The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gustave Flaubert · a novel in three parts · nineteen chapters · Michel Lévy frères, Paris, November 1869, in two volumes · scored on Flaubert’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and Robert Baldick’s translation (1964) for sense
Mode
Novel of education without education; the history of a young man, told as a chronicle of a generation and of the years 1840 to 1851
Mythos
The courtly pattern, built in order to be emptied: the young man, the married lady seen once as an apparition, a devotion of decades never consummated, and her token at the end; the barricade and the people at the palace shown as costume; time as the force that wears all things down
Phase
From the steamer leaving the quai Saint-Bernard on 15 September 1840, through February, June and December of the Second Republic, to a last meeting fifteen years on and a last conversation the winter after
Presentation
Fiction; three parts of six, six and seven chapters; an impersonal narration in free indirect style held close to a mind that cannot decide, carried by the imperfect tense
Register
Dinner-table talk of a dozen voices, the jargon of the clubs, the language of the dealer and the banker, and the flat sentence on which a chapter disperses
Scale
One young man, four women of four classes, a circle of friends, Paris and a provincial town, across eleven years of a nation’s history and fifteen more in a paragraph
Governing Proposition
A young man from the provinces sees a married woman on a river steamer in 1840 and loves her, without consummation, for the rest of the novel, while he moves among three other women, his friends’ politics, a dealer’s speculations and the revolution of 1848, until the coup of 1851 ends the history and fifteen years pass in a paragraph. The wager of the novel is that a generation which took its sentiments for a destiny lost its loves and its revolution by one mechanism, by waiting, by talk and by taking the image for the thing, and that a form without crisis, moving by habit, juxtaposition and ellipsis, can show that loss as it is lived.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Le 15 septembre 1840, vers six heures du matin, la Ville-de-Montereau, près de partir, fumait à gros tourbillons devant le quai Saint-Bernard”
“On 15 September 1840, at about six in the morning, the Ville-de-Montereau, about to leave, was pouring out great clouds of smoke before the quai Saint-Bernard.” The novel opens on a date, an hour, a boat and its smoke, fixed in one period. A young man from the provinces, Frédéric, is on board. So is a married woman, Mme Arnoux, and he sees her: “Ce fut comme une apparition”
“It was like a vision.” Everything the book will do to that sentence is already waiting in it.
The novel is built in three parts of six, six and seven chapters, nineteen in all. Its story runs from the steamer of September 1840 to the coup of 2 December 1851 at the end of the third part’s fifth chapter; then a last meeting in 1867, fifteen years on, and a final conversation in the winter that follows. The subtitle is Histoire d’un jeune homme, the history of a young man, and the history is long: a devotion of decades to a woman seen first as an apparition, never consummated.
Michel Lévy frères published it in Paris in November 1869, in two volumes, and it was badly received. It is not the earlier Éducation sentimentale that Flaubert wrote between 1843 and 1845, a different novel with different characters, unpublished in his life. The inheritance it turns is Balzac’s: the young provincial who comes to Paris to conquer it, as in Illusions perdues and Le Père Goriot, and the novel of education in which the hero is made by what he learns. Flaubert keeps the young man and the city and removes the engine.
Movement II
Mme Arnoux’s husband is a dealer. Arnoux runs an art paper, then a faience works, then speculations that grow shadier, and money passes through every relation in the book. Around Frédéric is a circle of friends and acquaintances: the painter Pellerin, the journalist Hussonnet, Sénécal, who believes in the revolution to come, and Dussardier. Beyond them stands the house of the banker Dambreuse, its salon and its politics.
Frédéric moves among four women: Mme Arnoux, whom he adores; Rosanette, a woman of the demi-monde; Mme Dambreuse, of the banker’s house; and Louise Roque, of the Roques of Nogent, in the provinces. Each is a version of the same deferral, priced in a different currency, and the book’s knowledge is in their equivalence. The days are given in the imperfect tense, which turns action into habit, and in a free indirect style held close to a mind that cannot decide. Chapters end on dispersal rather than climax. There are dinners, promenades and the Cisy duel.
