Indiana is the story's heroine, a young noblewoman descended from French colonial settlers from Île Bourbon who lives in France. Indiana is married to an older ex-army officer named Colonel Delmare and suffers from the lack of passion in her life. Indiana does not love Delmare and searches for someone who will love her passionately. Her cousin Ralph is in love with her, but she overlooks him and falls in love with their well-spoken neighbor, Raymon de Ramiere. Indiana escapes the house to faithfully present herself in Raymon's apartments in the middle of the night, but they don't get along and Colonel Delmare takes Indiana to Île Bourbon. Indiana returns to France on a perilous sea journey during the French Revolution of 1830, where she reconnects with Raymon, but also with Ralph, which further complicate matters. The novel is an exploration of nineteenth-century female desire complicated by class constraints and by social codes about infidelity.

Madame Bovary is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious perfectionist and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the precise word"). Long established as one of the greatest novels ever written, the book has often been described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Henry James writes: "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment." Giorgio de Chirico said that in his opinion "from the narrative point of view, the most perfect book is Madame Bovary by Flaubert".

Child of materialism and positivism, Courbet was without a doubt one of the most complex painters of the nineteenth century. Symbolising the rejection of traditions, Courbet did not hesitate to confront the public with the truth by liberating painting of conventional rules. He became from then on the leader of pictorial realism.

"Unequivocally a modern, Francois Boucher (1703-70) defined the French artistic avant-garde throughout his career. Yet the triumph of modernist aesthetics - with its focus on the self-critical, the autonomous, and the intellectually challenging - has long discouraged art historians and other viewers from taking Boucher's playful and alluring works seriously. Rethinking Boucher revisits the cultural meanings and reception of his diverse oeuvre, inviting us to revise the interpretive cliches by which we have sought to tame this artist and his epoch."--BOOK JACKET.