Manzoni contends that such a text either blurs the distinction between the factual and the fictional, and the reader, who wants to learn something certain about the past, is disappointed; or it expressly distinguishes the factual from the fictional, and the reader, who demands unity from a work of art, is again disappointed. Thus neither the realist nor the aesthete is satisfied. The fact is, Manzoni concludes, the separation of truth and invention, or veracity and verisimilitude, is impossible in the historical novel, but neither does this subgenre have any unified form; consequently, it can never be fully satisfactory.

“Historical” means true, or at least veracious, but it also means worthy to be recorded, memorable. “And then, what to choose among the real Facts?” Flaubert asked in a letter of March 1868 (Correspondance, vol. 3, p. 734). This was a crucial question, all the more so because he was dealing with a period still present in the minds of his contemporaries, a period rich in events that threatened to obfuscate the imaginary plot. “I have a very hard time embedding my characters in the political events of’48!” he deplored in the same passage. “I am afraid the background will absorb the foreground. Here is the defect of the historical genre. The historical characters are more interesting than the fictional ones.... The public will take less interest in Frédéric than in Lamartine?” This is why Flaubert was very careful not to let Lamartine and his famous, or infamous, partisans and adversaries take to the stage, and focused instead on made-up, albeit highly representative, actors.

Finally, though “historical” normally implies “public,” the novel concentrates on individual matters. Since the “novel” of “historical novel” is the substantive and “historical” only the attribute, the latter has to remain subordinate to the former. A way to negotiate this tense relationship is to hint at a secret correspondence between the general turmoil and the private tribulations. In Sentimental Education, there is an interconnectedness, sometimes an analogy, or, more often, an ironic link between the major scenes of collective life and those of the personal, especially amorous, life. In an unpublished note, Flaubert expressed his wish to “show that Sentimentalism (its development since 1830) follows Politics and reproduces its phases.” When Frédéric, having hired a hotel room for his first rendezvous, waits for Madame Arnoux, who does not show up, the February insurrection and its ambiguous promises start rumbling. When he falls back on Rosanette, he proclaims: “ ‘I am following the fashion! I’m reforming myself!’ ” (p. 316), “reform” being the slogan of the day. When he takes Rosanette to his hotel room, he notes: “ ‘Ah! They’re killing off some bourgeois’ ” on the Boulevard des Capucines (p. 317). Frédéric and Rosanette try to escape to Fontainebleau during the June repression. And the auction sale of the Arnoux property, at which Frédéric drops Madame Dambreuse, takes place on the eve of Bonaparte’s coup.

At Fontainebleau, Frédéric and Rosanette try to flee from their contemporary history into their sentimental novel. In the forest of Fontainebleau, the linear time of the calendar, punctuated by dates, is superseded by the cyclical and hazy time of the idyllic mode. The idyll resists history thanks to the combined forces of eternal Nature and intimate Love. The fresh and sensuous Rosanette can be assimilated to Nature—to these woods, in fact, as contaminated as she is by civilization. As for Love, Rosanette is an expert. But as such—as a whore, as a “public” woman—she is deprived of any intimacy, bereft of her life, her bed, her body, and her soul. And when she, the daughter of silk workers in Lyons, divulges her own sentimental education—“to what lover did she owe her education?” (p. 369)—she evokes public evils: poverty, exploitation, child prostitution, and implicitly, popular revolt (that of the silk-workers of Lyons in 1831). As a whole, the story of the couple, full of delays and cheating, presents many similarities with history.