Madame Bovary

by Gustave Flaubert

remarks—a surgeon’s caresses that are like the oil with which he greases his scalpel.

She would have liked the name Bovary, which was hers, to be famous, she would have liked to see it displayed in bookstores, repeated in newspapers, known to all of France. But Charles had no ambition!

her. The fact was, she no longer hid her scorn for anything, or anyone; and she would sometimes express singular opinions, condemning what was generally approved, and commending perverse or immoral things: which made her husband stare at her wide-eyed.

But she was so pretty! And he had possessed few women as ingenuous as she! This love, so free of licentiousness, was a new thing for him and, drawing him out of his easy ways, both flattered his pride and inflamed his sensuality. Emma’s rapturous emotion, which his bourgeois common sense disdained, seemed charming to him in his heart of hearts, since he was the object of it. And so, certain of being loved, he stopped making any effort, and imperceptibly his manner changed.

But what was making her so unhappy?

“Bring her to me!” said her mother, hurrying over to give her a kiss. “How I love you, my poor child! How I love you!” Then, noticing that the tips of the child’s ears were a little dirty, she quickly rang for warm water and cleaned her, changed her underclothes, her stockings, her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as though just back from a trip; and finally, kissing her again and weeping a little, she handed her back to the maid, who was standing there quite astonished at this excess of tenderness.

Rodolphe would come; what she wanted to tell him was that she was bored, that her husband was hateful and her life hideous!

have an arrangement to propose to you,” he said. “If, instead of paying the agreed-upon sum, you would like to take . . .”

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language.

as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.

“What a load of nonsense! . . .” Which summed up his opinion; for his pleasures, like children in a schoolyard, had so trampled his heart that nothing green now grew there, and whatever passed that way, more heedless than the children, left behind not even its name, as they did, carved on the wall.

Moreover, she now enveloped everything in such indifference, her words were so affectionate and her glances so haughty, her behavior so changeable, that one could no longer distinguish selfishness from charity, nor corruption from virtue.

Homais, surprised at his silence, asked his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous to morality than literature.