‘In short!’ he cried, with a flourish, ‘if it were only for distinguishing myself at fires!’
Then Homais inclined towards the Government. He secretly did the prefect great service during the elections. He sold himself – in a word, prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign in which he implored him to ‘do him justice,’ he called him ‘our good king,’ and compared him to Henri IV.
And every morning the druggist rushed for the paper to see if his nomination were in it. It was never there. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he had a grass plot in his garden designed to represent the Star of the Cross of Honour with two little strips of grass running from the top to imitate the ribbon. He walked round it with folded arms, meditating on the folly of the government and the ingratitude of men.
From respect, or from a sort of sensuality that made him carry on his investigations slowly, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer of a rosewood desk which Emma had generally used. One day, however, he sat down before it, turned the key, and pressed the spring. All Léon’s letters were there. This time there could be no doubt. He devoured them to the very last, ransacked every corner, all the furniture, all the drawers, behind the walls, sobbing, crying aloud, distraught, mad. He found a box and broke it open with a kick. Rodolphe’s portrait flew full in his face in the midst of the overturned love-letters.
People wondered at his despondency. He never went out, saw no one, refused even to visit his patients. Then they began to say that ‘he shut himself up to drink.’
Sometimes, however, some curious person climbed on to the garden hedge, and saw with amazement this wild, long-bearded, shabbily clothed man, weeping aloud as he walked to and fro.
On summer evenings he took his little girl with him and led her to the cemetery. They came back at nightfall, when the only light left in the Place was that in Binet’s window.
The voluptuousness of his grief was, however, incomplete, for he had no one near him to share it, and he paid visits to Madame Lefrançois to be able to speak of her. But the landlady only listened with half an ear, having troubles like himself. For Lheureux had at last established the ‘Favorites du Commerce’, and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for doing errands, insisted on a rise of wages and was threatening to go over ‘to the opposition shop.’
One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse – his last resource – he met Rodolphe.
They both turned pale at sight of each other. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and very hot) to the point of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the public-house.
Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved. He seemed to see again something of her in it. It was a marvel to him. He would have liked to have been this man.
The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in. Charles was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the succession of memories that crossed his face. This gradually grew redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at last a moment when Charles, full of sombre fury, fixed his eyes on Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon the old look of weary lassitude returned to his face.
‘I don’t blame you,’ he said.
Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow – ‘No, I don’t blame you now.’
He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made – ‘It is the fault of fatality!’
Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean.
The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the arbour. Rays of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled his aching heart.
At seven o’clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon, went to fetch him to dinner.
His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and in his hand was a long tress of black hair.
‘Come along, papa,’ she said.
And thinking he wanted to play, she pushed him gently. He fell to the ground. He was dead.
Thirty-six hours after, at the druggist’s request, Monsieur Canivet arrived on the scene. He made a post-mortem and found nothing.
When everything had been sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes remained, which served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary’s going to her grandmother. The good woman died the same year; old Roualt was paralysed, and it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor, and sends the child to a cotton-factory to earn a living.
Since Bovary’s death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville without any success, so severely did Homais batter them. He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and public opinion protects him.
He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.
Afterword
When Madame Bovary was first serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856, it caused a national scandal. The authorities were up in arms over the immoral behaviour of its eponymous heroine, and mounted a legal attack. A worried Flaubert was accused of offending the public morality, and brought to trial the following year at the Palais de Justice in Paris. It was rumoured at the time that the authorities, sick of irreligious authors, were out to make an example of him, and had been requesting that he be sentenced to at least two years in jail. However, with a little assistance from Flaubert’s brilliant defence lawyer, Monsieur Sénard, the court found that the nation’s morality had not been jeopardised, and the author was acquitted.
Although the novel might seem rather tame by today’s standards, it is not hard to see why it caused such a stir in the eighteen-fifties. It repeatedly deals with adultery, and – for its time – is comparatively daring in its presentation of the sexual act. Even when not ‘explicit’, the novel has a strong sensual flavour: the erotic thrill that many of its characters get from brushing against another person’s clothes, or from a glimpse of their flesh, must have raised a few eyebrows in nineteenth-century Paris. Added to this, there is the blasphemous element: the adulterous nature of Emma’s life and, more importantly, her eventual suicide, are clearly against the law of God; as are Monsieur Homais’s bad-tempered rants about Christianity.
