Sentimental Education is one of those books that contain everything. As such, it is one of the best novels of French literature. Everything is there. Based on a musical and elegant style as well as a sense of staging, Flaubert wrote a novel that gives the illusion of life. Sentimental Education affects all themes, interleaves and delivers a masterly lesson of literature. Anything goes: politics, love, friendship, illusions, stupidity, memory, nothing is foreign to this book. But though this novel is the story of the education of a young man, do not expect to find in Flaubert a teacher giving a lesson from the top of his experience into two chapters lectures (the last two), it returns finally the reader to the ambiguity of life and the impossibility to give it a definitive meaning.
