ATALA (CHATEAUBRIAND)Theframe story:A young disillusioned Frenchman, Ren, has joined an Indian tribe and married a woman named Cluta. On a hunting expedition, one moonlit night, Ren asks Chactas, the old man who adopted him, to relate the story of his life.At the age of seventeen, theNatchezChactas loses his father during a battle against theMuscogees. He flees toSt Augustine, Florida, where he is raised in the household of the Spaniard Lopez. After 2 years, he sets out for home, but is captured by the Muscogees and Seminoles. The chief Simagan sentences him to be burnt in their village.The women take pity on him during the weeks of travel, and each night bring him gifts. Atala, the half-caste Christian daughter of Simagan, tries in vain to help him escape. On arrival at Apalachucla, his bonds are loosed and he is saved from death by her intervention. They run away and roam the wilderness for 27 days before being caught in a huge storm. While they are sheltering, Atala tells Chactas that her father was Lopez, and he realises that she is the daughter of his erstwhile benefactor.Lightning strikes a tree close by, and they run at random before hearing a church bell. Encountering a dog, they are met by its owner, Pre Aubry, and he leads them through the storm to his idyllic mission. Aubry's kindness and force of personality impress Chactas greatly.Atala falls in love with Chactas, but cannot marry him as she has taken a vow of chastity. In despair she takes poison. Aubry assumes that she is merely ill, but in the presence of Chactas she reveals what she has done, and Chactas is filled with anger until the missionary tells them that in fact Christianity permits the renunciation of vows. They tend her, but she dies, and the day after the funeral, Chactas takes Aubry's advice and leaves the mission.In an epilogue it is revealed that Aubry was later killed byCherokees, and that, according to Chactas's granddaughter, neither Ren nor the aged Chactas survived a massacre during an uprising. The full account of Chactas's wanderings after Atala's death, inLes Natchez, gives a somewhat different version of their fates.

LORENZACCIO (MUSSET)Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence, aided by Lorenzo de' Medici, takes away a girl under her brother's nose. He wishes to complain to the duke, but it is the duke who is taking her away. In Lorenzaccio's palace, his uncle Bindo Altoviti and Venturi, a gentleman, wish to know from Lorenzaccio whether he will join their conspiracy against the duke. But when the duke, as suggested by his cousin, offers them a promotion and privileges, despite their republican talk, they immediately accept. Alessandro serves as model for a portrait, when Lorenzaccio takes his coat of mail and throws it in a well. One of the duke's men, Salviati, covered in blood, appears, saying that Pietro Strozzi and his brother, Tomaso, attacked him. The duke orders their arrest, so that the Strozzi family are up in arms to free them. Lorenzaccio proposes to his cousin his bedroom to seduce Catherine, his aunt, which is actually a plot to kill him. Meanwhile, Pietri and Tomaso are freed and learn of their sister's death by poison at the hands of Salviati's servant. The cardinal of Cibo scolds his sister-in-law for not being able to hold her lover for more than three days. Unheeding his appeal to return to him, she reveals to her husband her adultery with the duke. The night he proposes to kill his cousin, Lorenzaccio warns noblemen to prepare for revolt, but none of them believe he'll do it. The cardinal warns the duke of Lorenzaccio, but he dismisses his warnings and follows his cousin to his bedroom, where Lorenzaccio kills him. Cosimo de' Medici is elected as the new duke. With the duke dead, the Strozzi conspiracy does not achieve anything, nor are republican sentiments heard of, except for some massacred students. Lorenzaccio is assassinated and the cardinal gives the ducal crown to Cosimo de' Medici on behalf of Pope Paul III and Emperor Charles V.

LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR (STENDHAL)In two volumes, The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the 19th Century tells the story of Julien Sorels life in a monarchic society of fixed social class.Book IBook I presents Julien Sorel, the ambitious son of a carpenter in the fictional village of Verrires, in Franche-Comt, France. He would rather read and daydream about the glory days of Napoleon's long-disbanded army than work his fathers timber business with his brothers, who beat him for his intellectual affectations.[1] He becomes an acolyte of the abb Chlan, the local Catholic prelate, who later secures him a job tutoring the children of Monsieur de Rnal, the mayor of Verrires. Although he appears to be a pious, austere cleric, Julien is uninterested in the Bible beyond its literary value and how he can use memorised passages (learnt in Latin) to impress important people.He enters a love affair with Monsieur de Rnals wife, which ends when it is revealed to the village by her chambermaid, Elisa, who is also in love with Julien. The abb Chlan orders Julien to a seminary in Besanon, which he finds intellectually stifling and pervaded with social cliques. The initially cynical seminary director, the abb Pirard (a Jansenist even more hated than Jesuits within the diocese), likes Julien and becomes his protector. Disgusted by the Churchs political machinations, the abb Pirard leaves the seminary, first rescuing Julien from the persecution he would have suffered as his protg, by recommending him as private secretary to the diplomat Marquis de la Mole, a Roman Catholic legitimist.Book IIBook II takes place in the years leading up to the July Revolution of 1830. During this time Julien Sorel lives in Paris as an employee of the de la Mole family. Despite his moving among high society and his intellectual talents, the family and their friends condescend to Julien for being an uncouth plebeian. Meanwhile, Julien is acutely aware of the materialism and hypocrisy that permeate the Parisian lite, and that the counter-revolutionary temper of the time renders it impossible for even well-born men of superior intellect and sthetic sensibility to participate in the nation's public affairs.The Marquis de la Mole takes Julien to a secret meeting, then despatches him on a dangerous mission to communicate a letter (Julien has it memorised) to the Duc d'Angouleme, who is exiled in England; however, the callow Julien is mentally distracted by an unsatisfying love affair, and thus only learns the message by rote, missing its political significance as a legitimist plot. Unwittingly, he risks his life in service to the right-wing monarchists he most opposes; to himself, he rationalises these actions as merely helping the Marquis, his employer, whom he respects.Meanwhile, the Marquiss bored daughter, Mathilde de la Mole, has become emotionally torn between her romantic attraction to Julien, for his admirable personal and intellectual qualities, and her social repugnance at becoming sexually intimate with a lower-class man. At first, he finds her unattractive, but his interest is piqued by her attentions and the admiration she inspires in others; twice, she seduces and rejects him, leaving him in a miasma of despair, self-doubt, and happiness (for having won her over her aristocratic suitors). Only during his secret mission does he gain the key to winning her affections: a cynical jeu damour (game of love) taught to him by Prince Korasoff, a Russian man-of-the-world. At great emotional cost, Julien feigns indifference to Mathilde, provoking her jealousy with a sheaf of love-letters meant to woo Madame de Fervaques, a widow in the social circle of the de la Mole family. Consequently, Mathilde sincerely falls in love with Julien, eventually revealing to him that she carries his child; despite this, whilst he is on diplomatic mission in England, she becomes officially engaged to Monsieur de Croisenois, an amiable, rich young man, heir to a duchy.Learning of Juliens romantic liaison with Mathilde, the Marquis de la Mole is angered, but relents before her determination and his affection for Julien, and bestows upon Julien an income-producing property attached to an aristocratic title, and a military commission in the army. Although ready to bless their marriage, he changes his mind after receiving the reply to a character-reference-letter he wrote to the abb Chlan, Juliens previous employer in the village of Verrires; the reply letter, written by Madame de Rnalat the urging of her confessor priestwarns the Marquis that Julien Sorel is a social-climbing cad who preys upon emotionally vulnerable women.On learning of the Marquiss disapproval of the marriage, Julien Sorel travels back to Verrires and shoots Madame de Rnal during Mass in the village church; she survives, but Julien is imprisoned and sentenced to death. Mathilde tries to save him by bribing local officials, and Madame de Rnal, still in love with Julien, refuses to testify and asks for his acquittal. Despite this, along with the efforts of priests who have looked after him since his early childhood, Julien Sorel is determined to die because the materialist society of Bourbon Restoration France will not accommodate a low-born man of superior intellect and sthetic sensibility who possesses neither money nor social connections.Meanwhile, the presumptive duke, Monsieur de Croisenois, one of the fortunate few of Bourbon France, is killed in a duel fought over a slur upon the honour of Mathilde de la Mole. Her undiminished love for Julien, his imperiously intellectual nature, and its component romantic exhibitionism, render Mathildes prison visits to him a duty.When Julien learns he did not kill Madame de Rnal, his genuine love for her is resurrectedhaving lain dormant throughout his Parisian timeand she continues to visit him in jail. After he is guillotined, Mathilde de la Mole re-enacts the cherished 16th-century French tale of Queen Margot, who visited her dead lover, Joseph Boniface de La Mole, to kiss the lips of his severed head. She makes a shrine of his tomb in the Italian fashion. Madame de Rnal, more quietly, dies in the arms of her children.

TROIS CONTES (FLAUBERT)"A Simple Heart""A Simple Heart", or Un cur simple or Le perroquet in French, is a story about a servant girl named Felicit. After her one and only love Thodore purportedly marries a well-to-do woman to avoid conscription, Felicit quits the farm where she works and heads for Pont-l'vque, where she picks up work in a widow's house as a servant. She is very loyal, and easily lends her affections to the two children of her mistress, Mme Aubain. She gives entirely to others; although many take advantage of her, she is unaffected.She has no husband, no children, and no property, and is reliant on her mistress to keep her; she is uneducated, which bars her visits to the Church; her death is virtually unnoticed. Despite her life being seemingly pointless, she has within her the power to love, which she does even when she does not receive it in return. She also carries within her a yearning, a majestic quasi-religious sensibility which finds its apotheosis in the deification, as she dies, of her pet parrot who floats above her deathbed masquerading as the Holy Ghost. She lives a simple, unexamined life.

