Charles Bovary Quotes

La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue, et les idées de tout le monde y défilaient dans leur costume ordinaire, sans exciter d'émotion, de rire ou de rêverie

Charles went to kiss her shoulder. -Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.

Charles’ conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody’s ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant.

... la passion de Charles n'avait plus rien d'exorbitant. Ses expansions étaient devennues régulières; il l'embrassait à de certaines heures. C'était une habitude parmi les autres, et comme un dessert prévu d'avance, après la monotonie du dîner.

...but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house.

What exasperated her was that Charles seemed to have no notion of her torment. His conviction that he was making her happy struck her as impudent imbecility, his uxorious complacency as ingratitude.

Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel. A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.

The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know.

Charles's conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone's ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie. He had never been curious, he said, when he lived in Rouen, to go to the theater and see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and he could not explain to her, one day, a riding term she had come upon in a novel. But shouldn't a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries? Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him.

Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock.

Arribà a persuadir-se fàcilment que la passió de Charles no tenia res d'exorbitant. Les seves expansions havien esdevingut regulars;la besava a hores fixes.

His assets—inherited, not earned—had vanished. If the book had been brought to its end, the hopeless imbeciles Bouvard and Pécuchet would have logically sought refuge in death.

This man is a consummate writer, in line with that dictum of Thomas Mann’s: one for whom writing is especially hard.

Elle aurait voulu que ce nom de Bovary, qui était le sien, fût illustre, le voir étalé chez les libraires, répété dans les journaux, connu par toute la France. Mais Charles n’avait point d’ambition

Even at table she would bring her book, leafing through the pages while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Vicomte always recurred in her reading. She drew comparisons between him and the invented characters. But little by little the circle whose centre he occupied widened around him, and that halo of glory he wore, straying from his face, spread itself further off, to illuminate other dreams.

C’est ainsi, l’un près de l’autre, pendant que Charles et le pharmacien devisaient, qu’ils entrèrent dans une de ces vagues conversations où le hasard des phrases vous ramène toujours au centre fixe d’une sympathie commune.

not as world, but as surroundings; he experienced them the way one observes the fauna in a landscape, as dainty, odious, even repugnant and worthy of extermination; and the question should remain open as to how well he knew the members of his own class, and what sympathy he may have felt for them.

No tempo da sra. Dubuc, a velha senhora se sentia ainda como a preferida; mas, agora, o amor de Charles por Emma lhe parecia uma deserção de sua ternura, uma invasão do que lhe pertencia; e ela observava a felicidade do filho com um silêncio triste, como alguém arruinado olha, através da vidraça , pessoas à mesa em sua antiga casa.

Flaubert’s irony is hard, maybe even wicked, in any case profoundly unfair. Let us take a look at one of the most important figures from Madame Bovary, the apothecary Homais, and then proceed from his example. In him, bourgeois enlightenment, the heritage of our civilization, the indispensable fundament of every socialist utopia, finds itself cast into monstrous ridicule.

Şimdi ise bütün hayatını beraber geçireceği, taparcasına sevdiği güzel bir karısı vardı. Charles'ın nazarında evren, Emma'nın ipek etekliğinin etrafından ibaretti; onu kâfi derecede sevmiyor diye üzülüyor, onu göreceği geliyordu; hemen eve döner, yüreği çarpa çarpa merdivenleri çıkardı. Emma'yı odasında, kendine çekidüzen vermekle meşgul bulurdu; yavaşça yürüyerek girer, onu ensesinden öperdi. Kadın bir çığlık koparırdı.

Je ne vous en veux pas, dit-il. Rodolphe était resté muet. Et Charles, la tête dans ses deux mains, reprit d’une voix éteinte et avec l’accent résigné des douleurs infinies : – Non, je ne vous en veux plus ! Il ajouta même un grand mot, le seul qu’il ait jamais dit : – C’est la faute de la fatalité ! Rodolphe, qui avait conduit cette fatalité, le trouva bien débonnaire pour un homme dans sa situation, comique même, et un peu vil.

