WHEN FLAUBERT MADE HIS famous statement—“Madame Bovary is me”—he was echoing one of his favorite authors, Cervantes. Cervantes, on his deathbed, so the story goes, was asked whom he meant to depict in Don Quixote. “Myself,” he answered. In Cervantes’ case, this must have been true, quite simply and terribly, whether or not he ever said it. In Flaubert’s, the answer was an evasion. He was tired of being asked about the “real-life original” of his heroine. According to tradition, there was one; in fact, there may have been two or even three. First and most important was Delphine Delamare, née Couturier, the wife of a public-health officer in the Bray region of Normandy, not far from where Flaubert lived. In 1848, aged twenty-seven, she killed herself, leaving behind her a little girl, Alice-Delphine. Among her effects, it was said, was an unpaid bill from a circulating library in Rouen, Flaubert’s friends had suggested her case to him as the subject for a novel, on the writing-course principle of “Write about what you know.” What better source than a mother-in-law? Old Madame Delamare, the doctor’s widowed mother, used to come to see old Madame Flaubert and lament his marital unhappiness, his untimely death; Flaubert’s niece remembered her well and was convinced that the old lady’s complaints about her daughter-in-law’s misconduct were the basis for Madame Bovary. In an inventory of Delamare’s property and papers, made on his decease, an I.O.U. of three hundred francs to “Madame Flaubert” has recently been found.
Dr. Delamare had died, presumably of grief, like Charles Bovary, long before Madame Bovary appeared, in 1857; he survived his wife by only twenty-one months. But other principals in the Delamare drama (rumor gave her many lovers) and a chorus of commentators were still living. And many years later, in the village of Ry—which advertises itself as the original of Yonville l’Abbaye—Delphine Delamare’s smart double curtains, yellow and black, were still talked about by her neighbors, like her blue-and-silver wallpaper. Today her house is gone (two different houses have competed for that title), her tombstone has been lost or stolen, but her garden is there, the property of the village pharmacist, who displays in his shop what purports to be Monsieur Homais’ counter.
The real Monsieur Homais was probably legion. Flaubert is said to have spent a month at Forges-les-Eaux studying the local pharmacist, a red-hot anti-clerical and diehard republican, whom he had already spotted and banded, but he is also thought to have had his eye on other atheistical druggists, birds of the same feather, in the neighborhood.
In short, Madame Bovary revived and spread a scandal (a second suspected Rodolphe was uncovered at Neufchâtel-en-Bray) that had been a nine-days’ wonder in the locality, and Flaubert was no doubt sick of the gossip and somewhat remorseful, like most authors, for what he had started, tired too maybe of hearing his mother tax him with what he had “done” to poor Delamare’s memory. At the same time, as an author, he must have resented the cheapening efforts of real life to claim for itself material he had transmuted with such pain in his study; even in her name, “Delphine Delamare” sounds like a hack’s alias for Emma Bovary.
The gossip was not silenced by his denials. Indeed, it proliferated, breeding on the novel itself—impossible to know how much elderly witnesses, interviewed in Ry forty years later, had had their memories refreshed by contact with the novel. Was the Delamares’ elegant furniture really sold at auction to satisfy her creditors? And the unfortunate doctor’s “two hundred rose stocks de belle variété”? What about the “mahogany Gothic prie-dieu embroidered in subdued blue and yellow gros point?” by Delphine Delamare? In 1890, on the word of one authority, it could be seen in Rouen, the cushion considerably faded. In 1905, the servant Felicité (her real name was Augustine), aged seventy-nine, was still talking to visitors about her mistress, differing stoutly with others who remembered her on the color of her hair. “No. Not blond. Chestnut.” After Madame Bovary, figures in the Delamare story, real or fancied, must have spent their lives as marked men. The rumored “Rodolphe,” a veritable Cain, was said to have emigrated to America, then come back and shot himself on a Parisian boulevard. If that happened to an actual country gentleman of the vicinity named Louis Campion (and there is no record of such a suicide), it cannot have been part of Flaubert’s intention. And the gossip, as always, must have been wrong quite a bit of the time. Even given Flaubert’s passion for documentation, he cannot have set out to make an exact copy of the village of Ry and its inhabitants. How well, in fact, he could have known it, except as the site of the Delamare drama, is a matter of doubt.
