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47 Cards in this Set
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Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Moliere)
1622-1673 Performed before Louis XIV Comic Playwright Criticized by church + moralists |
Notable Works:
Tartuffe; The Misanthrope; The miser; the school for Wives; The Bourgeois Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid |
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Tartuffe
By Moliere Performed 1664 |
Characters:
# Madame Pernelle, Orgon's mother # Orgon, head of the house and husband of Elmire # Elmire, Orgon's second wife # Damis, son of Orgon # Mariane, daughter of Orgon, betrothed to Valère # Valère, In love with Mariane # Cléante, Elmire's brother # Tartuffe, falsely pious man who fools Orgon and Mme. Pernelle Plot: As the play begins, the well-off Orgon is convinced that Tartuffe is a man of great religious zeal and fervor. In fact, Tartuffe is a scheming hypocrite. He is interesting as a character in that he gets around Orgon not by telling lies, but by allowing him to use his power as the master of the household over everyone else. By the time Tartuffe is exposed and Orgon renounces him, Tartuffe has legal control of his finances and family, and is about to steal all of his wealth and marry his daughter — all at Orgon's own invitation. At the very last minute, the king intervenes, and Tartuffe is condemned to prison. |
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Le Misanthrope
By Moliere Performed 1666 |
Characters:
Alceste- the protagonist and "misanthrope" of the title. He is quick to criticize the flaws of everyone around him, including himself. He cannot help but love Célimène though he loathes her behavior. Célimène- A young woman who is courted by Alceste, Oronte, Acaste, and Clitandre. She is playful and flirtatious, and likes to point out the flaws of everyone she meets behind their backs. Célimène pays much attention to social appearances. Philinte- A polite man who genuinely cares for Alceste, and recognizes the importance of occasionally veiling one's true opinions in a social context. He is mainly thought of as Alceste's foil. Éliante- Love interest to Philinte and cousin to Célimène, who initially pines for Alceste. She possesses a good balance between societal conformity and individual expression. Oronte- An outgoing, seemingly confident man who also loves Célimène for a time. His insecurity is revealed when he is unable to handle Alceste's criticism of his love sonnet. Plot: This work centers on the protagonist Alceste, whose wholesale rejection of his culture's polite social conventions make him tremendously unpopular. In the first act of the play, he states: “…Mankind has grown so base, / I mean to break with the whole human race”. However, this conviction manifests itself in the primary conflict of the play, which consists of Alceste's intense love for Célimène, a flirtatious young woman who pays great attention to social appearances and conventions. |
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The Miser
Moliere Performed 1668 |
Characters:
# Harpagon, father of Cléante and Elise, in love with Marianne. # Cléante, Harpagon's son, lover to Marianne. # Valère, son to Anselme, and lover to Élise. # Anselme, father of Valère and Marianne. Plot: The Miser's plot, involving a rich money-lender called Harpagon, whose feisty children long to escape from his penny-pinching household and marry their respective lovers, is a comedy of manners to which the 17th-century French upper classes presumably objected. At end, unexpected character revealed to be everyone's father. |
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The School for Wives
Moliere Performed 1662 |
Characters:
ARNOLPHE, also known as MONSIEUR DE LA SOUCHE AGNÈS, an innocent young girl, Arnolphe's ward HORACE, Agnès' lover, Oronte's son CHRYSALDE, a friend of Arnolphe's ORONTE, Horace's father and Arnolphe's old friend Plot: Arnolphe, the main protagonist, is a man of 42 years who has groomed the young Agnès since the age of 4. Arnolphe supports Agnes living in a convent until the age of 17, when he removes her and moves her to one of his abodes. His intention is to bring up Agnès in such a manner that she will be too innocent to make him a cuckold, or being unfaithful to him. He becomes obsessed with avoiding the fate of cuckoldry. In order to do this, he forbids the nuns who are instructing her from teaching her anything that might lead her astray. Right from the very first scene, Chrysalde warns Arnolphe of his downfall, but Arnolphe takes no notice. |
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Le Bourgeois gentilhomme
Moliere Comedic-Ballet Performed 1670 |
Characters:
# Monsieur Jourdain, a bourgeois # Madame Jourdain, his wife # Lucile, their daughter # Nicole, their maid # Cléonte, suitor of Lucile Plot: The play takes place entirely at Jourdain's house in Paris. Jourdain is a middle-aged bourgeois whose father grew rich as a cloth-merchant. The rather foolish Jourdain now has one aim in life—to rise above this middle-class background and be accepted as an aristocratic gentleman. To this end, he orders splendid new clothes (and is naively delighted when the tailor's boy mockingly addresses him as "my Lord") and applies himself to learning the gentlemanly arts of fencing, dancing, music and philosophy, despite his age; in doing so he continually manages to make a fool of himself, to the disgust of his hired teachers. |
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Le Malade imaginaire
Moliere Performed 1673 |
Plot + Characters:
The play is about a hypochondriac miser, Argan. Argan wants his daughter Angelique to marry a doctor so he can get free medical "care", even though she is already in love with Cleante. Together with Argan's maid Toinette, his brother Bernarde attempts to "heal" Argan from his fixation on doctors. Together, they convince him to play dead, in order to find out who is really loyal to/in love with him. As it turns out, Argan's second wife is only after his money, whereas his daughter really loves him. After the "revival" of the supposedly-dead Argan, Angelique is free to marry whomever she choses. |
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Charles Pierre Baudelaire
(9 April 1821 - 31 August 1867) |
a nineteenth century French poet, critic and translator. A controversial figure in his lifetime, Baudelaire's name has become a byword for literary and artistic decadence. At the same time his works, in particular his book of poetry Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), have been acknowledged as classics of French literature.
