7.22 Flaubert — Un cœur simple — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the first two parts of Gustave Flaubert's Un cœur simple , about 3,500 words: the portrait of a servant, her youth, a lost love, and her first years with her mistress's children. Appreciate Flaubert's precision: every word chosen, every detail concrete, and almost no comment from the narrator. Recognise the three-part rhythm of Flaubert's sentences and his use of the semicolon. Notice how a life of devotion is told in a few pages, with its single dramatic moment, the bull. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Pendant un demi-siècle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l’Évêque envièrent à Mme Aubain sa servante Félicité. For half a century, the ladies of Pont-l'Évêque envied Madame Aubain her servant Félicité . savait brider un cheval, engraisser les volailles, battre le beurre knew how to bridle a horse, fatten the poultry, churn butter et par-dessus sa camisole un tablier à bavette and over her bodice an apron with a bib Puis sa mère mourut, ses sœurs se dispersèrent, un fermier la recueillit Then her mother died, her sisters scattered, a farmer took her in Un soir d’automne, on s’en retourna par les herbages. One autumn evening, they came back through the pastures. C’était un taureau, que cachait le brouillard. It was a bull, hidden by the fog. Prerequisites : 7.21 — this reading follows 7.21 Reading . You met le réalisme in 5.18 Vocabulary ; Flaubert is its master. The farm and country words of 5.10 Vocabulary and 7.19 Reading will help. About this text Note: this text contains an attempted sexual assault. Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), the son of a surgeon in Rouen, spent most of his life writing in his house at Croisset, by the Seine, sometimes a week for a single page. His Madame Bovary (1857) changed the novel in Europe. Un cœur simple is the first of the Trois Contes , three tales published together in 1877, three years before his death. He wrote it in part for his friend George Sand, who had reproached him for the coldness of his books; she died before he finished it. The story is the life of Félicité , a servant in the small Norman town of Pont-l'Évêque , who serves the same mistress, Madame Aubain, a widow with two children, for half a century. She has nothing and expects nothing; she gives all her love, in turn, to a man, to the children, to a nephew, and finally to a parrot. The first part is a portrait of Félicité and the house in which she serves. The second goes back to her childhood and tells her first years in that house. The text here is the first and second parts of the five, about 3,500 words, from Trois contes in the edition of Flaubert's complete works published in Paris by Louis Conard in 1910, as transcribed in French Wikisource. The numbers I and II mark the two parts. Reading Flaubert Precision. Flaubert names objects exactly: the barometer above the piano, the tablier à bavette , the red petticoat. A list of tasks, elle faisait la cuisine et le ménage, cousait, lavait, repassait , is a whole life in one line. If a word is unfamiliar, it is usually a concrete object; guess its kind from the context and read on. Three beats. Many sentences have three parts, three verbs or three adjectives: petit, rouge, obèse . Read them aloud and you will hear the rhythm Flaubert tested by shouting his sentences in his study. The semicolon. Flaubert uses the semicolon to set two facts side by side and let the reader draw the link: Cette couardise fut pour Félicité une preuve de tendresse ; and the next clause, la sienne en redoubla , shows her own tenderness growing in return. No comment. The narrator almost never comments. He never says that Félicité is good; one of the few open judgements comes at the start, in the second paragraph, where Madame Aubain is a mistress qui cependant n’était pas une personne agréable ; another comes in Part II, about her sister's family: évidemment ils l’exploitaient . The facts say the rest: the hundred francs a year, the forbidden kisses, the bull. Reading it a second time, part by part I. The portrait. For fifty years the ladies of the town envied Madame Aubain her servant. The house, its rooms and furniture; the widow's finances; Félicité 's day, her cleanliness, her clothes, her face of indeterminate age. II. Childhood and Théodore . An orphan, Félicité is hired out on farms, beaten, accused of theft. At eighteen, at a village festival, she meets Théodore , who courts her and proposes; then, to escape military service, he marries a rich old woman instead. II. Madame Aubain. Heartbroken, Félicité leaves for the town, meets a widow looking for a cook, and is hired the same day. She adores the two children, Paul and Virginie. The visitors are described: the farmers, a ruined marquis who is Madame Aubain's uncle, and a former attorney. II. The bull. Walking home across the fields one autumn evening, the family meets a bull. Félicité faces it, throws earth in its eyes, and holds it off while Madame Aubain and the children escape. She does not even realise she has done anything heroic. II. Trouville and after. The family spends a summer by the sea for Virginie's health. Paul is sent to school in Caen, and Félicité takes Virginie to the catechism every day. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. A Simple Heart I For half a century, the ladies of Pont-l'Évêque envied Madame Aubain her servant Félicité . For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did the housework, sewed, washed, ironed, knew how to bridle a horse, fatten the poultry, churn butter, and remained faithful to her mistress, who, however, was not a pleasant person. Madame Aubain had married a handsome young man without fortune, who died at the beginning of 1809, leaving her two very young children and a great many debts. Then she s