Bouvard et Pécuchet Reading Order

Bouvard et Pécuchet (unfinished, published posthumously 1881) by Gustave Flaubert is the most ambitious and most encyclopedic of Flaubert's projects — the novel that occupied the last decade of his life and that he described as his 'testament.' Two copy clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, meet by chance on a Paris street, discover their unexpected kinship, and when Bouvard inherits enough money to retire, they move to Normandy and begin systematically studying every field of human knowledge: agriculture, chemistry, medicine, geology, archaeology, history, literature, politics, philosophy, and religion. In every field they follow the same trajectory — initial enthusiasm, conscientious study, disastrous practical failure — and the comedy of the novel is the comedy of the gap between human knowledge (as represented by the books they read) and human experience (as represented by what happens when they try to apply it). Flaubert intended the novel to end with Bouvard and Pécuchet giving up on all knowledge and returning to copying — but copying everything: creating the 'sottisier' (dictionary of received ideas) that would demonstrate the universal mediocrity of human thought. He died before completing it, and the posthumous text ends at what would have been roughly the two-thirds point. The novel is the most extreme expression of Flaubert's fundamental conviction that human stupidity (bêtise) is not the exception but the rule, and that the most a novelist can honestly do is copy its most characteristic expressions.