In "A Simple Heart," Flaubert has, so to say, related the history of the old serving maid to whom the prize was awarded in "Madame Bovary." It is a touching narrative of an old worn-out maid-servant, who, forsaken by all, at length bestows the entire love of her heart upon a parrot. She admires this parrot beyond all else in the world; it seems to her, in her simplicity, to resemble the Holy Ghost as a dove in the altar-painting of the village church, and gradually it comes to occupy in her consciousness the place of the Holy Ghost. The bird dies and she has it stuffed. In her dying hour, she sees it in colossal size, with outspread wings, waiting to receive her and bear her upward into Paradise. This is like a profoundly melancholy parody on the conclusion of the legend. In one, as in the other, all is vision and illusion. Owing to the frailty of our nature, our capacity for being deceived, our need of consolation, and our readiness to sink into despair,--Flaubert seems to say,--one straw will serve us quite as well as another in our extremity. These three stories met with no success whatever. In them study had made one step forward at the cost of life. They contained scarcely any conversations, scarcely any isolated remarks; they were rather tables of contents than novels. People felt that the author had begun to despise the poetic form proper. Furthermore, they contained too great a display of erudition. The reader can readily conjecture how many legends Flaubert must have read in order to reproduce their character so accurately. But no attempt is made to place the result of this erudition in perspective before the eyes of the modern reader. Not a single path is hewn in the primitive forest of the legendary world; it is a dense thicket, which wholly impedes the free course of the vision. The story seems rather adapted to the public of the thirteenth century, or to polished connoisseurs, than to ordinary modern readers. VI. The year 1874 finally brought the work which Flaubert himself considered his _chef d'œuvre,_--a work on which he had labored for twenty years, and which furnished the sharpest definition of his mind,--a most startling work. When it was first rumored that a French novelist had written "The Temptation of St. Antonius," at least nine-tenths of the public entertained not the slightest doubt that the title was to be accepted facetiously or symbolically. Who could surmise that the work was a thoroughly serious history of the temptation of the ancient Egyptian hermit!