flaubert’s “The Sentimental Education.” This greatest Bildungsroman, one of the first modern novels, tells the mock-epic, tragicomic story of Frédéric Moreau, a provincial dilettante who fritters away an inheritance on the wrong women, friends, pleasures, investments, and causes, and whose ambitions are thwarted as methodically as his illusions are demolished. I had nearly all of French literature to choose from, but there was no contest. ![]() Toward the end of my stay, the curator offered to give me a going-away present: a day at my carrel with any manuscript in her archives. I once spent a year in the manuscript room of the old French National Library on the Rue de Richelieu. “A romantic anarchist with a small private income,” Flaubert lived in the country with his mother for most of his writing life. ![]()
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