Sentimental Education: A New Translation
Paris, 1840. A young man from the provinces boards a riverboat heading home, and in a single moment, his life changes - though not in any way he could predict, or that anyone around him would notice.
Frédéric Moreau is nineteen, ambitious, and full of feeling that has nowhere to go. In the years that follow, he will pursue a career in law, then abandon it. He will move in the glittering circles of Parisian society - artists, journalists, financiers, revolutionaries - and fail to become any of them. He will fall in love, repeatedly and inconclusively. And he will carry, through all of it, an attachment to a woman he met on that riverboat: Madame Arnoux, older, married, and utterly unattainable - the fixed point around which his entire aimless life quietly revolves.
Set against the Revolution of 1848 and the rise of Napoleon III's Second Empire, Sentimental Education is Flaubert's portrait of a generation: young men who arrived in Paris with grand ambitions and watched history swallow them whole. It is a novel about love that is never consummated, politics that leads nowhere, and time - above all, time - and what it does to the people who believed, once, that everything was still possible.
By the author of Madame Bovary. First published in 1869. Considered by many the greatest French novel of the nineteenth century.
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