As Flaubert portrays their experience...

As Flaubert portrays their experience, doing as they please involves Bouvard and Pecuchet in a practical and theoretical jaunt through agriculture, history, chemistry, education, archaeology, literature, always with less than successful results; they move through fields of learning like travelers in time and knowledge, experiencing the disappointments, disasters, and letdowns of uninspired amateurs.

What they move through, in fact, is the whole disillusioning experience of the nineteenth century, whereby-in Charles Moraze's phrase-"les bourgeois conquerants" turn out to be the bumbling victims of their own leveling incompetence and mediocrity. Every enthusiasm resolves itself into a boring cliche, and every discipline or type of knowledge changes from hope and power into disorder, ruin, and sorrow.

Among Flaubert's sketches for the conclusion of this panorama of despair are two items of special interest to us here. The two men debate the future of mankind. Pécuchet sees "the future of Humanity through a glass darkly," whereas Bouvard sees it "brightly!" Modern man is progressing, Europe will be regenerated by Asia.

The historical law that civilization moves from Orient to Occident...the two forms of humanity will at last be soldered together.1 This obvious echo of Quinet represents the start of still another of the cycles of enthusiasm and disillusionment through which the two men will pass. Flaubert's notes indicate that like all his others, this anticipated project of Bouvard's is rudely interrupted by reality-this time by the sudden appearance of gendarmes who accuse him of debauchery.

A few lines later, however, the second item of interest turns up. The two men simultaneously confess to each other that their secret desire is once again to become copyists. They have a double desk made for them, they buy books, pencils, erasers, and-as Flaubert concludes the sketch- "ils s'y mettent": they turn to. From trying to live through and apply knowledge more or less directly, Bouvard and Pecuchet are reduced finally to transcribing it uncritically from one text to another.

Although Bouvard's vision of Europe regenerated by Asia is not fully spelled out, it (and what it comes to on the copyist's desk) can be glossed in several important ways.