Frédéric et Bernerette Reading Order

Frédéric et Bernerette (1838) by Alfred de Musset is the story of a young bourgeois, Frédéric, who falls in love with Bernerette, a grisette — a working-class seamstress — and of the difficulties that the difference in their social position creates. Unlike Mimi Pinson (1845), which is a charming idyll of grisette generosity, Frédéric et Bernerette is a more complex and less comfortable story: Bernerette loves Frédéric but she also needs to survive, and her practical arrangements with other men drive Frédéric to abandon her, and her, in her distress, to a decision that ends the story on a note of genuine tragedy. The story is one of the most realistic of Musset's prose works — the social distance between Frédéric and Bernerette, and the economic constraints that govern Bernerette's choices, are presented without the softening romance that Mimi Pinson applies to the same social world — and it is a significant transition between the Romantic tradition of the idealized grisette and the Naturalist tradition that would portray working-class women more unsparing.