For fifty years Félicité keeps house for the widowed Madame Aubain in Pont-l’Évêque: cooking, mending, fattening poultry and loving, one after another, a sweetheart, her mistress’s children, a sailor nephew and finally a parrot named Loulou. Flaubert tells her quiet life with exact, unsentimental detail and great tenderness.
The first of Flaubert’s Three Tales, a short masterpiece that can be read in an evening. Download the free EPUB.