Dead Madame Bovary

Well, it happened. She took poison and died. Good good book. I had forgotten much in 35 years. Even in translation it breathes, its cynical, and a real masterpiece of demeaning one's characters and the writing is to die for. Its supposed to be exquisite in the original French. Somehow in my brain the good doctor was the one elected to the Legion, not the pharmacist. I read Anna Karenina shortly afterward (probably shouldn't have) and think of her end in connection with this book. Tolstoy wrote his twenty years later. Ole Leo had a bit more compassion in his soul. A couple of years ago I read Salambo (it was my last Flaubert) because I had a good antique copy on my shelf for twenty years and the remainder of a literary art group that had met once a month in west LA for twenty years was going to doing the book. I was dumbfounded by this group of intellectuals that did not understand that the princess lost her virginity at the end of the book. And as I was rereading the good Madame, I began to wonder if there were whole groups of lost souls wandering the earth that did not understand that she slept (MADE LOVE) with her lovers in this book. They couldn't write explicit sex scenes in those days.
What do I know? (I've been giving advice to my kids for years on how to get an A on their papers, by sucking up to the common and accepted thought in place for most of their barely there teachers. 'Fitzgerald was a romantic, Hemingway was a realist' school of accepted public pander.) They've been making As. How about Flaubert the father of the naturalist school of Zola and Frank Norris and Dreiser and Steinbeck and Hem.
Anyway, I'm still going on with our young to die Russian French painter. She was proposed to at 14 and was taking it seriously, but had the sense to realize that love at 14 can be very different later. The words to came out of her. She would go back to her room at night and try to capture the day in pages and pages