Madame Bovary

What's inside (9 sections)

1. Charles before Emma
2. Tostes and a cold marriage
3. Yonville, Leon, and waiting
4. Rodolphe and the break
5. Lheureux, debts, and Rouen Thursdays
6. Arsenic and what Charles learns
7. What drags and who should skip it
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I picked up Madame Bovary expecting a fast scandal about a cheating wife and found something slower and sadder. I knew the outline, bored wife, lovers, debts, poison, and I thought I would hurry to the famous ending. Instead I spent days in small Norman towns where people talk about calves and jam and church repairs while Emma Bovary stares out the window, waiting for her life to sound like one of the books she read in the convent.

Flaubert published it in 1857 with Michel Levy Freres after it ran as a serial, and the state put him on trial for offending morals. He was acquitted. That makes it sound thrilling. The book itself is often still on purpose. It lingers on a wedding cake, on a pharmacist's jars, on a tax man making napkin rings. Then a letter or a bill arrives and the floor drops.

This is the whole story, spoilers included. Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary, a kind and dull country doctor. They live first at Tostes, then at Yonville. Emma takes two lovers, Leon Dupuis and Rodolphe Boulanger, and buys far beyond her means on credit from the draper Lheureux. It ends with arsenic, with a terrible death, and with Charles left to face what she hid.

Charles before Emma

The novel starts not with Emma but with Charles as a schoolboy. He is awkward, slow, laughed at for his strange cap, pushed forward by a mother who wants him to rise and a father who loves food and drink and noise. Charles is not clever, but he is patient. He studies just enough to become a health officer, the lower rank of doctor who can set bones and pull teeth and deliver babies around Rouen.

His mother marries him to an older widow who is supposed to have money. She has debts and a temper. Charles works the villages, she scolds, he endures. On a call to set old Rouault's broken leg at the farm of Bertaux, he meets Emma, the farmer's daughter.

Emma is twenty, dark haired, pretty, with fine hands and a convent education full of romances, prayers, and pictures of Paris she has never visited. She plays a little piano, sews well, loves pretty plates. Her father is rough and fond. Charles, soon widowed when his first wife dies, sees Emma as light. Emma says yes to his proposal because she believes marriage must bring the trembling and moonlight she read about. She gets Charles, who loves her truly and has no idea how to show it in the way she wants.

Tostes and a cold marriage

The first months at Tostes set the pattern. Charles has a small practice there. Their house is neat. Emma arranges flowers and buys a dress and enjoys being called Madame for a few weeks. Then sameness closes in.

Charles comes home, eats, talks of patients, falls asleep. He kisses her forehead and is content. Emma waits for something to happen after dinner and nothing happens. She rereads old books, walks in the garden, watches rain on the road. Flaubert piles up small sounds, pots, bells, a neighbor coughing. I found myself flipping ahead, which I think is the point. You feel why she hates the quiet.

One night breaks the dullness. They are invited to a ball at Vaubyessard. For a few hours Emma lives as she imagined. Chandeliers, champagne, a vicomte waltzing with her, the smell of vanilla on gloves. She keeps a cigar case she finds there like a relic. On the cold drive home she already mourns that night as her real life, with Tostes as the error.

After that she sinks. She stops keeping house, grows thin, restless, sharp. Charles, worried and blind, decides the damp air at Tostes harms her and moves his practice to Yonville, a market town near Rouen. He thinks new air will cure her. She thinks a new place will start her story. Money already bends between them. Emma orders small luxuries, Charles pays without question, his mother scolds. Emma learns that signing a bill feels like freedom.

Yonville, Leon, and waiting

Yonville is where most of the book lives. Flaubert maps it closely. The church, the Lion d'Or inn kept by Madame Lefrancois, the pharmacy of Homais with its jars and talk, the notary Guillaumin, Binet the tax collector alone in his attic turning napkin rings, the doctor's house across the square. Homais is everywhere, loud, progressive, writing for the Rouen paper, flattering the priest while mocking religion.

At the inn Emma meets Leon Dupuis, a young law clerk boarding with Homais. Leon is blond, shy, bored, full of vague ideals about music and travel and poetry. With Emma he finds someone who shares his taste. They lend each other magazines, talk of Paris, take walks with Homais and Charles. It is tender and harmless at first.