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Les Fleurs du mal (literal trans. "The Flowers of Evil")
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a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The subject matter of these poems deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism.
* Spleen et Idéal (Spleen and Ideal) * Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) * Révolte (Revolt) * Le Vin (Wine) * La Mort (Death) The foreword to the volume, identifying Satan with the pseudonymous alchemist Hermes Trismegistus and calling boredom the worst of miseries, neatly sets the general tone of what is to follow: |
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Henri-Marie Beyle (January 23, 1783 – March 23, 1842)
better known by his pen name Stendhal |
a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).
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Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) is a novel by Stendhal, published in 1830.
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It is set in 1830, and relates a young man's attempts to rise above his plebeian birth through a combination of talent, hard work, deception and hypocrisy, only to find himself betrayed by his own passions.
The protagonist, Julien Sorel, is a driven and intelligent man, but equally fails to understand much about the ways of the world he sets out to conquer. He harbours many romantic illusions, and becomes little more than a pawn in the political machinations of the influential and ruthless people who surround him. Stendhal uses his flawed hero to satirize French society of the time, particularly the hypocrisy and materialism of its aristocracy and the Roman Catholic Church, and to foretell a radical change in French society that will remove both of those forces from their positions of power. |
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The Charterhouse of Parma
Country France Language French Publication date 1839 |
The Charterhouse of Parma tells the story of the young Italian nobleman Fabrizio del Dongo and his adventures from his birth in 1798 to his death in 1829 (?). Fabrizio’s early years are spent in his family’s castle on Lake Como, while most of the novel is set in a fictionalized Parma (both in modern-day Italy).
The novel's early section is largely focused on Fabrizio's rather quixotic effort to join Napoleon when he returns to France in March 1815 (the Hundred Days). Fabrizio at seventeen is rather naive and doesn't speak very good French. However, he won't be stopped, and he leaves his home on Lake Como and travels north under false papers. He wanders through France, losing money and horses at a fast rate. He is nearly imprisoned as a spy, but he escapes, dons the uniform of a dead French Hussar, and, much to his surprise, finds himself in the Battle of Waterloo. Fabrizio having returned to Lake Como, the novel now divides its attention between him and his aunt (his father's sister), Gina, the sometime Duchess of Sanseverina. Gina meets and falls in love with the Prime Minister of Parma, Count Mosca. Count Mosca proposes that Gina marry a wealthy old man, who will be out of the country for many years as an ambassador, so she and Count Mosca can be lovers while living under the social rules of the time. Gina's response is: "But you realize that what you are suggesting is utterly immoral?" She agrees, and so a few months later, Gina is the new social eminence in Parma's rather small aristocratic elite. |
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Honoré de Balzac
(20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) |
a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.
Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. |
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La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's (1799 – 1850) multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy (1815-1848).
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The Comédie humaine consists of 95 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 48 unfinished works (some of which exist only as titles). It does not include Balzac's 5 theatrical plays or his collection of humorous tales, the "Contes drolatiques" (1832-37). The title of the series is a reference to Dante's "Divine Comedy". While Balzac sought the comprehensive scope of Dante, his title indicates the worldly, human concerns of a realist novelist. The stories are placed in a variety of settings, with characters reappearing in multiple stories.
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Gustave Flaubert
(December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) |
a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style, best exemplified by his endless search for "le mot juste" ("the right word").
He can be said to have made cynicism into an art form, as evinced by this observation from 1846: To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless. |
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Madame Bovary is a novel by Gustave Flaubert, often considered his masterpiece. The novel focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was notoriously perfectionistic about his writing and claimed to always be searching for le mot juste (the right word).
The work was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between October 1, 1856 and December 15, 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made the story notorious. After the acquittal on February 7, 1857, it became a bestseller in book form in April 1857, and now stands virtually unchallenged not only as a seminal work of Realism, but as one of the most influential novels ever written. |
Emma is the novel's protagonist and is the main source of the novel's title (although Charles's mother and his former wife are also referred to as Madame Bovary). She has a highly romanticized view of the world and craves beauty, wealth, passion and high society. It is the disparity between these romantic ideals and the realities of her country life that drive most of the novel, most notably leading her into two extramarital love affairs as well as causing her to accrue an insurmountable amount of debt that eventually leads to her suicide.
