My French is nowhere near good enough to tackle it, but if yours is, take a look at the new website for Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. For the whole thing, that is. If you’ve read – in any language – the 500 or so pages of the novel as usually published, you’ve read only about one-tenth of the original. The Madame B site is http://is.gd/tisv. The Independent has a good article on it – in English – at http://is.gd/tipM.
ps
PJS, it resembles a variorum edition, in which the editors have pulled back into the text virtually everything that Flaubert tried to omit. He was a notorious reviser and constantly sought to condense scenes and characters down to their irreducible essence. So, while these editions are helpful to scholars who want to understand the revision process, they are not much help to readers who want the story as the author intended.
In this “uncut” edition, does a character named Kugelmass unexpectedly show up around page 100, by any chance?
–Greg
Cf. “The Kugelmass Episode”, Woody Allen, 1977.