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, “She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.” The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument “whose strings buzzed,” and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue, et les idées de tout le monde y défilaient dans leur costume ordinaire, sans exciter d’émotion, de rire ou de rêverie. Il n’avait jamais été curieux, disait-il, pendant qu’il habitait Rouen, d’aller voir au théâtre les acteurs de Paris. Il ne savait ni nager, ni faire des armes, ni tirer le pistolet, et il ne put, un jour, lui expliquer un terme d’équitation qu’elle avait rencontré dans un roman.

Alors, elle se livra à des charités excessives. Elle cousait des habits pour les pauvres ; elle envoyait du bois aux femmes en couches ; et Charles, un jour en rentrant, trouva dans la cuisine trois vauriens attablés qui mangeaient un potage. Elle fit revenir à la maison sa petite fille, que son mari, durant sa maladie, avait renvoyée chez la nourrice. Elle voulut lui apprendre à lire ; Berthe avait beau pleurer, elle ne s’irritait plus. C’était un parti pris de résignation, une indulgence universelle. Son langage, à propos de tout, était plein d’expressions idéales. Elle disait à son enfant :

Ach, het is maar weinig, de dood!' dacht zij; 'ik ga wat slapen, en dan is alles uit!' Zij dronk een slok water en keerde zich naar de muur. Die afschuwelijke inktsmaak hield maar aan. 'Ik heb dorst!... O, wat heb ik een dorst!' zuchtte zij. 'Wat heb je toch?' vroeg Charles en reikte haar een glas aan. 'Niets!... Zet het raam open... Ik stik hier!' En zij kreeg plotseling zo'n aanval van misselijkheid dat zij nauwelijks tijd had om haar zakdoek onder haar kussen vandaan te halen. 'Neem hem mee!' zei ze haastig; 'gooi weg!' Hij stelde haar vragen; zij antwoordde niet. Ze bleef stil liggen, bang dat ze bij de minste beweging zou overgeven. Intussen voelde zij een ijzige kou optrekken van haar voeten naar haar hart. 'Ach, nu begint het!' mompelde zij.

Entre os apetites da carne, a ambição do dinheiro e as melancolias da paixão, tudo confundia-se num mesmo sofrimento; e em lugar de desviar seu pensamento, agarrava-se mais a ele, excitando a dor e procurando em toda a parte ocasiões para excitá-lo. Irritava-se com um prato mal servido ou com uma porta entreaberta, lamentava-se pelo veludo que não possuía, pela felicidade que lhe faltava, por seus sonhos grandes demais, por sua casa por demais acanhada. O que a exasperava era que Charles não parecia suspeitar de seu suplício. Sua convicção de que a fazia feliz parecia-lhe um insulto imbecil e sua segurança nesse ponto parecia-lhe ingratidão. Para quem então era ela sensata? Não era ele o obstáculo para qualquer felicidade, a causa de toda miséria e como o bico pontudo daquela fivela, daquela correia complexa que a fechava por todos os lados? Portanto, tranferiu somente para ele o ódio denso que resultava de seus desgostos e cada esforço para diminuí-lo serviu apenas para aumentá-lo; pois àquela dor inútil acrescentavam-se outros motivos de desespero e ela contribuía ainda mais para seu afastamento. Mesmo a doçura para consigo mesma provocava-lhe rebeliões. A mediocridade doméstica empurrava-a para fantasias luxuosas, a ternura matrimonial a desejos adúlteros. Teria desejado que Charles lhe batesse, para poder detestá-lo com maior razão, vingar-se dele. Espantava-se às vezes com as conjecturas atrozes que lhe vinham à cabeça; e seria preciso continuar a sorrir, ouvir repetir que era feliz, fingir sê-lo e deixar que acreditassem?

