Why this book

Flaubert labored five long, obsessive years polishing every single sentence of it, and the finished book quietly reshaped generations of novelists who followed him -- call it the birth of the modern antihero: a man defined not by triumph, but by everything he almost did, and never once finished.

The Story

Frederick Moreau, young, dreamy, and newly graduated from law school, sails home up the Seine to Paris on a crowded river steamer and glimpses Madame Arnoux standing at the rail in golden afternoon light, an older married woman, therefore he falls instantly and hopelessly in love, though he barely finds courage to speak.

He quickly befriends her husband Arnoux, a restless picture-and-pottery dealer full of shifting money schemes and grand, hopeful talk, hoping that simple nearness to him might somehow mean nearness to her instead, but Arnoux's careless moods and constant, mounting debts keep Frederick forever circling just outside the real warmth of that household.

His oldest friend Deslauriers, sharp, poor, and relentlessly ambitious, keeps pushing him hard toward real money and a serious legal career, therefore Frederick drifts instead between half-finished law studies, glittering Parisian salons, and quiet afternoons in Madame Arnoux's parlor, achieving almost nothing at all but longing, year after wasted year.

Lonely, impatient at waiting, and unable to ever truly reach the one woman he actually wants, Frederick soon drifts into an affair with Rosanette, a vivacious young courtesan everyone in Paris fondly calls the Marechale, therefore his divided heart quietly splits in two, between patient devotion and restless, present desire.

The struggling painter Pellerin finally finishes a large, ambitious portrait of Rosanette but Frederick stubbornly refuses to pay the full bill he had once carelessly promised, therefore Pellerin spitefully exhibits the finished canvas in a public shop window under Frederick's own name, embarrassing him thoroughly before all of fashionable, gossiping Paris.

The cowardly young aristocrat Cisy publicly insults Madame Arnoux's honor at a crowded dinner party, therefore Frederick furiously hurls a plate straight at his head and a formal duel with pistols is hastily arranged, but Arnoux, badly misreading the whole quarrel, rushes in and stops the fight before real blood is drawn.

Frederick had already lent Arnoux a good sum of money toward a mortgage-registration scheme that quietly collapsed, losing every single franc of it, but he forgives him completely right after the aborted duel anyway, simply unable to stay angry at his careless, endlessly charming, endlessly forgiven rival for very long.

Chasing quick fortune like everyone else that speculative season, Frederick gambles heavily on Northern railway shares and gains thirty thousand francs almost overnight, therefore he briefly tastes real wealth, but the market suddenly crashes and he loses sixty thousand francs instead, therefore Deslauriers now urges him to simply marry for money.

In quiet, provincial Nogent, Louise Roque, the devoted young daughter of the wealthy landowner Pere Roque, confesses through tears one evening that she has secretly loved Frederick since they were both children, therefore he agrees, almost absently, to marry her, though his restless heart truly stays fixed elsewhere, back in Paris.

Back in busy Paris once more, Frederick quietly buys Pellerin's unwanted, unsold portrait himself, simply to own one small thing once touched by Madame Arnoux's presence, therefore their careful, unspoken intimacy deepens further after she and her husband move away to the quieter outskirts at Auteuil, some distance from the city center.

Frederick secretly rents and lovingly furnishes an entire private apartment in the city for one long, long-awaited rendezvous with Madame Arnoux, but her small son Eugene suddenly falls dangerously ill with croup that very same morning, therefore she cannot possibly leave his bedside to come to him at all, that day.

On that very same fateful day, Paris erupts into open revolt and the whole tottering monarchy itself collapses in the Revolution of 1848, therefore history and private heartbreak collide in one single afternoon, and Frederick, refused by the one woman he truly loves, takes Rosanette to the waiting apartment instead.

The financier Dambreuse now urges Frederick to stand for a seat in the brand-new National Assembly, but the radical agitator Senecal openly blocks his candidacy at a rowdy political club and installs a total stranger, a Spanish orator, in his place instead, therefore Frederick slinks back home, thoroughly humiliated, to Rosanette's waiting arms.

