Explain Félicité's religious beliefs and behavior in A Simple Heart.

Flaubert is deliberate in his construction of Felicite's
religious belief and behavior. It starts off very small in how Felicite learns about religion and
Christianity. She begins learing it with Virginie, innocent as a child in attempting to gain a
better understanding of her own spiritual dimensions. This growth and maturation evolves over the
course of the short story. Once Felicite is introduced to religion and spirituality, it becomes
the focus of her life, almost as if she recognizes her past as configured by religion and her
future as being guided by it. Felicite understands more of her religious identity when Virginie
dies, through which she uses her religion to maintain a vigil by the body, prepare the body for
burial, and to maintain the grave in a respectful and reverential manner. Felicite's compassion
and transcendent sense of love is one guided by her religious identity, almost as if she has
surrendered herself to this higher force. It is in this where Loulou the parrot becomes an
embodiment of spirituality in Felicite's own mind, to the point where the stuffed bird gives her
peace in transcendence as she dies. Felicite's religious love and passion is what Flaubert
believes is "the answer" for human beings. Surrounded and immersed in a world full of despair and
pain, Flaubert sees religious love such as what Felicite displays as representing the only way in
which humans can retort to a cold and cruel world. It is here where Felicite's belief in religion
is shown to be something that represents the best examples of an end to which a human being can
aspire, and why Flaubert has developed her character in such a manner.