Madame Bovary

Chapter 4 is Flaubert at his most sociological. The wedding is not a love story — it is an inventory of provincial France, catalogued with deadpan precision. Guests arrive from thirty miles away in every variety of vehicle. Their clothing is mapped by rank: fine tail-coats for the respectable, shooting jackets for the middling, work blouses for those who "you may be sure, would sit at the bottom of the table." Shirts stand out from chests like cuirasses. Men who shaved before dawn have diagonal gashes under their noses, reddened by the morning air. The procession walks a mile and a half to the mairie and back, stretching across the fields "like one long coloured scarf." The fiddler leads with ribbons on his bow. Emma's dress is too long — it trails on the ground, and she stops repeatedly to pull it up, picking off coarse grass and thistledowns with her gloved hands while Charles stands beside her, empty-handed, waiting. This single image — Emma managing her own appearance against rough terrain while Charles looks on passively — says everything about what their marriage will be. The feast runs until dark: four sirloins, six chicken fricassees, three legs of mutton, a suckling pig, and at dessert a wedding cake of theatrical ambition — a blue cardboard temple at the base, a Savoy cake dungeon with candied angelica fortifications in the middle, and on top a green field with nutshell boats, jam lakes, and a small Cupid balanced on a chocolate swing with real roses for handles. The confectioner had only just set up in the area and had taken considerable trouble. Charles does not shine. He answers feebly to the wedding jokes and toasts, unable to hold his end of the table's rough humour. The morning after, he is transformed — radiant, constantly seeking Emma out, calling her "my wife," putting his arm around her waist in the yard where anyone might see. Emma, by contrast, gives no sign that anything has changed. "The shrewdest did not know what to make of it." Flaubert notes the reversal with dry precision: the morning after, it is Charles who looks like the bride. Emma had asked her father in advance to be spared the usual crude wedding-night pranks. Rouault stops a fishmonger cousin mid-act — squirting water through the keyhole — by invoking the distinguished position of his son-in-law. The cousin is not convinced, joins a group of guests who feel they received the worst cuts of meat, and they spend the evening whispering about Rouault and hoping he will ruin himself. Charles's mother sits silent the entire day. She was consulted about nothing — not the dress, not the feast. She goes to bed early. Her husband stays up until dawn smoking cigars and drinking kirsch-punch, a combination the guests had never encountered, which "added greatly to the consideration in which he was held." Two days later the couple departs. Rouault rides with them as far as Vassonville, embraces Emma, then turns back alone. He walks about a hundred paces, stops, and watches the cart disappear into the dust. He remembers his own wedding — carrying his wife home on a pillion through Christmas snow, her face smiling on his shoulder, her cold hands tucked into his breast for warmth. He thinks: their son would have been thirty by now. He looks back down the empty road. "He felt dreary as an empty house." He considers walking to the church, decides it would only make things worse, and goes home. Monsieur and Madame Charles Bovary arrive at Tostes at six in the evening. The neighbours come to their windows to watch. The old servant curtsies and apologises for not having dinner ready, and suggests that madame might like to look over her house.