He must have passed through it, on his way from Rouen, and certainly the village, even now, shows correspondences with the décor of the novel, though, as in a dream, nothing is in quite its right place: the church, the cemetery, the market place, Monsieur Homais’ pharmacy, the Lion d’Or. The “river” behind Madame Delamare’s garden has shrunk to a feeble stream, more of a ditch or drain, really, and the real river runs past the village, not through it. But there are the outlying meadows, the poplars, the long single street, which is an extended place in the novel; “Rodolphe’s château” is pointed out on a nearby road, and along the river there are many cow-crossings made of old planks reminiscent of the one Emma used, at the foot of her garden, going by the wet-nurse’s house to meet her lover. In the courtyard of the Hôtel de Rouen, identified by a marker as the “Lion d’Or,” a suggestible person can believe himself to be in the setting of Madame Bovary.
Human suggestibility, obviously, has magnified and multiplied correspondences in a way no doubt undreamed of by Flaubert. The fame of the novel caused dubious and even false claimants to be presented or present themselves as the genuine originals. A notary in the Oise named Louis Bottais (or Léon Bottet; there is some confusion) pretended to have served as the model for Léon; he was unmasked as an impostor. The progressive pharmacist at Ry, toward the end of the century, modeled himself on Monsieur Homais, who he insisted had been drawn from his father—as though this were reason for family pride.
The net has been cast wider. A second—or third—model for Emma has been found in the wife of Flaubert’s friend the sculptor Pradier, who made the pretty ladies, Lille and Strasbourg, that sit on pedestals like halted patriotic floats on the Place de la Concorde. A “memoir” of this woman, written out in an illiterate script by her confidante, a carpenter’s wife, had fallen into Flaubert’s hands. Did he use it? Louise Pradier was good-looking, silly, extremely unfaithful to her husband, and up to her neck in debt. In the “memoir,” where she is called “Ludovica,” she is being driven to suicide by her debts and adulterous anxieties; her husband, like Charles Bovary, dies of the shock dealt him by the discovery of his wife’s infidelities and the bills she had run up. In reality, Pradier long outlived his separation from Louise, and Louise herself, though she may have talked of it, never threw herself in the Seine. She was living when Madame Bovary came out and she and her Bohemian friends may have been persuaded, whatever the truth was, that she had “sat for” Flaubert.
This endless conjecturing on the part of the public is the price paid by the realistic novelist for “writing about what he knows.” With Salammbô and The Temptation of Saint Anthony, there was no occasion for Flaubert to issue denials. But Madame Bovary was fraught with embarrassment for its author, who foresaw, while still writing it, the offense he was going to give his neighbors by the heavy dosage of Norman “local color” he had put in. And as often happens, whatever he did to change, combine, disguise, invent, probably made matters worse, purely fictive episodes being taken as the literal truth.
There may also have been correspondences with reality invisible to ordinary provincial readers but suspiciously visible to his immediate family: “I know where you got that!” an author’s relations cry, in amusement or reproach. Take the following, as a guess. Dr. Delamare studied under Flaubert’s father, a well-known surgeon, at the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen; whether he was a poor student or not is uncertain. In any case, being dead, he could not be hurt by the book. But there was someone else who conceivably could be: Flaubert’s brother, Achille, also a doctor, highly regarded in local medical circles. He operated on their father; gangrene developed, and Dr. Flaubert died. It is thought that he may have had a diabetic condition, always dangerous for a surgical patient. In any case, the outcome was fatal. A little later, Flaubert’s sister Caroline died of puerperal fever. Whether Achille was in attendance is not clear. But the two deaths, coming so close together, greatly affected Flaubert. In a letter, he described sitting up with Caroline’s body while her husband and a priest snored. Just like Emma’s wake. Flaubert remembered those snores. Did he remember the operation performed on his father when he wrote about Charles’ operation on the clubfooted inn boy—the most villainous folly in the book? Or did he fear that Achille remembered and would draw a parallel, where none had been intended? A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must claim to forget.*
On the one hand, Flaubert declared he was Emma. On the other, he wrote to a lady: “There’s nothing in Madame Bovary that’s drawn from life. It’s a completely invented story. None of my own feelings or experiences are in it.” So help him God. Of course, he was fibbing, and contradicting himself as well. Like all novelists, he drew on his own experiences, and, more than most novelists, he was frightened by the need to invent. When he came to do the ball at Vaubyessard, he lamented. “It’s so long since I’ve been to a ball.” If memory failed, he documented himself, as he did for Emma’s school reading, going back over the children’s stories he had read as a little boy and the picture books he had colored. If he had not had an experience the story required, he sought it out. Before writing the chapter about the agricultural fair, he went to one; he consulted his brother about club foot and, disappointed by the ignorance manifest in Achille’s answers, procured textbooks. There is hardly a page in the novel that he had not “lived,” and he constantly drew on his own feelings to render Emma’s.
