Word: bouvard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...BOUVARD AND PÉCUCHET (348 pp.)-Gustave Flaubert-New Directions...
...Madame Bovary, one of the most searching and compassionate stories of a woman ever written. But Flaubert was also gifted with an acute sense of the fatuous, had long thought his mission was to write an encyclopedic lampoon of human stupidity. At 51, he set out to write Bouvard and Pécuchet, the story of a couple of Paris copying clerks, simpletons both, who want to improve their minds. In preparation, he settled down to read everything he could find that passed as authoritative knowledge in the arts and sciences...
...Gold! It's Gold!" Flaubert's simpletons are a Mutt & Jeff pair. François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard is fat and gay, Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet thin and dour. When they come into some money, they move to Normandy and become gentlemen-farmers, foreseeing "mountains of fruit, torrents of flowers, avalanches of vegetables." Pan and brush in hand, Pécuchet tramps the roads for fertilizer. When others contemptuously hold their noses, Bouvard cries, "But it's gold! It's gold!" Too much "gold" burns out the strawberry patch...