PONT L'ƒVEQUE

        In France, families of modest means can find agreeable vacation lodgings via the homely institution of the g”te, a government-inspected house that the owner may submit to the local mairie (city hall) for listing. We were especially lucky that our g”te was only a few minutes from the sprightly town of Port l'ƒv�que, famous for its potent cheese of the same name. Only ten miles away lie the two dazzling sea resorts of Deauville and Trouville, often painted by Claude Monet and other Impressionists. At low tide, their clean sands and dawdling bathers look exactly as we have seen them in a dozen miniatures by the subtle coastal artist Eug�ne Boudin, who has a museum named after him in nearby Honfleur.
        Pont l'ƒv�que enjoys an unusual mixture of village ambience and urban cosmopolitanism. The town keeps up the festive custom of a Monday street market where the farmers display their produce. On the other hand, Maison de la Presse carries British, German, and Italian newspapers along with the International Herald Tribune. We had the sense of a community that knows it is flourishing.
        The tiny elite market, Le Bon (its motto: "Tout est bon ˆ Le Bon"), offers a surprising conglomeration of wares, all perfectly organized in their meager allotted space. Its chief competitor, the huge supermarket IntermarchŽ, is more like a country fair. Customers chat in the aisles, shopping is a family expedition, and shelving clerks double as tour guides. In the market and on the streets, there is often a pleasing chaos. The circulation of people and autos continues steadily till evening. But with its graceful, balanced architecture and its three diminutive rivers that appear and reappear all through town, the mood of Pont l'ƒv�que is serene and well disposed.
        To urban types like us, the drive to town was sheer bucolic poetry. Crossing a small bridge, we passed a crowded field of shorn glossy sheep, two miles of fragrant woods and grasses, and a sprawling sunny campsite where young plebeian mothers were hanging brightly colored T-shirts and swimsuits on the laundry lines. Then came a graceful swoop down to a large kidney-shaped lake with its "Centre de Loisir"--where arrows pointed toward boating and tennis. Finally, a single block of tidy beflowered houses led into the dense heart of Pont l'ƒv�que.
        We took this trip several times a week, but it wasn't until the second year that we suddenly paused halfway along the road to look at a small sign hidden behind an overgrown hedge. It read:

"FERME DE GEFFOSSE

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

A PASSƒ ICI UNE PARTIE

DE SA JEUNESSE"

