Bouvard et Pécuchet

Two middle-aged clerks become friends and, after acquiring enough means, retire to the countryside where they devote themselves to self-education. Through a series of episodic experiments in gardening, medicine, natural history, politics, religion, and the arts, they enthusiastically adopt and abandon methods and doctrines, applying half-understood theories to practical affairs. Each project collapses into confusion, farce, or harm, exposing the limits of amateurism, the emptiness of encyclopedic ambition, and the comic persistence of bourgeois vanity. The fragmentary narrative accumulates setbacks and absurd outcomes that satirize the promise of rational mastery and the stubborn repetition of human folly.