Sentimental Education

The most dangerous kind of love is the one that never arrives. Sentimental Education follows Frédéric Moreau, a young law student who boards a boat down the Seine and glimpses a beautiful married woman through a cabin window. That single moment will consume the next twenty years of his life. Madame Arnoux becomes his obsession, his reason for living, his excuse for never truly living at all. As revolutions rock France in 1848, as fortunes are made and lost, as friends become enemies and dreams curdle into regrets, Frédéric persists in his devotion to an impossible love that leaves nothing but wreckage in its wake. Flaubert intended this as his most personal novel, and it reads like an autopsy of a life unlived. Here is the terrible truth about romantic idealism: it feels like devotion but acts like destruction. For anyone who has ever chosen the ache of longing over the terrifying risk of actually living.