Monsieur Homais is the town pharmacist. He is materialistic and self-centered. The wife of Monsieur Homais, Madame Homais is a simple woman whose life revolves around her husband and children Emma's husband, Charles Bovary, is a very simple and common man. He is a country doctor by profession, but is, as in everything else, not very good at it. Léon Dupuis First befriending Emma when she moves to Yonville, Léon seems a perfect match for her. He shares her romantic ideals as well as her disdain for common life. Rodolphe is a wealthy local man who seduces Emma as one more addition to a long string of mistresses. Monsieur Lheureux A manipulative and sly merchant |
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Salammbô (1862)
an historical novel by Gustave Flaubert |
interweaves historical and fictional characters. The action takes place immediately before and during the Mercenary Revolt against Carthage in the third century BC. Flaubert's main source was Book I of Polybius's Histories. It was not a particularly well-studied period of history and required a great deal of work from the author, who enthusiastically left behind the realism of his masterpiece Madame Bovary for this tale of blood-and-thunder.
The book, which Flaubert researched painstakingly, is largely an exercise in sensuous and violent exoticism. Following the success of Madame Bovary, it was another best-seller and sealed his reputation. The Carthaginian costumes described therein even left traces on the fashions of the time. Nevertheless, in spite of its classic status in France, it is practically unknown today among English-speakers. |
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Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880.
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Although conceived in 1863 as Les Deux Cloportes ("The Two Woodlice"), and partially inspired by a short story of Barthélemy Maurice (Les Deux Greffiers, "The Two Court Clerks", which appeared in La Revue des Tribunaux in 1841 and which he may have read in 1858), Flaubert did not begin the work in earnest until 1872, at a time when financial ruin threatened. Over time, the book obsessed him to the degree that he claimed to have read over 1500 books in preparation for writing it—he intended it to be his masterpiece, surpassing all of his other works. He only took a minor break, in order to compose Three Tales in 1875–76. It received lukewarm reviews: critics failed to appreciate both its message and its structural devices.
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Alexandre Dumas, père (French for "father", akin to 'Senior' in English), born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870)
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a French writer, best known for his numerous historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world. Many of his novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne were serialized. He also wrote plays and magazine articles and was a prolific correspondent.
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The Count of Monte Cristo (French: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) is an adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas, père.
Publication date 1844-1846 |
often considered to be, along with The Three Musketeers, Dumas' most popular work. It is also among the highest selling books of all time. The writing of the work was completed in 1844. Like many of his novels, it is expanded from the plot outlines suggested by his collaborating ghostwriter Auguste Maquet.[1]
The story takes place in France, Italy, islands in the Mediterranean and the Levant during the historical events of 1815–1838 (from just before the Hundred Days through to the reign of Louis-Philippe of France). The historical setting is a fundamental element of the book. It is primarily concerned with themes of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy, forgiveness and death, and is told in the style of an adventure story. Edmond Dantès, sailor aboard the ship Pharaon, returns home to Marseille. He is excited to be reunited with his family and friends, and eager to marry his lovely fiancée, the Catalan beauty Mercédès. He is also proud of his recent promotion to captain. At the same time, he is saddened by the recent death of his friend Captain Leclère, his predecessor. While in prison, Edmond slowly sinks into despair and finally looks to God for salvation. After years of solitary confinement in a small, fetid dungeon, Dantès loses all hope and contemplates suicide by means of starving himself. His will to live is restored, however, by faint sounds of digging. Dantès soon begins his own tunnel to reach that of his fellow prisoner, the Abbé Faria, an Italian priest whose escape tunnel has strayed in the wrong direction. The two prisoners eventually connect and quickly become friends. Nine years after his return to Marseille, Dantès puts into action his plan for revenge. He reinvents himself as the Count of Monte Cristo, a mysterious, fabulously rich aristocrat. He surfaces first in Rome, where he becomes acquainted with Franz d'Epinay, a young aristocrat, and Albert de Morcerf, Mercédès's and Mondego's son. He subsequently moves to Paris, where he becomes the sensation of the city. Due to his knowledge and rhetorical power, even his enemies find him charming, and because of his status, they all desire his friendship. |
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The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. It recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to become a musketeer. D'Artagnan is not one of the musketeers of the title; those are his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—inseparable friends who live by the motto, "One for all, and all for One".
The story of d'Artagnan is continued in Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Those three novels by Dumas are together known as the D'Artagnan Romances. The Three Musketeers was first published in serial form in the magazine Le Siècle between March and July 1844. |
The Cardinal's revenge comes swiftly: the next evening, Constance is kidnapped. D'Artagnan brings his friends back to Paris and tries to find her, but fails. Meanwhile, he befriends the Count de Winter, an English nobleman who introduces him to his sister-in-law, Milady de Winter. Despite his love for Constance and his suspicions that Milady is the Cardinal's spy, he finds it very hard to resist her charms. He almost falls into the trap, believing Milady is in love with him, when he accidentally finds a letter of hers to the one she really loves, the Count de Wardes. Helped by Milady's chambermaid Kitty, who is infatuated with him, d'Artagnan has his revenge: he spends a night with Milady, pretending to be M. de Wardes in the darkened room, and Milady gives him a sapphire ring as a token of her love. He admits the truth though, and she tries to slay him with a dagger. In the struggle, d'Artagnan discovers that Milady has a fleur-de-lis burned into her shoulder, marking her as a felon. Remembering a story that Athos had once told him, d'Artagnan suddenly realizes with horror that Milady is not, as he thought, an English noble lady, but in fact Athos' wife, whom everyone thought dead. He now knows that Milady will never forgive him for having insulted her so dearly, and is relieved when all the King's Guards are ordered to La Rochelle where a siege of the Protestant-held town is taking place.
