Novellas: Three Tales

Overview
Published in 1877, Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales unites three short masterpieces that shift across modes, provincial realism, medieval legend, and biblical chronicle, while circling questions of devotion, sin, and revelation. Each tale isolates an existence under pressure and follows it to a visionary threshold: the servant Félicité’s humble sanctity, Saint Julian’s violent fall and redemption, and Herod Antipas’s court where prophecy collides with desire and power.

A Simple Heart
Set in Normandy, the story traces the life of Félicité, a poor, devoted servant in Mme Aubain’s household. Early disappointments, an abandoned romance with a workman named Théodore and the loss of family ties, narrow her world to service and small, steadfast affections. She pours her heart into the care of Mme Aubain’s children, especially Virginie, and into her nephew Victor, a sailor whose death overseas leaves a lasting wound. Virginie’s illness and death further erode the fragile structure of Félicité’s emotional life, and later, Mme Aubain herself dies, leaving the servant alone in the house that has defined her days.

Consolation arrives in the form of Loulou, a bright parrot whose presence charms Félicité into a simple theology of companionship. When the parrot dies, she has it stuffed and, over time, fuses her affection for Loulou with her faith, seeing in its green wings an image of the Holy Spirit. In her final illness, as a Corpus Christi procession passes and the monstrance glitters in the doorway, her vision resolves: the Holy Spirit descends in the shape of her beloved bird. The ordinary is transfigured, and a life of obscurity closes in an ecstasy made from love, habit, and uncomplaining endurance.

Saint Julian the Hospitaller
Patterned like a medieval stained-glass legend, this tale follows Julian, a noble-born hunter whose fervor for killing marks him early. A prophecy warns he will one day murder his parents. Horrified, he abandons home and wanders, distinguishing himself in battle and earning a distant kingdom and a bride. Years later, his aged parents arrive at his castle in his absence; his wife shelters them in the marital bed. Returning at night and imagining betrayal, Julian slays the sleeping pair, then discovers the truth.

Crushed by guilt, he renounces his former life, undertaking harsh penance as a ferryman-hospitaller on a dangerous river. In a night of bleak cold, a leper begs passage. Julian carries him, warms him, and offers his own bed to the sufferer. The leper reveals himself as a divine messenger, declaring Julian’s sin forgiven and promising salvation. The pattern completes itself: the hunter turned slayer becomes the host, and slaughter is redeemed by radical charity.

Herodias
In the fortress of Machaerus, Herod Antipas balances Roman pressure, border politics with King Aretas, and the denunciations of the prophet Iaokanann (John the Baptist), who condemns Herod’s union with Herodias. During a sumptuous birthday feast, Herodias’s daughter dances, enthralling the court. Granted a wish, she demands the prophet’s head at her mother’s prompting. The execution proceeds; the severed head is borne into the hall, a spectacle that chills the revelers and unsettles Herod’s uneasy authority.

The tale sets the jeweled surfaces of power against the stark voice of prophecy and the silence that follows it. Behind the ritual and pageantry, fear spreads, of Rome, of revolt, of a word that cannot be undone. Desire, political expediency, and the hunger for spectacle fuse in a single irrevocable act.

Unity and style
Across disparate settings, the tales mirror one another through images of bodies cared for or destroyed, voices heard or silenced, and moments where the mundane breaks open into the visionary. Flaubert’s exact prose binds the trio: impersonal, rhythmic, and crystalline, it elevates a servant’s piety, clarifies the curve of a legend, and hardens a biblical tableau into unforgettable relief.