Read Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) for Free Online Page A

Nature—to these woods, in fact, as contaminated as she is by civilization. As for Love, Rosanette is an expert. But as such—as a whore, as a “public” woman—she is deprived of any intimacy, bereft of her life, her bed, her body, and her soul. And when she, the daughter of silk workers in Lyons, divulges her own sentimental education—“to what lover did she owe her education?” (p. 369)—she evokes public evils: poverty, exploitation, child prostitution, and implicitly, popular revolt (that of the silk-workers of Lyons in 1831). As a whole, the story of the couple, full of delays and cheating, presents many similarities with history. In the end, Frédéric decides to leave Rosanette behind and, alleging a civic sense that does not encroach on his private interests, goes back to the embattled capital.
    Fontainebleau, the site of a François I castle, offers the lovers a flight into past history. While monarchy is being abolished in Paris, the Fontainebleau domain maintains the “impassiveness of royalty” (p. 359); while the Tuileries are ransacked, the Renaissance palace remains severely sumptuous. Paris is a prey to urgency, in Fontainebleau an “emanation of the centuries, overwhelming and funereal, like the scent of a mummy” prevails (p. 362). Yet the tourists penetrating the remote apartments and scrutinizing the furniture and the portraits with a lascivious titillation are not without a certain similarity to the mob invading the Tuileries and the princesses’ bedrooms, with an obscene and desecrating curiosity.
    As a museum, Fontainebleau could complement the pair’s educational trajectory, were it not that the two tend to reduce past history to private, sentimental details. The illiterate Rosanette interprets the deeds of the grandees according to her own petty preoccupations; did Christine of Sweden have her favorite assassinated at Fontainebleau? “ ‘No doubt it was jealousy? Better watch out!’ ” (p. 359). The well-read Frédéric relates more accurately to those who haunted these rooms, Emperor Charles V, the Valois kings, Henri IV, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire. Their trysts arouse him, and the evocation of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II, fills him with a “mysterious feeling of retrospective lust” (p. 360). In a way, before abandoning Rosanette for the happenings of his time, he is unfaithful to her by his lust for bygone times. In Sentimental Education, history, past and present, is contaminated by the private; conversely, the private is contaminated by history.
    Just like Frédéric’s destiny and his great passion, the revolution as reconstructed in the book is tossed off according to chance, sudden inspirations, and weaknesses. Like Frédéric’s destiny and passion, it appears split between the future (here the socialist utopia) and its past references: “ ‘A new ’89 is in preparation” (p. 20). Yet 1789 is a detrimental precedent: “Every person at that time modeled himself after someone, one copied Saint-Just, another Danton, another Marat”; another one “tried to be like Blanqui, who imitated Robespierre” (p. 340). The repetition, noted by Marx, does not end there. Consider, for instance, the mystery of the “calf’s head,” an English import:
    In order to parody the ceremony which the Royalists celebrated on the thirtieth of January [anniversary of Charles I’s execution], some Independents threw an annual banquet, at which they ate calves’ heads ... while toasting the extermination of the Stuarts. After Thermidor, some Terrorists organized a brotherhood of a similar description, which proves how contagious stupidity is (pp. 476-477).
    Flaubertian “folly,” which amounts to uncontrolled reiteration, does not spare the sequels of revolutions: that of Cromwell, that of the Jacobins, that of 1848, the epigones imitating with reverence what the predecessors imitated as a mockery. And the coup of December 1851 reiterates that of Napoleon Bonaparte