        So we were spending our vacations a stone's throw from the Flaubert family's nineteenth-century summer home, among the same landscapes where the author of Madame Bovary had rambled in his adolescence! We walked into a pasture that resembled a children's book illustration, with peacocks promenading ahead of us. We were greeted by a ruddy-faced couple who had leased the property and turned it into a landmark for visitors. They took us to the steep hill that Gustave climbed as a child so he could look all the way to the sea.
        Then they produced their star exhibit, a separate room in the corner of the barn for the commemoration of FŽlicitŽ, the heroine of Flaubert's classic short novel, A Simple Heart--his single entirely compassionate work. In the room sat a homemade but entirely believable model of FŽlicitŽ, garbed in a red apron and with a printed calico kerchief around her head. After we left, we bought a Penguin paperback translation and opened to the first sentence.
        "For half a century the women of Pont l'ƒv�que envied Madame Aubain for her maidservant FŽlicitŽ."
        "In return for a hundred francs a year, she did all the cooking and the housework, the sewing, the washing and the ironing. She could bridle a horse, fatten poultry and churn butter, and she remained faithful to her mistress, who was by no means an easy person to get along with."
        For a misanthropic novelist addicted to creating ineffectual or hypocritical characters, a writer whose initial response to experience was often sheer contempt (and who could say of a famous compatriot: "What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write"), his empathy for this selfless heroine is a stunner. FŽlicitŽ lives solely to be of service, to offer assistance and devotion that are rarely reciprocated. Despite Flaubert's constant avowals that art should not be interested in the artist's personality or feeling, he allowed himself to come eerily close to her life of deprivations. A poor country girl, orphaned, seduced and abandoned at eighteen, her one bit of luck is wending her way to the middle-class household of Madame Aubain.
        Her widowed employer keeps to herself and broods, leaving FŽlicitŽ to care for the children, Paul and Virginie. She takes the girl to catechism each day and is entranced by the picturesque stories of the Bible, trying to imagine what the Holy Ghost would look like--a fire or a bird. And she gets her chance for a holiday when Virginie, frightened by an advancing bull, is taken to Trouville to calm her nerves.
        "They almost always rested in the same field, with Deauville on their left, Le Havre on their right, and the open sea in front. ... Unseen sparrows could be heard twittering, and the sky covered the whole scent with its canopy. Madame Aubain sat doing her needlework, Virginie platted rushes beside her, FŽlicitŽ gathered lavender, and Paul, feeling profoundly bored, longed to get up and go."
        But after this brief benign interlude, FŽlicitŽ loses everyone for whom she feels affection. Paul goes off to school in Caen; her nephew signs up for a sea voyage and succumbs to yellow fever; Virginie grows ill and dies. Finally, in a stroke of good fortune, she is bequeathed a parrot: "His name was Loulou. His body was green, the tips of his wings were pink, his poll was blue and his breast golden." FŽlicitŽ trains him to speak and treats him like a lover; but, on a terrible winter day, she finds him hanging, dead, in his cage. She sends him out to be stuffed. When he returns he looks magnificent and is installed in her room. Madame Aubain dies and FŽlicitŽ is left alone with Loulou. He looks to her the very image of the Holy Ghost, and she falls into the habit of kneeling before him to say her prayers. Months later, "as she breathed her last breath, she thought she could see, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering over her head."
        Remarkably enough, Flaubert somehow managed to recount these sorrows with no hint of condescension, but rather as if he were himself absorbing each frustration and accommodating to it as she might have done.

FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND

        A Simple Heart was written in 1876, when Flaubert was fifty-four, a time when he was exchanging opposing views of the writer's function with George Sand, the reigning female novelist of France. It was largely because of her sermonizing that he finally gave way to tenderness toward one of his heroines. Sand was his most intimate friend of those later years and became his most eloquent critic, though a fond, admiring one. She reproached him for lacking convictions and for concealing his own feelings and judgments. "All the characters in this book," she wrote about The Sentimental Education, "are weak and come to nothing, except those with evil instincts."
        He wrote back with his customary reverential form of address, "Mon Ma”tre," but staunchly assures her: "I am only too full of convictions. I burst with suppressed anger and indignation. But my ideal of art demands that the artist show none of this, and that he appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing, the work is everything!"
        On January 12, 1876, Sand argued passionately against his contention that a writer had only to tell all the facts and write well.
        "Your story is inevitably a conversation between you and the reader. If you show him evil coldly without ever showing him good, he's angry. ... He's right; supreme impartiality is anti-human, and a novel must above all be human. If it isn't, the public cares nothing for its being well written, well-composed and well-observed in every detail. The essential quality--interest--is lacking.""
        Her strong words had their effect, and on May 29, 1876, Flaubert wrote to Sand: "You will see from my Story of a Simple Heart (in which you will recognize your direct influence) that I am not as stubborn as you believe. I think you will like the moral tendency, or rather the underlying humanity of this little work." But George Sand died ten days later, without ever seeing the moving tale toward which she had steered him.
        Francis Steegmuller (who has translated Flaubert's Niagara of letters and written the engaging critical study Flaubert and Madame Bovary) tells us that despite the author's ambition to keep himself out of his books, A Simple Heart is, in fact, very autobiographical and full of sentiment for Pont l'ƒv�que and its surroundings.
        Flaubert kept the name and exact description of the Geffosse farm near our g”te, Mme Aubain resembles his own aunt, and the children are himself and his sister Caroline, who died giving birth to his prized niece. Even the parrot was real; it belonged to a retired sea captain from Trouville. Beyond those details, the novelist was in that period undergoing, like FŽlicitŽ, enormous losses of people close to him: the poet Louis Bouilhet, who gave him the surest advice on the subjects of his fiction and whom he called "the seltzer water which helped me digest life"; his mother, in whose house on the Seine river he spent most of his days; and literary friends like Saint-Beuve and ThŽophile Gautier.
        In a sense, Flaubert was having it both ways when he wrote this sad tale. There is no doubt that he felt kindly about FŽlicitŽ, whom he envisioned, he said in a letter, as "pious but fervent, discreetly loyal, and tender as newly baked bread." Yet a preternatural calm guides the scrupulously disciplined prose.
        Pont l'ƒv�que's local Flaubert expert, Pierre-Jean Penault, has observed that this writer's fiction often brims with nostalgia for the summer places of the Pays d'Auge. Even so traumatic an event as his first epileptic fit, which he had while coming home from a trip to Deauville with his brother Achille, leads to a propitious outcome. His seizure puts an end to his despised law studies. He gives up his Paris flat and returns to his mother's home in Croisset (just south of Rouen), with a room of his own facing the Seine. Two years later, he confides that his illness brought him great benefit "in that I am allowed to spend my time as I like, a great thing in life for me. I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice, well-heated room with the books one loves and the leisure one wants."
        The writer's father was a surgeon who headed Rouen's municipal hospital, and the Flaubert family lived in a wing of the same building. Gustave and his sister had to watch bloody corpses being carried across the courtyard for dissection--so that the Norman countryside with its animals, hills, and orchards must have seemed to them the ultimate antidote and escape. Whatever softness and lyricism found their way into the novelist's satirical prose and irascible outlook surely originated here at the Geffosse farm and the Trouville seascapes that continued to charm and refresh him throughout his life.
        It was on the beach at Trouville that the fourteen-year-old Gustave caught sight of a young woman, Elsa Schlesinger, breast-feeding her baby. She was twenty-six, wife of a music publisher, and staying at the same hotel as the Flauberts. Beautiful in her red striped cloak, maternal and inaccessible, she became his permanent ideal. She accounts, in large part, for his lasting enchantment with this resort. Twenty years later, again vacationing there, he was deep in reminiscence: "All the memories of my youth speak to me, just as the shells crunch under my feet. The crash of each wave awakens far distant reverberations within me." As an adult, he visited the Schlesingers occasionally in Paris, but he contained his amorous feelings and behaved with propriety. He kept the elusive, spiritualized image of Elsa intact until it was time for him to turn her into Madame Arnoux, the heroine of The Sentimental Education, published in 1869 when he was forty-eight.
