In the Library
Three Tales
Gustave Flaubert, 1877
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by M. Walter Dunne (1904)
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 35k words
£1.99
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For half a century the housewives of Pont-l’Evêque had envied Madame Aubain her servant Félicité.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
In a Normandy kitchen a stuffed parrot stands green and moth-eaten on a shelf, and an old servant kneels in front of it. Félicité has lost the man who jilted her, the child she raised, the nephew who died of fever a world away, and the bird was the last warm thing left to her. Flaubert, the coldest anatomist in French prose, turns all that patience on a servant no one in the story ever looks at twice, and never once smiles at her. Beside her he sets Julian, the boy whose arrows empty the forests until an enormous white-bearded stag turns and tells him he will murder his own mother and father, and Salomé, walking on her hands across the tetrarch's floor while a prophet's voice rises from the pit below the hall. Flaubert believed in nothing, and at the end of each of these lives he lets something divine come down anyway, offered without a trace of irony. Nothing in Madame Bovary prepares you for how tender he could be.