One hundred and fifty years later, of course, society is much less alarmed by such issues. However, it is a testament to its greatness as a novel that Madame Bovary has lost none of its impact. Now that changes in public attitudes have robbed it of its controversial status, it is justly remembered as not only Flaubert’s masterpiece, but also as a landmark in the history of world literature. All of which makes it a little surprising to learn that this difficult, challenging, and ultimately very rewarding book, was also its author’s first. To do justice to its many attributes would take more than a brief afterword, but a quick evaluation of what makes the novel so unique is possible.
One of the things that marks Madame Bovary out as a true work of genius is the clipped, precise nature of its prose style. Flaubert was notoriously exact in his choice of phrase and syntax; endlessly searching, as he put it, for ‘le mot juste’. He was born the son of a surgeon (his father was the model for Bovary’s Dr Larivière), and, as many critics have noted, there is a remarkably clinical element to his writing: a whiff, perhaps, of the post-mortem room. In his letters, Flaubert once described literature as ‘the dissection of a beautiful woman’, and this description is doubly apt for Madame Bovary. The author cuts cleanly and quickly to the heart of what is going on. This, added to the fact that Bovary is a ‘realist’ novel (part of a nineteenth century French tradition which also includes Balzac and Zola), gives the whole work a vivid clarity only rarely glimpsed in other writing.
Through this carefully-honed mixture of realism and linguistic precision, Flaubert conjures up a view of provincial country life that is so clear in the mind’s eye, that one could almost be looking at a painting. The detail of his brushwork is delicate: he always makes sure that we know the colour of the sky, the texture of the buildings and the streets, and the style and cut of the characters’ clothes. He uses light like an Old Master too; casting subtle shade and brightness over his scenes, and always taking care to tell us how a room is lit. The beautifully visual feel of the book seduces the reader into an imaginative landscape which feels every bit as real as the world of Emma’s romantic novels must seem to her.
However, Flaubert was not merely a follower of an established literary school. He was a great experimenter and innovator himself. In Madame Bovary, he is, for instance, constantly testing the boundaries of narrative form. Like the Modernist authors of the twentieth century, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Flaubert was keen to allow the psychology of his characters to have a bearing on the ‘voice’ of the book: a technique known in French as ‘style indirect libre’. This technique – roughly translated as ‘free indirect discourse’ – means that happenings are described as if from the point of view of a character, but without actually using that character’s voice. So it is that Madame Bovary is told through the impressions, emotions, and opinions of its protagonists. Everyone with whom the novel deals – Charles, Homais, even the long-dead Normans, eating their Lenten cakes in Part Three, Chapter 4 – are allowed to stamp their sensations and beliefs upon the text. It is through the thoughts of Emma, however, that the novel is predominantly told.
Madame Bovary herself is a striking and important figure in the history of literature, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that she is emphatically not a conventional heroine. Although she is very beautiful, as shown by the many men who fall in love with her through the course of the book, Emma is essentially unsympathetic. She is (at least to nineteenth-century eyes) ‘immoral’, with a strong selfishness at the core of her being. Because of this self-absorption, her husband dies a bankrupt, and Berthe, her daughter, ends up a pauper, working in a cotton-mill. However, what is so skilful about Flaubert’s presentation of his leading lady is that, despite these failings, the reader still manages to understand, and even sympathise with her.
Emma’s life begins in loneliness and isolation. Her childhood is spent on a country farm, far off from other children and wider society, and she enters a convent school at the age of thirteen. It is here that she begins to use her vivid imagination as a means of escape from the boredom of her surroundings. She becomes obsessed by romantic novels, dreaming of the idealised lovers she reads about in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. When her mother dies, Emma sees herself as a tragic heroine, achieving through her grief ‘that exquisite ideal of wan decline from which the mediocre heart is ever excluded.’ After this period of her life, she believes – crucially – that she has ‘nothing more to learn and nothing more to feel’. In other words, her emotional development stops when her romanticised vision of the world takes root. It is this childishly unrealistic view of life and love that leads to the unhappiness and tragedy of her adult life.
