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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (1821-1880)

LECTURES ON LITERATURE

Vladimir Nabokov

Madame Bovary

(1856)

We now start to enjoy yet another masterpiece, yet another fairy tale. Of all the fairy tales in this series, Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary is the most romantic. Stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do.*

A child to whom you read a story may ask you, is the story true? And if not, the child demands a true one. Let us not persevere in this juvenile attitude towards the books we read. Of course, if somebody tells you that Mr. Smith has seen a blue saucer with a green operator whiz by, you do ask, is it true? because in one way or another the fact of its being true would affect your whole life, would be of infinite practical consequence to you. But do not ask whether a poem or a novel is true. Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no practical value whatsoever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a professor of literature. The girl Emma Bovary never existed: the book Madame Bovary shall exist forever and ever. A book lives longer than a girl.

The book is concerned with adultery and contains situations and allusions that shocked the prudish philistine government of Napoleon III. Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene. Lam glad to say that Flaubert won his case. That was exactly a hundred years ago. In our days, our times. . . . But let me keep to my subject.

We shall discuss Madame Bovary as Flaubert intended it to be discussed: in terms of structures (mouvements as he termed them), thematic lines, style, poetry, and characters. The novel consists of thirty-five chapters, each about ten pages long, and is divided into three parts set respectively in Rouen and Tostes, in Yonville, and in Yonville, Rouen, and Yonville, all of these places invented except Rouen, a cathedral city in northern France.

The main action is supposed to take place in the 1830s and 1840s, under King Louis Philippe (1830-1848). Chapter 1 begins in the winter of 1827, and in a kind of afterword the lives of some of the characters are followed up till 1856 into the reign of Napoleon III and indeed up to the date of Flaubert’s completing the book. Madame Bovary was begun at Croisset, near Rouen, on the nineteenth of September 1851, finished in April 1856, sent out in June, and published serially at the end of the same year in the Revue de Paris. A hundred miles to the north of Rouen, Charles Dickens in Boulogne was finishing Bleak House in the summer of 1853 when Flaubert had reached part two of his novel; one year before that, in Russia, Gogol had died and Tolstoy had published his first important work, Childhood.

Three forces make and mold a human being: heredity, environment, and the unknown agent X. Of these the second, environment, is by far the least important, while the last, agent X, is by far the most influential. In the case of characters living in books, it is of course the author who controls, directs, and applies the three forces. The society around Madame Bovary has been manufactured by Flaubert as deliberately as Madame Bovary herself has been made by him, and to say that this Flaubertian society acted upon that Flaubertian character is to talk in circles. Everything that happens in the book happens exclusively in Flaubert’s mind, no matter what the initial trivial impulse may have been, and no matter what conditions in the France of his time existed or seemed to him to exist. This is why I am opposed to those who insist upon the influence of objective social conditions upon the heroine Emma Bovary. Flaubert’s novel deals with the delicate calculus of human fate, not with the arithmetic of social conditioning.

We are told that most of the characters in Madame Bovary are bourgeois. But one thing that we should clear up once and for all is the meaning that Flaubert gives to the term bourgeois. Unless it simply means townsman, as it often does in French, the term bourgeois as used by Flaubert means "philistine,” people preoccupied with the material side of life and believing only in conventional values. He never uses the word bourgeois with any politico-economic Marxist connotation. Flaubert's bourgeois is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. In a famous scene of our book when a hardworking old woman, getting a medal for having slaved for her farmer-boss, is confronted with a committee of relaxed bourgeois beaming at her—mind you, in that scene both parties are philistines, the beaming politicians and the superstitious old peasant woman—both sides are bourgeois in Flaubert’s sense. I shall clear up the term completely if I say that, for instance, today in communist Russia, Soviet literature, Soviet art, Soviet music, Soviet aspirations are fundamentally and smugly bourgeois. It is the lace curtain behind the iron one. A Soviet official, small or big, is the perfect type of bourgeois mind, of a philistine. The key to Flaubert’s term is the philistinism of his Monsieur Homais. Let me add for double clarity that Marx would have called Flaubert a bourgeois in the politico-economic sense and Flaubert would have called Marx a bourgeois in the spiritual sense; and both would have been right, since Flaubert was a well-to-do gentleman in physical life and Marx was a philistine in his attitude towards the arts.

The reign of Louis Philippe, the citizen king (le roi bourgeois), from 1830 to 1848, was a pleasantly dingy era in comparison to Napoleon’s fireworks in the beginning of the century and to our own variegated times. In the 1840s "the annals of France were tranquil under the cold administration of Guizot.” But "1847 opened with gloomy aspects for the French Government: irritation, want, the desire for a more popular and perhaps more brilliant rule. . . . Trickery and subterfuge seemed to reign in high places.” A revolution broke out in February 1848. Louis Philippe, "assuming the name of Mr. William Smith, closed an inglorious reign by an inglorious flight in a hackney cab” (Encyclopaedia Britannica,9th edition, 1879). I have mentioned this bit of history because good Louis Philippe with his cat> and umbrella was such a Flaubertian character. Now another character, Charles Bovary, was born according to my computations in 1815; • entered school in 1828; became an "officer of health” (which is one degree below doctor) in 1835; married his first wife, the widow Dubuc, in the same year, at Tostes, where he started practicing medicine. After losing her, he married Emma Rouault (the heroine of the book) in 1838; moved to another town, Yonville, in 1840; and after losing his second wife in 1846, he died in 1847, aged thirty-two.

This is the chronology cf the book in a capsule.

In the first chapter we pick up our initial thematic line: the layers or layer-cake theme. This is the fall of 1828; Charles is thirteen and on his first day in school he is still holding his cap on his knees in the classroom. "It was one of those headgears of a composite type in which one may trace elements of the bearskin and otterskincap, the Lancers’ shapska [a flat sort of helmet], the round hat of felt, and the housecap of cotton; in fine, one of those pathetic things that are as deeply expressive in their mute ugliness as the face of an imbecile. Ovoid, splayed with whalebone, it began with a kind of circular sausage repeated three times; then, higher up, there followed two rows of lozenges, one of velvet, the other of rabbit fur, separated by a red band; next came a kind of bag ending in a polygon of cardboard with intricate braiding upon it; and from this there hung, at the end of a long, too slender cord, a twisted tassel of gold threads. The cap was new; its visor shone.”* (We may compare this to Gogol’s description in Dead Soulsof Chichikov’s traveling case and Korobochka's carriage—also a layers theme!)

In this, and in the three other examples to be discussed, the image is developed layer by layer, tier by tier, room by room, coffin by coffin. The cap is a pathetic and tasteless affair: it symbolizes the whole of poor Charles’s future life—equally pathetic and tasteless.

Charles loses his first wife. In June 1838, when he is twenty-three, Charles and Emma are married in a grand farmhouse wedding. A set dish, a tiered cake—also a pathetic affair in poor taste—is provided by a pastry cook who is new to the district and so has taken great pains. "It started off at the base with a square of blue cardboard [taking off, as it were, where the cap had finished; the cap ended in a polygon of cardboard]; this square held a temple with porticoes and colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches studded with gilt-paper stars; there came next on the second layer a castle in meringue surrounded by minute fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of orange; and, finally, on the uppermost platform, which represented a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and nutshell boats, a little cupid sat in a chocolate swing whose two uprights had two real rosebuds for knobs at the top.”

•Quotations in this essay are taken from the Rinehart edition of 1948 but greatly revised by VN in his preserved heavily annotated copy. Ed.

The lake of jam here is a kind of premonitory emblem of the romantic Swiss lakes upon which, to the sound of Lamartine's fashionable lyrical verse, Emma Bovary, the budding adulteress, will drift in her dreams; and we shall meet again the little cupid on the bronze clock in the squalid splendor of the Rouen hotel room where Emma has her assignations with Leon, her second lover.

We are still in June 1838 but at Tostes. Charles had been living in this house since the winter of 1835-1836, with his first wife until she died, in February 1837, then alone. He and his new wife Emma will spend two years in Tostes (till March 1840) before moving on to Yonville. First layer. "The brick front ran flush with the street, or rather highway. [Second layer. ] Behind the door hung a cloak with a small cape, a bridle, and a black leather cap, and on the floor, in a corner, there was a pair of leggings still caked with dry mud. [Third layer:] On the right was the parlor, which served also as dining room. Canary yellow wallpaper, relieved at the top by a garland of pale flowers, quivered throughout its length on its loose canvas; the windows were hung crosswise with white calico curtains, and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two silver-plated candlesticks under oval shades. [Fourth layer:] On the other side of the passage was Charles’s consulting room, a little place about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office armchair. Volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Science, the leaves unopened (that is, not yet cut open) but the binding rather the worse for the successive sales through which they had gone, occupied almost alone the six shelves of a dea l bookcase. [Fifth layer:]The smell of frying butter could be felt seeping through the walls during office hours, just as in the kitchen one could hear the patients coughing in the consultation room and recounting all their woes. [Sixth layer:] Next came ["venait ensuite,” which exactly copies the formula of the cap] a large dilapidated room with an oven. It opened straight onto the stable yard and was now used as a woodshed, cellar, and storeroom.”

In March 1846 after eight years of married life, including two tempestuous love affairs of which her husband knew nothing, Emma Bovary contracts a nightmare heap of debts she cannot meet and commits suicide. In his only moment of romanticist fantasy, poor Charles makes the following plan for her funeral: "He shut himself up in his consulting room, took a pen, and after a spell of sobbing, wrote: " 'I want her to be buri in her wedding dress, with white shoes, and a wreath. Her hair is to be spread out over her shoulders. [Now come the layers.] Three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, and one of lead. ... Over all, there is to be laid a large piece of green velvet.’ ’’

All the layers themes in the book come together here. With the utmost lucidity we recall the list of parts that made up Charles’s, pathetic cap on his first day of school, and the wedding layer cake.

