Madame Bovary

A letter arrives at eleven at night summoning Charles to the Bertaux farm to set a broken leg. He rides out before dawn through flat, grey Norman countryside, half-asleep in the saddle. The fracture turns out to be simple — no complications. What is not simple is Emma Rouault. Flaubert introduces Emma through Charles's eyes, and what strikes him is entirely physical. He notices her nails first — "more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped" — as she sews bandage pads and pricks her fingers. Then her eyes: brown, but appearing black because of the lashes, meeting his "with a candid boldness." Before Charles leaves, he returns to fetch his whip. Emma spots it between the flour sacks and bends to retrieve it. Charles reaches at the same moment and his chest brushes against her back. She stands up scarlet and hands him the whip without a word. He rides home. He goes back the next day. Then twice a week. Then whenever he can invent a reason. Flaubert is precise about Charles's self-deception: he does not stop to ask himself why he goes. Had he asked, Flaubert tells us, he would have invented a professional excuse. Instead he wipes his boots in the grass before entering the courtyard, puts on black gloves, and notices everything about Emma — her wooden shoes on the kitchen flags, her apron strings blowing in the wind, the way she always walks him to the first step of the stairs before his horse is brought round. Once, during a thaw, she fetches a silk parasol the colour of pigeons' breasts and stands smiling under it while drops of snowmelt fall one by one on the stretched silk. Charles watches. Héloïse works it out quickly. She investigates and discovers Emma was educated at the Ursuline Convent — dancing, geography, drawing, piano. "That was the last straw." She makes Charles swear on a prayer-book never to return. He obeys. But Flaubert notes, with cold irony, that he thought "his interdict to see her gave him a sort of right to love her." In spring, Héloïse's notary absconds with the funds in his office. Investigation reveals her celebrated fortune was fiction — the house mortgaged to its foundations, the boat share negligible. The family confrontations that follow are brutal. Within a week Héloïse, hanging washing in the yard, is seized with a haemorrhage. The next day she says "O God," sighs, and dies. Charles goes home, sees her dress still hanging by the alcove, sits at the writing table until dark. "She had loved him after all." The chapter ends on grief, not relief — and Flaubert gives Charles no sense of liberation, only a quiet, belated recognition that something real has just been lost.