Once the deferral nearly ends. A rendezvous is fixed in the rue Tronchet, and a room prepared (II.6). She does not come: her child is ill. Frédéric takes Rosanette to the room that was prepared for the other. The climax is refused, as the book refuses every climax, and the refusal is not a misfortune visited on the plot. It is the plot.
Movement III
February 1848 comes into the novel as noise in the street and talk at dinner. The Tuileries are sacked (III.1). The clubs meet, and the satire of their speeches is coarse. The republic of February and Frédéric’s adoration of Mme Arnoux will dissolve by the same mechanism: by waiting, by talk, by taking the image for the thing. The revolution’s myths, the barricade, the people at the palace, the club, are shown as costume.
In June, while Paris fights, Frédéric is in the forest of Fontainebleau with Rosanette (III.1). The idyll is set against the guns: rocks and old trees, a cold height, and the city at war beyond them. In the same chapter, at the Tuileries, old Roque turns his violence on a prisoner. The private and the public are placed side by side without comment, and the juxtaposition is the argument: the great events pass beside a life that does not change.
The Republic runs on toward its end. Mme Arnoux’s household goes to auction, its furniture sold piece by piece, a casket among the lots (III.5). A few pages later comes the coup of 2 December 1851. In the street Sénécal, the man who most believed in the revolution, now a police agent, kills Dussardier, whose faith is killed rather than disproved. The history of the novel ends there.
Movement IV
“Il voyagea. Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots, les froids réveils sous la tente, l’étourdissement des paysages et des ruines, l’amertume des sympathies interrompues. Il revint.”
“He travelled. He knew the melancholy of steamers, cold wakings under canvas, the dizziness of landscapes and ruins, the bitterness of broken friendships. He came back.” The paragraph comes after the coup and a blank, in the sixth chapter of the third part (III.6).
It carries about fifteen years. The form performs the passing of time instead of narrating it: the blank before the paragraph, then two words, then four nouns of melancholy, then two words again. The ellipsis is a new instrument in the novel, and the whole book has been preparing it, since a life that does not progress can be summarised in a sentence once it has been shown at length as habit.
In 1867 Frédéric and Mme Arnoux meet a last time. Her hair is white. She cuts a lock of it and gives it to him (III.6). The courtly pattern closes on its token: the young man, the married lady seen once as an apparition, a devotion of decades, the gift at the end. It has been load-bearing from the first page, and the book has spent its whole length emptying it.
Movement V
The last chapter (III.7) is a conversation in the winter after that meeting, between Frédéric and a friend, both now in their forties. They were the young men of a generation, and they look back on what their youth was.
They remember a visit to a brothel in their youth, from which Frédéric fled before anything happened. The ending reaches back before the book’s beginning, to a non-event, and they agree on it: “C’est là ce que nous avons eu de meilleur !”
“That was the best time we ever had.” The book that opened on a date, an hour and a boat closes on a memory from before the boat, and on nothing.
Whether that last line is irony, nostalgia or both, the book does not say. The disclosure is negative: the best thing in a life was a desire that never reached its object. A century and a half of readers, Lukács, Proust, Sartre, Bourdieu, have returned to the question it leaves, whether Frédéric is weak or merely honest, and the novel holds it open.