Madame Bovary the first is the widow of a bailiff. This is the first and false Madame Bovary, so to speak. In chapter 2 while the first wife is still alive, the second one looms. Just as Charles installed himself opposite the old doctor as his successor, so the future Madame Bovary appears before the old one is dead. Flaubert could not describe her wedding to Charles since that would have spoiled the wedding feast of the next Madame Bovary. This is how Flaubert calls the first wife: Madame Dubuc (the name of her first husband), then Madame Bovary, Madame Bovary Junior (in relation to Charles’s mother), then Heloise, but the widow Dubuc when her notary absconds with her money in his keeping; and finally Madame Dubuc.

In other words, as seen through the simple mind of Charles, she starts to revert to her initial condition when Charles falls in love with Emma Rouault, passing through the same stages but backward. After her death, when Charles Bovary marries Emma, poor dead Heloise reverts completely to the initial Madame Dubuc. It is Charles who becomes a widower, but his widowhood is somehow transferred to the betrayed and then dead Heloise. Emma never seems to have pitied the pathetic fate of Heloise Bovary. Incidentally, a financial shock assists in causing the death of both ladies.

The term romantic has several meanings. When discussing Madame Bovary—the book and the lady herself—I shall use romantic in the following sense: "characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind tending to dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature.” (Romanesque rather than romanticist.) A romantic person, mentally and emotionally living in the unreal, is profound or shallow depending on the quality of his or her mind. Emma Bovary is intelligent, sensitive, comparatively well educated, but she has a shallow mind: her charm, beauty, and refinement do not preclude a fatal streak of philistinism in her. Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional; and her passion for luxury does not prevent her from revealing once or twice what Flaubert terms a peasant hardness, a strain of rustic practicality. However, her extraordinary physical charm, her unusual grace, her birdlike, hummingbirdlike vivacity—all this is irresistibly attractive and enchanting to three men in the book, her husband and her two successive lovers, both of them heels: Rodolphe, who finds in her a dreamy childish tenderness in welcome contrast to the harlots he has been consorting with; and Leon, an ambitious mediocrity, who is flattered by having a real lady for his mistress.

Now what about the husband, Charles Bovary? He is a dull, heavy, plodding fellow, with no charm, no brains, no culture, and with a complete set of conventional notions and habits. He is a philistine, but he also is a pathetic human being. The two following points are of the utmost importance. What seduces him in Emma and what he finds in her is exactly what Emma herself is looking for and not finding in her romantic daydreams. Charles dimly, but deeply, perceives in her personality an iridescent loveliness, luxury, a dreamy remoteness, poetry, romance. This is one point, and I shall offer some samples in a moment. The second point is that the love Charles almost unwittingly develops for Emma is a real feeling, deep and true, in absolute contrast to the brutal or frivolous emotions experienced by Rodolphe and Leon, her smug and vulgar lovers. So here is the pleasing paradox of Flaubert’s fairy tale: the dullest and most inept person in the book is the only one who is redeemed by a divine something in the all-powerful, forgiving, and unswerving love that he bears Emma, alive or dead. There is yet a fourth character in the book who is in love with Emma but that fourth is merely a Dickensian child, Justin. Nevertheless, I recommend him for sympathetic attention.

Let us go back to the time when Charles was still married to Heloise Dubuc. In chapter 2 Bovary's horse—horses play a tremendous part in this book, forming a little theme of their own*—takes him at a dreamy trot to Emma, the daughter of a patient of his, a farmer. Emma, however, is no ordinary farmer’s daughter: she is a graceful young lady, a "demoiselle,” brought up in a good boarding school with young ladies of the gentry. So here is Charles Bovary, shaken out from his clammy connubial bed (he never loved that unfortunate first wife of his, oldish, flat-chested and with as many pimples as the spring has buds—the widow of another man, as Flaubert has Charles consider her in his mind), so here is Charles, the young country doctor, shaken out of his dull bed by a messenger and then proceeding to the farm of Les Bertaux to reset the leg of a farmer. As he approaches the farm, his gentle horse all of a sudden shies violently, a subtle premonition that the young man’s quiet life will be shattered.

We see the farm and then Emma through his eyes as he comes there for the first time, still married to that unfortunate widow. The half a dozen peacocks in the yard seem a vague promise, a lesson in iridescence. We may follow the little theme of Emma’s sunshade towards the end of the chapter. Some days later, during a day of thaw when the bark of the trees was glossy with dampness and the snow on the roofs of the outbuildings was melting, Emma stood on the threshold; then she went to fetch her sunshade and opened it. The sunshade of prismatic silk through which the sun shone illumed the white skin of her face with shifting reflected colors. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of water could be heard falling with a precise drumming note, one by one, on the taut moire, the stretched silk.

Various items of Emma’s sensuous grace are shown through Bovary's eyes: her blue dress with the three flounces, her elegant fingernails, and her hairdo. This hairdo has been so dreadfully translated in all versions that the correct description must be given else one cannot visualize her correctly: "Her hair in two black bandeaux, or folds, which seemed each of a single piece, so sleek were they, her hair was parted in the middle by a delicate line that dipped slightly as it followed the incurvation of her skull [this is a young doctor looking] -, and the bandeaux just revealed the lobes of her ears [lobes, not upper "tips” as all translators have it: the upper part of the ears was of course covered by those sleek black folds], her hair knotted behind in a thick chignon. Her cheekbones were rosy."

The sensual impression that she makes on our young man is further stressed by the description of a summer day seen from the inside, from the parlor: "the outside shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across the stone floor long fine rays that broke at the angles of the furniture and played upon the ceiling. On the table flies were walking up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with livid blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma sat sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see droplets of sweat on her bare shoulders.”

Note the long fine sun rays through the chinks in the closed shutters, and the flies walking up the glasses (not "crawling" as translators have it: flies do not crawl, they walk, they rub their hands), walking up the glasses and drowning in the dregs of the cider. And mark the insidious daylight that made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace and touched with livid blue the cold cinders. The droplets of sweat on Emma's shoulders (she wore an open dress), mark them too. This is imagery at its best.

The wedding procession winding its way through the fields should be compared with the funeral procession, with dead Emma, winding its way through other fields at the end of the book. In the wedding: "The procession, at first united like one long colored scarf that undulated across the fields, along the narrow path winding amid the green wheat, soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons at its scroll. Then came the married pair, the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell; the children stayed behind amusing themselves plucking the fruiting bells from the oak-stems, or playing amongst themselves unseen. Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from time to time she stopped to lift its hem, and then delicately, with her gloved fingers, she picked off bits of coarse grass and small spikes of thistles, while Charles, his hand unoccupied, waited until she had finished. Old Rouault, with a new silk hat and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands down to the nails, gave his arm to Madame Bovary senior. As to Monsieur Bovary senior, who, really despising all these folk, had come simply in a frock-coat of military cut with one row of buttons—he was passing bar-room compliments to a young peasant girl with fair hair. She bowed, blushed, and did not know what to say. The other wedding guests talked of their business or played the fool behind each other’s backs, tuning themselves up for the coming fun. If one listened closely one could always catch the squeaking [cricket's note] of the fiddler, who went on playing across the fields.”

Emma is being buried. "The six men, three on either side, walked slowly, panting a little. The priests, the choristers, and the two choir-boys recited the De profundis,and their voices echoed over the fields, rising and falling. Sometimes they disappeared in the windings of the path; but the great silver cross rose always between the trees. [Compare the fiddler at the wedding.]

"The women followed in black cloaks with turned-down hoods; each of them carried in her hands a large lighted candle, and Charles felt himself weakening at this continual repetition of prayers and torches, beneath this oppressive odor of wax and of cassocks. A fresh breeze was blowing; the rye and colza ["cabbage seed”] were green, dew-droplets trembled at the roadsides and on the hawthorn hedges. All sorts of joyous sounds filled the air; the jolting of a cart rolling afar off in the ruts, the crowing of a cock, repeated again and again, or the gamboling of a foal running away under the apple trees. The pure sky was fretted with luminous clouds; a bluish haze rested upon the huts covered with iris. Charles as he passed recognized each courtyard. He remembered mornings like this, when, after visiting some patient, he came out from one and returned to her. [Curiously enough, he does not remember the wedding; the reader is in a better position than he.]

"The black cloth bestrewn with white beads blew up from time to time, laying bare the coffin. The tired bearers walked more slowly, and it advanced with constant jerks, like a boat that pitches with every wave.”

After the wedding our young man’s bliss in his daily life is pictured in another subtly sensuous paragraph. And here again we are forced to improve on the poor translations: "In bed, in the morning, by her side, his elbow on the pillow, he watched the sunlight as it touched the golden bloom on her cheeks half hidden by the scallops of her nightcap. At close range her eyes looked strangely large, especially when on waking up she opened and shut them. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, layers of successive colors, which, denser at the bottom, grew lighter toward the surface of the cornea.” (A little echo of the layers theme.)

