In rejecting the two relational models-marriage and adultery-in which the nineteenthcentury novel so often appears to have wished to enclose the entirety of human experience, then, Flaubert relies on friendship. In another sense, however, both these works' eschewal of the love-and-marriage plots makes them novels about those plots; as Brooks puts it, ĽÉducation sentimentaler "tenuous readability depends directly on its intertextual support, its presupposition of a certain standard novelistic mode which it resolutely refuses to endorse" (171). In this article, however, I wish to consider a novel that, while self-consciously shunning the twin narrative predictabilities of love and marriage, attempts in seeming good faith to offer friendship as a viable narrative principle in their stead. In this article, I want to read the novel as an expression of the intellectual and political ferment of the 1840s, in which potential new forms of social organization were proposed and debated-notably the vague but powerful idea of association. ĽEnvers de ľhistoire contemporaine, I shall suggest, engages intellectually and conceptually, which is to say thematically, with these debates (association is a topic of explicit discussion in its latter part), while attempting to find a narrative mode in which the salient human relationships are not limited to-and therefore, for the sake of the demonstration, positively exclude-the erotic and the conjugal.