On a Parisienne’s Bookshelf THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE’S BOOKSHELF: The books you so often claim you’ve read that you actually believe you have. The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character’s name. The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some “culture”. The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love. The books that you’ve been promising yourself you’ll read next summer … for the past ten years. The books you bought only because you liked the title. The books that you think makes you cool. The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life. The books that remind you of someone you loved. The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any. The books whose first ten pages you’ve read so many times you know them by heart. The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read. AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY: The Stranger, Albert Camus The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust “How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits” By Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Maigret, and Sophie Mas

La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue, et les idées de tout le monde y défilaient dans leur costume ordinaire, sans exciter d’émotion, de rire ou de rêverie. Il n’avait jamais été curieux, disait-il, pendant qu’il habitait Rouen, d’aller voir au théâtre les acteurs de Paris. Il ne savait ni nager, ni faire des armes, ni tirer le pistolet, et il ne put, un jour, lui expliquer un terme d’équitation qu’elle avait rencontré dans un roman. Un homme, au contraire, ne devait-il pas, tout connaître, exceller en des activités multiples, vous initier aux énergies de la passion, aux raffinements de la vie, à tous les mystères ? Mais il n’enseignait rien, celui-là, ne savait rien, ne souhaitait rien. Il la croyait heureuse ; et elle lui en voulait de ce calme si bien assis, de cette pesanteur sereine, du bonheur même qu’elle lui donnait.

Ce qui l’exaspérait, c’est que Charles n’avait pas l’air de se douter de son supplice. La conviction où il était de la rendre heureuse lui semblait une insulte imbécile, et sa sécurité, là-dessus, de l’ingratitude. Pour qui donc était-elle sage ? N’était-il pas, lui, obstacle à toute félicité, la cause de toute misère, et comme l’ardillon pointu de cette courroie complexe qui la bouclait de tous côtés ? Donc, elle reporta sur lui seul la haine nombreuse qui résultait de ses ennuis, et chaque effort pour l’amoindrir ne servait qu’à l’augmenter ; car cette peine inutile s’ajoutait aux autres motifs de désespoir et contribuait encore plus à l’écartement. Sa propre douceur à elle-même lui donnait des rébellions. La médiocrité domestique la poussait à des fantaisies luxueuses, la tendresse matrimoniale en des désirs adultères. Elle aurait voulu que Charles la battît, pour pouvoir plus justement le détester, s’en venger. Elle s’étonnait parfois des conjectures atroces qui lui arrivaient à la pensée ; et il fallait continuer à sourire, s’entendre répéter qu’elle était heureuse, faire semblant de l’être, le laisser croire ! Elle avait des dégoûts, cependant, de cette hypocrisie. Des tentations la prenaient de s’enfuir avec Léon, quelque part, bien loin, pour essayer une destinée nouvelle ; mais aussitôt il s’ouvrait dans son âme un gouffre vague, plein d’obscurité.

El heroísmo, la audacia, la prodigalidad, la libertad son, aparentemente, prerrogativas masculinas; sin embargo, Emma descubre que los varones que la rodean —Charles, Léon, Rodolphe— se vuelven blandos, cobardes, mediocres y esclavos apenas ella asume una actitud «masculina» (la única que le permite romper la esclavitud a que están condenadas las de su sexo en la realidad ficticia).

También en sus relaciones conyugales los roles hembra-varón se invierten muy pronto; Emma pasa a ser la personalidad dominante y Charles la dominada. Ella impone el tono, se hace siempre su voluntad, al principio sólo en cuestiones domésticas y luego en los otros dominios: Emma se encarga

Lo primero que hace Charles, cuando ella desaparece, es decidir un entierro suntuoso y romántico, conforme a los gustos de Emma. Después contrae los hábitos pródigos, los caprichos refinados de su mujer, con lo que acaba de precipitarse en la ruina, exactamente igual que ella. El narrador resume esta situación en una conmovedora imagen: «Elle le corrompait au-delà du tombeau».[56]

La madre de Charles Bovary pasa a ser el jefe de su hogar desde que el matrimonio se arruina, y lo mismo la primera mujer de Charles, la que, desde que se casan, según lo precisa el narrador, «fut le maître». Hay una diferencia, desde luego. Estas matriarcas no son propiamente feministas, no hay en ellas la menor rebeldía implícita en la inversión de roles, sino, más bien, resignación. Asumen el papel del hombre porque no tienen otro remedio, ya que sus maridos han renunciado a él y alguien debe tomar las decisiones del hogar. En Emma, la virilidad no es sólo una función que ella asume para llenar una vacante, sino también una ambición de libertad, una manera de luchar contra las miserias de la condición femenina.