In chapter 6 Emma's childhood is shown in retrospect in terms of shallow romanesque culture, in terms of the books she read and what she got from those books. Emma is a great reader of romances, of more or less exotic novels, of romantic verse. Some of the authors she knows are first-rate, such as Walter Scott or Victor Hugo; others not quite first-rate, such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre or Lamartine. But good or bad this is not the point. Hie point is that she is a bad reader. She reads books emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character’s place. Flaubert does a very subtle thing. In several passages he lists all the romantic cliches dear to Emma's heart; but his cunning choice of these cheap images and their cadenced arrangement along the curving phrase produce an effect of. harmony and art. In the convent, the novels she read "were all love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, somber forests, heart-aches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, gentlemen* brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed and weeping like tombstone urns. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, sleeked her hands over with the dust of books from old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, under the foils of ogives, pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching the approach of a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields/’

He uses the same artistic trick when listing Homais’s vulgarities. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

The theme of Emma’s daydreaming has some connections with the whippet, the gift of a gamekeeper, which she took "out walking [in Tostes], for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. .. . Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander at random, like her whippet, who ran round and round in the open country, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of some acres of wheat. Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, ’Good heavens! why did I marry?*

"She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would not have been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would have been those unrealized events, that different life, that unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old schoolmates had married. What were they doing now? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theaters, and the lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands, the senses blossom. But her life was as cold as a garret whose dormer-window looks on the north, and boredom, the silent spider, was darkly weaving its web in every nook of her heart/'

The loss of this whippet on the journey from Tostes to Yonville symbolizes the end of her mildly romantic, elegiac daydreaming at Tostes and the beginning of more passionate experiences at fateful Yonville.

But even before Yonville, Emma’s daydreaming romantic image of Paris emerges from the silk cigar case she picked up on that empty country road returning from Vaubyessard,* much as in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the greatest novel of the first half of our century, the little town of Combray with all its gardens (a memory) emerges from a cup of tea. This vision of Paris is one of a succession of Emma’s daydreams that appear throughout the book. One daydream, shortly destroyed, is that she can make the name of Bovary famous through Charles: "Why, at least, was not her husband one of those men of grim and passionate pursuits who work all night deep in their books, and finally at sixty, when the age of rheumatism sets in, wear a cross of honor stitched on their ill-fitting black coat? She wished the name of Bovary, which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers’, repeated in the newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition.”

The daydream theme joins quite naturally with the theme of deceit. She hides the cigar case over which she dreams; she deceives Charles from the very first in order to have him take her elsewhere. By faking an illness, she is responsible for the removal to Yonville, supposedly a better climate: "Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue from it? Yet she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls to weep;-she envied the lives of stir; longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these must surely yield.

"She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart. Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her more. . . .

"As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea, began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere.

•VN notes that Emma found the cigar case, which becomes to her the symbol of fashionable romantic Parisian life, when Charles had stopped to mend the horse s harness. Later, Rodolphe will also fix a broken bridle after the seduction that begins her romantic association with him. Ed.

"From that moment she drank vinegar to make herself thin, contracted a sharp little cough, and completely lost her appetite.”

It is in Yonville that fate will overtake her. The fate of her bridal bouquet is a kind of premonition or emblem of her taking her own life a few years later. She had wondered when she found Bovary’s first wife’s bridal flowers what would be done to her bouquet. Now on leaving Tostes she burns it herself in a wonderful passage: "One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding-bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver-bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was like a red bush in the cinders. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper petals, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney.” In a letter of about 22 July 1852, Flaubert wrote what could be applicable to this passage, "A really good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, something you cannot change, and just as rhythmic and sonorous.”

The theme of daydreaming surfaces again in the romantic names she thinks of bestowing on her daughter. "First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better.” The other characters are faithful to themselves in the names they propose. "Charles wanted the child to be named after her mother; Emma opposed this.” Monsieur Leon, says Homais, " 'wonders why you do not choose Madeleine. It is very much in fashion now.’

"But Madame Bovary senior cried out loudly against this name of a sinner. As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for names that recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a humane idea. . . .” One should note why Emma finally chooses Berthe. "At last -Emma remembered . that at the chateau of Vaubyessard 5he had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from that moment this name was chosen. . . .”

The romantic considerations in naming the child contrast with the conditions under w hich she had been farmed out to nurse, an extraordinary custom of those days. Emma strolls with Leon to visit the child. "They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it. Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuces, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several nondescript rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a-baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country.”

The ups and downs of Emma’s emotions—the longings, the passion, the frustration, the loves, the disappointments—a chequered sequence, end in a violent self-inflicted and very messy death. Yet before we part with Emma, we shall mark the essential hardness of her nature, somehow symbolized by a slight physical flaw, by the hard dry angularities of her hands; her hands were fondly groomed, delicate and white, pretty, perhaps, but not beautiful.

She is false, she is deceitful by nature; she deceives Charles from the very start before actually committing adultery. She lives among philistines, and she is a philistine herself. Her mental vulgarity is not so obvious as that of Homais. It might be too hard on her to say that the trite, ready-made pseudoprogressive aspects of Homais’s nature are duplicated in a feminine pseudoromantic way in Emma; but one cannot help feeling that Homais and Emma not only phonetically echo each other but do have something in common—‘and that something is the vulgar cruelty of their natures. In Emma the vulgarity, the philistinism, is veiled by her grace, her cunning, her beauty, her meandering intelligence, her power of idealization, her moments of tenderness and understanding, and by the fact that her brief bird life ends in human tragedy.

Not so Homais. He is the successful philistine. And to the last, as she lies dead, poor Emma is attended by him, the busybody Homais, and the prosaic priest Bournisien. There is a delightful scene when these two—the believer in drugs and the believer in God—go to sleep in two armchairs near her dead body, facing each other, snoring in front of each other with bulging bellies and fallen jaws, twinned in sleep, united at last in the same human weakness c' sleep. And what an insult to poor Emma’s destiny— the epitaph Homais finds for her grave! His mind is crammed with trite Latin tags but at first he is stumped by not being able to find anything better than sta viator; pause, traveler (or stay, passenger). Pause where?

The end of this Latin tag is heroam calcas—you tread on a hero's dust. But finally Homais with his usual temerity substituted for hero’s dust, your beloved wife's dust. Stay, passenger, you tread upon your beloved wife— the last thing that could be said about poor Charley who, despite all his stupidity, loved Emma with a deep, pathetic adoration, a fact that she did realize for one brief moment before she died. And where does he die? In the very arbor where Rodolphp and Emma used to make love.

(Incidentally, in that last page of his life, not bumblebees are visiting the lilacs in that garden but bright green beetles. Oh those ignoble, treacherous, and philistine translators! One would think that Monsieur Homais, who knew a little English, was Flaubert’s English translator.)

Homais has various chinks in his armor:

1.    His science comes from pamphlets, his general culture from newspapers; his taste in literature is appalling, especially in the combination of authors he cites. In his ignorance, he remarks at one point " 'That is the question,' as I lately read in a newspaper,” not knowing that he is quoting Shakespeare and not a Rouen journalist—nor perhaps had the author of the political article in that newspaper known it either.

2.    He still feels now and then that dreadful fright he got when he was almost jailed for practicing medicine.

3.    He is a traitor, a cad, a toad, and does not mind sacrificing his dignity to the more serious interests of his business or to obtain a decoration.

4.    He is a coward, and notwithstanding his brave words he is afraid of blood, death, dead bodies.

5.    He is without mercy and poisonously vindictive.

6.    He is a pompous ass, a smug humbug, a gorgeous philistine, a pillar of society as are so many philistines.

7.    He does get his decoration at the end of the novel in 1856. Flaubert considered that his age was the age of philistinism, which he called mufltsme. However, this kind of thing is not peculiar to any special government or regime; if anything, philistinism is more in evidence during revolutions and in police states than under more traditional regimes. The philistine in violent action is always more dangerous than the philistine who quietly sits before his television set.

Let us recapitulate for a moment Emma’s loves, platonic and otherwise:

1.    As a schoolgirl she may have had a crush on her music teacher, who passes with his encased violin in one of the retrospective paragraphs of the book.

2.    As a young woman married to Charles (with whom at the beginning

she is not in love), she first has an amorous friendship, a perfectly platonic one technically, with Leon Dupuis, a notary clerk.

3.    Her first "affair” is with Rodolphe Boulanger, the local squire.

4.    In the middle of this affair, since Rodolphe turns out to be more brutal than the romantic ideal she longed for, Emma attempts to discover an ideal in her husband; she tries seeing him as a great physician and begins a brief phase of tenderness and tentative pride.

5.    After poor Charles has completely botched the operation on the poor stableboy’s clubfoot—one of the greatest episodes in the book—she goes back to Rodolphe with more passion than before.

6.    When Rodolphe abolishes her last romantic dream of elopement and a dream life in Italy, after a serious illness she finds a subject of romantic adoration in God.

7.    She has a few minutes of daydreaming about the opera singer Lagardy.

8.    Her affair with vapid, cowardly Leon after she meets him again is a grotesque and pathetic materialization of all her romantic dreams.

9.    In Charles, just before she dies, she discovers his human and divine side, his perfect love for her—all that she had missed.

10. The ivory body of Jesus Christ on the cross that she kisses a few minutes before her death, this love can be said to end in something like her previous tragic disappointment since all the misery of her life takes over again when she hears the awful song of the hideous vagabond as she dies.

Who are the "good” people of the book? Obviously, the villain is Lheureux, but who, besides poor Charles, are the good characters? Somewhat obviously, Emma’s father, old Rouault; somewhat unconvincingly, the boy Justin, whom we glimpse crying on Emma’s grave, a bleak note; and speaking of Dickensian notes let us not forget two other unfortunate children, Emma’s little daughter, and of course that other little Dickensian girl, that girl of thirteen, hunchbacked, a little bleak housemaid, a dingy nymphet, who serves Lheureux as clerk, a glimpse to ponder. Who else in the book do we have as good people? Hie best person is the third doctor, the great Lariviere, although I have always hated the transparent tear he sheds over the dying Emma. Some might even say: Flaubert’s father had been a doctor, and so this is Flaubert senior shedding a tear over the misfortunes of the character that his son has created.