        At the beginning of the novel, young Frederic Moreau is on a riverboat, returning from Paris to Nogent-sur-Seine (a location not unlike Croisset). Pushing through a deck littered with cigar butts and nutshells, he opens the gate into the first class:
        "It was like a vision:
        She sat in the middle of a bench, quite alone--dazzled by her eyes, he perceived no one else. ..."
        "He had never seen anything like the splendor of her dark skin, the seductiveness of her figure or the delicacy of her translucent fingers. He gazed in wonder at her work-box, as if it were something extraordinary."
        Already cast as a dreamer, he has meanwhile had a chat with his opposite number, the rakish Jacques Arnoux, owner of L'Art Industriel, whose worldly manner he admires.
        After this preamble, we find Frederic in Paris, enrolled in law school, wandering the streets of the city and establishing serendipitous connections. By chance, he sees the sign L'Art Industriel in a shop window and drops in, hoping to meet the owner's wife. For lack of a better occupation, he becomes a habituŽ of the sportive Arnoux's motley circle of artists, bohemians, and demimondaines. There is no genuine affinity among these copains (pals), but Flaubert detects an ominous similarity: They are all fired by projects that are obviously beyond them. The painter Pellerin wants to rival Veronese but actually sells cheap copies of masterpieces to Arnoux. The law clerk Deslauriers (Frederic's old school friend, who comes to Paris and moves in with him) wants to be a wealthy patron of politicians but ends up a failure and a cuckold. Arnoux's high spirits and low morals also lead to impoverishment and trouble. In comparison with his cohorts' shenanigans, Frederic's aspiration to achieve perfect love seems relatively wholesome, but his notion of it is so tenuous and extreme as to assure its implausibility. Whenever Madame Arnoux appears--simple, courteous, and tastefully dressed, an anomaly among her husband's ribald companions--he usually grows timid and tongue-tied. Even as he dreams of her, some perverse instinct prompts him to take a mistress who is being kept by three men simultaneously.
        Flaubert seems to be saying that those who cannot assess their talents and limitations honestly are eventually forced to settle for less and less, sinking into premature cynicism and disenchantment. Certainly, The Sentimental Education is a novel about failure and corruption of many sorts--its weak characters are the very ones George Sand reprimanded the writer for.
        Luckily, Flaubert sensed that describing such aborted lives would not in itself add up to an impressive novel, so he set them with precise detail against the disruptions and horrors of the two revolutions that shook Paris in 1848. This chaotic background, to some extent, explains the demoralized state of the antihero and his buddies. In any case, it provides the novelist an opening for some searing prose.
        "Most of the National Guardsmen were pitiless. Those who had not fought in the streets hoped to distinguish themselves now. In a panic, they were taking revenge against the newspapers, the clubs, the demonstrations, the doctrines, against everything that had infuriated them during the last three months; and despite their victory, equality ... emerged triumphant--an equality of brutish beasts, a common level of bloodstained savagery. For the fanaticism of the rich was as great as the frenzy of the poor, the aristocracy was prey to the same madness as the rabble, and the cotton nightcap proved as hideous as the revolutionary bonnet."
        It's easy to see from this passage that Flaubert's much-repeated declaration that "an artist must be like God in his creation, invisible and all powerful ... everywhere felt and nowhere seen" does not apply to the composition of The Sentimental Education. Here we confront the vehement, opinionated Flaubert, discharging his scorn in all directions. He was equally outraged by autocrats and democrats, socialists and rightists, and discerned few virtues in any of the three contending classes.
        Nineteenth-century writers and readers criticized the disjointed episodes and directionless behavior in this novel; yet there is something authentic in the peregrinations of Frederic and his cronies. Flaubert could well have been prone to the same haphazard ramblings and fantasies when he was an unsuccessful law student in Paris. Indeed, he was never short of extravagant plans for his future, once considering that he would become a muleteer in Spain, another time submerging himself in an imaginary aesthetic orgy: "Servants would ease him into shoes studded with diamonds, ... he would give oyster banquets, and have his dining room surrounded by epaliers of flowering jasmine, out of which bright finches would sweep."
        But he is most undisguisedly subjective in his treatment of Frederic's never-consummated romance with Marie Arnoux, which was very much in accord with his own predilections. Years pass and they meet again, both declaring their love undiminished but drawing back hurriedly. Frederic has seen her white hair and is thunderstruck. They part tenderly, but he is relieved that he did not succumb.
        This denouement conforms to the author's frequently stated preference for sexual encounters as anticipation and remembrance rather than experience. The last few pages of The Sentimental Education show how firmly he adheres to this view. Now middle-aged, Frederic and Deslauriers are together after a long separation, summing up their failures and mistakes but still not totally disheartened. They recall a Sunday in their adolescence when they picked flowers and excitedly planned a visit to the town bordello. When Frederic presented his flowers, the girls laughed at him. In embarrassment, the friends ran away.
        "That was the best time we ever had!" said Frederic.
        "Yes, you may be right. That was our best time!" said Deslauriers.

