Three Tales: A New Translation
A servant who gives everything. A hunter condemned by prophecy. A queen who demands a prophet's head.
Three Tales brings together the final masterwork of Gustave Flaubert - three stories that span the breadth of human history and the depths of the human soul.
In A Simple Heart, F licit , an illiterate Norman servant, outlives everyone she loves - the children she raised, the nephew she adored, the parrot that became, in her failing mind, an image of the Holy Spirit itself. Hers is a life without drama or recognition, rendered by Flaubert with devastating tenderness.
In The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier, a medieval nobleman is driven by an inexplicable bloodlust to slaughter, to parricide, and ultimately to sainthood - the story told in the vivid, heraldic style of a cathedral window, its hero neither fully guilty nor fully innocent.
In Herodias, the court of Herod Antipas awaits a birthday feast. Herodias has her plan. Salom will dance. A head will be delivered on a platter. Flaubert compresses the drama of an empire into a single day of heat, intrigue, and irreversible consequence.
Published in 1877, three years before his death, Three Tales is the work in which Flaubert - author of Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education - achieved something beyond the novel: three perfect forms, three eras, three kinds of grace.
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