Un coeur simple by Gustave Flaubert

Acclaimed by Italo Calvino as "one of the most extraordinary spirtual journeys ever accomplished outside any religion," Three Tales (1877) was the last of Flaubert's works published during his lifetime. The ambitious range of the stories -- "A Simple Heart," "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller," and "Herodias" -- reaches from the author's own century back to the Middle Ages and to ancient Israel. "A Simple Heart," in Flaubert's own words, "is just the account of an obscure life, that of Felicite a poor country girl, pious but mystical, quietly devoted, and as tender as fresh bread... I want to arouse people's pity, to make sensitive souls weep, since I am one myself." The middle story, "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller," tells of a bloodthirsty hunter and warrior whose attempts to escape a dire prophecy ultimately lead to a state of grace. "Herodias," the final tale, is based on the legends surrounding King Herod, Salome, and John the Baptist. It served as the inspiration for later interpretations, including Oscar Wilde's Salome and Jules Massenet's opera Herodiade. "To any modern writer, in whatever language," remarked Anthony Burgess of Three Tales, "these are recommended as a fundamental textbook of style." Book jacket.

"A Simple Heart moved me to tears."—Russell Baker In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes' Flaubert’s Parrot, Félicité, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert's "great saint" endures loss after loss by embracing the rich, true rhythms of life: the comfort of domesticity, the solace of the Church, and the depth of memory. This novella showcases Flaubert's perfectly honed realism: a delicate counterpoint of daily events with their psychological repercussions. "Flaubert is diagnosis," Ezra Pound wrote, "the whole of Flaubert, the whole fight for the novel as 'histoire morale contemporaine' was a fight against maxims, against abstractions, a fight back toward a human and/or total conception."

BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the internationally bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes a literary detective story of a retired doctor obsessed with the 19th century French author Flaubert—and with tracking down the stuffed parrot that once inspired him. • “A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio.” —The New York Times Book Review Julian Barnes playfully combines a detective story with a character study of its detective, embedded in a brilliant riff on literary genius. A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.

A study of Gustave Flaubert's Un coeur simple (A simple heart) originally written in 1876 and published in 1877.