Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-Comic Novel of Bourgeois Life, Part 1
Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-Comic Novel of Bourgeois Life, Part 1
Two clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, meet by chance on a Parisian boulevard and discover a shared dream: to escape the tedium of office life and find meaning in the countryside. When Bouvard inherits a fortune, they abandon their desks and acquire an estate, convinced that this time, finally, they'll master the art of living. What follows is a spectacular catalogue of failure: agriculture, politics, literature, medicine, each pursuit crumbling under the weight of their boundless optimism and profound incomprehension. Yet this is no simple mockery. Flaubert's genius lies in making these deluded dreamers genuinely sympathetic. They are Don Quixotes of ideas, tilting at knowledge itself, and their refusal to abandon hope becomes both absurd and oddly noble. Written as "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce," this novel dissects the bourgeois hunger for self-improvement while exposing how easily ambition curdles into self-deception. The comedy cuts deep because we've all been Bouvard or Pécuchet at some point, certain we understood more than we did.
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“It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings. Some shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket. ‘My Word,’ said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.’ Pecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.’ ‘What is the point of it all?’ ‘Perhaps there isn’t a point.’ ‘Yet…’ and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.””
— Gustave Flaubert
