Without Lifting A Finger

Finished the Kindle version yesterday, and have moved on to Madame Bovary (I tried her years ago, in a beautiful leatherbound edition, and gave up about halfway through: this time I'm determined to have her via Kindle). Frederick has returned home. As far as he knows he'll never see Madame Arnoux again (little does he know that she's lurking around the corner of the next page): He mingled in society, and he conceived attachments to other women. But the constant recollection of his first love made these appear insipid; and besides the vehemence of desire, the bloom of the sensation had vanished. The corner/page has turned. Madame Arnoux has come to see him. Frederick is getting quite sentimental: "All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction you have made me feel," said Frederick. "I can understand Werther, who felt no disgust at his Charlotte for eating bread and butter." Frederick reveals his foot fetish: "The sight of your...

I'm almost finished with Sentimental Education . I'm glad I've stuck it out--IMO it could be halved w/o losing too much--because the wind-up has caught my attention. Out of context--perhaps even "in"--this quote sounds a bit sexist, but I liked it all the same: The hearts of women are like little pieces of furniture wherein things are secreted, full of drawers fitted into each other; one hurts himself, breaks his nails in opening them, and then finds within only some withered flower, a few grains of dust--or emptiness! 

Will Frederick get the girl or not? Which girl? Anyway, I'm progressing through Sentimental Education and found this ode to  La Ville-Lumière enticing: But there was only one place in the world where this could be turned to account--Paris; for to his mind, art, science, and love (those three faces of God, as Pellerin would have said) were associated exclusively with the capital.