All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Madame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her husband, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips like a slithery grass snake as she undressed in the hotel room in Rouen, the blinds of the cab that hid her and Leon as they made love. In a letter he made clear the state of mind in which he wrote. That day he had been doing the scene of the horseback ride, when Rodolphe seduces Emma in the woods. “What a delicious thing writing is—not to be you any more but to move through the whole universe you’re talking about. Take me today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were already heavy with passion.” It is hard to imagine another great novelist—Stendhal, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Balzac—who would conceive of the act of writing as a rapturous loss of identity. Poets have often expressed the wish for otherness, for fusion—to be their mistress’ sparrow or her girdle or the breeze that caressed her temples and wantoned with her ribbons, but Flaubert was the first to realize this wish in prose, in the disguise of a realistic story. The climax of the horseback ride was, of course, a coupling, in which all of Nature joined in a gigantic, throbbing partouze while Flaubert’s pen flew. He was writing a book, and yet from his account you would think he was reading one. “What a delicious thing reading is—not to be you any more but to flow through the whole universe you’re reading about...” etc., etc.
Compare this, in fact, to the rapt exchange of platitudes between Léon and Emma on the night of their first meeting, at dinner at the Lion d’Or. “‘...is there anything better, really, than sitting by the fire with a book while the wind beats on your window panes and the lamp is burning?’ ‘Isn’t it so?’ she said, fixing him with her large black eyes wide open. ‘One forgets everything,’ he continued. ‘The hours go by. Without leaving your chair you stroll through imagined landscapes as if they were real, and your thoughts interweave with the story, lingering over details or leaping ahead with the plot. Your imagination confuses itself with the characters, and it seems as if it were your own heart beating inside their clothes.’ ‘How true! How true!’ she said.”
The threadbare magic carpet, evidently, is shared by author and reader, who are both escaping from the mean provincial life close at hand. Yet Madame Bovary is one of a series of novels—including Don Quixote and Northanger Abbey—that illustrate the evil effects of reading. All reading, in the case of Madame Bovary, not simply the reading of romances. The books Emma fed on were not pure trash, by any means; in the convent she had read Chateaubriand; as a girl on the farm, she read Paul et Virginie. The best sellers she liked were of varying quality: Eugène Sue, Balzac, George Sand, and Walter Scott. She tried to improve her mind with history and philosophy, starting one “deep” book after another and leaving them all unfinished. Reading was undermining her health, according to her mother-in-law, who thought the thing to do was to stop her subscription to the lending library in Rouen. It ought to be against the law, declared the old lady, for circulating libraries to supply people with novels and books against religion, that mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. Flaubert is making fun of Madame Bovary, Senior, and yet he too felt that Emma’s reading was unhealthy. And for the kind of reason her mother-in-law would give: books put ideas in Emma’s head. It is characteristic of Flaubert that his own notions, in the mouths of his characters, are turned into desolate echoes—into clichés.
Léon too is addicted to books, as the passage cited shows. He prefers poetry. But it is not only the young people in Madame Bovary who are glamorized by the printed page. Monsieur Homais is another illustration of the evil effects of reading. He offers Emma the use of his library, which contains, as he says, “the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the Echo des Feuilletons.” These authors have addled his head with ideas. And Monsieur Homais’ ideas are dangerous, literally so; not just in the sense Madame Bovary, Senior, meant. An idea invading Monsieur Homais’ brain is responsible for Charles’ operation on the deformed Hippolyte. Monsieur Homais had read an article on a new method for curing club foot and he was immediately eager that Charles should try it; in his druggist mind there was a typical confusion between humanitarian motives and a Chamber of Commerce zeal. The operation is guaranteed to put Yonville l’Abbaye on the map. He will write it up himself for a Rouen paper. As he tells Charles, “an article in the paper gets around. People talk about it. It ends by snowballing.” This snowballing is precisely what is happening, with horrible consequences yet to come. Thanks to an article in the press, Hippolyte will lose his leg.
The diffusion of ideas in the innocent countryside is the plot of Madame Bovary. When the book ran serially, Flaubert’s editors, who were extremely stupid, wanted to cut the club-foot episode: it was unpleasant, they said, and contributed nothing to the story. Flaubert insisted; he regarded it as essential to the book. As it is. This is the point where Monsieur Homais interlocks with Emma and her story; elsewhere he only talks and appears busy. True, Emma gets the arsenic from his “Capernaum”—a ridiculous name for his inner sanctum based on the transubstantiation controversy—but this is not really the druggist’s fault. He is only an accessory. But when it comes to the operation Monsieur Homais is the creative genius; it is his hideous brain child, and Charles is his instrument. Up to the time of the operation, Monsieur Homais could appear as mere comic relief or prosaic contrast. But with the operation the affinity between apparent opposites—the romantic dreamer and the “man of science”—becomes clear. Monsieur Homais is not just Emma’s foil; he is her alter ego.
