Although unfinished during Flaubert's lifetime, Bouvard and Pecuchet is now considered to be one of his greatest masterpieces. In his own words, the novel is "a kid of encyclopedia made into farce...A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this novel are Bouvard and Pecuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends with a disaster. In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. In addition to being a new translation, this edition includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.