A question: can we call Madame Bovary realistic or naturalistic? I wonder.

A novel in which a young and healthy husband night after night never wakes to find the better half of his bed empty; never hears the sand and pebbles thrown at the shutters by a lover; never receives an anonymous letter from some local busybody;

A novel in which the biggest busybody of them all, Homais—Monsieur Homais, whom we might have expected to have kept a statistical eye upon all the cuckolds of his beloved Yonville, actually never notices, never learns anything about Emma's affairs;

A novel in which little Justin—a nervous young boy of fourteen who faints at the sight of blood and smashes crockery out of sheer nervousness—should go to weep in the dead of night (where?) in a cemetery on the grave of a woman whose ghost might come to reproach him for not having refused to give her the key to death;

A novel in which a young woman who has not been riding for several years—if indeed she ever did ride when she lived on her father’s farm— now gallops away to the woods with perfect poise, and never feels any stiffness in the joints afterwards;

A novel in which many other implausible details abound—such as the very implausible naivete of .a certain cabdriver—such a novel has been called a landmark of so-called realism, whatever that is.

In point of fact, all fiction is fiction. All art is deception. Flaubert’s world, as all worlds of major writers, is a world of fancy with its own logic, its own conventions, its own coincidences. The curious impossibilities I have listed do not clash with the pattern of the book—and indeed are only discovered by dull college professors or bright students. And you will bear in mind that all the fairy tales we have lovingly examined after Mansfield Park are loosely fitted by their authors into certain historical frames. All reality is comparative reality since any given reality, the window you see, the smells you perceive, the sounds you hear, are not only dependent on a crude give-and-take of the senses but also depend upon various levels of information. Flaubert may have seemed realistic or naturalistic a hundred years ago to readers brought up on the writings of those sentimental ladies and gentlemen that Emma admired. But realism, naturalism, are only comparative notions. What a given generation feels as naturalism in a writer seems to an older generation to be exaggeration of drab detail, and to a younger generation not enough drab detail. The isms go; the istdies; art remains.

Ponder most carefully the following fact: a master of Flaubert's artistic power manages to transform what he has conceived as a sordid world inhabited by frauds and philistines and mediocrities and brutes and wayward ladies into one of the most perfect pieces of poetical fiction known, and this he achieves by bringing all the parts into harmony, by the inner force of style, by all such devices of form as the counterpoint of transition from one theme to another, of foreshadowing and echoes. Without Flaubert there would have been no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland. Chekhov in Russia would not have been quite Chekhov. So much for Flaubert's literary influence.

Flaubert had a special device which may be called the counterpoint method, or the method of parallel interlinings and interruptions of two or more conversations or trains of thought. The first example comes after Leon Dupuis has been introduced. Leon, a young man, a notary's clerk, is brought in by the device of describing Emma as he sees her, in the red glow of the fireplace at the inn which seems to shine through her. Farther on, when another man, Rodolphe Boulanger, comes into her presence, she is also shown through his eyes, but Emma as seen through Rodolphe’s eyes is of a more sensual quality than the on the whole pure image that Leon perceives. Incidentally, Leon's hair is described later as brown (chatain); here, he is blond, or looks so to Flaubert, by the light of the fire especially kindled to illume Emma.

Now comes the contrapuntal theme in the conversation at the inn on the first arrival in Yonville of Emma and Charles. Exactly one year after his starting to compose the book (eighty to ninety pages in one year—that is a fellow after my heart), Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet on 19 September 1852: "What a nuisance my Bovary is____This scene at the inn may take me three months for all I know. At times I am on the brink of tears—so keenly do I feel my helplessness. But I prefer my brain to burst rather than to skip thr t scene. I have to place simultaneously, in the same conversation, five < c six people (who talk), several others (who are talked about), the whole egion, descriptions of persons and things—and amid all this I have to show a gentleman and a lady who begin to fall in love with each other because they have tastes in common. And if 1 only had enough room! But the fact is that the scene should be rapid and yet not dry, ample without being lumpy.”

So in the large parlor of the inn a conversation starts. Four people are involved. On the one hand, a dialogue between Emma and Leon, whom she has just met, which is interrupted by monologues and sundry remarks on Homais’s part, who is conversing mainly with Charles Bovary, for Homais is eager to get on good terms with the new doctor.

In this scene the first movement consists of a brisk interchange among all four: "Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his cap, for fear of catching a cold in the head; then, turning to his neighbor—

" 'Madame is no doubt a little fatiguedj'one gets jolted so abominably in our "Hirondelle.” ’

" 'That is true,’ replied Emma; 'but moving about always amuses me. I like change of place.’

'It is so dreary,’ sighed the clerk, 'to be always riveted to the same places.'

'If you were like me,’ said Charles, 'constantly obliged to be in the saddle—’

" 'But,' Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, 'nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant [than to ride]—when one can,’ he added.” (The horse theme slips in and out here.)

The second movement consists of a long speech by Homais, ending in his giving some tips to Charles about a house to buy. " 'Moreover,’ said the druggist, 'the practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world . . . for people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the doctor or druggist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad, and we even have a few men of ninety in our parish. The thermometer (I have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees, and in the hottest season rises to 25 or 30 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the Saint-Jean hills on the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapors given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which pumping up the humus from the soil, mixing together all those different emanations, unites them into a bundle, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long-run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata,— this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come—that is to say, the southern side—by the southeastern winds, which, havihg cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia.' ”

In the middle of the speech he makes a mistake: there is always a little chink in the philistine armor. His thermometer should read 86 Fahrenheit, not 54; he forgot to add 32 when switching from one system to the other. He almost makes another fumble in speaking of exhaled air but he recovers the ball. He tries to cram all his knowledge of physics and chemistry into one elephantine sentence; he has a good memory for odds and ends derived from newspapers and pamphlets, but that is all.

Just as Homais’s speech is a jumble of pseudoscience and journalese, so in the third movement the conversation between Emma and Leon is a trickle of stale poetization. " 'At any rate, you have some walks in the neighborhood?’ continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.

" 'Oh, very few,’ he answered. 'There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.’

" 'I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets,’ she resumed, 'but especially by the side of the sea.’

" 'Oh, I adore the sea!’ said Monsieur Leon.

" 'And then, does it not seem to you,’ continued Madame Bovary, 'that the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?’

" 'It is the same with mountainous landscapes,’ continued Leon.”

It is very important to mark that the Leon-Emma team is as trivial, trite, and platitudinous in their pseudoartistic emotions as the pompous and fundamentally ignorant Homais is in regard to science. False art and false science meet here. In a letter to his mistress (9 October 1852) Flaubert indicates the subtle point of this scene. "I am in the act of composing a conversation between a young man and a young woman about literature, the sea, mountains, music, and all other so-called poetic subjects. It may all seem to be seriously meant to the average reader, but in point of fact the grotesque is my real intention. It will be the first time, I think, that a novel appears where fun is made of the leading lady and her young man. But irony does not impair pathos—on the contrary, irony enhances the pathetic side.”

Leon reveals his ineptitude, the chink in hisarmor, when he mentions the pianist: "A cousin of mine who traveled in Switzerland last year told me that one could not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of incredible size across torrents, log cabins suspended over precipices, and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some imposing site." How the sights of Switzerland must move you to prayer, to ecstasy! No wonder a famous musician used to play his piano in front of some magnificent landscape in order to stimulate his imagination. This is superb!

Shortly we find the whole bible of the bad reader—all a good reader does not do. " 'My wife doesn’t care about [gardening],’ said Charles; 'although she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room reading.’

" 'Like me,’ replied Leon. 'And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?’

'What, indeed?' she said, fixing her large black eyes wide upon him.

" 'One thinks of nothing,' hecontinued; 'the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, toys with details, or follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.’

" 'That is true! that is true!’ she said.”

Books are not written for those who are fond of poems that make one weep or those who like noble characters in prose as Leon and Emma think. Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the characters in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories; but this is what Emma and Leon do." 'Has it ever happened to you,' Leon went on,'to come across some vague idea of your own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?’

" 'I have experienced it,’ she replied.

" 'That is why,’ he said, 'I especially love the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears.’

'Still in the long-run it is tiring,’ continued Emma. 'Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.’

" 'Yes, indeed,’ observed the clerk, 'works, not touching the heart, miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all the disenchant -ments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness.’ ”

Flaubert set himself the task of giving his book a highly artistic structure. In addition to the counterpoint, one of his tricks was to make his transitions from one subject to another within the chapters as elegant and smooth as possible. In Bleak Housethe transition from subject to subject moves, on the whole, from chapter to chapter—say from Chancery to the Dedlocks, and so on. But in Madame Bovary there is a continual movement within the chapters. I call this device structural transition. We shall inspect certain examples of it. If the transitions in Bleak House can be compared to steps, with the pattern proceeding en escalier, here in Madame Bovary the pattern is a fluid system of waves.

The first transition, a fairly simple one, occurs at the very beginning of the book. The story starts with the assumption that the author, aged seven, and a certain Charles Bovary, aged thirteen, were schoolmates in Rouen in 1828. It is in the manner of a subjective account, in the first persons, but of course this is merely a literary device since Flaubert invented Charles from top to toe. This pseudosubjective account runs for about three pages and then changes from the subjective to an objective narrative, a shift from the direct impression of the present to an account in ordinary novelistic narrative of Bovary’s past. The transition is governed by the sentence: "It was the cure of his village who had taught him his first Latin.” We go back to be informed of his parents, and of his birth, and we then work our way up again through early boyhood and back to the present in school where two paragraphs, in a return to the first person, take him through his third year. After this the narrator is heard no more and we float on to Bovary’s college days and medical studies.

