at happened in a nearby town, Flaubert tried to create a new realistic kind of fiction that had not been done before. He spent years carefully working and reworking his writing, on this book and all his others, in an attempt to select exactly the right words and details to create a complete "unity of tone" (1017). In writing realistically about people who were very different from himself Flaubert tried to enter into their existence. He wanted to be like God in his books, everywhere but invisible at the same time. He said of the heroine of his novel, "I am Madame Bovary" (1017).
Throughout his life Flaubert was still "contemptuous of the bourgeois provincialism of his characters" and in creating the story of Félicité he contrasted the life of a person who was completely good and capable of the deepest love with the selfish bourgeois people that she worked for (1017). The main characters in the story are the servant Félicité, Madame Aubain (the woman she worked for), Paul and Virginie (Madame Aubain's children), Félicité's nephew Victor, and the parrot Loulou who is given to Félicité. Other characters, such as the lawyer M. Bourais and Madame Aubain's uncle the Marquis de Gremanville, also come into the story briefly but are important.
The simple heart of the title refers to Félicité's ability to give so much love to people who are barely kind to her. She loves the young
...