Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life, part 2 — A Reader’s Guide

The Gospel According to Bouvard and Pécuchet

When the two copyists turn to religion, they do so with characteristic literalness. The Gospel 'dilated their souls, dazzled them like a sun'—a simile that suggests both illumination and blindness. They imagine Jesus 'standing on a mountain, with one arm raised,' or 'on the margin of a lake,' or 'lifted high upon the Cross.' These are vivid tableaux, not theological insights. Flaubert notes that 'their reason was not astonished' by miracles; they accept everything with a credulity that mirrors their earlier scientific gullibility. The narrator's dry observation—'they found in that Book, wherein Heaven unfolds itself, nothing theological'—underscores their inability to grapple with dogma. Their faith is a sentimental attachment to images of humility and oppression, not a coherent belief system. This episode prefigures their eventual abandonment of religion, just as they abandoned agriculture, chemistry, and medicine.

The Committee as Comic Villain

Included in this volume is Flaubert's Letter to the Municipality of Rouen, a separate polemic that nonetheless echoes the novel's themes. The letter attacks the municipal council for refusing to fund a fountain bearing the bust of the poet Louis Bouilhet. Flaubert's satire targets the bourgeois committee's paralysis: 'When the public clamours, a committee is at once appointed; and from that time nothing is done.' He mocks their stinginess—30,000 francs for a Napoleon statue, but only 7,037.38 for a statue of Corneille, and nothing for Bouilhet. The letter's refrain, 'always the committee!', becomes a comic motif. Flaubert accuses the bourgeoisie of having 'the feelings of the rabble' and predicts their end. This document, with its specific figures and quoted newspaper reactions, offers a real-world counterpart to the novel's fictional critiques of mediocrity and inertia.

The Structure of Failure

The novel's second part continues the pattern established in the first: each new enthusiasm—religion, art, science—leads to disappointment. The excerpts show Bouvard and Pécuchet moving from Gospel reading to a 'Conference' on art and science, but the trajectory is clear. Flaubert's plan, included as an extract, indicates the work's conclusion: the two heroes return to copying, their original occupation. This circular structure is the novel's deepest irony. The 'Tragi-comic' subtitle is earned not through plot twists but through the relentless repetition of failure. The reader watches the protagonists cycle through disciplines, each time believing they have found the key, only to be thwarted by their own incompetence or the world's indifference. Flaubert's method is accumulative: the specific details of each failure—the lump on Marcel's forehead, the 7,037.38 francs—build a world where nothing succeeds.

Readers approaching this second part should attend to Flaubert's use of repetition and variation. Each new subject—religion, art, municipal politics—receives the same treatment: initial enthusiasm, comic mishap, and quiet defeat. The inclusion of the Letter to the Municipality of Rouen is not an appendix but a key: it shows Flaubert's satirical method applied to real events, with the same targets (mediocrity, committees, false economy) that animate the novel. Watch how the prose shifts between lyrical description and deadpan reportage; that tension is the book's engine.

After all these years among the stacks, I still ponder Bouvard and Pécuchet's restless futility, how their grand pursuits crumble into quiet absurdity. It reminds me sometimes of The Corner House Girls How they moved to Milton, what they found, and what they did — Background and Themes, where simpler folk find meaning not in great systems, but in daily, modest struggles. Different worlds, yet both whisper of our shared, stumbling humanity.