A Simple Soul

A Simple Soul is the standard English title for Un Coeur Simple, the long short story or novella by Gustave Flaubert that appeared in 1877 as the first of his Trois Contes. Flaubert, who lived from 1821 to 1880, was the central figure of nineteenth century French literary realism and one of the most influential European prose writers of the modern period.

A Simple Soul follows Félicité, a country servant woman in nineteenth century Normandy, across her long life of devoted service to a provincial bourgeois family. Félicité has no education, almost no inner life that the conventional novel would have considered substantial, and almost nothing that the world would call achievement or success. She works for the family across decades, loves and loses various of the people who pass through her life, becomes deeply attached to a parrot that becomes her companion in old age, and dies finally in a moment of religious vision that the story treats with the absolute formal precision that Flaubert brought to all his work.

The story is generally regarded as one of the supreme achievements of nineteenth century European short fiction. Flaubert had been working for years on what he called a story that would be the history of an obscure life, and he eventually produced in A Simple Soul one of the most carefully constructed studies of a humble life that any major European writer had attempted. The story is short by Flaubert’s standards, around fifty pages in most editions, but the compression is part of what gives the story its substantial power.

The particular Flaubertian technique that the story shows in its purest form is what Flaubert himself called the free indirect style, the prose method that allows the third person narrator to enter into the consciousness of the character so closely that the reader hears the character’s own perceptions and limitations in the narrator’s voice. The technique allowed Flaubert to present Félicité from the inside without ever condescending to her or violating the actual limits of her understanding, and the result is one of the most moving treatments of a humble protagonist in European literature.

The story is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth century French literature or in the broader development of European prose fiction. It pairs naturally with Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education and with the other two stories in Trois Contes.