![]() A small country house in the town of Chavignolles as their headquarters, the pair are at last free to satisfy their superhuman yearning for knowledge. If they were to combine their mental resources, how much longer could their brilliance remain a secret to the world? An ideal opportunity to test this thesis drops in their laps in the form of a hefty inheritance. As intellectual companions, they egg each other on to ever more ludicrous levels of self-assurance. Separately, Bouvard and Pécuchet were harmless bookworms. After all, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, as Hugh Kenner points out in The Stoic Comedians, are really a cliché cleft in two: “Frenchmen are by turns sensual and rational worldly, lecherous and suave, or else rigorous, logical, prickly the fat and the thin, the optimist and the pessimist the Mediterranean and the Roman temperament, respectively.” Care to guess which is which? The first meeting could almost count as a reunion. The encounter between two Parisian copy clerks leads to a remarkable friendship. ![]() ![]() Gustave Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet starts with a chance meeting that has the air of serene machination about it. ![]() See all books by Gustave Flaubert at .uk | ![]()
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