que quiere decir que esas novelas falsifican la vida). Por eso, las personas sensatas, como la madre de Charles, temen la afición de Emma por las novelas. No se equivocan. Que la insatisfacción de Emma se enraíza en la literatura se ve muy bien en el episodio que sigue inmediatamente a su entrega a Rodolphe. Madame Bovary cree entrar en el mundo de las heroínas ficticias, está segura que la ilusión se va a convertir por fin en realidad: «Alors elle se rappela les héroïnes des livres qu’elle avait lus, et la légion lyrique de ces femmes adultères se mit à chanter dans sa mémoire avec des voix de soeurs qui la charmaient. Elle devenait elle-même comme une partie véritable de ces imaginations...».

Hay, además, el aprovechamiento posible de experiencias más transitorias. Para los adulterios de Emma y la imagen de Charles pudieron servirle las aventuras de Madame Roger des Genettes, quien más tarde sería su amiga. Pero cuando está escribiendo Madame Bovary, habla pestes de ella a Louise y se apiada del marido engañado: «J’ai bien vu le père Roger passer dans la rue avec sa redingote et son chien. Pauvre bonhomme!... Comme il se doute peu! As-tu songé quelquefois à cette quantité de femmes qui ont des amants, à ces quantités d’hommes qui ont des maîtresses, à tous ces ménages sous les autres ménages? Que de mensonges cela suppose! Que de manoeuvres et de trahisons, et de larmes et d’angoisses!» (carta del 23 de diciembre de 1853). La figura del père Roger hace

ciertas cosas, como la casquette de Charles, son más locuaces y trascendentes que sus dueños, y nos revelan, mejor que las palabras y los actos de aquéllos, la personalidad del amo: su estatuto social, su economía, sus costumbres, sus aspiraciones, su imaginación, su sentido artístico, sus creencias.

And yet, holding fast to the precarious stability of quotidian jargon, accepting without argument the ludic maxims conceived by the bourgeois Flaubert, it remains permissible to move beyond the element of play and to question the reality of this country doctor now present in the imaginative life of millions, over whom the ownership claims of the bourgeois landowner from Croisset have long expired—even without hope of any “real” insight.

Born poor, little earned besides, brought up dumb, little learned besides. Your penknife, Gustave Flaubert, and oui and merci, all too mean and too meager.

How the subject is determined through objective circumstances and yet remains a subject, endowed with full existential freedom: this would only be illuminated through dialectical reason, the totalization of knowledge that would not be systematically considered until one hundred years after the appearance of Bovary, by Jean-Paul Sartre.

and so many more! That the country doctor failed to notice his

And above all: the first draft of the—as his discerning comrades assured him—thoroughly disastrous metaphysical novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

The most admirable, if certainly most capricious interpretation, is the one expounded by Jean-Paul Sartre in his redoubtable work on Flaubert, in the third volume, to be exact: there, when he speaks of the societally conditioned “objective neurosis” that history imposed not only on Flaubert, but on all of the authors who were his contemporaries, he sees nothing more nor less than the Hegelian world-spirit.

And to close: the true and sad biography of Delphine Delamare, the doctor’s wife from the village of Ry. A banal affaire d’adultère, probably discussed in the Flaubert household, which the author’s friends Bouilhet and Du Camp suggest to him as a theme for a novel. He must be “healed” of the superfluous phantasms

Your penknife, Flaubert.

What may be achieved, perhaps, is nothing more than this: to gaze at Sartre’s mountains of thought, but from a distance, so that only the contours are visible in the mental heavens, and not to get lost amid the peaks and valleys. Sartre’s Flaubert is the Sartre-Flaubert, and should remain such. It is now left to others to discover their own Flaubert-Flaubert according to the map each sketches out for himself. For what it’s worth, we have an example before us now.

I demand a closed chamber, for regrettably, what the accused has proposed to reveal here is a danger to public morals. The defendant, infected by his wife’s dissoluteness, which judicial language lacks words to describe, is the most appalling specimen I have ever come across in the long course of my life as a guardian of order and morals. Look at him, how he sits there, his gaze unmoved, at his table at the inn, hatching his plans for murder, necrophilia, and sodomy, le visage blême, serrant dans la main gauche la fiole avec le poison [50]—the palefaced killer!

