The lineage of A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale)

1869

A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale)

Gustave Flaubert

Second Empire. France. written in French.

Flaubert's 1869 novel follows Frédéric Moreau from 1840 through the 1848 Revolution and the coup of 1851, as his lifelong unconsummated love for Madame Arnoux and his drifting ambitions come to nothing. It turns the novel of a young man's education into a study of illusion, inertia and failure.

Where it came from

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert 1857
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes 1605–1615 follow this thread
Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues), Honoré de Balzac 1837–1843 follow this thread
Volupté, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve 1834 follow this thread
René, François-René de Chateaubriand 1802 follow this thread

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1857

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

Second Empire. France. written in French.

Flaubert's first published novel, about a provincial doctor's wife whose romantic reading leads her into adultery, debt and suicide.

What it handed down

To A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale) (1869)

Stylistic influence, well documented.

Flaubert carried over the method he forged in Madame Bovary: free indirect style, impersonal narration, and a protagonist whose desires are shaped by romantic clichés. Frédéric is in many ways a male counterpart to Emma, and the Fontainebleau and ballroom scenes reuse the earlier novel's technique of setting private reverie against indifferent reality.

Where it came from

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1788

Paul and Virginia (Paul et Virginie)

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Ancien Régime. France. written in French.

Sentimental pastoral of two children raised in innocence on Mauritius whose love ends in Virginia's drowning.

What it handed down

To Madame Bovary (1857)

Direct source, well documented.

In Part One, chapter six, Emma's convent reading begins with Paul and Virginia, and she dreams of its bamboo hut and faithful dog. Flaubert uses the book as a named source of the sentimental images that will mislead her.

Where it came from

Daphnis and Chloe, Longus c. 2nd–3rd century CE
Julie, or the New Heloise, Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1761 follow this thread

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c. 2nd–3rd century CE

Daphnis and Chloe

Longus

Roman Imperial Greek. Lesbos, Roman Greece. written in Ancient Greek.

Pastoral prose romance of two foundlings raised by herdsmen who slowly discover love.

What it handed down

To Paul and Virginia (Paul et Virginie) (1788)

Structural model, probable.

Longus's romance of two children raised in the countryside who grow into love, widely read in France in Amyot's translation, supplies the pastoral frame. Bernardin transposes it to a tropical island and ends it in tragedy.

Where it came from

Idylls, Theocritus c. 270 BCE

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c. 270 BCE

Idylls

Theocritus

Hellenistic. Hellenistic Sicily and Alexandria. written in Ancient Greek.

Short poems, many of them songs of herdsmen, that founded the pastoral genre.

What it handed down

To Daphnis and Chloe (c. 2nd–3rd century CE)

Direct source, well documented.

Longus took his hero's name and his bucolic world of goatherds, piping and rustic love from Theocritus's pastoral poems. The novel translates Theocritean pastoral into prose narrative.

Where it came from

The Odyssey, Homer c. 700 BCE

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c. 700 BCE

The Odyssey

Homer

Archaic Greece. Archaic Greece. written in Ancient Greek.

Epic of Odysseus's ten-year journey home from Troy to Ithaca.

What it handed down

To The Sorrows of Young Werther

Direct source, well documented.

In his early letters Werther calls Homer his cradle-song and reads the Odyssey in the village, comparing his simple life to the scenes with the swineherd Eumaeus. The Homeric idyll is the measure against which his later Ossianic gloom is set.

To The Aeneid

Structural model, well documented.

The first six books follow the Odyssey: a hero's wanderings by sea, a retrospective tale told at a royal banquet, and a descent to the underworld. Virgil also revisits Odyssean episodes such as the Cyclops.

To Idylls (c. 270 BCE)

Direct source, well documented.

Idyll 11 presents the Cyclops Polyphemus of Odyssey Book Nine as a lovesick young herdsman singing to the nymph Galatea. Theocritus regularly reworks Homeric figures into the pastoral mode.

Where it came from

This is one of the oldest surviving works in its tradition; the line ends here.

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A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale)

Where it came from

Madame Bovary

What it handed down

To A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale) (1869)

Where it came from

Paul and Virginia (Paul et Virginie)

What it handed down

To Madame Bovary (1857)

Where it came from

Daphnis and Chloe

What it handed down

To Paul and Virginia (Paul et Virginie) (1788)

Where it came from

Idylls

What it handed down

To Daphnis and Chloe (c. 2nd–3rd century CE)

Where it came from

The Odyssey

What it handed down

To The Sorrows of Young Werther

To The Aeneid

To Idylls (c. 270 BCE)

Where it came from

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