Reading Order
Trois Contes Reading Order
Trois Contes (1877) by Gustave Flaubert is the most perfect collection of short prose in French Realism — three tales as different from each other as possible (a Norman servant girl's life, a medieval legend, a Biblical episode) unified by the Flaubertian method and by a common meditation on religious feeling. Un Cœur simple tells the life of Félicité, a servant in a Normandy bourgeois household, from her youth through her old age, through the deaths of everyone she has loved, culminating in a vision of her stuffed parrot Loulou as the Holy Spirit on her deathbed — the most precise and most moving account of a simple faith in French literature. La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier retells the medieval legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller (the patron of travelers) in the style of a stained-glass window, with the violence, color, and narrative speed of medieval hagiography. Hérodias retells the story of Herod Antipas, Salome, and the execution of John the Baptist with the Salammbô archaeological method applied to Palestine in 29 AD. The three tales together are the most concentrated demonstration of Flaubert's range: the contemporary domestic, the medieval legendary, and the ancient historical, each handled in a style appropriate to its period.
Where to start
Un Cœur simple
Complete Trois Contes Book List
- 1Buy
Un Cœur simple (Trois Contes)
Gustave Flaubert·1877·The first and finest of the three tales; the parrot Loulou's identification with the Holy Spirit at the end is the most perfectly handled ambiguity in French short fiction — is it a vision or a hallucination? Flaubert does not say - 2Buy
La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier (Trois Contes)
Gustave Flaubert·1877·The second tale; inspired by a stained-glass window in Rouen Cathedral; the violence of the hunting episodes and the quietness of the leper episode are the two poles of medieval hagiography Flaubert reproduces - 3Buy
Hérodias (Trois Contes)
Gustave Flaubert·1877·The third tale; the Herodias-Salome-John the Baptist episode rewritten in the Salammbô archaeological style; the most intellectually demanding of the three - 4Buy
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert·1857·The novelistic companion: where Trois Contes presents the Flaubertian method in miniature across three genres, Madame Bovary presents it in its fullest realist form; Un Cœur simple can be read as the anti-Emma — the simple woman who lives genuinely where Emma fantasizes - 5Buy
L'Éducation sentimentale
Gustave Flaubert·1869·The full-length companion: reading Trois Contes after L'Éducation sentimentale shows the range of Flaubert's subjects and styles — from the most historically remote (Hérodias in 29 AD) to the most contemporary (L'Éducation in 1848)
Trois Contes — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Loulou the parrot in Un Cœur simple really the Holy Spirit?
Flaubert refuses to say. The final passage describes Félicité's deathbed vision of a gigantic parrot hovering over her head as she dies — and the novel's last word is 'Loulou.' Is it a vision produced by dementia? Is it a genuine religious experience? Is Flaubert saying that simple faith and simple superstition are the same thing, or that simple faith is the most genuine form of religious experience? The ambiguity is precise and permanent.
Why is Un Cœur simple considered Flaubert's finest writing?
Because it achieves the most complete form of the Flaubertian ideal: a narrative that maintains absolute sympathy for its protagonist and absolute ironic distance simultaneously, with no visible seam. The style adapts to Félicité's consciousness — simple, direct, non-literary — without condescension and without false simplicity. The emotional effect at the end is achieved through absolutely restrained means, and the restraint is what makes it devastating.
What is the stained-glass window source of La Légende de Saint Julien?
The 12th-century stained-glass window in Rouen Cathedral depicting the life of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, which Flaubert saw as a child and which he explicitly credits in the tale's final sentence ('and that is the story of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, more or less as you find it on a stained-glass window in a church in my part of the world'). The narrative style — flat, visual, iconic — is modeled on the window's sequence of images.
How do the three tales relate to each other?
Each uses a different period (contemporary, medieval, ancient) and a different style (realist, legendary, archaeological) and a different form of religious experience (domestic faith, hagiographic conversion, prophetic ecstasy). Together they constitute Flaubert's meditation on what religious feeling means in a secular world: from the simple-hearted servant who is never sure whether her parrot is a parrot or the Holy Ghost, to the Baptist who knows exactly what he is witnessing and is killed for saying it.
Why did Flaubert write Trois Contes between Bouvard et Pécuchet and his other projects?
Partly to prove that he could still write — the work on Bouvard et Pécuchet had been long and exhausting, and the Trois Contes were written quickly as a release. Partly because he needed the income. Partly because the three subjects had been in his notebooks for years and the shorter form allowed him to complete them without the encyclopedic apparatus that Bouvard demanded. The result is the most accessible entry-point to Flaubert and the most formally perfect short fiction in French Realism.
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