In Yonville just before Leon leaves for Paris, a more complex structural transition takes place from Emma and her mood to Leon and his, and then to his departure. While making this transition Flaubert, as he does several times in the book, takes advantage of the structural meanderings of the transition to review a few of his characters, picking up and rapidly checking, as it were, some of their traits. We start with Emma returning home after her frustrating interview with the priest (seeking to calm the fever that Leon has aroused), annoyed that all is calm in the house while within she is in tumult. Irritably, she pushes away the advances of her young daughter Berthe, who falls and cuts her cheek. Charles hastens to Homais, the druggist, for some sticking plaster which he affixes to Berthe’s cheek. He assures Emma that the cut is not serious but she chooses not to come down to dinner and, instead, remains with Berthe until the child falls asleep. After dinner Charles returns the sticking plaster and stays at the pharmacy where Homais and his wife discuss with him the dangers of childhood. Taking Leon aside, Charles asks him to price in Rouen the making of a daguerreotype of himself that in his pathetic smugness he proposes to give to Emma. Homais suspects that Leon is having some love affair in Rouen, and the innkeeper Madame Lefran^ois questions the tax collector Binet about him. Leon’s talk with Binet helps, perhaps, to crystallize his weariness at loving Emma with no result. His cowardice at changing his place is reviewed, and then he makes up his mind to go to Paris. Flaubert has attained what he wanted, and the flawless transition is established from Emma’s mood to Leon’s mood and his decision to leave Yonville. Later, we shall find another careful transition when Rodolphe Boulanger is introduced.

On 15 January 1853, as he was about to begin part two, Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet: "It has taken me five days to write one page— What troubles me in my book is the insufficiency of the so<alled amusing element. There is little action. But I maintain that images are action. It is harder to sustain a book’s interest by this means, but if one fails it is the fault of style. I have now lined up five chapters of my second part in which nothing happens. It is a continuous picture of small-town life and of an inactive romance, a romance that is especially difficult to paint because it is simultaneously timid and deep, but alas'without any inner wild passion. Leon, my young lover, is of a temperate nature. Already in the first part of the book I had something of this kind; my husband loves his wife somewhat in the same way as my lover does. Both are mediocrities in the same environment, but still they have to be differentiated. If I succeed, it will be a marvelous bit, because it means painting color upon color and without well-defined tones.” Everything, says Flaubert, is a matter of style, or more exactly of the particular turn and aspect one gives to things.

Emma’s vague promise of happiness coming from her feelings for Leon innocently leads to Lheureux (ironically a well-chosen name, "the happy one," for the diabolical engine of fate.) Lheureux, the draper and moneylender, arrives with the trappings of happiness. In the same breath he tells Emma confidentially that he lends money; asks after the health of a cafe keeper, Tellier, whom he presumes her husband is treating; and says that he, too, will have to consult thedoctoroneday about a pain in his back. All these are premonitions, artistically speaking. Flaubert will plan it in such a way that Lheureux will lend money to Emma, as he had lent money to Tellier, and will ruin her as he ruins Tellier before the old fellow dies; moreover, he will take his own ailments to the famous doctor who in a hopeless attempt is called to treat Emma after she takes poison. This is the planning of a work of art.

Desperate with her love for Leon, "Domestic mediocrity drove her to luxurious fancies, connubial tenderness to adulterous desires.” Daydreaming of her school days in the convent, "she felt herself soft and quite deserted, like the down of. a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it.” About the scene with the cure Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet in mid-April 1853: "At last l am beginning to see a glimmer of light in that damned dialogue of the parish priest scene. ... 1 want to express the following situation: my little woman in a fit of religious emotion goes to the village church; at its door she finds the parish priest. Although stupid, vulgar, this priest of mine is a good, even an excellent fellow; but his mind dwells entirely on physical things (the troubles of the poor, lack of food or firewood), and he does not perceive moral torments, vague mystic aspirations; he is very chaste and practices all his duties. The episode is to have at most six or seven pages without a single reflection or explanation coming from the author (all in direct dialogue).” We shall note that this episode is composed after the counterpoint method: the cure answering what he thinks Emma is saying, or rather answering imaginary stock questions in a routine conversation with a parishioner, and she voicing a kind of complaining inner note that he does not heed—and all the time the children are fooling in the church and distracting the good priest’s attention from the little he has to say to her.

Emma’s apparent virtue frightens off Leon so that when he leaves for Paris the way is clear for a more forward lover. The transition is going to be from Emma's illness following Leon’s departure to her meeting with Rodolphe and then the scene of the county fair. The meeting is a first-class illustration of structural transition which took Flaubert many days to compose. His intention is to introduce Rodolphe Boulanger, a local country gentleman, at heart exactly the same kind of cheap vulgarian as his predecessor, but with a dashing, brutal charm about him. The transition goes as follows: Charles had invited his mother to come to Yonville in order to decide what to do about Emma’s condition, for she is pining away. The mother comes, decides that Emma reads too many books, evil novels, and undertakes to discontinue Emma’s subscription at the lending library when she passes through Rouen on her way home. The mother leaves on a Wednesday, which is the market day at Yonville. Leaning out of the window to watch the Wednesday crowds, Emma sees a gentleman in a green velvet coat (green velvet is what Charles picks for her pall) coming to Bovary’s house with a farm boy who wants to be bled. In the study downstairs when the patient faints Charles shouts for Emma to come down. (It should be noted that Charles is consistently instrumental, in a really fateful way, in introducing Emma to her lovers or helping her in continuing to see them.) It is Rodolphe who watches (with the reader) the following lovely scene: "Madame Bovary began taking off his tie. The strings of his shirt had got into a knot, and for a few minutes her light fingers kept running about the young fellow’s neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her cambric handkerchief ; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and then blew upon them softly. The yokel revived. ...

"Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the movement she made in sinking to a squatting position, her dress (it was a summer dress with four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) ballooned out around her on the stone floor of the room; and as Emma, stooping, swayed a little on her haunches as she stretched out her arms, the ballooning stuff of her skirt dimpled with the inflections of her body.”

The county fair episode is instrumental in bringing Rodolphe and Emma together. On 15 July 1853, Flaubert wrote: "Tonight I have made a preliminary sketch of my great scene of the county fair. It will be huge— about thirty manuscript pages. This is what I want to do. While describing that rural show (where all the secondary characters of the book appear, speak, and act) I shall pursue ... between its details and on the front of the stage a continuous dialogue between a lady and a gentleman who is turning his charm on her. Moreover, I have in the middle of the solemn speech of a councilor and at the end something I have quite finished writing, namely a newspaper article by Homais, who gives an account of the festivities in his best philosophic, poetic, and progressive style.” The thirty pages of the episode took three months to write. In another letter, of 7 September;

Flaubert noted: "How difficult it is____A tough chapter. I have therein all the characters of my book intermingled in action and in dialogue, and ... a big landscape that envelops them. If I succeed it will be most symphonic." On 12 October: "If ever the values of a symphony have been transferred to literature, it will be in this chapter of my book. It must be a vibrating totality of sounds. One should hear simultaneously the bellowing of the bulls, the murmur of love, and the phrases of the politicians. The sun shines on it, and there are gusts of wind that set big white bonnets astir____ I obtain dramatic movement merely through dialogue interplay and character contrast.”

As if this wete a show in young love’s honor, Flaubert brings all the characters together in the marketplace for a demonstration of style: this is what the chapter really is about. The couple, Rodolphe (symbol of bogus passion) and Emma (the victim), are linked up with Homais (the bogus guardian of the poison of which she will die), Lheureux (who stands for the financial ruin and shame that will rush her to the jar of arsenic), and there is Charles (connubial comfort).

In grouping the characters at the beginning of the county fair, Flaubert does something especially significant in regard to the moneylending draper Lheureux and Emma. Some time before, it will be recalled, Lheureux when offering Emma his services—articles of wear and if need be, money—was curiously concerned with the illness of Tellier, the proprietor of the cafe opposite the inn. Now the landlady of the inn tells Homais, not without satisfaction, that the cafe opposite is going to close. It is clear that Lheureux has discovered that the proprietor’s health is getting steadily worse and that it is high time to get back from him the swollen sums he has loaned him, and as a result poor Tellier is now bankrupt. "What an appalling disaster!" exclaims Homais, who, says Flaubert ironically, finds expressions suitable to all circumstances. But there is something behind this irony. For just as Homais exclaims "What an appalling disaster!” in his fatuous, exaggerated, pompous way, at the same time the landlady points across the square, saying, "And there goes Lheureux, he is bowing to Madame Bovary, she's taking Monsieur Boulanger's arm.” The beauty of this structural line is that Lheureux, who has ruined the cafe owner, is thematically linked here with Emma, who will perish because of Lheureux as much as because of her lovers—and her death really will be an "appalling disaster." The ironic and the pathetic are beautifully intertwined in Flaubert's novel.

At the county fair the parallel interruption or counterpoint method, is utilized once more. Rodolphe finds three stools, puts them together to form a bench, and he and Emma sit down on the balcony of the town hall to watch the show on the platforirt, listen to the speakers, and indulge in a flirtatious conversation. Technically, they are not lovers yet. In the first movement of the counterpoint, the councilor speaks, horribly mixing his metaphors and, through sheer verbal automatism, contradicting himself: "Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment will, I am sure, be shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the higher administration, to the government, to the monarch, gentlemen, our sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts.”

In the first stage the conversation of Rodolphe and Emma alternates with chunks of official oratory. " 'I ought,’ said Rodolphe, 'to get back a little further.’

" ‘Why?’ said Emma.

