Madame Bovary begins and ends not with the heroine herself but with the story of Charles Bovary, Emma’s future husband. This neat framing device situates her within the confines of marriage to a man who is physically unattractive and congenitally unimaginative. As a schoolboy, he wears a bizarre cap, “one of those sorry objects, whose mute ugliness has depths of expression, like the face of an imbecile.”3 Whew! Charles is an ugly duckling who will always remain an ugly duckling. As a newly minted officier de santé—a health officer or second-class doctor—he is married off by his parents to a financially comfortable widow twice his age and is destined for a mundane life until he meets Emma. Seeing her for the first time at her family’s farm, where Charles has come to set her father’s fractured leg, he is struck by “the whiteness of her fingernails” and “her full lips, which she had a habit of biting in her moments of silence.” These expressions of refinement and sensuality, clues to her character, draw Charles back to the farm after his first wife’s death and inspire him to ask for Emma’s hand.
Charles and Emma’s two-day country wedding begins with a realistic picture of guests arriving in carriages, one-horse chaises, two-wheeled cars, open gigs, vans, wagons, and carts, followed by a description of farming people in their best attire—women with bonnets, fichus, and gold watch chains; men with frock coats, tailcoats, and long jackets. Then a lyrical portrayal of the procession, “united like a single colorful scarf, undulating over the countryside,” zeroes in on the fiddler with his beribboned violin leading the married couple, relatives, friends, and children to the town hall. After the ceremony, food was laid out under the cart shed, and the guests ate copiously until night. The pièce de résistance was a wedding cake in the form of a temple with a small Cupid balanced in a chocolate swing. Emma would have preferred a midnight wedding with torches, but such romantic ideas had been dismissed in favor of an old-fashioned celebration suitable for country folk. After the couple had retired for the night, they were not spared some of the usual wedding tricks: a fishmonger squirted water through the keyhole of their bedroom. The next day, Charles looked elated, whereas the bride gave nothing away.
This wedding scene, like a painting by Flaubert’s contemporary Courbet, aimed at representing life as one saw it with one’s eyes and heard it with one’s ears. Of course, Flaubert, like Courbet and any other major artist, shaped external reality according to an inner vision. Forget grottos and mountains where lovers experience romantic transports. Instead, the author gave us an irreverent picture of love and marriage that often bordered on satire.
It is only after Emma settles into her new home that we begin to know her from the inside. We learn that she had attended a convent school, where she had enjoyed the sensual aspects of the church service: “the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the fonts, and the glow of the candles.” She had developed a cult for the beheaded Scottish queen, Mary Stuart, and other famous women like Joan of Arc, Héloïse, and Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII. Some role models! She read the French poetry of Lamartine and the English novels of Walter Scott, which ill prepared her for her future role as the wife of a modest country doctor. Little wonder that she expected more of life than her husband’s coarse manners and tiresome conversation, “flat as a sidewalk.” Before long Emma was asking herself: “Oh, dear God! Why did I ever marry?”
Subsequently her romantic imagination became increasingly insistent. Disillusioned by marriage and her domestic surroundings, Emma sought consolation by conjuring up what might have been. She tried to imagine events that could have led to a different husband and a different life. Emma’s dissatisfaction with her present situation and her melancholy yearning for unknown romantic fulfillment have come to be called “bovarism.”
At this point in the novel, an extraordinary event occurs: Emma and Charles are invited to a ball by a local marquis! The ball at Vaubyessard introduces Emma to the aristocratic luxury she had dreamed of. This is what she wants. Everything in the château where they spend the night seems designed to produce a fairy-tale romance, where superior men and women with porcelain skin and fine clothes move about in an aura of satiated pleasure. Emma takes delight in every elegant detail—the flowers and furniture, food and wines, and especially the cotillion that begins at three in the morning. Though she does not know how to waltz, she finds herself in the arms of a knowledgeable viscount, who whirls her around the ballroom at an ecstatic pace.
The aristocratic ball preceded by the farm wedding and followed later in the book by an agricultural fair offer a panoramic view of nineteenth-century provincial society. The town of Yonville-l’Abbaye, where most of the action takes place, resembles villages Flaubert knew personally in the region around his family home near Rouen. Whereas Emma’s roots are among the peasant farmers and petits bourgeois who gather together for her wedding and the agricultural fair, her romantic head is filled with images of the local nobility. Love, as she fashions it, must come with the luxuries found in a class above her own. These material cravings are part and parcel of her adulterous liaisons and will trigger her eventual downfall.
As we might expect, adultery is the highway running through this novel. We are never far from it in French literature, be it in the twelfth century or the nineteenth. Madame Bovary will become synonymous with the adulteress in France, on a par with Anna Karenina a generation later in Russia. But what a poor, sad adulteress Emma becomes in the hands of Flaubert. Look how he mocks her in her first conversation with the notary’s clerk, Léon Depuis.
“I think there is nothing as wonderful as a sunset,” she said, “especially at the seaside.”
“Oh, I love the sea!” said Monsieur Léon.
