Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life, part 1

Satisfied with their regimen, they desired to improve their constitutions by gymnastics; and taking up the _Manual of Amoros_, they went through its atlas. All those young lads...

In order to understand chemistry they procured Regnault's course of lectures, and were, in the first place, informed that "simple bodies are perhaps compound." They are divided...

How happy they felt when they awoke next morning! Bouvard smoked a pipe, and Pécuchet took a pinch of snuff, which they declared to be the best they had ever had in their whole...

In the vestibule stood an old wooden beam. The staircase was encumbered with the geological specimens, and an enormous chain was stretched on the ground all along the corridor....

On the morning of the 25th of February, 1848, the news was brought to Chavignolles, by a person who had come from Falaise, that Paris was covered with barricades, and the next d...

The men of the past who had for them been only phantoms or names, became living beings, kings, princes, wizards, footmen, gamekeepers, monks, gipsies, merchants, and soldiers, w...

Farther down, the Canal St. Martin, confined by two locks, showed in a straight line its water black as ink. In the middle of it was a boat, filled with timber, and on the bank...

And now the days began to be sad. They studied no longer, fearing lest they might be disillusioned. The inhabitants of Chavignolles avoided them. The newspapers they tolerated g...