“But at this moment the voice of the councilor rose to an extraordinary pitch. He declaimed—

" This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord shed blood in our public places, when the landed gentry, the business-man, the workingman himself, peacefully going to sleep at night, trembled lest he should be awakened suddenly by the disasters of fire and warning church bells, when the most subversive doctrines audaciously undermined foundations.’

" Well, some one down there might see me,’ Rodolphe resumed, 'then I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad reputation—’

" 'Oh, you are slandering yourself,’ said Emma.

" 'No! It is dreadful, I assure you.’

’But, gentlemen,’ continued the councilor, 'if, banishing from my memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, 1 carry my eyes track to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there?’ ’’

Flaubert collects all the possible cliches of journalistic and political speech; but it is very important to note that, if the official speeches are stale "journalese,” the romantic conversation between Rodolphe and Emma is stale "romantese." The whole beauty of the thing is that it is not good and evil interrupting each other, but one kind of evil intermingled with another kind of evil. As Flaubert remarked, he paints color on color.

The second movement starts when Councilor Lieuvain sits down and Monsieur Derozerays speaks. "His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councilor, but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had always contributed to civilization. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism.” In contrast to the preceding movement, at the start the conversation between the two and the speech from the platform are rendered descriptively until in the third movement the direct quotation resumes and the snatches of prize-giving exclamations borne on the wind from the platform alternate rapidly without comment or description: "From magnetism little by little Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing Cincinnatus and his plow, Diocletian planting his cabbages, and the Emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.

'Thus we,’ he said, 'why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite, our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other,'

"And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.

" 'For good farming generally!’ cried the president.

" 'Just now, for example, when I went to your house—'

" 'To Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix.'

" '—did I know I should accompany you?'

" 'Seventy francs.'

" A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you—I remained.'

" 'Manures!'

" 'And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!’

" 'To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!’

" 'For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a charm.’

" 'To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin.’

" And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you.’

" 'For a merino ram!'

" But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow.'

" ‘To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame.’

" Oh, do say no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I not?'

” 'Porcine race; prizes—equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg, sixty francs!'

"Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering like a captive dove that wants to continue its flight; but, whether she was trying to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure, she made a movement with her fingers. He exclaimed—

" 'Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!'

"A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering.

" 'Use of oil-cakes,’ continued the president. He was hurrying on: 'Flemish manure—flax-growing—drainage—long leases—domestic service.' "

The fourth movement begins here when both fall silent and the words from the platform where a special prize is now being awarded are heard in full, with commentary: ''Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and softly, without an effort, their fingers intertwined.

" 'Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-Ia-Guerriere, for fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal—value, twenty-five francs!'...

"Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes____Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant proximity to cattle she had caught their dumbness and their calm. . . . Thus stood before these beaming bourgeois this half-century of servitude. . . .

" 'Approach! approach!'

'' 'Are you deaf?' said Tuvache, jumping up in his armchair; and he began shouting in her ear, 'Fifty-four years in service. A silver medal!. Twenty-five francs! For you!’

"Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her muttering—

" TH give it to our cure up home, to say some masses for nje!’

'What fanaticism!* exclaimed the druggist, leaning across to the notary."

The apotheosis to this splendid contrapuntal chapter is Homais's account in the Rouen paper of the show and banquet: " 'Why these

festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical sun pouring its heat upon our meads?’ . .

"He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury, and he even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais, druggist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society. When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. 'The father embraced the son, the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one showed his humble medal with pride, and no doubt when he got home to his good housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot.

" 'About six o’clock a banquet prepared in the grass-plot of Monsieur Liegeard brought together the principal personages of the festivity. The greatest cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed: Monsieur Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays, Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Ameliorations. In the evening some brilliant fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of a dream of the "Thousand and One Nights......

In a way, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters, symbolize the hog breeders and the tender couple in a kind of farcical synthesis. This is a wonderful chapter. It has had an enormous influence on James Joyce; and I do not think that, despite superficial innovations, Joyce has gone any further than Flaubert.

"Today ... a man and a woman, lover and mistress in one [in thought], I have been riding on horseback through a wood, on an autumn afternoon, under yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words that were exchanged and the crimson sun . . . and my two lovers.” So Flaubert on 23 December 1853, to Louise Colet, about the famous chapter 9 of the second part, Rodolphe's seduction of Emma.

Within the general frame and scheme of the nineteenth-century novel, this kind of scene was technically known as a woman’s fall, the fall of virtue. In the course of this delightfully written scene the behavior of Emma’s long blue veil—a character in its own serpentine right—is especially to be marked.* After dismounting from their horses, they walk. "Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell slantingly from her man's hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves." So, when she is daydreaming about the event in her room on their return: "Then she saw herself in the glass and wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, ’I have a lover! a lover!’ delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the darkness in the interspaces of these heights.” And one should not forget that, later, the poisonous arsenic was in a blue jar—and the blue haze that hung about the countryside at her funeral.

The event itself that gave rise to her daydreaming is briefly described but with one most significant detail: "The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him.

"The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled her eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds in flight** had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; a mild something seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar in his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles that had broken.”

When Emma has returned from love's swoon, you will please mark the •In listing the details of the horse theme (for which see the Notes at the end of this essay), VN writes, that "the scene can be said to be seen through the long blue veil of her amazon dress." Ed.

••"This is a simile that must be supposed to have occurred to Emma. Hummingbirds do not occur in Europe. May have found it in Chateaubriand." VN in his annotated copy. Ed.

remote note that reaches her from somewhere beyond the quiet woods—a musical moan in the distance—for all its enchantment is nothing but the glorified echo of a hideous vagabond’s raucous song. And presently Emma and Rodolphe come back from their ride—with a smile on the face of the author. For that raucous song here and in Rouen will hideously mingle with Emma's death rattle less than five years later.

Following the end of Emma’s affair with Rodolphe in which he jilts her at the very moment she expected him to elope with her into the blue mist of her romantic dreams, two associated scenes are written in Flaubert’s favorite contrapuntal structure. The first is the night at the opera Lucia di Lammermoor when Emma meets Leon again after his return from Paris. The elegant young men she notices parading in the pit of the opera house, leaning with the palms of their gloved hands on the glossy knob of their canes, form an introduction to the preliminary hubbub of various instruments getting ready to play.

In the first movement of the scene Emma is intoxicated with the tenor’s melodious lamentations, which remind her of her love for Rodolphe long gone. Charles interrupts the music of her mood by his matter-of-fact remarks. He sees the opera as a jumble of idiotic gestures, but she understands the plot because she has read the novel in French. In the second, she follows the fate of Lucy on the stage while her thoughts dwell upon her own fate. She identifies herself with the girl on the stage and is ready to be made love to by anybody whom she may identify with the tenor. But in the third movement the roles are reversed. It is the opera, the singing, that creates the unwelcome interruptions, and it is her conversation with Leon that is the real thing. Charles was beginning to enjoy himself when he is dragged away to a cafe. Fourthly, Leon suggests that she come back on Sunday to see the last scene they had missed. The equations are truly schematic: for Emma the opera at first equals reality; the singer initially is Rodolphe, and then he is himself, Lagardy, a possible lover; the possible lover becomes Leon; and finally Leon is equated with reality and she loses interest in the opera in order to go with him to a cafe to escape the heat of the opera house.

Another example of the counterpoint theme is the cathedral episode. We have some preliminary sparring when Leon calls upon Emma at the inn before we come to their assignation in the cathedral. This preliminary conversation echoes that with Rodolphe at the county fair but this time Emma is far more sophisticated. In the first movement of the cathedral scene Leon enters the church to wait for Emma. The interplay is now between the beadle in his janitor’s uniform (the permanent guide in wait for sightseers) on the one hand and Leon who does not want to see the sights. What he does see of the cathedral—the iridescent light dappling the floor and so on—is in keeping with his concentration upon Emma, whom he visualizes as the jealously guarded Spanish ladies sung by the French poet Musset who go to church and there pass love messages to their cavaliers. The beadle is boiling with anger at seeing a potential sightseer taking the liberty of admiring the church by himself.

The second movement is inaugurated when Emma enters, abruptly thrusts a paper at Leon (a letter of renunciation), and goes into the chapel of the Virgin to pray. "She rose, and they were about to leave, when the beadle came forward, hurriedly saying—

" 'Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts ? Madame would like to see the curiosities of the church?’

" 'Oh, no!’ cried the clerk.

'Why not?’ said she. For she dung with her expiring virtue to the Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs—anything.”

Now the torrent of the beadle’s descriptive eloquence runs parallel to the impatient storm in Leon’s mood. The beadle is about to show them, of all things, the steeple when Leon rushes Emma out of the church. But, thirdly, when they have already reached the outside, the beadle manages again to interfere by bringing out a pile of large bound volumes for sale, all about the cathedral. Finally, the frantic Leon tries to find a cab and then tries to get Emma into the cab. It is done in Paris, he responds when she demurs—to her the Paris of the green-silk cigar case—and this, as an irresistible argument, decides her. "Still the cab did not come. Leon was afraid she might go back into the church. At last the cab appeared.

" 'At least go out by the north porch,’ cried the beadle, who was left alone on the threshold, 'so as to see the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames.’.

" 'Where to, sir?’ asked the coachman.

" 'Where you like,’ said Leon, forcing Emma into the cab.

"And the lumbering contraption set out.’’

Just as the agricultural subjects (the hogs and the manure) at the fair foreshadowed the mud that the boy Justin cleans off Emma’s shoes after her walks to the house of her lover Rodolphe, so the lastgust of the beadle’s parrotlike eloquence foreshadows the hell flames which Emma might still have escaped had she not stepped into that cab with Leon.