“And doesn’t it seem to you,” replied Madame Bovary, “that one’s spirit roams more freely over that limitless expanse, and that contemplating it elevates the soul and gives one glimpses of the infinite, and the ideal?”
“It is the same with mountainous scenery,” Léon said.
Here we see the cherished ideals of the romantics reduced to banal clichés. Flaubert spares no one, not the would-be lovers, not the village priest, not the local pharmacist.
The notary’s assistant and the doctor’s wife are both too shy and too inexperienced to carry their longings beyond a stage of platonic attraction, at least in the first part of the novel. Such is not the case for Rodolphe Boulanger, a practiced seducer, wealthy and handsome, with an estate on the outskirts of town. Rodolphe sees immediately that Emma is bored by her husband and that she yearns for romance. He says to himself: “She’s gasping for love like a carp for water on a kitchen table. With three pretty compliments, that one would adore me, I’m sure of it! It would be lovely! Charming! . . . Yes, but how to get rid of the woman afterward?” Those sentences sum up Rodolphe’s part of the story: he is successful in seducing her with little more than flowery compliments and expert wiles. The affair is lovely, charming, and delicious while it lasts. And he ultimately gets rid of her with the same cynical ease he had enjoyed when wooing her in the first place.
Emma’s part of the story runs deeper. Here at last is the man she had dreamed of, here at last is the man who will save her from a life of monotonous despair. What could be more romantic than the personality he invents expressly for her? He styles himself as an advocate of passion and an enemy of conventional duty. “Our duty is to feel what is great, to cherish what is beautiful.” He and she were obviously preordained for each other. “Why did we meet? What chance decreed it? It must be that, like two rivers flowing across the intervening distance and converging, our particular inclinations impelled us toward each other.” If this were a romantic novel, such fatal affinities might seem plausible. Instead, because the reader has been clued in to Rodolphe’s intentions, there is no way we can believe he is sincere. The only person duped by his parody of the romantic hero is Emma Bovary.
After she has succumbed to Rodolphe’s advances, she says to herself again and again
: “I have a lover! A lover!” She recognizes herself among the “lyrical throng of adulterous women” who were the heroines of the books she had read. Those women, once the instigators of Emma’s romantic fantasies, now welcome her into their fold with sisterly voices.
Emma’s love affair with Rodolphe is played out against the everydayness of provincial life, with its petty triumphs and minor tragedies. The village priest, the secular pharmacist, the greedy merchant enter into Emma’s story as necessary foils for her romantic sensibility. One of these secondary characters, the merchant Lheureux, will contribute substantially to her ultimate demise by abetting her appetite for luxury and drawing her into catastrophic debt.
Emma and Rodolphe make the most of their two-year affair. It comes with all the pleasures of the flesh, all the conventional expressions of love, and all the convoluted deceit that adultery requires. Charles, the consecrated cuckold, makes his daily rounds like a horse with blinders. He sees nothing beyond his good fortune in having a beautiful wife and an adorable daughter.
This “idyllic” period comes to an end when Emma, emotionally exhausted by her duplicitous life, persuades Rodolphe to run off with her. Though he pretends to acquiesce to her plan, in the end he reneges and writes her a letter that begins: “Be brave, Emma! Be brave! I don’t want to ruin your life.” When Emma receives his farewell letter hidden in the bottom of a basket of apricots and then sees Rodolphe’s carriage leaving for Rouen without her, she falls into a delirious state that lasts for forty-three days. Ever-faithful Charles abandons his work to be constantly at her bedside, and after several months, she begins to recuperate. Will Emma have learned her lesson? Of course not.
Charles takes Emma to the opera in Rouen in the belief that a diversion will do her good. Settled into her box, she gives herself over to Lucie de Lammermoor sung by the famous tenor Lagardy. Her recollection of the novel by Walter Scott, on which the opera is based, makes it easier for her to follow the libretto, and soon she is bathed once more in the vapors of romantic love. If only she had found a man like Lagardy!
With him she would have traveled through all the kingdoms of Europe, from capital to capital, sharing his troubles and his triumphs . . . she wanted to run into his arms, take refuge in his strength, cry out to him: “Lift me up, take me away, let us go away! All my passion and all my dreams are yours, yours alone.”
Do women think like this anymore in the twenty-first century? Did they ever think like this? We are tempted to attribute Emma’s absurd longings to Flaubert’s masculinist view of what women want, but is that fair? Haven’t we seen from Julie de Lespinasse that some women did indeed derive their entire self-worth from possessing a man’s love, and some women probably still do.
What’s more, Flaubert could draw upon aspects of his mistress, Louise Colet, a dyed-in-the-wool romantic endowed with the tempestuous fervor of her species. Senior to Flaubert by eleven years, she was clearly the one who loved more in their relationship. Some details in Madame Bovary can be traced directly to Colet, such as the cigar case with the motto Amor nel cor that she gave Flaubert at the beginning of their liaison and which Emma offers Rodolphe in the novel.
