A Simple Heart I
pp. 3-21 top

Gustave Flaubert

You need to read often between the lines when you read Flaubert’s writing. 

·         His narrator does not often express his opinions of the story, as does Balzac’s.  Readers are mostly left to interpret the story themselves,  which is not to say that any interpretation will suffice.  

·         Balzac often adopts the point of view of a character or characters on the world in which they live, so we can find out what they are thinking, seeing, or feeling and try to understand them.  The characters’ opinions often do not represent the narrator’s.

·         The details and story in this “realist” text tell us a lot about life and social relationships in a small town in the early nineteenth century, but without Balzac’s long, introductory, sociological descriptions.

1.  Chapter I

a.  p. 3 From whose point of view does the narrator describe the servant, Félicité, in the second paragraph?  (Look carefully at the first paragraph before you answer this question. )  Explain.  What does this description tell us about the person or person’s holding that point of view?

b. The fourth and fifth paragraphs describe Mme Aubain’s present home.  How do they illustrate the narrator’s words, when he speaks of “relics of better days and vanished luxury”?   What do they say about her past life and her sense of social status?

 c. 1) What do the last three paragraphs of the first chapter say about Félicité?  To whom might Félicité “loo[k] like a wooden dummy, driven by clockwork”?   

2) The descriptions of Mme Aubain sitting all day in an armchair beside the living room window and of Félicité’s mechanical behavior are followed, in Chapter II, by the story. 

a.  When does this story take place in relation to the descriptions in Chapter I? 

b.  Why do you think the narrator presents these initial descriptions before beginning his story? 

c.  What questions is the narrator inviting us to ask about the two main characters?

d. Compare the descriptions in this first chapter to the introductory descriptions in “The Deserted Woman” and “The Girl with the Golden Eyes.”  What is Balzac trying to do? And Flaubert?

2.  Chapter II

a.  4-11 1) What does the narrator imply when he begins Chapter II by saying “She had had, like anyone else, her love story”? 

2)  What do the second and third paragraphs, including the description of a “mass of people all hopping about in time,” say indirectly about how she sees the fair and about her heart? 

3)  What do the words “he kissed her again” say about the sentence “There was a soft breeze. . . plodded on”? and about Felicity? 

4)  What does Félicité’s reaction to Théodore’s betrayal say about her heart?  On p. 11, long after her love story, interpret her reaction to the tenant farmer’s words about Mme Lehoussais. 

5)  a. In general, what is the narrator saying about her “heart?

b.  7-11 These pages provide a lot of information about social relations in a small French town at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
1)   Félicité mourns Théodore “all alone.”  When she starts kissing the children all the time, Mme Aubain tells her to stop kissing them all the time, and Félicité is “deeply hurt.”  What is the social importance of a servant’s emotions in the early nineteenth century?  

2) 8 What does Félicité think of the lawyer, Bourais?  Why? What do we learn about Bourais’s, relationship to Mme Aubain?  What questions does the text indirectly pose about that relationship?  

3)  8 What does the text tell us about Félicité’s, and in general a servant’s, and children's education in a small town? and about what the small town considers an “event” to be talked about for years? 

4)  11 What does the story of their visit to the farm at Toucques tell us about the relationship between a tenant farmer and the owners of the farm they land? [Mme Aubain, like many bourgeois and nobles in nineteenth-century France, lives in part off the “rents” from her farms, which take the form of produce, poultry, and money.]   

5)  13 bottom, What do we learn about the social acceptability of friendship between a bourgeoise’s son and a fisherwoman’s son?

 3.    Chapter III

a.  14-15 Virginie’s catechism classes and first communion.  Note the last words in the first paragraph of the chapter. What do they tell us about the point of view of the description in the second paragraph?  What attracts Félicité’s attention in the church?  What does she react to? 

b.  In the third paragraph, what questions does she ask about the priest’s stories?  What relationship does she establish between abstractions or things that she cannot see (like the Holy Land and Christ) and things that she sees in her daily life (like the countryside around Pont L’Évêque, lambs, and doves?  What effect does this have on her love of the world that she perceives every day? and on the abstractions or invisible things?

c.  Given Félicité’s example, what in general do people in the working class, in town and in the fields, probably learn about religion?

d. 15-16 What relationship does Félicité have with Virginie at the bottom of 15 and top of 16?  What does it tell us about this servant?   17-19 What relationship does she establish with Victor?

4.  14-21 a.  Note that the education Paul and Virginie receive in Pont-l’Évêque is pretty worthless, so Paul is sent to a private school in a large nearby town, Caen (14), and Mme Aubain sends her daughter to convent school (16).  She must pay for both. What type of education does Mme Aubain want her daughter to have?  What is the importance of that education for a young bourgeois or aristocratic woman, do you think at that time?

b.   In what different ways do Mme Aubain and Félicité deal with their sadness at Virginie’s departure for the convent (school)?   How does Mme Aubain deal with Félicité’s attempt to console her by mentioning how much longer Victor will be away?  How does Félicité react to her mistress’s words?   Does she have a simple heart?  Explain.