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Victor Hugo
(26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France. |
In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests primarily on his poetic and dramatic output and only secondarily on his novels. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame).
Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Panthéon. |
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Les Contemplations sont un recueil de 158 poèmes rassemblés en 6 livres que Victor Hugo a publié en 1856.
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Il est considéré comme le chef-d’œuvre lyrique de cet auteur. La plupart de ces poèmes ont été écrits entre 1841 et 1855. Mais les poèmes les plus anciens de ce recueil datent de 1834. Les Contemplations sont un recueil du souvenir, de l’amour, de la joie mais aussi de la mort, du deuil et même mystique.
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La Légende des siècles is a collection of poems by Victor Hugo, conceived as an immense depiction of the history and evolution of humanity.
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Written intermittently between 1855 and 1876, while the exiled Victor Hugo worked on numerous other projects, the poems were published in three series in 1859, 1877, and 1883. Bearing witness to an unparalleled poetic talent in which all Hugo's art is evident, the Légende des Siècles is often considered the only true French epic and, according to Baudelaire's formulation, the only modern epic possible.
The dreaming poet contemplates the "wall of the centuries," indistinct and terrible, on which scenes of the past, present and future are drawn, and along which the whole long procession of humanity can be seen. The poems are depictions of these scenes, fleetingly perceived and interspersed with terrifying visions. Hugo sought neither historical accuracy nor exhaustiveness; rather, he concentrated on obscure figures, usually his own inventions, who incarnated and symbolized their eras. As he proclaimed himself in the preface to the first series, "this is history, eavesdropped upon at the door of legend." The poems, by turns lyrical, epic and satirical, form a view of the human experience, seeking less to summarize than to illustrate the history of humanity, and to bear witness to its long journey from the darkness into the light. |
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Les Misérables (translated variously from French as The Miserable Ones, The Wretched, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, The Victims) (1862) is a novel by French author Victor Hugo
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Les Misérables contains a multitude of plots, but the thread that binds them together is the story of the ex-convict, Jean Valjean (known by his prison number, 24601), who becomes a force for good in the world, but cannot escape his dark past. The novel is divided into five parts, each part divided into books, and subdivided into chapters. Each chapter is relatively short - usually no longer than a few pages. Nevertheless, the book as a whole is quite lengthy by usual standards, well exceeding twelve hundred pages in unabridged editions. Within the borders of the novel's story, Hugo fills many pages with his thoughts on religion, politics, and society, including his three lengthy digressions, one being a discussion on enclosed religious orders, another being on argot, and most famously, his epic retelling of the Battle of Waterloo.
The story starts in 1815, in Toulon. The peasant Jean Valjean has just been released from imprisonment in the bagne of Toulon after nineteen years: five for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family, and fourteen more for numerous escape attempts. Upon being released, he is required to carry a yellow passport that marks him as a convict, despite having already paid his debt to society by serving his time in jail. Rejected by innkeepers, who do not want to take in a convict, Valjean sleeps on the street. This makes him even more angry and bitter. However, the benevolent Bishop Myriel, the Bishop of Digne, takes him in and gives him shelter. In the middle of the night, he steals the bishop’s silverware and runs. He is caught, but the bishop rescues him by claiming that the silverware was a gift and at that point gives him his two silver candlesticks as well, chastising him to the police for leaving in such a rush that he forgot these most valuable pieces. The bishop then tells him of the promise, (one Jean has no recollection of making), to use the silver to make an honest man of himself. As Valjean broods over these words, he accidentally steals a child's money when the boy's coin rolls under his shoe; he chases the child away (Petit Gervais). Soon after, he finds the coin under his shoe, realizes his mistake, and decides to follow the bishop's advice. He searches the city for the child whose money he accidentally stole. At the same time, his theft is reported to the authorities, who now look for him as a repeat offender. If Valjean is caught, he will be forced to spend the rest of his life in prison, so he hides from the police. Six years later, Valjean, having assumed the pseudonym Monsieur Madeleine to avoid capture, has become a wealthy factory owner and is appointed mayor of his adopted town of Montreuil-sur-mer. Sometime later, Valjean meets the dying Fantine, who was fired from her job at his factory and had been forced to resort to prostitution to pay for her daughter's board and expenses. Her young daughter, Cosette, lives with the Thénardiers, a corrupt innkeeper and his selfish, cruel wife. Fantine is unaware of the constant abuse to her daughter and continues to try to pay their growing, extortionate demands for her upkeep. Separated from Cosette, Fantine is slowly dying from an unnamed disease, (probably tuberculosis). Valjean, seeing in Fantine similarities to his former life of hardship and pain, promises her that he will take care of Cosette, despite the imminent threat of arrest. The town's police inspector, Javert, had already suspected that Madeleine was in fact Valjean, whom he had seen in jail while a guard in Toulon. This suspicion is momentarily dispelled when another man is mistakenly accused of being Valjean after being arrested and having noticeable similarities to the real Valjean. To save the man, Valjean reveals himself at the trial and is sent to jail. During his incarceration, Valjean fakes his death and escapes. He pays off the innkeeper, Thénardier, to obtain Cosette, and flees with her to Paris. Once in Paris, they find shelter in a convent. |
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The Hunchback of Notre Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris) is an 1831 French novel written by Victor Hugo. It is set in 1482 in Paris, in and around the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. The book tells the story of a poor barefoot Gypsy girl (La Esmeralda) and a misshapen bell-ringer (Quasimodo) who was raised by the Archdeacon (Claude Frollo). The book was written as a statement to preserve the Notre Dame cathedral and not to 'modernize' it, as Hugo was thoroughly against this.