For the first time, they see eye to eye; they are a team pulling together to persuade Charles to do the operation and for the same reason: a thirst for fame. And both, in their infatuation with a dream, have lost sight of the reality in front of them, which is Charles. He surrenders to the dazzling temptation they hold out to him. What is it, exactly? The temptation to be something other than what he is, a slow, cautious, uncertain practitioner who is terrified to set a simple fracture. Charles has got nothing out of books; he cannot even stay awake after dinner to peruse a medical text. He accepts his ignorance innocently as his lot in life and takes precautions to do as little harm as possible; his pathos as a doctor is that he is aware of being a potential hazard to his patients. Yet when Hippolyte’s club foot is offered him, he falls, like Adam, urged on by the woman and the serpent. After the operation, Charles’ limitations are made public, and the touching hope he had, of securing Emma’s love by being different from what he is, is lost to both of them. This is the turning-point of the book. Emma has met resistance in Charles, the resistance of inert reality to her desire to make it over, as she can change the paper in her parlor. In furious disgust she resumes her relations with Rodolphe, and from then on her extravagances have a hysterical aim—revenge on Charles for his inability to be papered over.
Both Emma and Monsieur Homais regard themselves as confined to a sphere too small for their endowments—hers in sensibility, his in sense. Emma takes flight into the country, where the château is, into the town, with its shops and “culture.” Monsieur Homais’ solution is to inflate the village he lives in by his own self-importance and by judicious publicity. It must be remembered that if Emma is a reader, Monsieur Homais is not only a reader but a writer—the local correspondent of the Fanal de Rouen. That is, they represent the passive and the active side of the same vice. No local event has happened for Monsieur Homais till he has cast it into an epic fiction to be sent off to his paper; for Emma, less fertile, nothing happens in Yonville l’Abbaye by definition.
Emma surely felt that she had nothing in common with the grotesque pock-marked druggist in his velvet cap with the gold tassel; he was the antithesis of refinement. But Monsieur Homais was attracted to her and sensed a kindred spirit. He expressed this in his own way: “She’s a woman of great parts who wouldn’t be out of place in a sub-prefecture.” Homais is a textbook case of the Art of Sinking in prose, and this is the comic side of his hobbled ambitions: he would like to be a modern Hippocrates, but he is a druggist—halfway between a cook and a doctor. He is bursting with recipes; he has a recipe for everything. At the same time, he would like to turn his laboratory, which is a kind of kitchen, into a consulting-room; he has been in trouble with the authorities for playing doctor—practicing medicine without a license.
Emma’s voluptuous dreams in coarser form have tickled the druggist’s thoughts. He takes a fatherly interest in Léon, his lodger, seeing the notary’s clerk as a younger self and imagining on his behalf a wild student life in Paris, with actresses, masked balls, champagne, and possibly a love affair with a great lady of the Faubourg St. Germain. He is dreaming à la Emma, but aloud, and he lends his dream, as it were, with a show of philanthropy to Léon. This is double vicariousness. In practice, Monsieur Homais’ dissipations are more thrifty. When he goes to Rouen for an outing, he insists that Léon accompany him to visit a certain Bridoux, an apothecary who has a remarkable dog that goes into convulsions at the sight of a snuffbox. The unwilling clerk is seduced by Monsieur Homais’ excitement into witnessing this performance, which is evidently the pharmacist’s equivalent for a visit to a house of ill fame; and Léon, having yielded like a voyeur to his curiosity, knows he is committing an infidelity to Emma, who is waiting impatiently in “their” hotel room for him. In fact, between Emma and Homais, there has always been a subtle rivalry for Léon, and this betrayal is the first sign that she is losing. Léon is turning into a bourgeois; soon he will give up the flute and poetry, get a promotion, and settle down. As Léon is swallowed by the middle class, Monsieur Homais emerges. By the end of the novel, he has published a book, taken up smoking, like an artist, and bought two Pompadour statuettes for his drawing-room.
