First published in French in 1877, "Three Tales" is a collection of three short stories by the celebrated French novelist Gustave Flaubert. The first story in this collection "A Simple Soul" is a story of love and spiritual awakening seen through the simple and apparently unremarkable life of a servant girl. While she has little materially, she retains her ability to love and is devoted to others. "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier" is an...

A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor's voice, Gustave Flaubert, perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century, lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his novels at the rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall's new biography weaves together Flaubert's provincial life with...

Extrait : "Charles fut surpris de la blancheur de ses ongles. Ils étaient brillants, fins du bout, plus nettoyés que les ivoires de Dieppe, et taillés en amande. Sa main pourtant n'était pas belle, point assez pâle, peut-être, et un peu sèche aux phalanges ; elle était trop longue aussi, et sans molles inflexions de lignes sur les contours."

A study of Flaubert's refinement of symbolism and realism as stylistic techniques in the novel. Eminent writers analyze Madame Bovary, Salammbo, and L'Education Sentimentale for insight into Flaubert's impact on modern literature.

"In 1869, Gustave Flaubert published what he considered to be his masterwork novel, A Sentimental Education, which told a deeply human and deeply pessimistic story of the 1848 revolutions. The book was a critical and commercial flop. Flaubert was devastated. Yet his year was only going to get worse. The summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871 would come to be known as the "Terrible Year" in France. France suffered a humiliating defeat in their war...