Gustave Flaubert

Three Tales is a work by Gustave Flaubert that was originally published in French in 1877. It consists of the short stories "A Simple Heart", "Saint Julian the Hospitalier," and "Hérodias". "Dance of Death" is another story sometimes grouped with "Simple Heart" and "Saint Julian the Hospitalier" as Three Short Works.

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes' Flaubert’s Parrot, Félicité, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert's "great saint" endures loss after …