Emma is pregnant. She wants a son, a strong boy named Georges who will be free where she feels trapped. The child is a girl, Berthe. Emma is shocked by her own coldness. She loves dressing Berthe more than nursing her and leaves much care to the nurse, Mere Rollet. Charles adores the baby and adores Emma for the baby. He sees a family. She sees proof that life ignores her wishes.

Leon and Emma clearly love each other in a sentimental way, but neither speaks. They sit close, tremble, fail. Emma tries for a while to be good. She gives to the poor, tries church feeling, tries to love Charles by effort. It does not hold. Leon leaves for Paris to finish his studies. Their farewell in a meadow, with the priest Bournisien chattering about cows, is a missed chance that aches. Emma watches the coach go and feels ill.

Emma can be hard to like here. She is snobbish with neighbors, careless with Berthe, careless with money. Charles can be hard to respect. He sees nothing. Leon can tire you. He wants passion without risk. If you need warm people, this stretch tests you. I kept going because Flaubert shows their self deceit so plainly that I saw bits of my own daydreams in it.

Rodolphe and the break

Rodolphe Boulanger owns La Huchette near Yonville. He is thirty four, dark, rich, bored, practiced with women. He notices Emma at the agricultural show, where Homais speechifies about manure and progress below while Rodolphe draws Emma upstairs in the town hall to look at the room. While prizes for pigs are shouted outside, he talks to her about loneliness and souls that must meet. It is theater and it works.

The affair fills Emma's life for months. They meet in her garden, in woods, at her house when Charles is out. Rodolphe is careful. He brings gifts, writes short notes, keeps his groom on watch. Emma brings all her heart. She writes long night letters, buys him presents she cannot afford, talks of fleeing together. She uses confession as cover and learns to lie easily.

Flaubert shows her growing bolder and Rodolphe growing cooler. She wants the affair to prove she is a heroine. He sees a pleasant summer. When she begs him to take her away and asks for passports and a carriage, he agrees to her face. Then he sends a basket of apricots with a farewell letter inside, pompous and cowardly, telling himself he saves her.

Emma reads it in the attic and collapses. Brain fever follows. She cannot eat, loses her hair, lies for weeks while Charles weeps and Homais advises and the priest prays. Old Rouault sells a cow to pay. After she recovers she turns pious again for a time, reads holy books, visits the poor. Rodolphe sees her in church, pale and pretty, and feels nothing much. The pattern is set. Elation, dread, illness, brief repentance, then new hunger.

Lheureux, debts, and Rouen Thursdays

After Rodolphe, money drives the plot. Lheureux the draper sells cloth and shawls and also lends, discounts notes, orders Paris goods. Smiling and patient, he flatters Emma's taste. Charles deserves a better scarf, Berthe a better collar, the house new curtains. He lets her sign. Then sign again.

Bills pile. A shawl, furniture, interest, old notes renewed with fees, a power of attorney Charles signs without reading because he trusts and fears quarrels. Lheureux passes her notes to others. Emma hides letters and at one point forges. Each purchase feels like love or beauty. A riding habit to ride with Rodolphe. Gifts for Leon later. Curtains to feel like Paris.

Leon returns from Paris, now working in Rouen, more polished, living with clerks who eat oysters and talk of actresses. Emma meets him again at the opera in Rouen, where Charles takes her to hear Lucia after her illness. Singing and swords and a heroine mad for love light her up. Charles, bored and tired, lets her stay overnight while Leon shows her the town. That trust, complete and absurd, opens the second affair.

Soon Emma takes the Hirondelle coach to Rouen every Thursday for supposed piano lessons with Mademoiselle Lempereur. In truth she meets Leon in a hotel room by the cathedral. She pays for lunches and wine, for an umbrella, for paper for their rented room. Leon loves her after a fashion but finds her demands heavy. His mother disapproves, his work slips, he wishes she were less intense.

At Yonville, Charles tries a bold cure for the clubfooted stable boy Hippolyte at Homais urging, and fails badly. Canivet must amputate the leg. The shame costs money and standing. Emma despises Charles for it. It is cruel and true to what she feels. She wanted a great man. She got a kind one.

