Gustave Flaubert: Man of Letters

On Sentimental Education (1869)

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I recently finished reading the French author Gustave Flaubert’s (1821-1880, died at age 58) 1869 masterpiece, Sentimental Education. Needless to say: It blew me away. In general, I’ve long been a fan of reading 19^th century writing—or 20^th century at latest—because I’ve found, frankly, that the more modern you get with literature, the less “literary” it seems, and the more mired in obvious, blatant political ideology, some sort of hyper-moral agenda, and tribal stupidity it tends to be. Easy and lovely exceptions to this are authors such as Zadie Smith, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elif Batuman, the late David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Junot Diaz, Chuck Palaniuk, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, and others.

What fascinates me above all else in Sentimental Education is the incredible, profoundly nuanced and complex and layered plotwork. Flaubert is a master at plot. If you’re an aspiring writer right now, in 2023, read this book because it’ll teach you in a masterly manner how to concoct a believable, tension-filled plot.

The story is too complex to summarize with any real accuracy in this one brief post, but the basic idea is the following. Frédéric Moreau is the young male protagonist. He flees his rural home in France for Paris in order to learn about real life. He hopes to become an author, a writer of the history of aesthetics. In the beginning he is a mere 18-year-old social rube who is hopelessly clueless. He happens to meet an older wealthy entrepreneur on the ship back from Paris after seeing his uncle about an inheritance, and through this wealthy man meets and—hilariously instantaneously, without a word spoken, which was normal in the 1800s—“falls in love” with the wealthy man’s wife.

Thus begins the tale of Frédéric in Paris, the classic story of a young outsider, entering slowly into the very heart, the core of the Society of a major metropolitan city. He moves from woman to woman, always with the wealthy man’s wife—"Madame Arnoux”—at the forefront of his mind. Along the way there are perhaps half a dozen sexual/romantic intrigues. For something like 220 or 240 pages—the book is complete at 420 pages; the novel, at least the version I have, is the version published originally in 1964 and translated by Robert Baldick—Flaubert expertly plays out the sexual tension: There are glances and finger brushing and nods and reproaches and potential flirting but never a kiss, nor certainly anything more. He drags the tension between Frédéric and Madame Arnoux out excruciatingly…and of course we can’t stop reading as a result.

That is one of the strongest tools in the writer’s box: Sexual tension, spread out and dropped in slowly and with nuanced, titillating patience. This is probably three-quarters of the reason most movies work. We get hooked in because sex is one of the most fundamental desires of mankind. We have to know how it’ll all turn out.

The novel is of the Naturalism, or realism school: Flaubert was not imagining so much as putting down a mix of his own autobiographical experience, the historical realities of the 1848 Paris Revolution—which is the backdrop of the novel—and an exploration of Paris in the 1840s. The title—Sentimental Education—itself points to an attempt to paint the portrait of a time and place, to explore the depths of how people felt, what they thought, what their expressed morals and values were, the dissonance between what they said in Society and what they actually did in “real life” (on the page).

That word—dissonance—says it all. Flaubert is also a master at this technique: The tension between what characters think say and do. Frédéric, of course, especially, given that he’s our main POV and our protagonist/hero, though he’s really more of an anti-hero. (The novel is technically told in 3^rd-person POV, though we mostly, say 85%, stay within Frédéric’s head.) Frédéric tells countless women he loves them, and sometimes even believes it, only to turn around and chase after another woman, often a married one. Mistresses, courtesans (what we would now call “sex workers”), cheating married women, all of these abound in the novel.

Frédéric—somewhat hiding his own grotesque motives even from himself—genuinely seeks M. Arnoux’s (the wealthy man, who turns out, in the beginning, to be an art collector/dealer) friendship, even helping him later with financial assistance (when Frédéric comes into money), yet simultaneously he wants nothing more than to sleep with and ultimately marry Arnoux’s wife. The concepts of denial and self-rationalization are ripe in this novel. Ultimately, Frédéric, like most young men, then or now, wants what he wants. He isn’t a total narcissist or sociopath; he feels deep shame, fear, sadness, regret, even self-hatred. But he simply cannot help himself.

In the end, becoming wealthy first from his uncle’s inheritance (his uncle dies) and then from the Stock Exchange and other means, he navigates through the thick and complicated world of the Paris aristocracy of the 1840s. He becomes “of Society.” Mostly he finds it a boring, artificial social bubble which is both obnoxious, inane and unsustainable. Our hero is forced to see himself when the Revolution exposes the nasty hypocrisy of both the political Right and Left, the monarchy and the aristocracy and the Socialists and, even, the working-class masses. The whole situation throws a light on the mad absurdity of it all, on mankind in general.

The Revolution plays as a symbolic, metaphorical backdrop to the insipient chaos of his own wild, off-the-rails life. He’s throwing money every which way, loaning and giving it away like paper. His “friends” have all, by the end, more or less screwed him in various ways, and in many respects he, too, has screwed them. When he is rejected by Madame Arnoux for the final time, he turns to his on/off mistress.