Three Tales

Three Tales - Hardcover

$42.66
$42.66
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Three Tales
  • Three Tales
Three Tales - Hardcover

Three Tales - Hardcover

by Gustave Flaubert
$42.66
$42.66

Book Overview

"A Simple Heart", or Un coeur simple in French, is a story about a servant girl named Felicité. After her one and only love Théodore purportedly marries a well-to-do woman to avoid conscription, Felicité quits the farm where she works and heads for Pont-l'Évèque, where she picks up work in a widow's house as a servant. She is very loyal, and easily lends her affections to the two children of her mistress, Mme Aubain. She gives entirely to others; although many take advantage of her, she is unaffected.


She has no husband, no children, and no property, and is reliant on her mistress to keep her; she is uneducated; her death is virtually unnoticed. Despite her life being seemingly pointless, she has within her the power to love, which she does even when she does not receive it in return. She also carries within her a yearning, a majestic quasi-religious sensibility which finds its apotheosis in the deification, as she dies, of her pet parrot who floats above her deathbed masquerading as the Holy Ghost. She lives a simple, unexamined life.


Flaubert's challenge was to create the main protagonist as someone very different from the satirical characters appearing in his previous novels such as Madame Bovary. (wikipedia.org)
ISBN9781636374888
Author Gustave Flaubert
PublisherBibliotech Press
GenreLiterature
FormatHardcover
PublishedNovember 2022
LanguageENG- English
Pages148
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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More by Gustave Flaubert

Three Tales

Three Tales - Hardcover

Three Tales - Hardcover

By Gustave Flaubert

About Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a prominent physician. A solitary child, he was attracted to literature at an early age, and after his recovery from a nervous breakdown suffered while a law student, he turned his total energies to writing. Aside from journeys to the Near East, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, and a stormy liaison with the poetess Louise Colet, his life was dedicated to the practice of his art. The form of his work was marked by intense aesthetic scrupulousness and passionate pursuit of le mot juste; its content alternately reflected scorn for French bourgeois society and a romantic taste for exotic historical subject matter. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for "immorality"; Salammbô (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. Among fellow writers, however, his reputation was supreme. His circle of friends included Turgenev and the Goncourt brothers, while the young Guy de Maupassant underwent an arduous literary apprenticeship under his direction. Increasing personal isolation and financial insecurity troubled his last years. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pécuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880. Geoffrey Wall is author of the critically acclaimed Flaubert: A Life and translated Madame Bovary for Penguin Classics.Michèle Roberts is the author of ten highly praised novels.

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