One of the key themes of Madame Bovary is the discrepancy between illusion and reality. Throughout the book, Emma (along with many of the other characters) does not want to see life as it actually is. She projects romantic ideals and feelings on to men, like Rodolphe and Leon, who clearly do not match them in actual fact. She spends Charles’s limited money as if she was a millionairess. She sees herself as well-bred and genteel when she is, in fact, the lowly wife of a loutish country doctor.
This unrealistic view of the world might not have mattered but for Emma’s other tragedy: that she has been born a woman in a man’s world. This unavoidable fact of her social position is the one that ultimately frustrates all of her dreamy ambitions. She is a powerful, dominant, individual, living at a time when women were supposed to be meek and subservient. Had she been a man, she could easily have run off, like Leon, to the big city. She could have been rich, and moved in fashionable circles, like Rodolphe. She could have shaped her own destiny, without having to be dependent on a lazy and weak-willed husband. When she learns she is pregnant, she longs for a son, because she knows that a ‘woman is forever hedged about . . . Always she feels the pull of some desire, the restraining pressure of some social restriction.’ The wish for a boy, like all of her other wishes, does not, of course, come true.
Towards the end of her life, Flaubert makes explicit what has been implied all along: that Emma must, in some way, prostitute herself to get what she wants. When the debt collectors are knocking at her door, she frantically rushes to Maitre Guillaumin, who, like Lhereux before him, implies that, were she to sleep with him, her debts might be cancelled. Although she is repulsed by this suggestion, she quickly realises that such an arrangement might be her only option, and offers herself, for money, to Binet and Rodolphe. When they refuse, she decides that suicide is her only way out. Yet even then, she must exploit her sexual hold over the young Justin to get arsenic from Homais’s loft.
Thus, the tragedy of Madame Bovary’s life and death leads us to the ultimate conclusion that perhaps it is masculine society, and not Emma herself, which is essentially immoral. She has committed adultery and defrauded her husband because such things were the only means she had of moulding her fate in a world dominated by men. The only tools she has ever had at her disposal have been her good-looks, and Charles’s money. She has had enough strength of character to realise this, and exploit it. However flawed or unrealistic her vision of a perfect life might have been, she has stuck to it with great tenacity, and fought to achieve it, against overwhelming odds, with every weapon in her limited armoury. She has, at the last, remained faithful to herself, if not to her husband. It is this perverse strength of character that makes her such a memorable, and even touching, character, and which has assured her place in the gallery of the great literary figures.
Charles Bovary, on the other hand, is one of the most neglected and derided of literature’s heroes. Over the years, critics and readers alike have dismissed him as boorish, ignorant, and, in some cases, lacking in any character at all. This is, however, unfair. We must remember that most of what we get to know about Charles comes through Emma’s unflattering view of him. When Flaubert allows Monsieur Bovary’s thoughts to take over the narrative, he comes across in a much more sympathetic light. However, his wife refuses to acknowledge this side of his character, shunning him whenever he tries to reach out to her.
Emma’s dismissiveness towards her husband is all the more poignant because, at heart, Charles is closer to Emma’s idealised vision of a lover than any of the men with whom she conducts an affair. He also has more in common with her temperament. Charles Bovary clearly loves his wife very much, and would do anything to make her happy. He is, like her, something of a dreamer, with his own romantic ideals of life which are also ultimately frustrated. After her death, he is every bit as picky as she would have been over the choice of coffin, and every bit as dismissive of the extravagant expense of the funeral. And when she has finally been buried, he plays the melancholy role of a grieving romantic hero to the full, before eventually dying of a broken heart. If only husband and wife had made some meaningful contact, their sad lives and lonely deaths might have turned out very differently.
Bibliography
Sherrington, R. J., Three Novels by Flaubert, Clarendon Press, 1970
Starkie, Enid, Flaubert: The Making of the Master, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967
Starkie, Enid, Flaubert the Master, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971
About the Author
Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821. He initially studied to become a lawyer, but gave it up after a bout of ill-health, and devoted himself to writing. After travelling extensively, and working on many unpublished projects, he completed Madame Bovary in 1856. This was published to great scandal and acclaim, and Flaubert became a celebrated literary figure. His reputation was cemented with Salammbô (1862) and Sentimental Education (1869). He died in 1880, probably of a stroke, leaving his last work, Bouvard et Pécuchet, unfinished.
First published 1857
This translation first published 1886
