Bouvard and Pécuchet
Two Paris copyists who discover on a hot boulevard that they have written out the same thoughts come into money and retire to a Normandy farm to take up knowledge itself. Agriculture, chemistry, medicine, archaeology, politics, love and religion are attempted in turn, each strictly from the manuals, and each collapses under the contradictions of its own authorities. Flaubert died with it unfinished, leaving the planned appendix of copied idiocies to be printed as the Dictionary of Received Ideas.
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