1.5 stars. Dull, sentimental pap. Give me Zola. Give me Maupassant. Give Mérimée. Give me Balzac. Hell, I'll even take Stendhal over this. Give me vibrancy, color, and flair. This is nothing but a presentation of the ordinary. Not the type of ordinary that might be exalted as the groundwork of great literary insights, as the modernists achieved, but merely the banality of everyday commonness in theme and form. In other words: boring. The ending was so laughable that I wish it had been intended to be ironic, but according to Flaubert, he was serious. The affect is so forced and inauthentic that I find it hard to believe that so many readers (some great writers among them) view it as a triumph of sentiment.