FLAUBERT AND LOUISE COLET

        Lost oppportunities are the sweetest to Flaubert. He was addicted to exclaiming over peculiar aspects of his disposition. At twenty-five, he wrote in a letter: "I loved one woman from the time I was fourteen until I was twenty, without telling her, without touching her, and after that I went three years without feeling sexual desire. At one time I thought I should continue so until I died, and I thanked God."
        The unlikely recipient of this confession, just four days after their first meeting and almost-immediate intimacy was his only real-life mistress, Louise Colet. She was a pretty blond poetess (twelve years older than Gustave, like the woman on the Trouville beach) whom he met in the studio of a Parisian sculptor and known libertine. The bohemian setting, along with Colet's looks, formidable activity, and maturity were very much to Flaubert's liking. And so began one of the most extraordinary literary liaisons: brief, intense, professionally supportive, and personally exasperating. Though Colet had won two Academy prizes, they might easily have been for skilled maneuvering rather than poetic talent. She had a knack for getting famous men to use their influence on her behalf (her books contained adulatory prefaces by Saint-Beuve and Chateaubriand), and she was given a government pension via the good offices of Victor Cousin, the philosopher and ex-minister of state, whose mistress she had been.
        During her young admirer's first visit to her apartment, she showed him her new verses and Shakespeare translations. Flaubert, always more honest than tactful, praised some and declared others hastily executed or totally bad. Nevertheless, he was infatuated, although a few days of heated lovemaking sufficed, and he hurried back to his prized solitude in Croisset.
        Twelve hours later, he was writing ecstatically: "At this very moment yesterday I was holding you in my arms! Do you remember? How long ago it seems!" In four more days, still passionate and filled with voluptuous longings, he nevertheless warns that asking long-term vows from him is presumptuous, then assures her that he will love her well before he loves her no longer. A number of eloquent amorous letters follow, often grateful and admiring, but usually containing some caution that she become calmer and less demanding. He would like her to grant that "it is possible to be in love and yet realize how pitiful are the rewards of love as compared with the rewards of art." He mentions that the greatest events in his life were "a few thoughts, a few books, certain sunsets on the beach at Trouville." Soon he is reminding her that she has been sulky, they have quarreled and been unhappy when they met. Eventually, he tells her, "It is impossible for me to continue any longer a correspondence that is becoming epileptic."
        Flaubert then embarks with a close friend, Maxime Du Camp, on a year and a half's journey to the Middle East. Places he always yearned to see--Alexandria, Jerusalem, Beirut, and finally Greece and Rome--sweep him out of his perennial self-absorption. He becomes totally immersed in his new surroundings, supremely attentive to and curious about everyone he encounters. Picturesque, exuberant, and colorful, his letters to friends and relatives give us a thrilling preview of the altered state of mind that led to the creation of his finest work, Madame Bovary.
        Back in Croisset, Flaubert receives several notes from Colet, who has lost both her husband and her lover and is eager to see him. After some persuasion, he relents, and they become lovers again--a lucky change of heart for his readers and biographers. The voluminous correspondence between them for the next three years provides our access to the volatile, explosive, unfair, but never less than fascinating writer not always visible in his familiar, consciously crafted mots justes. Flaubert was now setting to work on his first successful novel, and Colet apparently struck him as a perfect empathetic listening post. He writes her incessantly about the miseries of baldness, boils, wrinkles; about moments of serenity--reading Montaigne in bed, looking out of his window at a boat gliding by on the sunlit river. He rails against mediocrity in art, excoriates socialists for their materialism, and scolds Colet for aspiring to fame.
        Mostly he worries, despairing of his progress on Madame Bovary: "Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles." On rare occasions, his accomplishments intoxicate him:
        "It is a delicious thing to write ... to be no longer yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creation. Today, for instance, man and woman, lover and beloved, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horse, the leaves, the words my people spoke, even the red sun that made them shut their love-drowned eyes."
        Like Whitman, Flaubert contained multitudes. Whether depressed or elated, derisive or enthralled, filled with rage or affection--what wonderful letters these are!
        Between temperamental outbursts, they methodically remind Colet and himself to keep emotions and opinions out of their writing and give up "swagger of ideas and expression." They repeat his growing conviction that exactitude, the precise matching of language to the reality conjured up, can elevate any subject or setting. A good prose sentence must be "like a good line of poetry--unchangeable, just as rhythmic, just as sonorous." Letter by letter, the author has built up his dictionary of Flaubertian usage. Confiding to Colet has become the correspondence course in which he painstakingly transforms himself from the unstructured romantic lyricist of his first unpublished effort, The Temptation of St. Anthony (his close friends, Bouilhet and Du Camp, told him to burn it) to the extraordinary stylist who was to influence Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and T.S. Eliot--and eventually to be regarded as the progenitor of the modern novel.
        In March 1855, the second three years of the Flaubert-Colet connection came to a harsh and calloused finish with a note from him saying he was not in when she called and must warn her, "I shall never be in." Francis Steegmuller, the magnificent biographer most involved and sympathetic with Flaubert's personal and literary fate, inserts a poignant sentence: "Because of the cessation of letters to Louise, the composition of the last third of Madame Bovary is scarcely recorded, leaving no doubt how totally entwined were her adoring amorous presence and the writing of his masterpiece."