Bridoux’s dog is an evil portent for Emma; he has been heard before, offstage, at another critical juncture, when Emma falls ill of brain fever, having received the “fatal” note from Rodolphe in a basket of apricots. Homais, to whom love is unknown, blames the smell of the apricots and is reminded of Bridoux’s dog, another allergic subject. For Yonville l’Abbaye grief and loss only release a spate of anecdotes; similar instances are recalled, to reduce whatever has happened to its lowest common denominator. This occurs on the very first night the Bovarys arrive in Yonville; Emma’s little greyhound has jumped out of the coach coming from Tostes, and Lheureux, the draper, her nemesis-to-be, tries to console her with examples of lost and strayed dogs who found their masters after a lapse of years. Why, he has heard of one that came all the way back from Constantinople to Paris. And another that did fifty leagues as the crow flies and swam four rivers. And his own father had a poodle that jumped up on him one night on the street, after twelve years’ absence. These wondrous animals, almost human, you might say, are a yipping chorus of welcome to Yonville l’Abbaye, where everything has a parallel that befell someone’s cousin, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Emma’s boredom and her recklessness distinguish her from Monsieur Homais, who is a coward and who creates boredom around him without suffering it himself. Yet Emma is tiresome too, at least to her lovers, and she would have been tiresome to Flaubert in real life, as he well knew, because her boredom is a silly copy of his own, and she is never more conventional and tedious than when she is decrying convention. She and Léon agree that membership in a circulating library is a necessity if you have to live in the provinces (he also has a music subscription), and they are both wholly dependent on this typical bourgeois institution. The lending library is a central metaphor of Madame Bovary because it is the inexhaustible source of idées reçues—borrowed ideas and stock sentiments which circulate tritely among the population.
But for Flaubert all ideas become trite as soon as somebody expresses them. This applies indifferently to good ideas and bad. He makes no distinction. For him, the lending library is an image of civilization itself. Ideas and feelings as well get more and more soiled and grubby, like library books, as they pass from hand to hand. The curé’s greasy thumbprint on Christian doctrine is just as repulsive as Monsieur Homais’ coffee stain on the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The pursuit of originality is as pathetic as Emma’s decorating efforts. Similarly with the quality called sincerity. If it exists, it is inarticulate, pre-verbal, dumb as an ox or as the old peasant woman who is awarded a medal at the agricultural fair for fifty years of meritorious service. The speech of presentation annihilates fifty years of merit—a life—in a flash by turning it into words.
From his own point of view, this renders Flaubert’s efforts in his study as unavailing as Emma’s quest for a love that will live up to her solitary dreams. Words, like lovers, have the power of lying, and they also, like lovers, have a habit of repeating themselves, since language is finite. Flaubert’s horror of repetition in writing (which has been converted into the dogma that you must never use the same word, above all the same adjective, twice on a page) reflects his horror of repetition in life. Involuntary repetition is banality. What remains doubtful, though, is whether banality is a property of life or a property of language or both. In Emma’s eyes, it is life that is impoverished and reality that is banal, reality being symbolized for her by Charles. But Charles is not banal; Rodolphe and Léon are banal, and it is exactly their banality that attracts her.
Rodolphe is superior to Léon, in that his triteness is a calculation. An accomplished comedian, he is not disturbed, at the agricultural fair, by the drone of the voice awarding money prizes for animal flesh, manure, and flax, while he pours his passionate platitudes into Emma’s fluttered ears. “Tell me, why have we known each other, we two? What chance has willed it?” His view of Emma is the same as the judge’s view of a merino ram. She is flesh, with all its frailties, and he is putting her through her paces, noting her points. Yet Rodolphe is trite beyond his intention. He is wedded to a stock idea of himself as a sensual brute that prevents him from noticing that he actually cares for Emma. His recipes for seduction, like the pomade he uses on his hair, might have been made for him by a pharmacist’s formula, and the fact that they work provides him with a ready-made disillusionment. Since he knows that “eternal love” is a cliché, he is prepared to break with Emma as a matter of course and he drops a manufactured tear on his letter of adieu, annoyed by a vague sensation that he does not recognize as grief. As for Léon, he is too cowardly to let himself see that his fine sentiments are platitudes; he deceives himself in the opposite way from Rodolphe: Rodolphe feels something and convinces himself that it is nothing, while Léon feels nothing and dares not acknowledge it, even in secrecy. His very sensuality is timid and short-lived; his clerkly nature passively takes Emma’s dictation.
Emma does not see the difference. She is disappointed in both her lovers and in “love” itself. Her principal emotions are jealousy and possessiveness, which represent the strong, almost angry movement of her will. In other words, she is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is only remarkable for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling. Emma is trite; what happens to her is trite. Her story does not hold a single surprise for the reader, who can say at every stage, “I felt it coming.” Her end is inevitable, but not as a classic doom, which is perceived as inexorable only when it is complete. It is inevitable because it is ordinary. Anyone could have prophesied what would become of Emma—her mother-in-law, for instance. It did not need a Tiresias. If you compare her story with that of Anna Karenina, you are aware of the pathos of Emma’s. Anna is never pathetic; she is tragic, and what happens to her, up to the very end, is always surprising, for real passions and moral strivings are at work, which have the power of “making it new.” In this her story is distinct from an ordinary society scandal of the period. Nor could any ordinary society Cassandra have forecast Anna’s fate. “He will get tired of her and leave her. You wait,” they would have said, of Vronsky. He did not. But Rodolphe could have been counted on to drop Emma, and Léon to grow frightened of her and bored.
