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Zusatztext “[ Madame Bovary is] a surprisingly romantic and deeply moving text! as well as a work of pioneering modernity. . . Flaubert’s anti-heroic heroine in fact acquires a haunting nobility through her relentless quest for the absolute of experience.” –from the Introduction by Victor Brombert Informationen zum Autor Gustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen and did not leave his birth city until he was nineteen when he went to study law in Paris. After three years, however, Flaubert abandoned law and began writing. His first finished work was November, a novella. In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony . His exploration of themes of spiritual torment was just the beginning of Flaubert's controversial subject choices. His frank and realistic display of the sex, adultery and other goings-on in bourgeois France in Madame Bovary saw him go on trial for immorality, charges he only narrowly escaped. He died in 1880. Klappentext Emma, a passionate dreamer raised in the French countryside, is ready for her life to take off when she marries the decent, dull Dr. Charles Bovary. Marriage, however, fails to live up to her expectations, which are fueled by sentimental novels, and she turns disastrously to love affairs. The story of Emma's adultery scandalized France when Madame Bovary was first published. Today, the heartbreaking story of Emma's financial ruin remains just as compelling.In Madame Bovary, his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day. One of the rare works of art that it would be fair to call perfect, Madame Bovary has had an incalculable influence on the literary culture that followed it. This translation, by Francis Steegmuller, is acknowledged by common consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert's text. Part One We were in study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk. Those who were sleeping awoke, and we all stood up as though interrupting our work. The headmaster motioned us to sit down, then turned to the teacher and said softly, "Monsieur Roger, I'm placing this pupil in your care. He'll begin in the eighth grade, but if his work and conduct are good enough, he'll be promoted to where he ought to be at his age." The newcomer hung back in the corner behind the door, so that we could hardly see him. He was a country boy of about fifteen, taller than any of us. He wore his hair cut straight across the forehead, like a cantor in a village church, and he had a gentle, bewildered look. Although his shoulders were not broad, his green jacket with black buttons was apparently too tight under the arms, and the slits of its cuffs revealed red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, sheathed in blue stockings, protruded from his yellowish trousers, which were pulled up tight by a pair of suspenders. He wore heavy, unpolished, hobnailed shoes. We began to recite our lessons. He concentrated all his attention on them, as though listening to a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs or lean on his elbow, and when the bell rang at two o'clock the teacher had to tell him to line up with the rest of us. When we entered a classroom we always tossed our caps on the floor, to free our hands; as soon as we crossed the threshold we would throw them under the bench so hard that they struck the wall and raised a cloud of dust; this was "the way it should be done." But the new boy either failed to notice this maneuver or was too shy to perform it himself, for he was still holding his cap on his lap at the end of the prayer. It was a head...