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The story begins during the Renaissance in 1482, the day of the Festival of Fools in Paris. Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer, is introduced by his crowning as Pope of Fools.
Esméralda, a beautiful 16-year-old gypsy with a kind and generous heart, captures the hearts of many men but especially Quasimodo’s adopted father, Claude Frollo. Frollo is torn between his lust and the rules of the church. He orders Quasimodo to get her. Quasimodo is caught and whipped and ordered to be tied down in the heat. Esméralda seeing his thirst, offers him water. It saves her, for she captures the heart of the hunchback. She is later accused of the murder of Phoebus, whom Frollo killed in jealousy, and is sentenced to death by hanging. Quasimodo saves her by bringing her to the cathedral under the law of sanctuary. Frollo rallies the truands (criminals of Paris) to charge the cathedral. The king, seeing the chaos, vetoes the law of sanctuary and commands his troops to take her out and kill her. When Quasimodo sees the truands, he assumes they are there to hurt Esméralda, so he drives them off. Frollo betrays Esméralda by handing her to the troops and watches while she is hanged. Quasimodo pushes him from Notre-Dame to his death. He then goes to where hanged dead bodies are thrown, lies next to her corpse and eventually dies of starvation. Two years later, excavationists find the skeletons of Esmeralda with broken neck and Quasimodo locked in an embrace. |
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Albert Camus
(7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) |
An Algeria-born French author, philosopher, and journalist who won the Nobel prize in 1957. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus refused this label.[1] On the other hand, as he wrote in his essay The Rebel, his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom.
In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons in the Revolutionary Union Movement, according to the book Albert Camus, une vie by Olivier Todd, a group opposed to some tendencies of the surrealistic movement of André Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he became the first Africa-born writer to receive the award, in 1957.[2] He is also the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident only three years after receiving the award. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked…" |
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The Stranger, The Outsider, (L’Étranger) (1942), by Albert Camus, is one of the most famous French novels of the twentieth century and is among the best literary expositions of the absurdity of human existence in an indifferent universe.
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Notified of his mother's death, Meursault attends her funeral, yet expresses none of the emotion typical and expected in such a circumstance. At her wake, when asked if he wishes to view the body, he declines, and, instead, smokes cigarettes and drinks coffee before the unviewed body. Afterwards, in the next few days, he helps his best friend and neighbour, Raymond Sintès, rid himself of a Moorish girlfriend suspected of infidelity. For Raymond, Meursault agrees to write a break-up letter, because, as an emotionally detached man, he cannot see any reason not to emotionally torture the Arab ex-girlfriend of his fellow Frenchman; he notes only the physical possibility of the situation.
Subsequently, on a beach, they encounter the spurned girlfriend's brother and an Arab friend; they confront Raymond and wound him in a knife fight. Later, walking on the beach alone, Meursault, now armed with a pistol, encounters the Arab friend and shoots him dead; the shooting is partly provoked by the sun's glare. Despite killing the Arab man with the first gun shot, he shoots the cadaver four more times; later, the police easily deduce who committed the murder, and arrest Meursault. At the trial, because they find Meursault's remorselessness offensive, the prosecuting attorneys concentrate more upon his inability or unwillingness to cry at his mother's funeral, than on his having murdered an Arab man in cold blood. They posit: if Meursault is incapable of remorse, he must be considered a dangerous misanthrope who must be executed with the guillotine. Meursault is convicted, principally for not feeling his mother's death — rather than for murdering an Arab man. In prison, whilst awaiting the execution of his death sentence by decapitation, Meursault meets with a chaplain, but rejects his proffered opportunity of turning to God. Yet, Meursault grasps the universe's indifference towards mankind: As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate. |
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The Plague (Fr. La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of medical workers finding solidarity in their labour as the Algerian city of Oran is swept by a plague epidemic. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.
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# The Narrator: presents himself at the outset of the book as witness to the events and privy to documents, but does not identify himself with any character until the ending of the novel.