Where destiny is no more than average probability, it appears inescapable in a peculiarly depressing way. This is because any element in it can be replaced by a substitute without changing the outcome; e.g., if Rodolphe had not materialized, Emma would have found someone else. But if Anna had not met Vronsky on the train, she might still be married to Karenin. Vronsky is necessary, while Rodolphe and Léon are interchangeable parts in a machine that is engaged in mass production of human fates. Madame Bovary is often called the first modern novel, and this is true, not because of any technical innovations Flaubert made (his counterpoint, his style indirect libre) but because it is the first novel to deal with what is now called mass culture. Emma did not have television, and Félicité did not read comic books in the kitchen, but the phenomenon of seepage from the “media” was already present in every Yonville l’Abbaye, and Flaubert was the first to note it.
Mass culture in Madame Bovary means the circulating library and the Fanal de Rouen and the cactus plants Léon and Emma tend at opposite windows, having read about them in a novel that has made cactuses all the rage. It means poor Charles’ phrenological head—a thoughtful attention paid him by Léon—and the pious reading matter the curé gives Emma as a substitute for “bad” books. It means the neo-classic town hall, with its peristyle, and the tax collector at his lathe, an early form of do-it-yourself. One of the last visions Emma has of the world she is leaving is the tax collector in his garret pursuing his senseless hobby, turning out little wooden imitations of ivory curios, themselves no doubt imitations produced in series in the Orient for export. She has run to Binet’s attic from the notary’s dining-room, which has simulated-oak wallpaper, stained-glass insets in the windowpanes, a huge cactus, a “niche,” and reproductions of Steuben’s “Esmeralda” and Schopin’s “Potiphar.” Alas, it is like Emma to stop, in her last hours of life, to envy the notary. “That’s the dining-room I ought to have,” she says to herself. To her, this horrible room is the height of good taste, but the blunder does not just prove she had bad taste. If the notary had had reproductions of the “Sistine Madonna” and the “Mona Lisa,” she would have been smitten with envy too. And she would have been right not to distinguish, for in the notary’s interior any reproduction would have the same value, that of a trophy, like a stuffed stag’s head. This is the achievement of mass-produced and mass-marketed culture.
In Emma’s day, mass-produced culture had not yet reached the masses; it was still a bourgeois affair and mixed up, characteristically, with a notion of taste and discrimination—a notion that persists in advertising. Rodolphe in his château would be a perfect photographic model for whiskey or tobacco. Emma’s “tragedy” from her own point of view is her lack of purchasing power, and a critical observer might say that the notary’s dining-room simply spelled out the word “money” to her. Yet it is not as simple as that; if it were, Emma’s head would be set straighter on her shoulders. What has happened to her and her spiritual sisters is that simulated-oak wallpaper has become itself a kind of money inexpressible in terms of its actual cost per roll. Worse, ideas and sentiments, like wallpaper, have become a kind of money too and they share with money the quality of abstractness, which allows them to be exchanged. It is their use as coins that has made them trite—worn and rubbed—and at the same time indistinguishable from each other except in terms of currency fluctuation. The banalities exchanged between Léon and Emma at their first meeting (“And what music do you prefer?” “Oh, German music, which makes you dream”) are simply coins; money in the usual sense is not at issue here, since both these young people are poor; they are alluding, through those coins, to their inner riches.
The same with Rodolphe and Emma; the same with nearly the whole cast of characters. A meeting between strangers in Madame Bovary inevitably produces a golden shower of platitudes. This shower of platitudes is as mechanical as the droning action of the tax collector’s lathe. It appears to be beyond human control; no one is responsible and no one can stop it. There is a terrible scene in the middle of the novel where Emma appeals to God, in the person of the curé, to put an end to the repetitive meaninglessness of her life. God is preoccupied and inattentive, and as she moves away from the church, she hears the village boys reciting their catechism. “What is a Christian?” “He who being baptized...baptized...baptized...” The answer is lost in an echo that reverberates emptily through the village. Yet the question, although intoned by rote, is a genuine one—the fundamental question of the book—for a Christian means simply a soul here. It is Emma’s demand—“What am I?”—coming back at her in ontological form, and there is no reply.
If this were all, Madame Bovary would be a nihilistic satire or howl of despair emanating from the novelist’s study. But there is a sort of tongue-tied answer. That is Charles Bovary. Without Charles, Emma would be the moral void that her fatuous conversation and actions disclose. Charles, in a novelistic sense, is her redeemer. To her husband, she is sacred, and this profound and simple emotion is contagious.
