Back in Paris, everywhere he goes makes him think of her. Madame Arnoux, wearing a wide straw hat with fluttering pink ribbons, is to him “like an apparition” and neither her elusive quality nor the presence of her husband and children stop him from experiencing a yearning for her and “a painful and infinite curiosity” to find out everything about her.
In the opening pages, on a boat trip out of Paris to his home town of Nogent-sur-Seine, he first sees the woman on whom his heart will be set for the rest of the novel.
Frédéric’s amorous adventures are all set against a very Parisian backdrop. A desultory student, Frédéric attends lectures for only a few weeks, abandoning the Civil Code “before they reached Article 3” and turning instead to other interests the Louvre, the theater, a new dancehall called the Alhambra on the Champs Élysées, where schoolboys smoke cheroots and prostitutes come “hoping to find a protector, a lover, a gold coin.” Unsurprisingly he fails his first exams and descends into a “bottomless pit of lethargy.”Ī view of the Jardin des Champs-Élysées in the 1860s, by Charles Fichot. Early in the story, we see the young Frédéric leave the provinces for Paris to study law, just as Flaubert himself had done. This is Paris in exciting times, actually witnessed by Flaubert in his 20s and retold in this novel, written 20 years after they happened. Opening in the reign of King Louis-Philippe, the story is set against the events which led to his abdication in 1848 and the beginning of the Second Empire. But it is set mainly in Paris, and readers also get to know many areas of the city in the 1840s and meet a whole range of characters from that most turbulent decade. The title of Gustave Flaubert’s weighty final novel, L’Education Sentimentale, meaning “an education of the heart” tells us that the novel will center on the amorous adventures of the main character, Frédéric Moreau.
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