This ends the cathedral part of the counterpoint. It is echoed in the next scene of the closed cab.* Here agajn the first idea on the coachman’s part is to show the couple, whom in the simplicity of his uninformed mind he takes for tourists, the sights of Rouen, a poet's statue for instance. Then there is an automatic attempt on the cabby's part to drive jauntily up to the station, and there are other attempts of the same nature. But every time he is told by a voice from the mysterious inside of his cab to drive on. There is no need to go into the details of this remarkably amusing carriage drive, for a quotation will speak for itself. Yet one must remark that a grotesque hackney cab, with its window shades drawn, circulating in the full sight of the Rouen citizens is a far cry from that ride in the tawny woods over the purple heather with Rodolphe. Emma’s adultery is cheapening. "And the lumbering contraption set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille.

'Go on,' cried a voice that came from within.

"The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop.

" 'No, straight on!’ cried the same voice.

"The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours, trotted quietly beneath the elm trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put his leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the side alley by the turfy margin of the waters. . . .

"But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatremares, Sotteville, La Grande-Chausee, the Rue d’Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of the Jardin des Plantes.

" 'Get on, will you?' cried the voice more furiously.

"And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever____It went up

the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard Cauchoise, then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills.

"It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont Gargan, at La Rougue-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise—in front of the Customs, at the 'Veille Tour,’ the 'Trois Pipes,' and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to time the coachman on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses. He could not understand •The entire passage of the cab, from the words of the coachman "Where to?” to the end of tl*e chapter was suppressed by the editors of the magazine Revue de Paris where Madame Bovary was appearing serially. In the issue of 1 December 1856, where this passage was to appear, there is a footnote informing the reader of the omission. VN.

what furious desire for locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth from behind him. Then he lashed his perspiring jades afresh, and drove on, indifferent to the jolting, scraping against things here and there, not caring if he did, demoralized, and almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression.

"And on the harbor, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds drawn, and which reappeared thus constantly, shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a ship.

"Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, an ungloved hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of torn paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off alighted, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover all in bloom. [This was the negative letter Emma had given to Leon in the cathedral.]

"At. about six o'clock the carriage stopped in a back .street of the Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down, and without turning her head.”

On her return to Yonville Emma is met by her maid, who brings a message that she is required at once at the house of Monsieur Homais. There is a curious atmosphere of disaster as she enters the pharmacy—for instance the first thing she sees is the great armchair lying on its back, overturned— however, the disorder is only due to the fact rhat the Homais family is furiously making jam. Emma is vaguely worried about the message; Homais, however, has completely forgotten what he wants to tell her. It later transpires that he had been asked by Charles to inform Emma, with all sorts of precautions, of her father-in-law's death, a piece of news she receives with the utmost indifference when Homais does blurt it out at the end of his furious monologue directed against little Justin, who having been told to fetch an additional pan for the jam, took one from the lumber room in the dangerous neighborhood of a blue jar with arsenic. The subtle jart of this wonderful scene is that the real message, the real information given to Emma and impressed on her mind is the fact of the existence of that jar of poison, of the place where it is, of the key to the room that little Justin has; and although at this moment she is in a delicious daze of adultery and does not think of death, that piece of information, intermingled with the news of ‘old Bovary’s death, will remain in her retentive memory.

There is no need to follow in detail the tricks Emma practices to make her poor husband consent to her going to Rouen for her meetings with Leon in their favorite hotel bedroom that soon seems to them to be like home. At this point Emma reaches the highest degree of happiness with Leon: her sentimental lake dreams, her girlish mooning among the modulations of Lamartine, all this is fulfilled—there is water, a boat, a lover, and a boatman. A ribbon of silk turns up in the boat. The boatman mentions someone—Adolphe, Dodolphe—a gay dog who had recently been in that boat with companions and girls. Emma shivers.

But gradually, like old pieces of scenery, her life begins to shake and fall apart. Beginning with chapter 4 of the third part, fate, abetted by Flaubert, proceeds to destroy her with beautiful precision. From the technical point of composition, this is the tapering point where art and science meet. Emma somehow manages to prop up the toppling falsehood of her piano lessons in Rouen; for a while, also, she props up Lheureux’s tumbling bills with other bills. In what may be termed yet another counterpoint scene Homais butts in by insisting that Leon entertain him in Rouen at the exact time that Emma is waiting for Leon at the hotel, a grotesque and very amusing scene that recalls the cathedral episode, with Homais in the beadle’s part. A rakish fancy-dress ball in Rouen is not a success for poor Emma, who realizes what sleazy company she is in. Finally, her own house starts to crumble down. One day on returning from town she finds a notice of the sale of her furniture unless her debt, now 8,000 francs, is paid within twenty-four hours. Here begins her last journey, from one person to another in search of money. All the characters join in this tragic climax.

Her first attempt is to secure more time. " 'I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days more!'

"She was sobbing.

" 'There! tears now!'

" 'You are driving me to despair!’

" 'I do not give a damn if 1 do,’ said he, shutting the door.”

From Lheureux she goes to Rouen, but Leon by now is anxious to get rid of her. She even suggests that he steal the money from his office: "An infernal boldness looked out from her burning eyes, and their lids drew close together with a lascivious and encouraging look,'so that the young man felt himself growing weak beneath the mute will of this woman who was urging him to a crime.” His promises prove worthless and he does not keep their appointment that afternoon. "He pressed her hand, but it felt quite lifeless. Emma had no strength left for any sentiment.

"Four o’clock struck, and she rose to return to Yonville, mechanically obeying the force of old habits.” .

Leaving Rouen, she is forced to make way for the Viscount Vaubyessard—or was it someone else—driving a prancing black horse. She travels back in the same coach as Homais after a searing encounter with the loathsome blind beggar. In Yonville she approaches the notary Monsieur Guillaumin who tries to make love to her. "He dragged himself toward her on his knees, regardless of his dressing-gown.

" 'For pity’s sake, stay! I love you!’

"He seized her by her waist. Madame Bovary’s face flushed a bright red. She recoiled with a terrible look, crying—’You are taking a shameless advantage of my distress, sir! 1 am to be pitied—not to be sold.’

"And she went out."

Then she goes to Binet, and Flaubert shifts his angle of view: we and two women watch the scene through a window although nothing can be heard. "The tax-collector seemed to be listening with wide-open eyes, as if he did not understand. She went on in a tender, suppliant manner. She came nearer to him, her breast heaving; they no longer spoke.

" 'Is she making him advances?’ said Madame Tuvache.

"Binet was scarlet to his very ears. She took hold of his hands.

” 'Oh, it’s too much!’

"And no doubt she was suggesting something abominable to him; for the tax-collector—yet he was brave, had fought at Bautzen and at Lutzen, had been through the French campaign, and had even been recommended for the cross—suddenly, as at the sight of a serpent, recoiled as far as he could from her, crying—

" 'Madame! what do you mean?’

" 'Women like that ought to be whipped,’ said Madame Tuvache.”

Next she goes to the old nurse Rollet for a few minutes’ rest, and after a daydream that Leon had come with the money, "Suddenly she struck her brow and uttered a cry; for the thought of Rodolphe, like a flash of lightning in a dark night, had passed into her soul. He was so good, so delicate, so generous! And besides, should he hesitate to do her this service, she would know well enough how to constrain him to it by re-waking, in a single moment, their lost love. So she set out toward La Huchette, not

seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution.” The false tale she tells vain and vulgar Rodolphe dovetails with the real episode at the beginning of the book where a real notary runs away and causes the death of the first Madame Bovary, Emma’s predecessor. Rodolphe’s caresses stop abruptly at her plea for 3,000 francs. " 'Ah!' thought Rodolphe, turning suddenly very pale, 'that was what she came for.' At last  he said with a calm air—" 'Dear madame, I do not have them.’

"He did not lie. If he had them, he would, no doubt, have given them, although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive.

"First she looked at him for some moments.

" 'You do not have them!’ she repeated several times. 'You do not have them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me. You are no better than the others.’ . . .

'I haven’t got them,’ replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield.

"She went out.... The earth beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed to her immense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand pieces of fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux’s office, their room at home, another landscape. Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did not in the least remember the cause of her terrible condition, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory, as wounded men, dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds.”

"Then in an ecstasy of heroism, that made her almost joyous, she ran down the hill, crossed the cow-plank, the footpath, the alley, the market, and reached the druggist’s shop.” There she wheedled the key to the lumber room from Justin. "The key turned in the lock, and she went straight to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, and withdrawing it full of a white powder, she began eating it.

’Stop!’ [Justin] cried, rushing at her,

" 'Hush! some one will come.’

"He was in despair, was calling out.

" 'Say nothing, or all the blame will fall on your master.’

"Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity of one that had performed a duty.”

The progressive agony of Emma's death is described in remorseless clinical detail until at the end: "Her chest soon began panting rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes, as they rolled, grew paler,dike the two globes of a lamp that is going out, so that one might have thought her already dead but for the fearful laboring of her ribs, shaken by violent breathing, as if the soul were leaping to free itself.... Bournisien had again begun to pray, his face bowed against the edge of the bed, his long black cassock trailing behind him on the floor. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms outstretched towards Emma. He had taken her hands and pressed them, shuddering at every beat of her heart, as at the shaking of a falling ruin. As the death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his prayers mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all seemed lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that rang like a tolling bell.

"Suddenly there came a noise from the sidewalk, the loud sound of clogs and the tap of a stick; and a voice rose—a raucous voice—that sang—

'When summer skies shine hot above

A little maiden dreams of love.’

"Emma raised herself like a galvanized corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, staring.

To gather carefully

The fallen ears of com.

Nanette goes bending down

To the earth where they were bom.’

" "The blind man!’ she cried. And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch standing out against the eternal night like a dreadful threat.