# Dr. Bernard Rieux: The principal character of the novel, though not a traditional protagonist. He describes himself as tired of the world, but is actively involved in events as a medical professional. He is among the first to notice the dying rats and human cases of the disease. # Jean Tarrou: A recent visitor to Oran, apparently independently wealthy. His diary notebooks provide an additional perspective on unfolding events, recording things seen and overheard accompanied by commentary that is often cryptic. # Joseph Grand: A municipal clerk of 22 years, passed over for promotion or adequate raise. As a result of his inadequate means, he lives in a sparingly furnished apartment. He has difficulty asserting himself and is uncomfortable communicating with others, yet aspires to write a book. He is a neighbor of M. Cottard. # M. Cottard: Introduced in the novel just following his attempted suicide, from which he is saved by his neighbor J. Grand. He is eager to socialize, but has few friends. He undergoes major changes throughout the novel. # Dr. Castel: An older colleague of Dr. Rieux. His personal experiences with bubonic plague outbreaks in China and Paris enable him to be the first to recognize the symptoms of the disease and give it a name. # Dr. Richard: A more cautious and methodical doctor. He is unwilling to take action to curtail spread of the disease without definitive proof that it is in fact plague. |
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The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus. It comprises about 120 pages and was published originally in 1942 in French as Le Mythe de Sisyphe
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In the essay, Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man's futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Does the realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus answers: "No. It requires revolt." He then outlines several approaches to the absurd life. The final chapter compares the absurdity of man's life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. The essay concludes, "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
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The Rebel (French title: L'Homme révolté) is a 1951 book-length essay by Albert Camus, which treats both the metaphysical and the historical development of rebellion and revolution in societies, especially Western Europe. Camus relates writers and artists as diverse as Epicurus and Lucretius, the Marquis de Sade, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and André Breton in an integrated, historical portrait of man in revolt.
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Examining both rebellion and revolt, which may be seen as the same phenomenon in personal and social frames, Camus examines several 'countercultural' figures and movements from the history of western thought and art, noting the importance of each in the overall development of revolutionary thought and philosophy.
One of Camus' primary arguments in The Rebel is that the urge for revolt stems from an urge for justice, or, to be more accurate, a rejection of then-accepted norms of justice, as these lead to a feeling of dissatisfaction in an individual subjected to them. |
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Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980), commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy.
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The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period as a politically engaged activist and intellectual. His 1948 work Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being both an intellectual at the same time as becoming "engaged" politically. He embraced communism, denied the purgings of Stalin, had an affair with a KGB-agent and defended existentialism, though never officially joining the Communist Party, and took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria. He became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatory of the Manifeste des 121. Furthermore, he had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967. Its effect was limited.
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The Roads to Freedom (Les chemins de la liberté, in the original French) is a trilogy of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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The three novels L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason), Le sursis (generally translated as The Reprieve but which could cover a number of semantic fields from 'deferment' to 'amnesty'), and La mort dans l'âme (Troubled Sleep, originally translated as Iron in the Soul), revolve around Mathieu, a Socialist teacher of philosophy, and a group of his friends. The trilogy was to be followed by a fourth novel, Drôle d'amitié; however, Sartre would never finish it, and only two (untranslated) chapters remain.[1]
The novels were written largely in response to the events of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, and express certain significant shifts in Sartre's philosophical position towards 'engagement' (commitment) in both life and literature, finding their resolution in the extended essay L'existentialisme c'est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Form of Humanism), which was criticized from both sides of the existentialist fence. |
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Nausea (orig. French La Nausée) is a novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938 and written while he was teaching at the lycée of Le Havre. It is one of Sartre's best-known novels.
The novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre, who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea. It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre was awarded (but declined) the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. They recognized him, "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." He was one of the few people ever to have declined the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution. |
Written in the form of journal entries, it follows 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin who, returned from years of travel, settles in the fictional French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932, a "sweetish sickness" he calls nausea increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys: his research project, the company of "The Self-Taught Man" ("The Autodidact" in some translations) who is reading all the books in the local library alphabetically, a physical relationship with a cafe owner named Francoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved, even his own hands and the beauty of nature.
Over time, his disgust towards existence forces him into near-insanity, self-hatred; he embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point. But finally he comes to a revelation into the nature of his being. Antoine faces the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself. In his resolution at the end of the book he accepts the indifference of the physical world to man's aspirations. He is able to see that realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because without that commitment there will be no meaning. |
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Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre that is generally regarded as the foundation for the growth of Phenomenological existentialism in the 20th century. Its main purpose was to define consciousness as an act of negation (a transcendence of the given world).
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Sartre’s overriding concern in writing Being and Nothingness was to vindicate the fundamental freedom of the human being, against determinists of all stripes. It was for the sake of this freedom that he asserted the impotence of physical causality over human beings, that he analysed the place of nothingness within consciousness and showed how it intervened between the forces that act upon us and our actions.[1]
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Émile François Zola
(2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism, an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus. |
More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine, Zola from the outset at the age of 28 had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the industrial revolution. The series examines two branches of a single family: the respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts, for five generations.
From 1877 onwards with the publication of l'Assommoir, Émile Zola became wealthy–he was better paid than Victor Hugo, for example. He became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans and other writers at his luxurious villa in Medan near Paris after 1880. Germinal in 1885, then the three 'cities', Lourdes in 1894, Rome in 1896 and Paris in 1897, established Zola as a successful author. |
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Les Rougon-Macquart is the collective title given to French novelist Émile Zola's twenty-novel cycle. Subtitled Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire (Natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire), it follows the life of a fictional family living during the Second French Empire (1852-1870) and is an example of the French naturalism.
