Madame Bovary

Chapter 6 is not backstory. It is Flaubert's formal diagnosis — a methodical account of exactly how Emma's imagination was constructed, layer by layer, so that the reader understands the mechanism driving everything that follows. It begins before the convent. Emma had read Paul and Virginia and dreamed not just of exotic places but specifically of a devoted little brother who would bring her bird's nests and red fruit from tall trees. On the journey to the convent at thirteen, she and her father stop at an inn whose plates depict Mademoiselle de la Vallière — a famous royal mistress — with legends glorifying "religion, the tendernesses of the heart, and the pomps of court." The images are already layering themselves before she arrives. At the convent she is initially devout, or appears to be: she knows her catechism, answers the Vicar's difficult questions, invents small sins so she can stay longer kneeling in the confessional shadow, her face against the grating beneath the priest's whisper. The sermons' language of "betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage" stirs unexpected sweetness in her. She loves the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with arrows. She tries fasting as mortification. But Flaubert is precise: she loved the church for the sake of the flowers, music for the words of the songs, and literature for its passional stimulus. It is atmosphere she craves, not faith. The key diagnostic line comes midway: if her childhood had been spent in a city shop-parlour, she might have romanticised nature, which city-dwellers know only through books. But she knew the country too well — the lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs. So she turned the other direction. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. She wanted personal profit from things and rejected as useless anything that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart. She was, Flaubert specifies, of a temperament more sentimental than artistic — she looked for emotions, not landscapes. The old linen-mender who visits the convent monthly is a figure of fallen aristocracy — her family was ruined by the Revolution, and the clergy patronise her for it. She carries romance novels in her apron pockets and lends them to the older girls on the sly. For six months, at fifteen, Emma made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries: persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, gentlemen brave as lions, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, weeping like fountains. Through Walter Scott she turns to historical romance — old chests, guard-rooms, minstrels, long-waisted chatelaines watching cavaliers with white plumes gallop in from the fields. Her heroines are Mary Stuart, Joan of Arc, Héloïse. Then come the keepsakes — illustrated gift books smuggled into the dormitory, read by the light of an argand lamp in the silence while a belated carriage rolls over the Boulevards outside. Emma trembles as she lifts the tissue paper from each engraving: a young man in a short cloak on a balcony; English ladies with greyhounds in parks; women dreaming over open letters by moonlight; women plucking marguerite petals with fingers that curve at the tips like peaked shoes; sultans with long pipes; Turkish sabres; Greek caps; exotic landscapes with palm trees on one side, tigers on the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon, and swans swimming in relief against steel-grey water. These are the precise images that furnish Emma's imagination. Flaubert lists them so we cannot claim ignorance of where her fantasies came from. When her mother dies she performs grief correctly — has a mourning picture made from the dead woman's hair, writes to the Bertaux asking to be buried in the same grave. Her father, alarmed, comes to see her. Emma is secretly pleased to have achieved, at the first attempt, the rare ideal of pale lives never attained by mediocre hearts. She listens to Lamartine, to harps on lakes, to the songs of dying swans. Then she wears out. She would not confess it, continued from habit, and one day is surprised to find herself soothed — no more sadness than wrinkles on her brow. The nuns had thought she had a vocation. They are astonished to find her slipping away. The more they pressed — prayers, retreats, novenas, sermons about modesty and salvation — the more she pulled back, like a tightly reined horse that finally gets the bit between its teeth. When her father takes her home, no one is sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior thinks she has been somewhat irreverent to the community. Back at the Bertaux she briefly enjoys managing the servants, then grows disgusted with the country and misses the convent. By the time Charles arrives, she thinks herself quite disillusioned — with nothing more to learn and nothing more to feel. She has already exhausted herself on posturing. It is in this state of flat, burnt-out quiet that Charles's presence unsettles her enough to make her believe she is finally feeling the wondrous passion she had read about — which had hung, until then, "like a great bird with rose-coloured wings in the splendour of the skies of poesy." And now she cannot think that the calm in which she lives is the happiness she had dreamed. The chapter ends there. Flaubert has shown us everything. Emma doesn't mistake Charles for a romantic hero because she is naive — she mistakes him because she has been trained, image by image, novel by novel, engraving by engraving, to mistake atmosphere for reality.