In the Library
Bouvard and Pécuchet
Gustave Flaubert, 1881
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 8
- Length
- Length 76k words
£1.99
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Then a pitiable faculty developed itself in their minds, that of observing stupidity and no longer tolerating it.
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About the book
Two Parisian copy-clerks meet on a bench by the Canal Saint-Martin, discover their hats are identical inside, become inseparable, and inherit a fortune that allows them to retire to Normandy and devote their lives to mastering every branch of human knowledge. Gustave Flaubert worked on this last novel for the final eight years of his life and died in 1880 with the second volume unfinished, leaving behind a stupendous catalogue of received ideas the two clerks never quite see through. Bouvard and Pécuchet take up agriculture, then chemistry, then medicine, then geology, archaeology, religion, philosophy, gymnastics. Each discipline collapses in their hands. Each book they consult contradicts the last. The encyclopedia is the comedy, and the comedy is that no encyclopedia will hold.