Word: cuchet
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BOUVARD AND PÉCUCHET (348 pp.)-Gustave Flaubert-New Directions...
...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...
Undaunted, Bouvard and Pécuchet go on to more ambitious studies-chemistry, physiology, geology, archeology, history, politics, literature, esthetics, philosophy, religion. The cultural scenery of the times flashes by as they careen along the road to knowledge. They are a little ashamed on discovering that "their own organism contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like the whites of eggs, hydrogen like gas lamps," but delighted to learn that "the tongue is the seat of taste, and the feeling of hunger resides in the stomach." Not complete imbeciles, they become suspicious of historians on reading that the Loire during the French...
James Waterhouse Angell, Ecole Cuchet, Geneva, Switzerland, and Chicago (III.) University High School...
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