By winter Lheureux calls in about eight thousand francs, a huge sum for a village doctor. He will not wait. Bailiff Hareng inventories the house. The seizure is posted for all to read. Emma begs Guillaumin, who hints she could pay with herself, and she flees. She begs Rodolphe, once rich with promises, and he shows empty drawers. She begs Leon to ask his friend Morel, and he fails. She even begs Binet, who refuses. Flaubert shuts these doors one by one. For once Emma sees clearly what she did.

Arsenic and what Charles learns

With no way out, Emma slips into Homais pharmacy past the apprentice Justin, who adores her and left the key within reach, and swallows white arsenic from the blue jar. She goes home and tells Charles. Doctors crowd in. Canivet and the great Lariviere of Rouen try emetics. Nothing holds.

The death is long and ugly. Vomiting blood, twisted limbs, blackened face, cries for water. She takes communion with sudden calm while Bournisien prays and Homais holds a basin nearby to be useful. Then pain returns. Outside a blind beggar sings a coarse song about a girl's skirts in the wind. Emma laughs horribly and dies. I had to set the book down after that song. Low life brushes high grief and Flaubert leaves it without comment.

What follows is quieter and sadder. Charles orders velvet and plumes for the funeral, keeps her room as it was, reads her letters and finds those of Rodolphe and Leon. He meets Rodolphe in a cafe, drinks with him, says he blames fate, not him. He loves dead Emma more than living Emma, making her a saint he failed. Debts remain. Furniture is sold. Berthe goes first to Mere Rollet, then to Charles mother. Charles finds no practice, no comfort. One afternoon he is found dead in the arbor with a lock of Emma's hair in his hand. Berthe ends in a cotton mill to live. Homais thrives and gets the cross of honor he always craved. That last note lands cold after so much grief.

Charles is the moral center for many readers though he barely speaks. His blindness looks like stupidity while Emma lives and like grace after she dies. I swung between pity and frustration with him. At Tostes I pitied him. During the affairs I wanted to shake him. After the arsenic I respected his refusal to hate. Flaubert does not ask you to admire him exactly. He asks you to see a plain good man ruined by wants he could neither share nor meet.

What drags and who should skip it

No honest note on this book should pretend it moves fast. Flaubert spends pages on Homais and Bournisien arguing about God while Emma and Leon ache in silence. He lists shops and hats and cheeses. The farm show drags, with speeches on cider cut against seduction upstairs. If you want plot, you will fidget. I did. Pharmacy talk with Justin grinding and Homais lecturing wore me on tired nights.

Emma will put some readers off. She neglects Berthe, lies to a husband who loves her, sneers at the poor, buys curtains while bills mount. Her lovers are no better. Rodolphe is selfish by habit. Leon is soft and vain. None grows as modern readers expect. The book gives no hero except perhaps Charles, and Charles fails at the practical task, keeping the house solvent, that might have saved them.

There is also how Flaubert looks at Emma. He said he identified with her, yet he often notes her skin and nails and dresses and tears as if she were a lovely problem to describe. Some lines on her reading and prayer feel tender and exact. Other lines feel like a man explaining why women dream too much. Readers today may bristle, with reason, at how much of her is nerves and shopping and lovers.

Still, I would press it on anyone who loves sentences and anyone who has wanted another life while washing dishes. Flaubert hunted the right word for days, and it shows in a market morning or a night ride or a dying woman asking for water. Read slowly, in small sittings, and let Yonville get under your skin. When Lheureux smiles and unrolls his cloth, notice how polite ruin can sound. When Emma rides the Hirondelle to Rouen on Thursdays, notice how free she feels for an hour and what that hour costs. Her tragedy is not that she dreamed. It is that she tried to buy the dream on credit from men who charged interest, and Charles and Berthe paid what was left.

FAQ

Why does Emma Bovary kill herself?

Lheureux calls in her debts, the house is seized, and Rodolphe, Leon, and Guillaumin all refuse real help. She eats arsenic from Homais pharmacy and dies in great pain at home.

Who are Emma's lovers?

Leon Dupuis is the shy clerk she loves in Yonville and meets later in Rouen on Thursdays. Rodolphe Boulanger is the rich neighbor who seduces her and then breaks off the planned flight.

Is Madame Bovary hard to read?

Yes for many readers. The middle at Tostes and Yonville moves slowly, Emma can feel unsympathetic, and Flaubert spends long pages on shops, speeches, and pharmacy talk before the crises hit.