Three Short Works

Gustave Flaubert, who lived from 1821 to 1880, was a French novelist and one of the great stylists of the nineteenth century. He is best known for Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education, novels that he wrote with painstaking care, searching for what he called the exact word. His letters show an obsessive craftsman, and his influence on later writers, in France and beyond, has been vast.

The three pieces collected here are quite different from one another. The first is a prose poem in which Death, Satan and the Roman emperor Nero speak, a sombre and theatrical piece that gives full rein to Flaubert's taste for the grotesque and the grand. The second is the Legend of St Julian the Hospitaller, a tale in the manner of a medieval saint's life, in which a young nobleman is haunted by a terrible prophecy and in the end becomes a saint. The third, A Simple Heart, tells the life of a selfless maid in nineteenth century France, a story of daily labour, devotion and quiet, and one of the most humane things Flaubert ever wrote.

Taken together, the three works exhibit the vigorous exactness, and the mixture of realism and romanticism, for which Flaubert is renowned. A writer who was often accused of coldness shows here an unexpected tenderness. Two of the three, Saint Julian and A Simple Heart, belong to the Three Tales that Flaubert published in 1877.

The recording has seven chapters, with the legend divided into several parts, and runs for about three hours. A single LibriVox volunteer reads it. It is a rewarding introduction for readers who know only his famous novels.