MADAME BOVARY

        Flaubert returned from his Oriental journey with the clear intention of producing a remarkable novel but absolutely no notion of what to write about. Bouilhet, whom he greatly respected, had already advised him to concern himself with real people and their daily lives, and to write with the precision of Balzac (which provoked a desolate shriek).
        On one occasion as he was bemoaning his problems, Bouilhet began to talk about a young doctor acquainted with the Flaubert family and his tragic marriage. Delamare (who had studied with Flaubert's father) was only partly trained but was still a licensed medical man. After the death of an older first wife, he married the pretty daughter of a nearby farmer. Educated in a convent and a reader of romantic novels, she was bored with country life and hoped that marriage would bring her something more vivid. But she was quickly disappointed and began to disdain her husband. She took lovers and indulged herself in expensive clothes. Eventually she sank into deep debt, grew melancholy, and poisoned herself. After her death and the revelations of her affairs, her husband also committed suicide.
        Crudely but literally, this is the basic plot of Madame Bovary. Flaubert was familiar with the Delamares and had heard much of the story, evidently without being impressed. But Bouilhet pointed out that for his novel the Normandy setting was one he knew in intimate detail. As a doctor's son, he was knowledgeable about local medical practice. He could skillfully describe rural and provincial life, and treat a topic on which he was especially fond of sounding off: the bourgeois mentality. Probably Bouilhet also guessed that a focus on adultery would not be amiss. Quick on the uptake, Flaubert saw that he had been handed an ideal subject. It is comical to realize that this esteemed writer needed to receive an entire plot summary and specific instructions as to how he should proceed.
        In an early American film version of Madame Bovary, Jennifer Jones plays the heroine as an ego-driven, demonically passionate creature, whirling into adultery after an intoxicating waltz with an aristocratic Louis Jourdan. But as she is first introduced in the book, Emma in no way resembles this cinematic wanton. She is a farmer's daughter with traditional household skills--diligent, thrifty, able to sew the nightcaps and chemises for her trousseau by herself. She marries Charles, the town doctor of Toste, because he is the only eligible man she has met and she finds his visits agreeable.
        Emma has been educated in a convent where she listened to sentimental songs, read romantic novels, and lingered over engravings of haughty English beauties gliding through parks and sultans reveling in the arms of dancing girls. Flaubert made her (perhaps for his own delectation) a voracious reader, dirtying her hands with books from old lending libraries, falling in love with history via Walter Scott. She is restless, like her creator, and dreams in Flaubertian phrases. She would have wished to spend her honeymoon in faraway places, breathing the fragrance of lemon trees: "Why shouldn't she be leaning over the balcony of some Swiss chalet? Or nursing her melancholy in a cottage in Scotland with a husband clad in a black velvet coat?"
