In the days when duelling was practiced, society tended to be much more civil. A gentlemen knew that he could be called to ultimate account for his words, therefore he did not speak carelessly. Moreover, unless proven otherwise, one knew that a gentleman's word was truly his bond. Gentlemen were also much more certain and thoughtful of their convictions, for they had to be sure if they truly believed in such convictions strongly enough to defend them if called upon to do so.

In some ways, it's Flaubert's answer to Stendhal, given the fact it's a roman à clef, similar in scope and theme to Le Rouge et Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme. It's also a Bildungsroman, in the same Stendhalian, Goethian tradition. The young Frederic experiences love and warfare in much the same way as the young Julien Sorel does in Le Rouge. Readers will also be reminded of Marius in Hugo's Les Miserables (both authors use Paris revolts as central incidents). Both authors also witnessed the 1848 February uprising personally. Hugo, as a rather passionate defender of the Republic, incorporates his experience in describing an earlier, similar revolt in 1832. Flaubert as a dispassionate, even slightly amused, observer, describes the 1848 downfall of the monarchy from the point of view of his young protagonist. The manner in which the two authors incorporate the incidents of the revolution reflects on their personal styles and sensibilities (Hugo adhering to his romantic idealism, ready to mount the barricades - Flaubert, the detached, acerbic, silent witness, standing aside making mental notes). Lovers of literature can appreciate the masterful manner in which both geniuses weave historical incidents within the threads of their narratives. Lovers of irony will most likely prefer Flaubert's treatment.

Flaubert was constantly striving for objectivity, and Sentimental Education is his most completely realized creation in that regard. It's one of the least heavy handed exercises in creative writing that any author has ever produced. The master's prose is faultless, brilliant, refined to its essence in every turn of phrase. All superfluity of expression has been discarded. The reader is left with a highly faceted, exquisite sapphire of a work. Lovers of literature from James to Gide to the present day have been overawed by its brilliance.

BEK

The story revolves around a young man and his uncle, who is a scientist. They discover a route to the center of the earth (hence the title), and the novel is about their journey. Once you get 100 pages into this book, you aren't able to stop. The things they find boggle the mind, but seem so real.

100 years from now, people will still be enjoying Jules Verne, because he captures the imagination of the young explorer.

De L'Isle-Adam wrote in the mid-19th century, yet many of the idols he lampoons--commericialism, materialism, excessive patriotism, scientific objectivity--are all the more pervasive in today's society. De L'Isle-Adam writes witty, thought-provking satire without coming off embittered; this is no easy feat

Some of the tales have a shocking climax, such as "Sentimentality" or "The Eleventh-Hour Guest" "Two Augurs" is extremely funny; although it deliberately exaggerates society's trend towards conformity, it makes one ponder how much of an exaggeration it really is.

De L'Isle-Adam was a radical individualist and subjectivist. And these stories offer a metaphorical journey into human unconsciousness. One is tempted to call them poetical Freudianism; before Freud. In some ways, De L'Isle-Adam is similiar to Poe; though not as darkly offputting. I see a positive Enlightenment Humanistic impulse in De L'Isle-Adam as well, even as he lampoons much of the Enlightenment tradition.

Finally, I should note that although De L'Isle-Adam attacks science and reason and advocates a personal mysticism, he is not a religious apologist. If anything, the mysticism he has in mind is more of an idealism (perhaps even a solipism as the previous writter suggests); a probing of one's own mind and the very personal, often very weird world it has the potential to create.

In these tales, Villiers treats these themes with varying success, but somehow they are attractive, so different from what we live, think and feel today. Two of the tales were, in my opinion, the best crafted: "The impatience of multitudes", about a warrior returning to an Ancient Greek city from a battle with the Persians. It is very vivid and indeed cruel, as the title of the collection suggests. It could even be said that it belongs in anthologies of this period. The other one is "The desire to be a man", a very sick story. The rest are very original (though it doesn't seem so, for the style has been appropriated by cheap entertainment and a few masterpieces) and they create the right mood, with pale full moons, crows, owls, night horse-rides and all which is now a cliche of ghosts stories. It is an easy and quick read, rather eccentric.

A Rebours is the late 19th century French companion piece to late 20th century English / American books like High Fidelity. If Huysmans were alive today, he would undoubtedly be in a neon-lit bedroom somewhere, listening to the latest Bjork album, ingesting hallucinogenics, watching a Wong-Kar Wei movie with the sound off. Instead, living in a society bereft of what we now call pop culture, he had to content himself with jewel-encrusted turtles and the paintings of Gustave Moreau -- which, thanks to this book, I am now obsessed with. When worlds collide.

What separates A Rebours from its shallow latter-day successors is that Huysmans was an honest-to-God misanthrope, and as a result, his work has an unimpugnable authenticity. There's no pandering to trends here -- Huysmans was his own madman. His major gift, however, was for extreme ornamentation of language ( the French would call it "tarabiscote." ) In the original French, this book seems to take on an almost three-dimensional quality, to spin like an orb in front of your disbelieving eyes.

Of course, there's no story to be found. Just a lot of free-associative ramblings about how, for instance, the sense of smell has been criminally neglected throughout the ages ( think this influenced Harold and Maude? ) A Rebours, it can't be denied, takes a lot of patience to complete. It's often downright dull. But Huysmans was truly prophetic -- he anticipated our entire generation of indolent sensation-seekers.

