Sentimental Education

Frederic Moreau arrives in Paris as a hopeful young man and promptly falls in love with Madame Arnoux, the wife of an art dealer, a passion he nurses for years without ever quite acting on it. Around this thwarted romance Flaubert unfolds the whole restless world of 1840s France, from student cafes to the barricades of the 1848 Revolution, tracing how a generation’s political and personal hopes curdle into disappointment. Cool, ironic, and unsparing, the novel refuses the consolations of a tidy plot, which is exactly why later writers came to prize it so highly. Flaubert considered it the moral history of the men of his time. This free PDF and EPUB edition makes his great study of wasted feeling available to read.