        Charles, simple and affectionate by nature, dotes on her, happily watching her bent over a sketchbook and marveling as her fingers fly over the piano keyboard. Never at peace, she rejects his serenity and, especially, his inability to sense her elusive discontents. Still, she continues to be a model wife, sending nicely worded bills to his patients and thinking up attractive Sunday dinners for her neighbors.
        She longs for something exceptional to happen, and finally a marquis whose abscess Charles had healed invites them to a ball at his ch‰teau. That evening, with imagination converted into reality, becomes the downward turning point for Emma. She dances with a vicomte, but it is not her partner who corrupts her. It is the taste of maraschino ice in her mouth, the perfumed air, the luster of satin, her own aestheticism. Her first swoon is into the arms of upper-class embellishments. Everything thereafter seems an anticlimax; she sinks into ennui and neurasthenic ailments. Charles, convinced that she needs a change of air, gives up his established practice in Toste, where he is well liked, and moves to the town of Yonville l'Abbaye.
        Until now, Flaubert has been writing with a precision and, to some extent, an objectivity that Balzac might have admired. Yet he meant it when he said, "Madame Bovary, �'est moi." He and the woman who could not abide provincial life and yearned for the vastness of Paris were kindred spirits.
        Flaubert was surely aware of Normandy's abundant physical charms. But in providing a backdrop for Emma's future discontent, he located Yonville in a sandy, stony region "whose language was without accent as its landscape was without character." And though he himself took advantage of the bourgeois comforts during the five years he was writing Madame Bovary, he zealously portrayed his fictional town as a breeding ground for all the bourgeois vices. Early on, he plunges into demolishing Yonville's solid citizens: the pompous, interfering pharmacist Homais, enamored of his own voice, dispensing a smattering of information on subjects ranging from the weather to religion to the preparation of jellies, vinegar and stews; the wheedling, conniving draper Lheureux, who unctuously tempts the heroine with a flamboyant Algerian scarf or a bolt of choice Parisian cloth; the curŽ, busy preparing the parish children for communion, too distracted to understand Emma's appeal for spiritual comfort.
        In this unpromising milieu, it is small wonder that she gravitates toward the shy young clerk, LŽon. They express their feelings to one another about mountain and sea, poetry and prose; they share a mutual distaste for moderate characters and accustomed places. Intended to be read as a farce, their conversation seems at the same time natural and touching. He is the first person to talk to the adult Emma about books. Easy preys to boredom, the two form a special bond, which the writer is careful to represent as reasonable and innocent at the onset, at least on Emma's part. But after a few evenings apart from the others, reading romantic verses together, she begins to find LŽon's blue eyes limpid and to entertain thoughts of love.
        LŽon proves to be the most diffident of suitors. He eventually gives up hope of physical conquest and goes off to Paris to lead a bohemian life. They part with a handshake and no declarations. Yet once he is gone, she is convinced she has missed her sole chance for happiness. She resents her sacrifice and gives herself away to anger, gloom, and unaffordable purchases. She orders a cashmere dressing gown from Rouen, knots one of Lheureux's finest scarves around her waist, and lies on her sofa with the blinds drawn.

