Sentimental Education

A young provincial arrives in Paris in 1840 and spends the next decade drifting through its boulevards, salons and studios in love with a married woman, while the 1848 revolution rises and dies around him.

Frédéric Moreau

Quai Saint-Bernard, the riverboat

Part 1, ch. 1

On the deck of a Seine steamer leaving the Quai Saint-Bernard, the young Frédéric Moreau first sees Madame Arnoux, and the sight fixes the whole course of his life. The riverboat opening sets the book's tone of longing and drift, a journey begun with a face glimpsed on the water. Everything that follows unspools from this single Parisian departure.

Part 1, ch. 1

explicit The novel opens with the steamer for Montereau about to leave the Quai Saint-Bernard on the Left Bank, at the edge of the Latin Quarter. The pin marks that quay along the Seine below the Jardin des Plantes.

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