Charles, too, is a bearer of values, bourgeois and social ones, no less deserving of mention than the proletarian and communal values of the old maid, which flicker tenderly as the stage lights fall on them in passing. But no, there is nothing! Charles Bovary, country doctor, is the uncouth weakling his wife takes him for; and the morsel of compassion the author patronizingly offers him now and then is a pittance.

Mais oui, Madame Bovary, c’est bien lui, Gustave Flaubert. [25] Her excesses are his, her passionate mysticism an analogue to his mystical subservience to the author’s craft. Her pathos, which the author’s irony barely alludes to, is the pathetic irreality of the visionary from the hermitage in Croisset. He said as much, moreover, if not with direct reference to his own self, which he never wished to turn out into the world.

it!

What remains then is fatalité, the mysterious fate behind which Flaubert the naysayer, Flaubert the runaway, hides. I’m good for nothing? I’m a dodgy scribbler? I’m not a useful member of society?—Eh bien, tant pis! C’est la faute de la fatalité.

The young notary Léon Dupuis and the landholder Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger, a venerable nobleman in the best years of his life, were the victims of this poisoner. Two heads fell: now the blade must fall on the neck of the murderer, so the people of this country do not despair of justice on earth, and whoever hatches murderous plans may know that he will have no more indulgence here on earth than up above in the kingdom of God.

No doubt, Charles abetted the two adulterous affairs of his Emma, whom he loved, in an implausible, suspect way. Well then, his considerateness showed his stupidity, as we have been assured, and more than once. But love sets a limit to stupidity. No one in his right mind—and the country doctor certainly was, or else he would never have reached the modest status of glorified barber-surgeon—behaves like the cocu, the cuckold of bad jokes the men in the Café du

In the grave of unconscious memory, the one and only great love, Elisa Foucault-Schlésinger, around nine years his elder, whom Gustave met in Trouville, too young to be in passion’s thrall; Elisa, whom he loved as he loved no other woman in his life, save for his mother, who always hovered as a kindly but stern shadow over the house in Croisset.

Speak to me, Emma, just a single soothing word, stroke my hair again, say what you confessed in death, that I was good—that at least I was good. And know, please—but you cannot know, the dead are deaf, the cerebrum decays, and with it, what a person was.

Anyway, she wouldn’t have allowed it, she knew I was trash compared to her. And I knew it, too. We never spoke of it, but she gave me to understand, and understand I did.

The poor man, pity him. Or was it: the pathetic loser, and was the red that rose into her cheeks a sign not of compassion, but of contempt?

There is no point in wondering. It’s all the same now, pity, derision, it makes no difference. In the end, I was good, that is all that matters.

The doctor prescribes, the apothecary follows his recommendations methodically. You deserve your sleep just as I deserve my Legion of Honor. I will write down the dosages on a scrap of paper and will affix it to the bottle, though you know perfectly well when quantity ceases to be mere quantity and takes on the qualities of a toxin. It is up to you to decide whether you should call on Doctor Canivet in his capacity as consulting doctor or proceed on your own. . . .” “On my own. On my own account, at my own risk.

and who, if he is made to play the pitiful role of the cuckold, deserves pathos, the highest blossoming of the strength of written art.—

He lamented becoming a “professional Auschwitz survivor”—in his letters he would use the term “Auschwitz Clown”—he chafed at playing the “professional senex” when On Aging: Revolt and Resignation appeared in 1968, and his urge to decry his devolution into a stock character may have inclined him to sympathize with the fictional Charles Bovary’s claims to humanity.

For Levi, the fault lay in part with Améry’s intransigence, his elevation of bitterness to an ethical imperative (for his part, Améry disparaged Levi as “the forgiver”). Favoring Levi’s suppositions is the vast clinical literature on the benefits of positive illusions and the deleterious psychological effects of “depressive realism.

Tostes, who slaved away in Yonville

recommend bed rest. The use of a soporific tea, which I will send for from my laboratory forthwith. It works

And you, new boy, will copy out for me twenty times the verb ridiculus sum.” I wrote it, turned in the clean copy, and went on thinking it; the phrase has never left me.