FLAUBERT'S REALISM

        A distinguishing aspect of Flaubert's realism is the uninterrupted line he draws from intellect to emotional temperament to morality. He is an astute psychologist, attentive to every small weakness and mannerism. As a moralist, he diagnoses the beginnings of Emma's corruption, not in her foolish amorousness for the notary's clerk, but in her hardness toward her trusting husband and her capricious dismissal of her child. If her morals are not up to snuff, that is in good part because she cannot recognize when her feelings are false.
        With the appearance of Rudolph, a wealthy gentleman who has bought a ch‰teau near Yonville, the momentum of the novel (until now held firmly in check) moves into high gear. A classic philanderer with "a brutal temperament and intelligent perspicacity," the handsome visitor surmises that Emma is "gasping after love like a carp out of water" and determines to possess her. The verbal seduction scene takes place on the florid and noisy day of the town's agricultural show, which Flaubert accurately previewed in a letter to Colet. He mercilessly describes the gaudy display, the clanging band, the childish drills and displays, and the mind-numbing speeches of the local bureaucrats.
        In ironic counterpoint to bellowing oxen and the banal cadences of the municipal councilors, the lovers-to-be talk in low voices about provincial mediocrity, lost illusions, and loneliness. Rudolph vaunts the passions and accuses the world of conspiring to separate those fated to unite. He moves closer, and Emma, smelling his perfumed hair pomade, drifts into sentimental reveries of LŽon and of her first intoxicating waltz with the vicomte. She is savoring, as the sweetest part of courtship, her own sensations.
        When Rudolph comes back to see her, after six weeks, they go horseback riding together and she succumbs to him in a forest glade. Having a lover delights her; she sees it as poetic justice, as the fulfillment of all her convent fantasies--and she feels no remorse. She lavishes endless caresses upon him, only to find him growing somewhat indifferent. In time, however, her beauty and her ardor very nearly persuade him to flee with her--to a fishing village, she imagines, where they will live in a low house shaded by a palm tree. But he quickly comes to his senses. On the arranged departure day, she receives a basket of apricots with his callous note avowing that he will exile himself to save her from the world's persecution, and that she must "accuse only fate."
        Emma faints, becomes delirious, and sinks into brain fever for several weeks. When she is better, Charles takes her to the opera in Rouen, hoping to raise her spirits. They run accidentally into LŽon, and Charles urges her to stay overnight to enjoy a second performance.
        By now Emma is an incurable love addict. After a few hesitations and withdrawals, she becomes LŽon's mistress. LŽon, too, is much smitten, and they shower one another with kisses and confidences. But this is a circumstantial affair, an affair of convenience--and soon a mutual uneasiness sets in. Emma behaves oddly with Charles, inventing one lie after another to explain her trips to Rouen; with LŽon, she acts too maternal or too coarse and bold. She feels a constant vague insufficiency in her life. LŽon remains dazzled and awed by her, but his mother and his employer beg him to get rid of her for the sake of his reputation. More sincere but fainter-hearted than Rudolph, he politely backs out.
        But Emma's bills have been mounting scandalously. Lheureux has cunningly induced her to sign endless IOUs, which he, in turn, sells to another dealer. Suddenly she receives a summons from the bailiff announcing that, unless complete payment is forthcoming, all her property and effects will be seized. In a terrifying scene where her small mistakes and indulgences seem to have added up in an instant to a monstrous disaster, she pleads desperately with Lheureux to help her. Dropping his habitual honeyed tone, he says, "What do I care?" and shuts the door.
        A distraught Emma tries to borrow money from LŽon, from his boss, the notary, from the tax collector, and even from Rudolph, but there are no volunteers. Horrified at the prospect of facing her husband when he comes into his empty house, she persuades Homais's young assistant, Justin, who has always adored her, to let her take something out of the druggist's cabinet. She finds poison and quickly swallows it. As she is dying, Charles asks disconsolately, "Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could." She answers: "Yes, that is true. You are good."
        After her death, Charles finds Rudolph's portrait and LŽon's love letters. More grief-stricken than jealous, he meets Rudolph and studies his face, wishing he could have been this man. The next day his daughter brings him dinner and finds him dead. Only Justin stays awake nights, crying. Flaubert wants to return our attention to the mundane world. In his cynical last words, he tells us that Homais now has an enormous medical practice and has just received the cross of the Legion of Honor.

FLAUBERT'S AFFINITY FOR EMMA