Read 4,500 Unpublished Pages of Madame Bovary — openculture.com

Why study a language like French? For the unparalleled pleasure, of course, of reading a beloved, respected, and enduring novel like Madame Bovary in the original — or so literarily inclined Francophiles might argue. After all, they’d rhetorically ask, can you really say you’ve read the book if you haven’t actually read the very same words Gustave Flaubert wrote? But now, literarily inclined Francophiles who also have an enthusiasm for the web (not an overwhelmingly large group, wags may point out) can insist that you haven’t really read Madame Bovary unless you’ve read it all in the original: all 4,500 pages of it. Yes, the French do tend to write longer sentences than most, but that impressive length has less to do with a national literary style than with thoroughgoing completism, an impulse that brings together all of the 1856 novel’s originally published pages as well as all of those cut, censored, or revised, free to read online at bovary.fr.

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