of sentiment in the noble verse form of Alexandrine couplets.
Charles Bovary is the first and last suitor she meets after returning from the convent to her family’s isolated farm. Flaubert has already told us a great deal about Charles before their first meeting. Awkward and bumbling throughout his youth, he was a mediocre student who barely managed to pass despite hard work and discipline. He attends medical school but never achieves the full status of doctor. Instead he becomes a public health officer, a job that was roughly equivalent to physician’s assistant. Charles knows his limits: His treatments are as noninvasive as possible. He fears killing his patients. The two meet when Charles is summoned to treat Pere Rouault’s broken leg. He rides eighteen miles through desolate countryside from the small town of Tostes to the Rouault family farm. At the time, he is still married to the forty-ish “rich widow” picked out by his mother. Still, he notices Emma, and in the second chapter of part one, a vaguely sado-erotic scene occurs between him and Rouault’s virginal daughter. (Flaubert was a great fan of the Marquis de Sade.) After checking on her father, Charles lingers before leaving the farm. He stops in the parlor, where Emma is gazing absently out the front window. Startled, she speaks her first line of dialogue.
“Are you looking for anything?” she asked.
“My whip, if you please,” he answered.
He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had fallen to the ground, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma saw it, and bent over the flour sacks. Charles out of politeness made a dash also, and as he stretched out his arm, at the same moment felt his breast brush against the back of the young girl bending beneath him. She drew herself up, scarlet, and looked at him over her shoulder as she handed him his whip (pp. 19-20).
A year later when Charles’s wife dies, it is a foregone conclusion that Emma will accept his faltering proposal of marriage.
Like Flaubert himself, Emma, a perpetual dreamer, was ill-suited to marriage or life in the provinces. As McCarthy points out, “Emma’s boredom is a silly copy of Flaubert’s own,” although when we read his letters and diaries, it’s a toss-up to say which of the two was more melodramatic. Describing Emma’s adolescence, Flaubert writes, “She rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes” (p. 37). Writing to Louise Colet after their first sexual encounter, Flaubert exclaims: “I am broken, dizzied, as after a long orgy, I am bored to death. I have an incredible void in my heart. I once so proud of my serenity, I who worked from morning to night with a sustained rigor, can neither read nor think nor write. Your love has made me sad. I can see that you’re suffering, I foresee that I shall make you suffer. For your sake first, then for mine, I wish that I had never known you” (Gray, Rage and Fire, p. 140). Later, in a more conversational vein, Flaubert confesses to spending an entire day dreaming of a special pair of divans: one stuffed with swansdown, the other with hummingbird feathers. This dream, he reports, left him sad all through the evening.
Emma’s despair after the first disillusion of marriage echoes Flaubert’s shortly before he started work on the novel. In part one, chapter nine, Emma abandons her former pastimes and hobbies, because “What was the good?” (p. 61). Writing to his friend Louis Bouilhet, Flaubert at age twenty-nine is plagued by the same question : “From the past I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing.... Something—the eternal ‘what’s the point?’ sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open” (Flaubert in Egypt).
Two years after beginning the novel, Flaubert wrote to Colet about the hours he wastes spending an imaginary fortune. He’d give oyster banquets, he’d have golden finches let loose in the house, his shoes would be studded with diamonds. He dreamed of the Orient. Likewise, to Emma it seemed that “certain places on earth must bring happiness, like a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage?” (p. 41). In a passage whose cadences echo a Nike ad targeted toward female consumers (“You