Frederick soon learns, with a bitter jolt, that Arnoux has quietly become Rosanette's lover as well as remaining Madame Arnoux's own husband, therefore he once even stands guard outside her very door in Arnoux's own place, and old jealousy slowly curdles into something closer to plain, weary disgust.

Workers' fury over harsh new conscription orders soon explodes into the bloody June Days riots across Paris, therefore Frederick flees the chaos for the quiet countryside with Rosanette, but urgent news that his devoted friend Dussardier lies badly wounded at the barricades pulls him straight back to the city alone.

Louise, waiting faithfully back home in Nogent for a wedding day that never seems to come, learns at last that Frederick openly keeps a mistress in the capital, therefore her girlish hope quietly withers and dies inside her, though Frederick himself does not yet notice what he has so carelessly lost back home, in Nogent.

Frederick at last reconciles passionately with Madame Arnoux, and for one long, trembling moment everything he has ever wanted seems finally within reach, but Rosanette suddenly bursts in unannounced and finds the two of them kissing, therefore Madame Arnoux flees at once in humiliation, and Frederick, deeply ashamed, still leaves with Rosanette anyway.

Rosanette soon announces that she is carrying Frederick's own child, therefore his sudden guilt briefly softens him toward her, but she then confesses she borrowed money from her other lover Arnoux to quietly settle an old debt of her own, therefore Frederick's fragile trust curdles fast into open contempt.

Turning coldly away from Rosanette at last, Frederick begins openly courting the sharp, calculating, wealthy widow Madame Dambreuse instead, therefore within one single carefully calculated season he wins both her bed and her late husband's considerable political influence, along with useful, far-reaching society connections all across Paris.

Old Dambreuse dies soon afterward, and his true final will, generously favoring his widow, is mysteriously lost somewhere in the confusion, therefore an earlier, harsher will stands instead, leaving her only thirty thousand livres rather than the expected millions, but Frederick marries her regardless, bound now purely by stubborn honor.

Rosanette quietly bears Frederick's son in secret at a small rented house in Chaillot, therefore he now lives a careful, exhausting double life split awkwardly between two separate households and two separate women, until Madame Dambreuse eventually hears gossip that he still secretly visits Madame Arnoux behind her trusting back.

Arnoux, sued by a furious ruined shareholder named Mignot, flees bankrupt overnight to the distant port of Le Havre, therefore Frederick quietly borrows a large sum of money from Madame Dambreuse under a false pretext and races desperately after him to help, but arrives far, far too late to do anything at all.

Rosanette's infant son soon dies quietly of a childhood thrush infection, therefore raw grief shatters what little warmth still remained between them, and Frederick, wrongly believing she herself engineered the humiliating public auction of Madame Arnoux's furniture, breaks with Rosanette completely and for good, without a single backward glance.

Frederick returns once more, older and considerably wearier now, all the way back to Nogent hoping to find Louise still faithfully waiting for him, therefore he arrives just in time to find her at the altar, marrying his old friend Deslauriers instead, therefore his very last comfortable refuge quietly closes its door on him forever.

Years later, Senecal, now working as a hardened police agent for the state he once opposed, coldly shoots down the ever-devoted Dussardier during yet another street uprising, therefore the one purely honest man in this whole long, tangled story dies crying out, Long live the Republic, with his very last breath.

In March of a much later year, an aged Madame Arnoux, now white-haired and long widowed after Arnoux's death, quietly visits Frederick in Paris merely to repay an old, forgotten mortgage debt between them, therefore decades of buried longing come flooding back all at once in one hushed, ordinary afternoon.

Seeing her white hair at last after all these years, Frederick feels the whole crushing weight of lost time collapse on him at once, but he still will not marry her, therefore she simply cuts a small lock of that white hair, leaves it for him, and departs quietly by cab forever.

In one final, quiet fireside talk many years later, an aging Frederick and Deslauriers, both quietly failed in love and in worldly ambition alike, meet again as true old friends, therefore they honestly measure their whole lives against everything they once hoped, as eager young men long ago, to someday become.

What it means

Looking back together at the fire, they see their grandest schemes of youth all crumbled into nothing much at all, yet a foolish, frightened teenage escapade they once fled from in sheer panic was, they now quietly agree, the very best time of their entire lives -- wanting, it turns out, always outshining having.

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