A Simple Heart II
21-40

1. 21-28 a. In what different ways do Félicité and Mme Aubain express their mourning of Victor and Virginie?   What role does society play in this difference?  bottom 24 How does Félicité combine her mourning of Victor with her mourning of Virginie?  What effect does this combination have on her sorrow?

b. After the deaths of Victor and Virginie, how do their lives change?

2.  a. 28-31 How does Félicité obtain the parrot that she wants?  What is she learning to do?  What does her parrot do that she, given her social role, would never do?  What does she not do about the parrot that someone in her social place would do? What do Loulou’s actions say about the feelings, thoughts, and desires that Félicité, as an obedient servant, has hidden from herself and from others all of her life?  

b.  What is Flaubert saying indirectly about Mme Aubain's "high society" of card players and Bourrais through Loulou? about this small town society? 

3.  31-33 a. After the coachman lashes Félicité, what does she suddenly discover in herself and her past?   What is new about her feelings? 

b. How would you interpret her paranoid moments (she thinks Fabu killed Loulou, or that someone stole him)?  During her life, what have others and time “stolen” or taken from her that would make her feel this way? 

4.  33-34   In light of the narrator’s description of her bedroom, how does she see the world differently now?  How does Félicité’s relationship with Loulou change as she gets older?  What does Loulou come to signify for her? 

5.  a. What is the point of view in each of the two descriptions on the events taking place outside the window?  The points of view are different. 

b. What do each point of view, and the contrast between them, tell us about Félicité concerns as she dies?.

c.  What does the last paragraph of the story have to say about Felicity’s heart? about her relation to religion? about uneducated servants?  Is this ending ironical?