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"In one word, his work wants to be the mirror of the contemporary society. My work, mine, will be something else entirely. The scope will be narrower. I don't want to describe the contemporary society, but a single family, showing how the race is modified by the environment. (...) My big task is to be strictly naturalist, strictly physiologist."
1. La Fortune des Rougon (1871) 2. La Curée (1871-2) 3. Le Ventre de Paris (1873) 4. La Conquête de Plassans (1874) 5. La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875) 6. Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876) 7. L'Assommoir (1877) 8. Une Page d'amour (1878) 9. Nana (1880) 10. Pot-Bouille (1882) 11. Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) 12. La Joie de vivre (1884) 13. Germinal (1885) 14. L'Œuvre (1886) 15. La Terre (1887) 16. Le Rêve (1888) 17. La Bête humaine (1890) 18. L'Argent (1891) 19. La Débâcle (1892) 20. Le Docteur Pascal (1893) |
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Germinal (1885) is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Widely considered Zola's undisputed masterpiece and one of the greatest novels ever written in the French language, the novel - an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s - has been published and translated in over one hundred countries as well as inspiring five film adaptations and two TV productions.
The title refers to the name of a month of the French Republican Calendar, a spring month. Germen is a Latin word which means "seed"; the novel describes the hope for a better future that seeds amongst the miners. Germinal was written between April 1884 and January 1885. It was first serialized between November 1884 and February 1885 in the periodical Gil Blas, then in March 1885 published as a book. |
Étienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a naïve youth; Zola's genetic theories come into play as Étienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. Luckily, Zola keeps his theorizing in the background and Étienne's motivations are much more natural as a result. He embraces socialist principles, reading large amounts of working class movement literature and fraternizing with Souvarine, a Russian anarchist and political émigré who has also come to Montsou to seek a living in the pits. Étienne's simplistic understanding of socialist politics and their rousing effect on him are very reminiscent of the rebel Silvère in the first novel in the cycle, La Fortune des Rougon (1871).
While this is going on, Étienne also falls for Maheu's daughter Catherine, also employed pushing carts in the mines, and he is drawn into the relationship between her and her brutish lover Chaval, a prototype for the character of Buteau in Zola's later novel La Terre (1887). The complex tangle of the miners' lives is played out against a backdrop of severe poverty and oppression, as their working and living conditions continue to worsen throughout the novel; eventually, pushed to breaking point, the miners decide to strike and Étienne, now a respected member of the community and recognized as a political idealist, becomes the leader of the movement. While the anarchist Souvarine preaches violent action, the miners and their families hold back, their poverty becoming ever more disastrous, until they are sparked into a ferocious riot, the violence of which is described in explicit terms by Zola, as well as providing some of the novelist's best and most evocative crowd scenes. The rioters are eventually confronted by police and the army, who repress the revolt in a violent and unforgettable episode. Disillusioned, the miners go back to work, blaming Étienne for the failure of the strike; then, in a fit of anarchist fervour, Souvarine sabotages the entrance shaft of one of the Montsou pits, trapping Étienne, Catherine and Chaval at the bottom. The ensuing drama and the long wait for rescue are among some of Zola's best scenes, and the novel draws to a dramatic close. Étienne is eventually rescued and fired but he goes on to live in Paris with Pluchart. |
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Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
(10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of À la recherche du temps perdu (in English, In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927. |
Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.
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In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) is a semi-autobiographical novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its extended length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine".
Publication date 1913–1927 |
The role of memory is central to the novel, hence the famous episode with the madeleine in the first volume. When the narrator's grandmother dies, her agony is depicted as her seeming to fall apart; particularly, as her memories seem to flow out of her, she loses contact with it. In the last volume, Time Regained, a flashback similar to the madeleines episode is the beginning of the resolution of the story. The narrator is transported back to an earlier time by sensory experiences of memory, triggered by smells, sights, sounds, or touch.
A large part of the novel has to do with the nature of art. Proust sets forth a theory of art in which we all are capable of producing art, if by art we mean taking the experiences of life and transforming them in a way that shows understanding and maturity. Music is also discussed at great length. Morel, the violinist, is examined to give an example of a certain type of "artistic" character. The artistic value of Wagner's music is also discussed. Homosexuality is a major theme in the novel, especially in Sodom and Gomorrah and subsequent volumes. Though the narrator himself is heterosexual, he invariably suspects his lovers of liaisons with other women. Similarly, Charles Swann, the central figure in much of the first volume, suspects his mistress Odette (whom he later marries) has had such encounters, something she subsequently admits to him is true. Several lesser characters are forthrightly homosexual, like the Baron de Charlus; while others, like the narrator's good friend Robert de Saint-Loup, are only later revealed to be closeted. |
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Comte de Lautréamont (pronounced [lotʁeaˈmɔ̃] in French) was the pen name of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (April 4, 1846 – November 24, 1870), an Uruguayan-born French poet.
