This text is an updated edition of Flaubert's classic tale. Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and ...

Two former lovers embark on a game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded existences. While the Marquise de Merteuil challenges the Vicomte de Valmont to seduce an innocent girl, the Vicomte is also occupied with the conquest of a married woman. But the consequences prove to be more serious, than they could have guessed.

Eugene wants to get on in the world. So he has come to Paris, where the streets teem with chancers, criminals and social climbers and everyone is out for what they can get. He sees a plan to make a fortune. Two women mysteriously come at night to visit him, Could they bring him the status and acceptance he craves?

The Flowers of Evil, which T. S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published were .