Word: pecuchet
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...Flaubert's last novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet, two middle-aged copyists come into an inheritance and move to the countryside where they try their hand successively at farming, medicine, archaeology, history, literature, spiritualism, gymnastics, education, philosophy and religion and manage to fail at each and every one of them before finally resolving, after 40 years, to return to their work as copyists...
...less of an imbecile (and no less of a dilettante) than Bouvard and Pecuchet, I fear I might also have come to share this habit of theirs. Stupidity is a harsh word. To use it is to suggest that one speaks from a more enlightened plane, which in my case would be an absurdity comparable to Hitler's claim that he was a man of peace. What I can say is that the sheer strangeness of everyday life confuses...
Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pecuchet...
...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 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...