Like her contemporary George Sand, Colet had many lovers, including some of the choice men of her era—the philosopher Victor Cousin, the poet Alfred de Vigny, and even Sand’s castoff, Alfred de Musset. And like Sand, she was a prolific writer who worked tirelessly to provide for herself and her daughter, with only a nominal husband and a stingy ex-lover (Victor Cousin) to help with her expenses. Flaubert, reclusively writing away at Croisset, loved Colet in his fashion—that is, he saw her rarely, made love avidly, wrote her regularly, criticized her work extensively, described his own literary process, and ended his relationship with Colet twice over an eight-year period, the second time for good. His remarkable letters to her contain treasured information about Flaubert as author and lover, and a vivid picture of Colet through his eyes.
Louise Colet was not the original source for Emma Bovary. That distinction belonged to a woman named Delphine Delamare, the wife of a country doctor from the Norman town of Ry and the mother of one child, a daughter. She, too, had acquired debts resulting from adulterous affairs and had committed suicide before the age of thirty. Flaubert knew about her only from the local newspapers. He took from Delamare, as he did from Colet and several other women, the raw materials he needed to create his hapless heroine.
It was at the opera that Emma Bovary was reunited with Léon Dupuis. Working for a notary practice in Rouen, he had gained considerable experience since his mute love for Emma several years earlier and was now in a position to make her his mistress. The scene in which their desires are consummated is one of the stylistic glories of all literature. First, they spend two hours touring the cathedral of Rouen under the guidance of an officious verger. Then, when Léon can stand it no longer, he sends for a cab and sequesters Emma for the longest city ride in Rouen’s history. The entire seduction scene is seen from outside the cab with its curtains drawn.
It went down the rue Grand-Pont, crossed the place des Arts, the quai Napoléon, and the Pont Neuf, and stopped short in front of the statue of Pierre Corneille.
“ ‘Keep going!’ ” said a voice issuing from the interior.
The carriage set off again and, gathering speed on the downward slope from the Carrefour La Fayette, came up to the railway station at a fast gallop.
“No! Straight on!” cried the same voice.
Three pages and five hours later, Emma emerged from the carriage, with her veil lowered over her face. This second affair, with a man less wealthy and less worldly than Rodolphe, may have been something of a comedown for Emma, but at least Léon was sincere in his love for her. They managed to meet every Thursday in Rouen under the pretense that she was taking music lessons.
Emma became bolder. In her hotel room with Léon, “She laughed, wept, sang, danced, sent for sorbets, insisted on smoking cigarettes, seemed to him extravagant, but adorable, splendid.” Now it was the woman taking the lead, rather than the man. “He did not know what reaction was driving her to plunge deeper and deeper, with her whole being, into the pursuit of pleasure. She was becoming irritable, greedy, and voluptuous.” Over time, Emma and Léon became disenchanted with one another. She saw him as “weak, ordinary, softer than a woman.” He became frightened at her excesses and tried to rebel against her dominance. She realized that “she was not happy and never had been.”
In addition to the disintegration of her love affair, the overnight trips to Rouen added to Emma’s indebtedness to Lheureux. The net of doom began its inexorable descent. However foolish she had been, however much we try to distance ourselves from Emma, it is impossible not to get caught up in her final tragedy. Flaubert himself suffered agonies when he described her suicide by arsenic.
With Madame Bovary, French love had traveled a long way from chivalric romance. Instead of the idealized passion shared by a knight and his lady, Flaubert offers a debasing bourgeois melodrama. Instead of the noble renunciation suffered by the Princess de Clèves, we are asked to witness the degradation of a lustful provincial. Instead of the airborne romanticism of Sand and Musset, we feel the sharp edge of Flaubert’s cutting knife. Who would ever believe in romantic love again?
The 1870 military victory of Prussia over France did not help the French recover their sense of identity as lovers. Indeed, until the last decade of the century, pessimistic portrayals of love dominated French thought. Flaubert’s disciple Guy de Maupassant offered glimpses into bizarre behavior hidden under a veneer of normalcy. In his short stories, which were to acquire a worldwide readership, love is never more than a sensual hunger seeking satisfaction. Men and women of various social strata—gentlemen and ladies, peasants, shopkeepers, government workers—war against each other with an elegance of style that belies their underlying primitive needs. Love affairs prove disastrous, and marriage offers no relief, since husbands tu
rn out to be either naïve cuckolds or brutal tyrants.
Even worse, Émile Zola’s novels between the 1860s and 1880s presented characters from the lowest levels of society—miners, factory workers, prostitutes, criminals—resembling animals in their mating habits. What Zola called “naturalism” was a pseudoscientific approach to society, part Darwinian, part Marxist, which saw hereditary degeneration everywhere. Love was subsumed into a kind of fertility cult—after all, the French (like the Germans) were obsessed with their declining birthrate. The best one could do was reproduce as frequently as possible. And yet, romantic love, like bulbs buried underground in the winter, was only waiting for the proper atmosphere to flower again.
CHAPTER TEN
Love in the Gay Nineties
Cyrano de Bergerac
I LOVE YOU, I’M CRAZY, I CAN’T GO ON ANY LONGER,
How the French Invented Love Page 20