Gustave Flaubert, I was nothing to you. What could I have said to you, anyway? I never read the solemn dramas you were acquainted with, I wrote no sweet verses, if the time came to talk in the park about girls and walks under the arbor, I had no choice but to make it all up.

I couldn’t let her wither from boredom, or seek shelter in the Abbé’s confessional: I had to be her refuge, her pride, and I knew she would repay me for it, with the shimmering riches of her love.

for Charles was dumb and the bourgeois author eclectic and erudite, and he hated stupidity (or what he took to be such) with the same hatred he harbored for that sin which he, a bourgeois through and through, would not forgive even Emma, his beloved, his transformed

that the haut bourgeois should detest the petit, and the cultivated the lowbrow; for the barber-surgeon from Yonville, the famous doctor’s son could summon arrogant pity, but not sympathetic compassion.

Now that I am enlightened, through mourning and the letters in the secret drawer, I would say to you,

Flaubert’s Charles Bovary was a dimwit; such a person doesn’t reason, he takes things as they come, chimneys and change and corruption, same as wind and bad weather and the irritable impatience of his bride, when she said over and over amid his awkward approaches at tenderness and his prattling: Laisse-moi! But a realist storyteller would have had to fill in the empty gaps.

And I didn’t take it hard, at least young Léon would have been an understanding schoolmate, devoted and ready to serve, nothing like the haughty, highborn Gustave.

However we might be deceived by his irony, which would prove fatal for false romanticism, he took the side of Emma and her finally murderous passion with its contempt for the bourgeois subject. He failed to see the citoyen, in both Homais and the country doctor; he only saw, only fashioned, the bourgeois that he himself was, endowing him with the repellent traits of the merchant Lheureux.

Les maris trompés que ne savent rien savent tout, tout de même. [1] —MARCEL PROUST, La Prisonnière

ate the same meals over and over with the same dependable hunger, embraced his wife at regular intervals, saddled his horse today as he had yesterday, the same way he would do tomorrow: bourgeois moderation is expressed through the metronome of the workday, along with occasional festivities, and this abrogates any feeling of temporality. Charles

So Gustave Flaubert was playing as he composed Madame Bovary, groaning under the crushing weight of words; and the game plays out further in these pages, albeit according to a different set of rules. Charles Bovary, the poor man from whom everything was stripped away, love, his beloved, his possessions, and even his memory—for, as he is forced to realize, he has lived in error—was treated by Gustave Flaubert as a quantité négligeable.

The operation turned out badly—what can you say? More than once in Rouen I’ve seen a patient meet his end in the operating room under the well-groomed hands of Dr. Achille-Cléophas Flaubert. That is how it goes in our line of work, which you don’t know a damned thing about. One time you get lucky, the next you don’t, that’s the end of the story. So undress and lie down next to me, and I will claim my conjugal rights, just as I perform my marital duties as a sound husband and provider. Not a word more!

Even asleep, the little greyhound trailed after her madame, through a weave of green stars and gas lamps, along the boulevards of Paris. It was a conjured city that no native would recognize—Emma Bovary’s head on the pillow, its architect. Her Paris was assembled from a guidebook with an out-of-date map, and from the novels of Balzac and Sand, and from her vividly disordered recollections of the viscount’s ball at La Vaubyessard, with its odor of dying flowers, burning flambeaux, and truffles. (Many neighborhoods within the city’s quivering boundaries, curiously enough, smelled identical to the viscount’s dining room.) A rose and gold glow obscured the storefront windows, and cathedral bells tolled continuously as they strolled past the same four landmarks: a tremulous bridge over the roaring Seine, a vanilla-white dress shop, the vague façade of the opera house—overlaid in more gold light—and the crude stencil of a theater. All night they walked like that, companions in Emma’s phantasmal labyrinth, suspended by her hopeful mists, and each dawn the dog would wake to the second Madame Bovary, the lightly snoring woman on the mattress, her eyes still hidden beneath a peacock sleep mask. Lumped in the coverlet, Charles’s blocky legs tangled around her in an apprehensive pretzel, a doomed attempt to hold her in their marriage bed.