Huysmans was literature's great complainer, capable of finding the misery and ennui in any situation-- even bachelorhood in late 19th century Paris. And while the book is regarded mainly as a manual for decadent living (Dorian Gray kept it by his bed), full of recherche and recondite indulgences, Huysmans' depiction of the unending quest for novelty and sensation is also drolly funny at times-- as in the scene in which an impotent des Esseintes takes up with a ventriloquist in the hopes that she can get a rise out of him by impersonating her own husband threatening violence outside the door while they copulate

I confess to having read the earlier reviews on the Amazon website, and have a slightly different view of the stories (which is fine as enjoyment of fiction is essentially subjective). The first tale, "A Simple Heart" is about Felicite, servant of Mme Aubain. It's a sad, but I thought sympathetically-told story of an inpressionable person who has little intelligence. Admittedly the ending is strange, which might be the cause of others' aversion to the story.

"The Legend of St Julian Hospitator" is, as the title suggests, a two-dimensional story with a religious/moral message. My impression was that Flaubert deliberately intended it to be read in that way. Such tales do not require character development - that is not their purpose.

"Herodias" is a biblico-historical story concerning the events leading up to the killing of John the Baptist. Flaubert takes the opportunity to let his imagination expand the Biblical account.

Each tale is tightly constructed and easily readable, though none will really stick in my mind.

The best of the tales is "A Simple Heart," the story of Felicite, a simple and pious servant girl who "loved her mistress with dog-like devotion and veneration." Orphaned at a young age, she is first taken in by a farmer who, "small as she was, [sent] her to look after the cows in the fields." It is a miserable life:

"She went about in rags, shivering with cold, used to lie flat on the ground to drink water out of the ponds, would be beaten for no reason at all, and was finally turned out of the house for stealing thirty sous, a theft of which she was innocent."

Felicite fortunately enters the service of another farmer who appreciates her devoted, unquestioning work habits. She grows into her adult years working for that farmer and then is retained as servant to Madame Aubain. Felicite's life with Madame Aubain forms the heart of the story, the first sentence of Flaubert's narrative adumbrating the whole: "For half a century the women of Pont-l'Eveque envied Madame Aubain her maidservant Felicite."

Felicite's life is a series of loves: of Theodore, a man whom she falls in love with at the age of eighteen and who leaves her for an older, wealthier woman; of the two children of Madame Aubain, who depart her world in different ways; of a nephew, who leaves on a sailing ship; of a poor old dying man who lives in a pig sty; and, finally, of a green parrot named Loulou. Throughout all these loves, "the years slipped by, each one like the last, with nothing to vary the rhythm of the great festivals: Easter, the Assumption, All Saints' Day."

It is interesting to quote what Flaubert had to say about the end of "A Simple Heart," because it is not entirely clear whether it reflects his true feelings or an ironic denial of irony: "When the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she herself comes to die she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. This is not at all ironical as you may suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move tender hearts to pity and tears, for I am tender-hearted myself."

While readers have struggled with whether the three tales are connected in any way, the confusion of Felicite suggests a Flaubertian irony (or perhaps cynicism) that runs through all the stories: that people who live their lives based on religious belief are living lives based on illusion. In the case of Felicite, it is an illusion that is suggested by the confusion of a stuffed green parrot named Loulou with the Holy Ghost. In the remaining two tales, it is suggested in other ways.

"The Legend of St Julian Hospitator" tells the story of Julian, who grows up in a castle and lives a life marked by violence and mysticism. It is the reworking of a well-worn medieval tale depicted in thirty scenes of a stained-glass window Flaubert saw in Rouen Cathedral. It is also a tale that suggests again that the Christian founding myths are perhaps not what they seem. Thus, Julian's dream of life in the Garden of Eden and of Noah's Ark seems like the dream of a world created by a demiurge, a kind of Gnostic vision of brutality rather than harmony and salvation:

"Sometimes, in a dream, he would see himself like our father Adam in the middle of Paradise, with all the birds and beasts around him; and stretching out his arm, he would put them to death. Or else they would file past him, two by two, according to size, from the elephants and lions down to the stoats and ducks, as they did on the day that they entered Noah's Ark. From the shadow of a cave he would hurl javelins at them which never missed their aim, but others would follow them, there would be no end to the slaughter, and he would wake up with his eyes rolling wildly."

There is, finally, "Herodias," in which Flaubert relates the story of the beheading of John the Baptist at the request of Salome. Like the other two tales, "Herodias" is unsettling to the Christian mythos insofar as it emphasizes verisimilitude and the mundane. Instead of painting a picture of a great historical event, "Herodias" tells a very human tale of politics, jealousy and factionalism in ancient Israel. By doing so, it brings the reader back to the original historical touchstones of writers like Josephus and other contemporaries of Herod, thereby attenuating the centuries of religious mythmaking that followed the real world events. Perhaps this is why no less a critic than Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, commenting on "Three Tales," said that, "these eighty pages teach me more about the circumstances, the origins and the background of Christianity than all of Renan's work."

While not his best work, "Three Tales" nonetheless provides remarkable insight into Flaubert's narrative style and his view of literature. It is a style and a view that consistently departs from romanticism (even though the casual reader perhaps thinks of "Madame Bovary" as a romantic story), using techniques and images that draw meticulous scenes of the real and plumb the psychological depths of the mundane. By all means, read "Madame Bovary" and "Sentimental Education," but don't forget "Three Tales" because it is an equally provocative example of Flaubert's literary endeavor.