Books by Charles Carlut

Unfinished at his death, Flaubert's final work is a vastly funny satire of the intellectual and moral pretensions of 19th-century French bourgeois society. It features two Chaplinesque clerks who, with the help of a surprise legacy, attempt to scale the heights of knowledge--only to discover an abyss of stupidity.

Flaubert's portrait of an adulteress who seeks freedom from a prosaic, disappointing life and ultimately is destroyed by her selfishness was considered scandalous when it was published. Flaubert chose his subject to illustrate his belief that any aspect of life, however trivial or vulgar, could be a subject for literature, and could be raised to the status of art by the quality of the writing.

Flaubert's epic is set in Carthage in 146 B.C., at the end of the Punic Wars.

These three stories include "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller," in which the hero is rescued from his humanity and its consequences by the grace of God; "A Simple Heart," one of Flaubert's most celebrated stories, in which a poor country woman who leads an exemplary life becomes obsessively devoted to her parrot, even after its death; and "Herodias," based on the legendary story of King Herod, Salome, and the head of John the Baptist.

Fascinated for years with the life of the Egyptian anchorite known as St. Anthony (b. 250 A.D.), Flaubert spent 25 years writing his own version. His disturbing fragmented chronicle, mostly in dialogue, stresses the difficulties of the spiritual life, presenting a deeply flawed saint--bitter, greedy, and sadistic--plagued by demons both internal and external. Flaubert's work draws heavily on the known facts of St. Anthony's life, but it is essentially a profoundly imaginative work of fiction.

This text is designed to review all the common elements of French grammar, both orally and in written French. Numerous all-French exercises are provided, in addition to English-to-French translations of various French phrases.