Act III · The Twelve
The design is subtractive by temperament, and the repetitions are the argument. Frédéric’s oscillation among four women, Mme Arnoux, Rosanette, Mme Dambreuse and Louise Roque, is required, because each is a version of the same deferral priced in a different currency, and the book’s knowledge is in their equivalence. Arnoux’s businesses, the art paper, the faience works and the shady speculations, are required too, since they carry money through every relation. What fails the test is a margin of social machinery: the full roster of the Dambreuse salon, the Cisy duel and part of the club scenes of 1848 run past their point, and some of the dinners and promenades of the second part could go without a fact the ending needs. A life that does not progress makes the drift partly earned and partly cost, about a tenth of the whole.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a generation that mistook its sentiments for a destiny lost both its loves and its revolution in the same way, by waiting, by talk and by taking the image for the thing. The erotic and the political are shown to be one failure. Frédéric’s adoration of Mme Arnoux and the republic of February dissolve by the same mechanism, and the man who betrays the revolution, Sénécal, become a police agent, is the man who most believed in it, and kills Dussardier in the street in December 1851 (III.5). The last disclosure is the hardest: two friends in their forties agree that the best thing they ever had was a youthful visit to a brothel from which Frédéric fled before anything happened. Held off the top because the disclosure is negative, and partly a mood of disenchantment the novel does not always turn into meaning.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The book refuses elevation as a policy, and the axis, indifferent to policy, counts height and frequency. The heights exist and are rationed. The first sight of Mme Arnoux on the steamer, “Ce fut comme une apparition” (I.1). The forest of Fontainebleau with Rosanette while Paris fights in June (III.1), a cold sublime of rocks and old trees set against the guns. The paragraph after the coup that carries fifteen years, “Il voyagea” to “Il revint” (III.6). The last meeting with Mme Arnoux and her white hair. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what lies between them: a register deliberately flat, which is not elevation, so that the heights are real and their frequency low. The flatness is credited where it belongs, on The Living Form and The Swerve.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is built, and built to be emptied. The structure is the courtly one: the young man, the married lady seen once as an apparition, a devotion of decades never consummated, and the lady’s token at the end, when she cuts a lock of her white hair and gives it to him (III.6). It is load-bearing; the book is unthinkable without it. But the novel’s whole labour is to deflate it, and what results is a type more than an archetype: Frédéric is the young man of a generation, the homme manqué, and he has not become a figure of world literature as Emma Bovary or Don Quixote have. The revolution’s myths, the barricade, the people at the Tuileries, the club, are shown as costume. The counter-myth Flaubert builds, of time wearing all things down, is strong, and holds the axis a tenth below the bar.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is Balzac: the young provincial who comes to Paris to conquer it, in Illusions perdues and Le Père Goriot, and the novel of education in which the hero is made by what he learns. Flaubert removes the engine. There is no conquest, no fall, no crisis that changes anything; the events of 1848 pass through the book as noise in the street and talk at dinner; the climaxes are refused, as when Mme Arnoux does not come to the rendezvous in the rue Tronchet (II.6); and the ending reaches back before the beginning to a non-event. The ellipsis of fifteen years in a paragraph is a new instrument. The stake was real and was lost at the time: the book was badly received in 1869. Held below the top because Madame Bovary had already made the stylistic break; this is the structural one.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Substitute a plotted form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that a life passes without event, that history arrives as rumour, and that desire is sustained by its deferral; a novel of crises would assert the opposite in its shape. The instruments: the imperfect tense, which turns action into habit; free indirect style held close to a mind that cannot decide; chapters that end on dispersal rather than climax; the juxtaposition of the private and the public, the idyll at Fontainebleau during the June days, the auction of Mme Arnoux’s furniture a few pages from the coup (III.5); and the blank before III.6, where the form performs the passing of time instead of narrating it. Held a step from the top because the middle of the second part at times becomes a container of social scenes rather than an instrument.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. A century and a half of reading has not exhausted it. Lukács, in The Theory of the Novel (1916), made it the type of the novel of disillusionment and of time as the novel’s subject; Proust wrote on Flaubert’s style in 1920; Sartre engaged with Flaubert at length; Bourdieu’s Les Règles de l’art (1992) opens with a reading of the book as a map of the field of power. The text keeps its questions open: whether Frédéric is weak or merely honest, whether Mme Arnoux’s virtue is love or fear, whether the last line is irony, nostalgia or both. Held a little below the deepest wells because many readers find its surface inert, and much of its yield is formal rather than semantic.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, through it, the European novel. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what a novel could be about, time passing, a life without shape, history as the inattentive live it, and how a novel could move, by ellipsis and juxtaposition rather than plot. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and was delayed. The book failed on publication, and its influence came through the novelists who made it a model, Proust in his novel of time, Joyce, and later the nouveau roman in its suspicion of plot. Delayed reach is credited and discounted. It is held below the kind of reach that made the novel of free indirect style a norm, and below the top, because its direct imitators are few: its pressure is felt as a permission more than a school.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is weighed on its span, one hundred and fifty-seven years, and on the presence that span allows. The text survives whole, in the form Flaubert published, with his manuscripts and drafts extant; nothing is lost and nothing is charged. It has been continuously in print in French, is set for the agrégation and taught in French schools and universities, and has been translated many times into English and into the major languages. It has outlived its conditions: the July Monarchy and 1848 are history, and the book is read for what they meant to a life. Charged against the widest figure for that span: its presence beyond France is narrower than that of Madame Bovary, and in English it is read more in the academy than by the general reader.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the French as far as it can be followed here; the sound of the sentence is credited where it is known and not inferred elsewhere. This is among the most finished prose in the novel’s history. The opening sentence fixes the date, the hour, the boat and the smoke in one period. The paragraph of travel moves in threes, four nouns of melancholy closed by two words, “Il revint”. The command extends to crowd scenes, the Tuileries sacked in February; to the dinner table with a dozen voices; and to objects that carry character, the casket bought at the auction and Pellerin’s portrait of Rosanette’s dead child. Charged lightly for the evenness in the second part that some readers call monotony, which is partly design. The structural command is known from the whole; the sentence-level case rests on the passages certain.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: old Roque’s violence against a prisoner held at the Tuileries (III.1) and the last meeting of Frédéric and Mme Arnoux in her white hair; or the idyll at Fontainebleau and the auction. One law governs them: illusion meets time and is dissolved, without catastrophe, by the ordinary. The bourgeois and the revolutionary, the lover and the speculator, the artist Pellerin and the journalist Hussonnet obey it; nobody in the book is exempt, Dussardier’s faith included, which is killed rather than disproved. The range is wide: comedy, satire, history, idyll, elegy. Charged a little for the satire of the clubs, coarser than the book’s law elsewhere allows, and for the thin end given to Louise Roque.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Held, not listed, across a broad field. Consciousness: Frédéric’s long indecision. The state and history, here as agent and not as ground: the July Monarchy, February and June 1848, the Second Republic and the coup, all entering private lives, in Dussardier’s death, Sénécal’s turn and Dambreuse’s politics. Money: Arnoux’s speculation, the faience works, Dambreuse’s finance, inheritances, the auction. Art: Pellerin’s painting, Hussonnet’s journalism, Arnoux’s dealing. Love and the demi-monde: four women of four classes. The provinces: Nogent and the Roques. What is thinner holds it a step down: the family is mainly absent, Frédéric’s mother a figure and Rosanette’s child alive for a page; the sacred appears only as satire; and labour as work done by hands stays offstage.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5, then The Unconcealment, The Swerve and The Inner Law at 9.2. Prose among the most finished in the novel’s history, from the opening period to the paragraph of fifteen years; a disclosure that a generation lost its loves and its revolution by one mechanism; a break with the novel of education that removes its engine; and one law, illusion dissolved by the ordinary, holding comedy, satire, history, idyll and elegy.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.3, held by a register flat by design: the heights, the apparition on the steamer, Fontainebleau in June, the paragraph of travel and the white hair, are real and rationed, and the frequency is low. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: a margin of social machinery in the salon, the duel and the clubs that runs past its point, and a courtly myth emptied into a type of a generation rather than carried as an archetype. The sound of Flaubert’s French beyond the sentences known here is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.2, The Living Form at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Swerve at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.9. The aggregate, at 8.9, also falls short of the summit; either alone holds the work in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale. Histoire d’un jeune homme, scored as the novel in Flaubert’s French as he published it, with Michel Lévy frères, Paris, in November 1869, in two volumes. The earlier Éducation sentimentale of 1843 to 1845, a different novel with different characters, unpublished in Flaubert’s life, is not the work; it is context only, neither credited nor charged. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Flaubert’s French. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own plain English beneath; no published translation is quoted. Translation · Robert Baldick’s Penguin translation (1964) is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense, with Douglas Parmée’s Oxford version beside it. Neither is in hand, neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged to the novel. The structure, the characters, the chronology, the principal scenes and the most quoted sentences are judged in full; the cadence of the French chapter by chapter is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates of composition, the month of the last meeting, the length of the novel in words or pages, how far the later editions differ, the particulars of old Roque’s act at the Tuileries and of the sack of the palace, the adaptations for film and television, and several claims about the book’s later readers, are not given. Citations are by part and chapter only where the chapter is certain: II.6 is Part Two, chapter 6.