aint Christopher, and
the trial--a harder one than that good giant bore, for Julian has, not
merely to carry over but, to welcome, at board _and_ bed, a leper--and
the Transfiguration and Assumption that conclude the story, give some of
the best subjects--though there are endless others nearly or quite as
good--in Hagiology. And Flaubert has risen to them in the miraculous
manner in which he could rise, retaining the strangeness, infusing the
reality, and investing the whole with the beauty, deserved and required.
There is not a weak place in the whole story; but the strongest places
are, as they should be, the massacre of hart, hind, and fawn which
brings on the curse; the ghastly procession of the beasts Julian has
slain or _not_ slain (for he has met with singular ill-luck); the final
"Translation."[401] Nowhere is Flaubert's power of description greater;
nowhere, too, is that other power noticed--the removal of all temptation
to say "Very pretty, but rather _added_ ornament"--more triumphantly
displayed.

[Sidenote: _Bouvard et Pecuchet._]

Little need be said of the posthumous torso and failure,[402] _Bouvard
et Pecuchet_. Nothing ever showed the wisdom of the proverb about
half-done work, children and fools, better; and, alas! there is
something of the child in all of us, and something of the fool in too
many. It was to be a sort of extended and varied _Education_, not
_Sentimentale_. Two men of retired leisure and sufficient income resolve
to spend the rest of their lives "in books and work and healthful play,"
and almost as many other recreative occupations (including "teaching the
young idea how to shoot") as they or you can think of. But the work
generally fails, the books bore and disappoint them, the young ideas
shoot in the most "divers and disgusting" ways, and the play turns out
to be by no means healthful. Part of it is in scenario merely; and
Flaubert was wont to alter so much, that one cannot be sure even of the
other and more finished part. Perhaps it was too large and too dreary a
theme, unsupported by any real novel quality, to acquire even that
interest which _L'Education Sentimentale_ has for some. But the more
excellent way is to atone for the mistake of his literary executors, in
not burning all of it except the monumental phrase quoted above,

Ainsi tout leur a craque dans la main,

by simply remembering this--which is the initial and conclusion of the
whole matter--and letting the rest