"The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier""The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier", in French La lgende de Saint-Julien l'hospitalier, is a story about Julian the Hospitaller. (Note that the story has nothing to do with the Order of Hospitallers, despite the similarity of the names.) He is predicted at birth to do great things. His father is told that he will marry into the family of a great emperor, while his mother is told he will be a saint. They dote on him. After Julian kills a mouse who interrupted his concentration in church, his cruelty towards animals grows and culminates into his massacre of an entire valley of deer. A stag curses him to kill his own parents. He almost brings the curse to fruition twice: he drops a sword while standing on a ladder near his father, and he pins his mother's white shawl against a wall with a javelin because it looked like a bird's wings. He leaves to escape his future (much like Oedipus).Julian joins a band of vagrants, and they eventually grow into a huge army under his control. He makes a name for himself and marries rich, but never hunts. Finally, his wife convinces him to go hunt and he is haunted by the spirits of all of the animals he has killed. He returns home to surprise his wife and finds a man and a woman in her bed. Unknown to him, his parents had arrived to see him and his wife had given them her bed. He thinks that it is another man sleeping with his wife and murders them. He recognizes his misdeed and leaves once again.Having given all of his possessions to his wife, Julian begs for food but is shunned for his deeds. He comes across a deserted river crossing and decides to live a life of servitude. One day, there is a great storm and a leper wishes to cross. It is rough but Julian does not give up. Once across, the leper's requests increase. He wishes for food and wine, Julian's bed, and finally the warmth of Julian's body. When Julian gives the man everything without hesitation, the leper is revealed to be an angel, or perhaps Jesus Christ himself, and Julian is taken to heaven.The story is described at length in Yann Martel's novel, Beatrice and Virgil.

"Hrodias""Hrodias" is the retelling of the beheading of John the Baptist. It starts slightly before the arrival of the Syrian governor, Vitellius. Herodias holds a huge birthday celebration for her second husband, Herod Antipas. Unknown to him, she has concocted a plan to behead John. According to Flaubert, this plan entails making her husband fall in love with her daughter, Salom, leading to him promising her whatever she wants. Salom, obviously in line with the instructions of her mother, will ask for John's head. Everything goes as planned. John has been repeatedly insulting the royals, so the king does not think long before granting Salom's wish. The crowd gathered for the party waits anxiously while the executioner, Mannaeus, kills John. The story ends with some of John's disciples awaiting the Messiah.

NANA (ZOLA)Nana tells the story of Nana Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class cocotte during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appears in the end of L'Assommoir (1877), an earlier work of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, in which she is portrayed as the daughter of an abusive drunk; in the conclusion of that novel, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution.The new novel opens with a night at the Thtre des Varits. The Exposition Universelle (1867) has just opened its doors. Nana is 15 years old (the number 18 mentioned in the book is not more than a fig leaf). Zola had taken care to make this clear to his readers by publishing an elaborate family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts in the newspaper Le Bien Public in 1878 when he started writing Nana. Zola describes in detail the performance of La blonde Vnus, a fictional operetta modelled after Offenbach's La belle Hlne, in which Nana is cast as the lead. She has never been seen on a stage, but all of Paris is talking about her. When asked to say something about her talents, Bordenave, the manager of the theatre (which he refers to as a brothel), explains that a star doesn't have to know how to sing or act: "Nana has something else, dammit, and something that takes the place of everything else. I scented it out, and it smells damnably strong in her, or else I lost my sense of smell." Just as the crowd is about to dismiss her performance as terrible, young Georges Hugon shouts: "Trs chic!" From then on, she owns the audience, and, when she appears only thinly veiled in the third act, Zola writes: "All of a sudden, in the good-natured child the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater."The novel then goes on to show how Nana destroys every man who pursues her: Philippe Hugon, Georges' brother, imprisoned after stealing from the army, his employer, for Nana; Steiner, a wealthy banker who is ruined after hemorrhaging cash for Nana's decadence; Georges Hugon, who was so captivated with her from the beginning that, when he realized he could not have her, stabs himself with scissors in anguish; Vandeuvres, a wealthy owner of horses who burns himself in his stables after Nana ruins him financially; Fauchery, a journalist and publisher who falls for Nana early on, writes a scathing article about her later, and falls for her again and is ruined financially; and Count Muffat, whose faithfulness to Nana brings him back for humiliation after humiliation until he finds her in bed with his elderly father-in-law. Becker explains: "What emerges from [Nana] is the completeness of Nana's destructive force, brought to a culmination in the thirteenth chapter by a kind of roll call of the victims of her voracity" (118).When Nana's work is done, Zola has her die a horrible death from smallpox: What lay on the pillow was a charnel house, a heap of pus and blood, a shovelful of putrid flesh. The pustules had invaded the whole face, so that one pock touched the next. While outside her window the crowd is madly chanting To Berlin! To Berlin! (the time is July 1870, after the Ems Dispatch), Venus is decomposing, her moral corruption is now physical. And this is, Zola implies, what is about to happen to the Second Empire.