you.” ... “But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow.” ... “Pig race; prizes—tied by Messrs. Lehérissé and Cullembourg, sixty francs!” (pp. 139-140). And yet Flaubert ends the scene by breaking our hearts, with the final award given to one Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, an elderly servant, who spent fifty-four years on one farm taking care of the animals. The elderly woman feels no emotion. Living close to the animals, she has assumed their wordless, placid state of being. Finally, a smile crosses her face as she realizes she can give her award to the priest to say masses.

Later, at the peak of another duet of clichés that marks Emma’s second seduction, her soon-to-be-lover Leon (or is it Flaubert now who is speaking?) observes, “Language is a machine that continually amplifies the emotions” (p. 218).

“Madame Bovary, c‘est moi,” Flaubert famously stated when his book was a hit and he was hounded by critics and fans to identify the real-life, verité source of his character. Yet he also liked saying the opposite: “There’s nothing in Madame Bovary that’s drawn from life,” he wrote to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie in a letter dated March 18, 1857. “It’s a completely invented story. None of my own feelings or experiences are in it.” And yet Flaubert also wrote, in his youth, “There are days when one would like to be an athlete, and others when one longs to be a woman. In the first case it is because our muscles are aquiver; in the second, because our flesh is yearning and ablaze” (Intimate Notebook, p. 47).

In fact, the word “realism” was initially applied to Madame Bovary by its first publishers, who also acted as censors. After agreeing to issue the book in six installments, Flaubert’s friends at the Revue de Paris asked him to cut several scenes that its readers would find much “too real.” At the top of the list was one of the book’s strongest and funniest scenes (part three, chapter one), in which Emma finally yields to Leon’s advances. Having made no prior arrangements, they take an eight-hour ride in the back of a cab. “Where to, sir?” asks the cabman. “Where you like!” answers Leon, and they’re off on a fornicator’s grand tour past all of provincial Rouen’s doubtful attractions. “Real” in this case was a euphemism. They meant obscene.

When the final installment appeared, Flaubert, and the editors and printer of the Revue de Paris were subpoened to court for of fenses against public morals and religion. (Installed via a coup five years previously, the government of Napoleon III had begun to enforce its draconian laws of political censorship.) Public prosecutor Ernest Pinard (who later, hilariously, would be exposed as the anonymous author of self-published pornography) denounced the book’s “realism.” Attorney for the defense Jules Senard argued persuasively that this very “realism,” and Emma’s meticulously described and horrible death, served as caution against the dangers awaiting young women like Emma, when they are educated and exposed to certain ideas beyond their comprehension and station (“Appendix: Speech for the Defense”). The charges were dropped, and Madame Bovary was published in book form by Michel Levy.

“Everyone thinks I am in love with reality,” Flaubert protested, at the pitch of the controversy, “whereas I actually detest it. It was in hatred of realism that I undertook this book. But I equally despise that false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present age” (Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary, p. 377).

In a sense, Emma Bovary’s dreaminess is not so very different from Flaubert’s own; he simply adapted it to the limits of her situation. The only child of a prosperous peasant, Emma Rouault is sent to a convent school in Rouen at the age of thirteen. Here she excels, until the nuns realize it is the erotics of Catholicism that Emma embraces. Emma has a particular talent for recognizing and responding to the sexual subtext of the religio-romantic ideas of her time as taught to young ladies. She swoons at the mortification of Jesus, practices fasting, and senses the pressing of flesh guarded over by golden-winged cherubs. She yearns along with the virgin hearts who aspire toward heaven. After the premature death of her mother, she abandons herself to more secular forms of soft-core pornography, devouring popular romances written by viscounts and counts. Like Flaubert, she is a child of the Romantic era, in which Great Men of Letters like Lamartine and de Musset concocted washes