The wind was strong that summer day,

Her skirt was short and flew away.’

She feil back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She was no more.”

Notes

STYLE

Gogol called his Dead Souls a prose poem; Flaubert's novel is also a prose poem but one that is composed better, with a closer, finer texture. In order to plunge at once into the matter, I want to draw attention first of all to Flaubert’s use of the word andpreceded by a semicolon. (The semicolon is sometimes replaced by a lame comma in the English translations, but we will put the semicolon back.) This semicolon-and comes after an enumeration of actions or states or objects; then the semicolon creates a pause and the andproceeds to round up the paragraph, to introduce a culminating image, or a vivid detail, descriptive, poetic, melancholy, or amusing. This is a peculiar feature of Flaubert’s style.

At the beginning of the marriage: '’[Charles] could not refrain from constantly touching her comb, her rings, her fichu; sometimes he gave her big smacking kisses on her cheeks, or else tiny kisses in Indian file all along her bare arm from the tips of her fingers up to her shoulder; and she would push him away, half-smiling, half-vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you.”

Emma bored with her marriage at the end of the first part: "She listened in a kind of dazed concentration to each cracked sound of the church bell. On some roof a cat would walk arching its back in the pale sun. The wind on the highway blew up strands of dust. Now and then a distant dog howled; and the bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing over the fields."

After Leon’s departure for Paris Emma opens her window and watches the clouds: "They were accumulating in the west, on the side of Rouen, and swiftly rolled their black convolutions from behind which the long sun rays stretched out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy, while the rest of the empty sky was as white as porcelain. But a blast of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered against the green leaves. Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows beat their wings in the drenched bushes; and streams of rainwater on the gravel carried away the pink petals of an acacia.”

Emma lies dead: "Emma’s head was turned towards her right shoulder, the comer of her mouth, which was open, seemed like a-black hole at the lower part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her hands; a’kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to disappear in a viscous pallor that looked like a thin web, as if spiders had been at work there. The sheet sunk in from her breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of the toes; and it seemed to Charles that an infinite mass, an enormous load, were weighing upon her.”

Another aspect of his style, rudiments of which may have been noticed in some examples of his use of and, is Flaubert’s fondness for what may be termed the unfolding method, the successive development of visual details, one thing after another thing, with an accumulation of this or that emotion. A good example comes at the beginning of part two where a camera seems to be moving along and taking us to Yonville through a gradually revealed unfolded landscape: "We leave the highroad at La Boissiere and keep straight on to the top of the Leux hill, from which the valley is seen. The river that runs through it makes of it, as it were, two regions with distinct physiognomies,—all on the left is pasture land, all on the right arable. The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond wheat fields. The white stripe of the river separates the tint of the meadows from that of the ploughed land, and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape fringed with silver.

"Before us, on the verge of the horizon, stand the oaks of the forest of Argeuil, with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills that bear from top to bottom red irregular scars; these are rain-tracks, and the brick-tones standing out in narrow streaks against the gray color of the mountainside are due to the quantity of iron springs that flow beyond in the adjoining country.”

A third feature—one pertaining more to poetry than to prose—is Flaubert’s method of rendering emotions or states of mind through an exchange of meaningless words. Charles has just lost his wife, and Homais is keeping him company. "Homais, to do something, took a decanter on one of the shelves in order to water the geraniums.

" 'Ah! thanks,' said Charles; 'you are so—’

"He did not finish, choking as he was under the profusion of memories that Homais' action recalled to him. [Emma had used to water these flower?.]

"Then to distract him, Homais thought fit to talk a little horticulture: plants, he said, needed humidity.-Charles bowed his head in assent.

" 'Besides,' Homais continued, 'the fine days will soon be here again.'

" 'Oh,' said Bovary.

"Homais having exhausted his supply of topics, gently draws the small window curtains aside.

" 'Hm! There's Monsieur Tuvache passing.'

"Charles repeated after him mechanically, '. . . Monsieur Tuvache passing.' "

Meaningless words, but how suggestive.

Another point in analyzing Flaubert's style concerns the use of the French imperfect form of the past tense, expressive of an action or state in continuance, something that has been happening in an habitual way. In English this is best rendered by would or used to-, on rainy days she used to do this or that; then the church bells would sound; the rain would stop, etc. Proust says somewhere that Flaubert's mastery of time, of flowing time, is expressed by his use of the imperfect,of the imparfait. This imperfect, says Proust, enables Flaubert to express the continuity of time and its unity.

Translators have not bothered about this matter at all. In numerous passages the sense of repetition, of dreariness in Emma's life, for instance in the chapter relating to her life at Tostes, is not adequately rendered in English because the translator did not trouble to insert here and there a would or a used to, or a sequence of woulds.

In Tostes, Emma walks out with her whippet: "She would begin \not "began^,r\ by looking around her to see if nothing hadchanged since last she had been there. She would find [not "found”] again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander [not "wandered”] at random. . . .”

Flaubert does not use many metaphors, but when he does they render emotions in terms which are in keeping with the characters' personalities:

Emma, after Leon's departure: "and sorrow rushed into her hollow soul with gentle ululations such as the winter wind makes in abandoned mansions.” (Of course this is the way Emma would have described her own sorrow if she had had artistic genius.)

Rodolphe tires of Emma's passionate protestations: "Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candor of hers; he thought that exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted;—as if the fulness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; for human speech is like a cracked kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to touch the stars to tears.” (I hear Flaubert complaining about the difficulties of composition.)

Rodolphe turns over old love letters before writing to Emma in farewell on the eve of their elopement: "At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to the cupboard, saying to himself, 'What a lot of rubbish!’ Which summed up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school-yard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.” (I see Flaubert revisiting his old school in Rouen.)

IMAGERY

Here are a few descriptive passages that show Flaubert at his best in dealing with sense data selected, permeated, and grouped by an artist’s eye.

A wintry landscape through which Charles rides to set old Rouault’s broken leg: "The flat country stretched as far as eye could see, and clumps of trees placed at long intervals around farms made purplish-black blotches on the vast gray surface that faded, at the horizon, into the dismal tint of the sky.”

Emma and Rodolphe meet to make love: "The stars glistened through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the clacking sound of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes quivering with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the night made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied repetitions.”

Emma as she appeared to Leon in her room at the inn the day after the opera: "Emma in a dimity negligee leaned her chignon against the back of the old armchair; the tawny wallpaper formed as it were a golden background behind her, and the mirror reflected her uncovered head with its white parting in the middle and the lobes of her ears just visible beneath the folds of her hair.”

THE EQUINE THEME

To pick out the appearances of the horse theme amounts to giving a synopsis of the whole of Madame Bovary. Horses play a curiously important part in the book’s romance.

The theme begins with "one night [Charles and his first wife] were awakened by the sound of a horse pulling up outside the door." A messenger has come from old Rouault, who has broken his leg.

As Charles approaches the farm where, in a minute he will meet Emma, his horse shies violently, as if at the shadow of his and her fate.

As he looks for his riding crop, he bends over Emma in a stumbling movement to help her pick it up from behind a sack of flour. (Freud, that medieval quack, might have made a lot of this scene. [Horses are a symbol of sexuality in Freud. Ed.])

As the drunken guests return from the wedding in the light of the moon, runaway carriages at full gallop plunge into irrigation ditches.

Her old father, as he sees the young pairoff, recalls how he carried off his own young wife years ago, on horseback, on a cushion behind his saddle.

Mark the flower Emma lets fall from her mouth while leaning out of a window, the petal falling on the mane of her husband's horse.

The good nuns, in one of Emma’s memories of the convent, had given so much good advice as to the modesty of the body and the salvation of the soul, that she^iid "as tightly reined horses do—she pulled up short and the bit slid from her teeth.”

Her host at Vaubyessard shows her his horses.

As she and her husband leave the chateau, they see the viscount and other horsemen galloping by.

Charles settles down to the trot of his old horse taking him to his patients.

Emma's first conversation with Leon at the Yonville inn starts with the horse topic. "If you were like me,” says Charles, "constantly obliged to be in the saddle—” "But,” says Leon, addressing himself to Emma,'"how nice to ride for pleasure. . . How nice indeed.

Rodolphe suggests to Charles that riding might do Emma a world of good.

The famous scene of Rodolphe and Emma’s amorous-ride in the wood can be said to be seen through the long blue veil of her amazon dress. Note the riding crop she raises to answer the blown kiss that her windowed child sends her before the ride.

Later, as she reads her father’s letter from the farm, she remembers the farm—the colts that neighed and galloped, galloped.

We can find a grotesque twist to the same theme in the special equinus (horse-hoof-like) variety of the stableboy’s clubfoot that Bovary tries to cure.

Emma gives-Rodolphe a handsome riding crop as a present. (Old Freud chuckles in the dark.)

Emma’s dream of a new life with Rodolphe begins with a daydream: "to the gallop, of four horses she was carried away” to Italy.

A blue tilbury carriage takes Rodolphe away at a rapid trot, out of her life.

Another famous scene—Emma and Leon in that closed carriage. The equine theme has become considerably more vulgar.

In the last chapters the Hirondelle, the stagecoach between Yonville and Rouen, begins to play a considerable part in her life.

In Rouen, she catches a glimpse of the viscount’s black horse, a memory.

During her last tragic visit to Rodolphe, who answers her plea for money that he has none to give her, she points with sarcastic remarks at the expensive ornaments on his riding crop. (The chuckle in the dark is now diabolical.)

After her death, one day when Charles has gone to sell his old horse—his last resource—he meets Rodolphe. He knows now that Rodolphe has been his wife’s lover. This is the end of the equine theme. As symbolism goes it is perhaps not more symbolic than a convertible would be today.