He is stupid, a peasant, as she calls him, almost a devoted animal, clumsy, a dupe. His broad back looks to her like a platitude. He has small eyes; he snores. Until she reformed him, he used to wear a nightcap. Weeping beneath the phrenological head, he is nearly ridiculous. He is nearly ridiculous at the opera (she has taken him to hear Lucia di Lammermoor) when he complains that the music is keeping him from hearing the words. “I like to know where I am,” he explains, though he, of all people, does not know where he is, in the worldly way of knowing what is going on under his nose. His next blunder, at the opera, is to spill a glass of orgeat down the back of a cotton spinner’s wife. He has no imagination, Emma thinks, no “soul.” When they find the green silk cigar case that must belong to the vicomte, on the way home from the ball at Vaubyessard, Charles’ only reaction is to note that it contains two smokable cigars.
Yet this provincial, this philistine is the only real romantic in the novel—he and the boy Justin, Monsieur Homais’ downtrodden apprentice, who dreams over Emma’s fichus and underdrawers while Félicité irons in the kitchen. These two, the man and the boy, despised and rejected, are capable of “eternal love.” Justin lets Emma have her death (the arsenic) because he cannot refuse her, just as Charles lets her have her every desire. The boy’s passion drives him to books, instead of the other way around: Monsieur Homais catches him reading a book on “Married Love,” with illustrations. Justin is only a child and he weeps like a child on Emma’s grave. Charles is a man, a provider, and he has a true man’s solicitude for the weaker creature. He sheds tears when he sees Emma eat her first bread and jam after her brain fever. This heavy, maladroit man is a person of the utmost delicacy of feeling. If he is easy to deceive, it is because his mind is pure. It never enters his head that Emma can be anything but good.
He first meets her in the kitchen of her father’s farmhouse. He has been waked up at night to go set Farmer Rouault’s leg, in a scene reminiscent of a genre painting: “Fetching the Doctor.” A succession of genre scenes follows that evoke the Dutch masters of light—Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch: Emma making the bandage, pricking her fingers with the needle and putting them into her mouth to suck while the doctor watches; Emma in the kitchen sewing a white stocking, darting her tongue into a liqueur glass of curaçao; Emma in the farmyard under a silk parasol. In the big kitchen Charles’ senses are heated as she cools her cheek against her palm and her palm against the great andirons, and his mind is buzzing, like the flies crawling up the empty cider glasses, as he looks at her bare shoulders with little drops of sweat on them. He is a man, and she is a young lady; his bewilderment and bewitchment arise from this fusion of the sensual and the sacred. For him, marriage with Emma is a sacrament, and the reader never sees him in the act of love with her, as though Charles, ever tactful, reverently drew the bed curtains.
Why did she marry him? Flaubert does not really say. “To get away from the farm” is not enough. Would she have married Monsieur Homais if he had come courting? There are a number of questions about Emma’s inner life that Flaubert does not ask. But thanks to Charles, the answer does not matter, because to him the whole thing is a mystery, and like the mysteries of faith to be accepted with holy joy and not puzzled over. For Charles, Emma is a mystery from start to finish. The fact that she ministers to his comfort, prepares charming little dishes, takes care of his house and his patients’ accounts, is part of the ineffable mystery of her sharing his bed. The reader is persuaded by Charles’ unquestioning faith, to the point where Emma’s little gewgaws—her watch charms, her monocle, her ivory workbox, the blue glass vases on her mantelpiece, her silver-gilt thimble—partake of her seductiveness. More than that, these acquisitions, seen through Charles’ vision, do just what an advertiser would promise: they give Emma value. Thus Charles is not only Emma’s dupe but also the dupe of commerce. And yet it works; the reader is convinced that Emma is somehow better than, say, Madame Homais—which is not true.
Through Charles, Emma acquires poetry. But he could not possibly put into words what she means to him, and if he could have articulated a thought on the subject, would have declared that she had brought poetry into his life. This is so. There was no poetry with his first wife, the widow. Emma’s beauty, of course, is a fact of her nature, and Charles has responded to it with worship, which is what beauty—a mystery—deserves. This explains why Charles, though quite deceived by Emma’s character, is not a fool; he has recognized something in her about which he cannot be deceived.
Charles, like Farmer Rouault, is dumbly rooted in the organic world, where things speak in a simple sign language. A turkey delivered to the doctor says “Thank you” every year for a cure, like a votive offering in church, and two horses in the stable say that business is doing well. Flaubert is not sentimental about the peasantry, yet he prefers Nature and those who live with her and come to resemble her—as old couples come to resemble each other—to the commercial people of the town and the vulgar aristocrats of the châteaus, toward whose condition the tradespeople are aspiring. The peasants still have the virtue of concreteness, and their association with the soil and its products guarantees that they are largely, so to speak, home-made. Emma brings her freshness from the cider-presses of the farm, which she hates.
