Flaubert - Sentimental Education

The Oxford edition cover of Flaubert's  Sentimental Education sports a study of dejeuner sur l'herbe done in 1865 by Monet (left) not the 1862 Manet work of the same title referred to by Proust seen below. Viewing these two works we sense the difference between the no picnic 1848 revolutionary days of Flaubert's novel to the fin-de-siècle decay later described by Proust.





Flaubert gives us a fast paced trip through Paris complete with lavish details of dress, food, streets and the people, all caught in a political maelstrom that sometimes seems to mirror our own times. One critic describes this novel as "a walk down a breezy sidewalk". The well drawn characters are frequently described  by their occupational status (clerk, lawyer) or political predilections (Citizen, Republican).

Our diffident, modest and shy* protagonist Frédéric Moreau has completed his baccalaureate gets an inheritance from an uncle and goes to Paris leaving behind his mother and the Roque daughter, a younger girl and playmate of his youth.

If you think you were naive on graduating college, wait until you read about Frédéric. 

* Gilbert & Sullivan "Ruddygore" Robin Oakapple sings:
As a poet, I'm tender and quaint –
I've passion and fervour and grace –
From Ovid and Horace To Swinburne and Morris,
They all of them take a back place.
Then I sing and I play and I paint:
Though none are accomplished as I,
To say so were treason:
You ask me the reason? 
I'm diffident, modest, and shy!

Altogether a very good read! =====================================================================

The section late in the novel when Frédéric and Rosannette leave Paris in June 1948 (to escape the June Uprising) and together travel the 34 miles South to Fontainebleau has inspired me to make the trip on my next visit to France.

Translation: 

The 2015 Amazon Kindle edition which understandably does not name a translator follows:

"Frederick had seated himself by her side under the linden-trees. He saw in imagination all the personages who had haunted these walls—Charles V, the Valois kings, Henry IV, Peter the Great, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and "the fair mourners of the stage-boxes," Voltaire, Napoléon, Pius VII, and Louis Philippe; and he felt himself surrounded, elbowed, by these tumultuous dead people. He was stunned by such a confusion of historic figures, even though he found a certain fascination in contemplating them, nevertheless."

Followed by a Helen Constantine translation which appears on Page 299 of the Oxford World Classics:

"Frédéric had sat down next to her under the lime trees. He thought about all the people who had walked beneath these walls, Charles V, the Valois, Henry IV, Peter the Great, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and "the lovely ladies who wept in the stage boxes". He thought about Voltaire, Napoleon, Pius VII, Louis-Phillippe. He felt surrounded, jostled by this throng of the dead. He was dazed, but at the same time fascinated by such a plethora of images."

The Table where Napoleon signed his abdication
on 4 April 1814, before his exile to Elba.