Deslauriers has followed a more scattered and declining trajectory: He has renounced his former convictions and fallen from a prefect to a secretary of a pasha to a publicist and petty employee. Betrayed by Louise, he remains alone, like Frédéric. But then, all the characters who achieve success are despicable, most of all Baptiste Martinon, a fellow student of peasant origin and pliable character, who weds the banker Dambreuse’s illegitimate daughter and is promoted to senator under the Empire. Humbled, isolated, and yet lucid, the two aging friends are not that far from the satirical pair of Bouvard and Pécuchet.


In his sentimental novel, Frédéric fluctuates among four women: a Romantic idol, a well-endowed heiress, an upper-class socialite, and a prostitute. He courts one for lack of the other, is loved by one while thinking of another—and lets them all escape. Significantly, Madame Arnoux, the idol, occupies the beginning and the end of the text. The second in order of appearance, and the last but one to disappear, is heiress Louise Roque, the provincial neighbor who at first seems unacceptable because of her father’s questionable morals, but then is highly desirable because of her father’s fortune; the only one candidly to confess her love for Frédéric, Louise nevertheless marries Deslauriers, before running off with yet another man. Further along in the plot appear two courtesans: Rosanette, a professional, and the socialite Madame Dambreuse, who hides behind a sham respectability and proves less difficult to conquer than the prostitute; the frivolous Rosanette takes on Fr6d6ric’s sexual education, while the greedy, cold-hearted, and well-connected Madame Dambreuse should insure Frédéric’s worldly success. In the end, he sacrifices them both to Madame Arnoux’s memory.

Madame Arnoux’s first name is Marie, the name of the Virgin Mother. The theme of the young man in love with a maternal figure, often with children of her own, who provides him with both a sentimental and a social education, appeared in the eighteenth century and is not rare in Romantic literature—one thinks of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Balzac’s Le Lys dans la Vállée (1836; The Lily in the halley), or Charles Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté (1834; Sensual Pleasure). In all these novels, the older woman is in competition with one or several younger females, and her child’s disease holds her back from adulterous, and symbolically incestuous, temptation. In our text as in those, Marie is the object of the deepest, and the most forbidden, desire. When Frédéric meets her on the boat on his way back to Madame Moreau’s, she sits like a Madonna with child; in the epilogue, she kisses him “on the forehead, like a mother” (p. 474). No one may emulate her in that role: Whereas her maternity is sublime—as when she sacrifices her first and only rendezvous with Frédéric to look after her sick child, and the child survives—Rosanette’s unwanted maternity, which she uses to retain Frédéric, is slightly grotesque, and her baby dies.

Starting with the initial “apparition” of the Beloved on the boat, the sentimental novel recycles the clichés of courtly and Romantic love. This love, however, entails neither chivalric prowess nor grandiose despair, not even suicide, as in the case of Madame Bovary. Madame Arnoux resembles “the women of whom he had read in romances” (p. 13)—but bears the prosaic patronymic of Arnoux, a name that sounds like that of the famous demimondaine Sophie Arnould. She looks wonderfully Andalusian, but she is from Chartres, not far from Paris. She represents an ethereal figure, but she is soiled by money problems and conjugal squabbles. She becomes the “center” of Frédéric’s existence; the Paris of his perambulations, his daily occupations, the people he frequents—everything revolves around her. For her sake he arranges his attire, his apartments, his activities. For her sake he associates with her husband and his vulgar acquaintances, squandering his financial resources. He projects her image everywhere: “All women brought her to mind, either from the effect of their resemblance to her or by the violent contrast” (p. 78). Frédéric stands in ecstasy before a lighted window—but it is not hers! He elaborates words, gestures, scenarios—which do not come to pass. When, while being posted to the National Guard in 1848 at the same time as Jacques Arnoux, he fathomed that the sleeping Arnoux could be disposed of by an accidental bullet, “images passed through his mind in endless succession. He saw himself with her at night in a coach, then on a river’s bank on a summer’s evening, and under the reflection of a lamp at home in their own house.... Frédéric brooded over this idea like a playwright in the creative act” (p. 354). But whereas Madame Bovary was poisoned by books before poisoning herself with arsenic, Madame Arnoux “did not display much enthusiasm about literature” (p.