Sentimental Education

Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

Sentimental Education opens on the 15th of September, 1840, as the steamboat Ville de Montereau leaves Paris. Aboard is Frederick Moreau, an eighteen-year-old who has just taken his Bachelor's degree and is going home to Nogent-sur-Seine before beginning his legal studies. On the boat he talks with Jacques Arnoux, a jovial, republican-minded proprietor of L'Art Industriel, a combined art journal and picture shop on the Boulevard Montmartre. Frederick then sees Arnoux's wife, who is embroidering, and is overwhelmed. He picks up her fallen shawl, hears her called Marie, and drops a louis d'or into a harpist's cap in her presence. Back in Nogent, his mother, a respected but financially strained noblewoman, hopes he will rise through patronage. His friend Charles Deslauriers, a poor and fiercely ambitious republican, urges him to cultivate the banker M. Dambreuse and to seek the banker's wife. In Paris, Frederick studies law half-heartedly and drifts through loneliness and idleness. He sends visiting-cards to the Dambreuses and gets no reply. He hangs about the Arnoux shop and writes a novel in which Madame Arnoux is the heroine. During a student disturbance near the Panthéon he meets the witty Hussonnet and the brawny shopman Dussardier, who is arrested for striking a policeman. Hussonnet later brings Frederick into Arnoux's circle: the painter Pellerin, the drinker and politician Regimbart, the dealer's sly business habits, and Mademoiselle Vatnaz, who seems tied to Arnoux. Frederick defends Arnoux against Pellerin's anger, then is finally invited to dinner in the Rue de Choiseul. There he hears Madame Arnoux sing, feels her hand in parting, and resolves to become a painter so as to be near her. Deslauriers arrives in Paris with seven thousand francs and shares Frederick's lodgings. Saturday gatherings bring together Hussonnet, Dussardier, Pellerin, Regimbart, the stern republican tutor Sénécal, Martinon and the timid aristocrat M. de Cisy. Frederick keeps Deslauriers away from the Arnoux house and borrows money from him. He fails his second law examination but hides it, and he stays in Paris when Arnoux goes away. A visit while Arnoux is home shows him a scene of embarrassment, and a walk with Madame Arnoux in the fog ends before he can declare himself. After a night at the Alhambra ball, where he sees Arnoux with Mademoiselle Vatnaz, he stands on the Pont de la Concorde and almost throws himself into the river. Frederick borrows more money from Deslauriers to buy a parasol for Madame Arnoux's feast-day and goes to the Arnoux country house at Saint-Cloud. There he watches Arnoux's careless lies, and on the carriage ride home he sees Madame Arnoux weeping after a pin in her bouquet cut her. Having passed his law degree, he returns to Nogent, where his mother reveals that his inheritance is far smaller than he believed. He is shattered, gives up his plan to return to Paris, and lives in provincial inertia, keeping a quiet friendship with Louise Roque, the red-haired illegitimate daughter of his neighbour. On the 12th of December, 1845, news comes that his uncle has died intestate and left him an income of twenty-seven thousand livres. He leaves at once for Paris, with Louise tearfully embracing him on his way. There he finds that the Arnoux have left their old address and cannot be traced. He searches the city for Regimbart through one café after another.

By Gustave Flaubert · First published 1869 · Genre: Realist novel, Bildungsroman, Social novel · 20 chapters · 206,361 words

First lines

On the 15th of September, 1840, about six o'clock in the morning, the Ville de Montereau, just on the point of starting, was sending forth great whirlwinds of smoke, in front of the Quai St. Bernard.

People came rushing on board in breathless haste. The traffic was obstructed by casks, cables, and baskets of linen. The sailors answered nobody. People jostled one another. Between the two paddle-boxes was piled up a heap of parcels; and the uproar was drowned in the loud hissing of the steam, which, making its way through the plates of sheet-iron, enveloped everything in a white cloud, while the bell at the prow kept ringing continuously.

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French realist fiction · coming of age · unrequited love · obsessive passion · provincial life · Paris · steamboat travel · Seine river · 1840s France · bourgeois society · social ambition · patronage

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