Bouvard and Pécuchet is a Romance French unfinished of Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881, on a purely posthumous basis.

Summary

By a heat day of summer, in Paris, two men, Bouvard and Pécuchet, meet and make knowledge. They discover that, not only they exert the same trade (copyist), but in more they have the same centers of interests. If they could it, they would like to live in the countryside. An extremely convenient heritage will enable them to change life. They take again a farm in the Calvados, not far from Caen and launch out in the Agriculture. Their incapacity to include/understand will generate only disasters. Same manner, they will be interested in medicine, with chemistry, geology, the policy with the same results. Wearied per so many failures, they turn over to their trade of copyist.

Comment

The project of this novel goes up with 1872, since the author informs of it George Sand, in a mail where he affirms his comic intention. As of this time, he thinks of writing a vast mocking remark on the vanity of his contemporaries. Between the idea and the drafting stopped by its death it will have had time to collect an impressive documentation: the figure of thousand five hundred books is advanced. At the time of the writing, Flaubert had thought of the subtitle: “ encyclopedia of the human silly thing ” and it is indeed because of the catalog which he proposes to us that the novel is famous. The comic one comes from the frenzy of the two accomplices, with any knowledge, all to test, and especially their incapacity to include/understand correctly. The novel that we know constitutes only the first part of the plan. The reception was reserved, but some regard it as a masterpiece

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