Yeah... I mentioned in my Rois Maudits review that there was some difficult vocabulary, and I'm afraid you may still have to look up some words when reading that, as his obscure vocabulary runs in different directions than Flaubert's, but on the whole his vocabulary is easier than Flaubert's.

I imagine that would make a difference, indeed. He's set up as a pompous guy who likes to show off from the start, but the incredible callousness he displays later on is something else entirely.

True. On the topic of the money, do you figure Flaubert intentionally made that sound as confusing as it did, or is it just a matter of modern readers not being used to the way they handled things back then and not knowing the exact definitions of the financial terms? Because I for one got lost very fast trying to keep track of how much she owed, and some of the operations that were described really made very little sense to me.