"Œuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert, tome 7: Bouvard et Pécuchet" by Gustave Flaubert is an unfinished novel published posthumously in 1881. Two copyists meet by chance in Paris and discover their shared interests. When an inheritance allows them to retire to the countryside, they enthusiastically attempt to master every field of knowledge—agriculture, science, archaeology, literature, politics, philosophy, and religion. Armed only with popular books and haphazard advice, their systematic experiments produce nothing but disasters, revealing the gap between their ambitions and their understanding. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