His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. Les Chants de Maldoror is often described as the first surrealist book. He died at the young age of 24. |
Les Chants de Maldoror is a poem of six cantos which are subdivided into 60 verses of different length (I/14, II/16, III/5, IV/8, V/7, VI/10). The verses were originally not numbered, but rather separated by lines. The final eight verses of the last canto form a small novel, and were marked with Roman numerals. Each canto closes with a line to indicate its end.
The work revolves around the misanthropic character of Maldoror, a figure of absolute evil who is opposed to God and humanity, and has renounced all ties to conventional morality and decency. The iconoclastic imagery and tone is typically violent and macabre, and ostensibly nihilistic. |
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Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (September 4, 1896, in Marseille – March 4, 1948 in Paris) was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director. Antonin is a diminutive form of Antoine (little Anthony), and was among a long list of names which Artaud used throughout his life.
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One big fan of the Songs of Maldoror was this "theater of cruelty" proponent who wrote Heavenly Backgammon and The Jet of Blood.
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Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970)
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an English novelist, short story writer, essayist, and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy and also the attitudes towards gender and homosexuality in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".
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A Passage to India (1924) is a novel by E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s.
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A young British schoolmistress, Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, visit the fictional city of Chandrapore, British India. On their arrival, Adela is to marry Mrs. Moore's son, Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate.
Meanwhile, Dr. Aziz, a young Muslim Indian physician, is dining with two of his Indian friends and conversing about whether it is possible to be friends with an Englishman. During the meal, a summons arrives from Major Callendar, Aziz's unpleasant superior at the hospital. Aziz hastens to Callendar's bungalow as ordered, but is delayed by a flat tyre and difficulty in finding a tonga and the major has already left in a huff. After an initial period of fever and weeping, Adela becomes confused as to Aziz's guilt. At the trial, she is asked point-blank whether Aziz sexually assaulted her. She asks for a moment to think before replying. She has a vision of the cave in that moment, and turns out that Adela had, while in the cave, received a shock similar to Mrs. Moore's. The echo had disconcerted her so much that she temporarily became unhinged. She ran frantically around the cave, fled down the hill, and finally sped off with Miss Derek. At the time, Adela mistakenly interpreted her shock as an assault by Aziz, who personifies the India that has stripped her of her psychological innocence, but he was never there. With laudable honesty and bravery, she proclaims her mistake. The case is dismissed. All the Anglo-Indians, who had eagerly rallied to her support, are shocked and infuriated by what they view as Adela's betrayal of the white race. Mrs. Turton shrieks insults at her, and Ronny Heaslop soon breaks off their engagement. Adela stays at the sympathetic Fielding's house until her passage on a boat to England is arranged. After explaining to Fielding that the echo was the cause of the whole business, she departs India, never to return. |
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A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.
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Furious with Charlotte for betraying her secret, Lucy forces her cousin to watch as she tells George to leave and never return. George argues with her, saying that Cecil only sees her as an "object for the shelf" and will never love her enough to grant her independence, while George loves her for who she is. Lucy is moved but remains firm. Later that evening, after Cecil again rudely declines to play tennis, Lucy sours on Cecil and immediately breaks off her engagement. She decides to flee to Greece with acquaintances from her trip to Florence, but shortly before her departure she accidentally encounters Mr. Emerson. He is not aware that Lucy has broken her engagement with Cecil, and Lucy cannot lie to the old man. Mr. Emerson forces Lucy to admit out loud that she has been in love with his son George all along.
The novel ends in Florence, where George and Lucy have eloped without her mother's consent. Although Lucy "had alienated Windy Corner, perhaps for ever," the story ends with the promise of lifelong love for both her and George. |
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Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a novel by E. M. Forster, originally entitled Monteriano. The title comes from a line in Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism: "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread".
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On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott, widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with both Italy and a handsome Italian much younger than herself, and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband's family send Lilia's brother-in-law to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but he arrives too late. Lilia had already married the Italian and in due course becomes pregnant again. When she dies giving birth to a son, the Herritons learn that Lilia's one-time traveling companion, Caroline Abbott, wishes to travel to Italy once again, this time to save the infant boy from an uncivilized life. Not wanting to be outdone -- or considered any less moral or concerned than Caroline for the child's welfare-- Lilia's in-laws try to take the lead in traveling to Italy. In the public eye, they make it known that it is both their right and their duty to travel to Monteriano to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman. Secretly, though, they have no regard for the child; only public appearances.
Similarly to A Room with a View, both Italy and its inhabitants are presented as exuding an irresistible charm, to which eventually also Caroline Abbott succumbs. However, there is a tragic ending to the novel, while the film adds a suggestively positive scene. |
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Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster, first published in 1910, which tells a story of class struggle in turn-of-the-century England. The main theme is the difficulties, and also the benefits, of relationships between members of different social classes.
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The book is about three families in England at the beginning of the twentieth century. The three families represent different gradations of the Edwardian middle class: the Wilcoxes, who are rich capitalists with a fortune made in the Colonies; the half-German Schlegel siblings (Margaret, Tibby, and Helen), who represent the intellectual bourgeoisie and have a lot in common with the real-life Bloomsbury Group; and the Basts, a couple who are struggling members of the lower-middle class. The Schlegel sisters try to help the poor Basts and try to make the Wilcoxes less prejudiced. The motto of the book is "Only connect..."
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