Word: bouvard
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...Carnet du Jour, a listing of all the births, marriages and deaths of those who count in French society. "You're not really married if it hasn't been noted in Figaro," is a familiar quip. A 37-year-old boulevardier and gossip columnist named Philippe Bouvard cruises Paris in a Citroen equipped with television and a telephone. As he picks up tips, he phones any of 15 legmen and women to follow them up. "Before, only a name was enough," says Bouvard. "Now you need a name and a good story...
Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pecuchet...
...hard knocks . . . A failure to get through The Monastery robbed me of Scott for half a lifetime. Imagine the fate of the man first introduced to Shakespeare through Troilus and Cressida, to Trollope through He Knew He Was Right, to Hardy through Jude the Obscure or to Flaubert through Bouvard et Pecuchet . . . Tolstoy is the only author I know whose novels and major stories can be read in any order without deterrence...
Flaubert has a common tie with other great satirists; his heroes set out to test and idea in the harshness of the world. With Don Quixote it is the chivalric ideal, with Candide, optimism. And with Bouvard and Pecuchet it is the notion that ideas themselves can triumph throughout the world...
...Flaubert grants his two heroes superiority over their contemporaries. Bouvard and Pecuchet, having found that they cannot conquer the world with ideas, return to their old task of copying. They build a double copying desk and set to work together. As in Voltaire's Candide, their last act is their most noble; a realization of the world's shortcomings and the acceptance of a simple, limited vocation as the only attainable reality of life...