The country people in general are at a kind of halfway stage in the process of evolution from the animal kingdom to Monsieur Homais. The farm men who come to Emma’s wedding are seen by the author as collections of strange, out-of-date clothes hung on frames of flesh and bones—tailcoats and shooting jackets and cutaways and stiff shirts, reeking of history and doubtless of camphor, that have been kept in the wardrobe all year round and issue forth only to go to weddings and funerals, as if by themselves. These grotesque animated garments, each with a strong personality, have as absurd a relation to their owners as the queer cap Charles wears on his first day at school. The new cap, which is like a recapitulation of the history of headgear, is an uncomfortable ill-fitting false self donned for a special occasion—Charles’ introduction to civilization, learning, book culture. The country boy does not know what to do with the terrible cap, any more than how to give his full name, which he pronounces in a queer way, as though it too were extraneous to him, a humiliation that has been stuck to him and that he cannot get rid of, just as he cannot put the cap down. A name is a label. Witness the penmanship flourishes of Monsieur Homais’ names for his children: Napoleon, Franklin, Athalie...
Many novels begin with the hero’s first day in school, and Charles is the hero of the book that, characteristically for him, bears someone else’s name. Madame Bovary starts with his appearance among his jeering schoolfellows and ends with his death. Charles is docile. It does not occur to him to rebel. His mother, his teachers, his schoolmates, and finally the widow, make a citizen of him. They equip him with a profession, for which he is totally unfitted but which he wears, like the cap he has been given, mildly and without protest. He did not choose to be a doctor; he did not choose his name; he did not choose the widow. The only thing in life he chooses is Emma. She is his first and last piece of self-expression. Or not quite the last. When she is taken away from him, his reverence and gratitude to the universe turn to blasphemy. “I hate your God!” he bursts out to the curé, who is trying to console him with commonplaces. “Still the spirit of rebellion,” the priest answers, with an ecclesiastical sigh.
Now at first glance this appears to be an irony, since Charles has never rebelled until that moment against anything, let alone God. But Flaubert’s ironies are deceptive, and what sounds like an irony is often the simple truth, making a double irony. The priest is right. From the very beginning, Charles has been an obstinate example of passive resistance to the forces of the time and the milieu. A proof of this is that, in all his days, he pronounces only one platitude. His love for Emma is the deepest sign of that obstination. He loves her in the teeth of circumstance, opinion, prudent self-interest, in the teeth even of Emma herself.
This passive resistance of Charles’, taking the form of a love of beauty, seems to come from nowhere. There is nothing in Charles’ history to explain it: a drunken father, a dissatisfied mother, a poor education, broken off for lack of money. Add to this a very middling I.Q. No program for human improvement could be predicated on Charles’ mute revolt against organized society. He is a sheer accident, nothing less than a placid miracle occurring among the notaries and tradesmen, the dyers and spinners of the textile city of Rouen, where he hankers, uncomplaining, for his country home, which was no arcadia either. He is a revelation, and at the same time his whole effort is to escape notice, to hide in his fleshly envelope like an animal in its burrow. Moreover, his goodness (for that is what it amounts to) has no practical utility and will leave no trace behind it. As a husband, he is a social handicap to Emma, and his mild deference probably contributes to her downfall; a harsher man might have curbed her extravagances, so that she would not have felt obliged to commit suicide. After his death his little girl is sent to work as a child-laborer in a cotton mill; he has not even been able to protect his young. His predecessor, a Pole (perhaps another romantic; he “decamped” to avoid his creditors), whose practice and house he moved into at least left behind the bower he constructed to drink beer in on summer evenings, which in Emma’s day was shaded by clematis and climbing nasturtiums. But the only reminder of himself Charles leaves in Yonville l’Abbaye is Hippolyte’s stump and two artificial legs, one for best—bought by Emma—and one for everyday. Was he drawn from life? A little of him, including his first wife, the widow, may have been borrowed from Eugène Delamare. There may be reminiscences of a schoolmate, especially the cap. All that can be said is that Charles Bovary, wherever he came from, dawning in a vision or patiently constructed out of treasured bits and pieces of reality, was cherished by his creator as a stubborn possibility that cannot be ruled out even from a pessimistic view of the march of events.
Spring, 1964
* This account of the sources of Madame Bovary has been revised, thanks to criticism administered by Francis Steegmuller when the essay first appeared. As far as the Delamares’ are concerned, my present documentation comes mainly from Géraud Venzac, Au pays de Madame Bovary.