Bouvard and Pécuchet

Published posthumously in 1881, Bouvard and Pécuchet is Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished comic novel about two Parisian copy-clerks who inherit a fortune and retreat to the Normandy countryside in pursuit of knowledge. There, Bouvard and Pécuchet embark on an increasingly bewildering series of experiments in agriculture, medicine, chemistry, history, philosophy and literature, discovering that every new discipline brings fresh contradictions and fresh opportunities for failure. Their earnest enthusiasm, paired with their inability to distinguish genuine understanding from fashionable opinion, becomes the vehicle for Flaubert’s devastating satire of human vanity and intellectual pretension. What begins as an eccentric tale of two amateur scholars develops into a searching examination of humanity’s restless desire to explain the world.

The culmination of Flaubert’s lifelong hostility towards bourgeois complacency, Bouvard and Pécuchet was conceived as an encyclopaedic comedy that would expose the clichés, borrowed convictions and absurd certainties underpinning modern thought. Left unfinished at the author’s death in 1880, it stands among the most audacious experiments in nineteenth-century fiction, anticipating later literary explorations of fragmented knowledge and the limits of reason. Its humour is both affectionate and merciless: the two protagonists are ridiculous, yet their determination to understand everything reflects a recognisably human longing for certainty. Radical in its structure and astonishingly modern in its scepticism, the novel remains one of Flaubert’s most provocative meditations on the pursuit of knowledge.

From the book

“As there were thirty-three degrees of heat the Boulevard Bourdon was absolutely deserted.”

— Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet

On Bouvard and Pécuchet

“Of all the works of this magnificent writer, this is certainly the deepest, the most thoroughly explored, the broadest.”

— Guy de Maupassant, Le Gaulois, 1881