Spiritual Emptiness and Failed Connections — Madame Bovary

April Angelus bells pull Emma from the window toward the church, her thoughts drifting to convent veils and the Virgin in incense smoke while Lestiboudois trims the box outside. Abbé Bournisien, greasy after dinner, cannot hear her: he scolds catechism boys, jokes about Riboudet and Monsignor, and when she tries to speak of souls who have bread but no fire in winter, he answers with tea and moist sugar for indigestion. She leaves like a statue on a pivot while catechism voices still chase her up the stairs, and the room's calm only sharpens the tumult inside her.

Home again she pushes Berthe away, elbows the child into the brass handle, then calms Charles with a lie about a fall. Watching Berthe sleep she thinks how ugly the girl is. Charles, planning a daguerreotype surprise, asks Léon about Rouen prices while Homais suspects an intrigue and Binet tells the landlady he is not paid to police clerks. At the chemist's, Homais lectures Charles on childproofing while Léon's heart races over the portrait errand.

Léon wearies of loving without result, complains of life to the tax-collector, dreams of Paris masked balls and blue velvet slippers, packs neckties and restuffed chairs, and still delays until his mother urges him on, and his employer advises Paris. At the farewell visit Emma says she was sure he would come; their thoughts cling like throbbing breasts; they kiss Berthe goodbye, then exchange the English handshake, and his being seems to pass into her moist palm before he hides behind a pillar and runs past the house where the curtain falls straight as a plaster wall while her marble forehead gives nothing away.

Homais weeps over the overcoat, Justin sobs; the notary's gig carries Léon toward Rouen. Rain breaks over the garden; Emma watches clouds toward Rouen and thinks how far off he already is. At dinner Homais smacks his lips over Latin-quarter actresses while Charles fears typhoid and Emma shudders; the chemist ends with rumor that the agricultural meeting may come to Yonville this year.