Charles Bovary, Country Doctor Quotes

“His assets—inherited, not earned—had vanished. If the book had been brought to its end, the hopeless imbeciles Bouvard and Pécuchet would have logically sought refuge in death.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“not as world, but as surroundings; he experienced them the way one observes the fauna in a landscape, as dainty, odious, even repugnant and worthy of extermination; and the question should remain open as to how well he knew the members of his own class, and what sympathy he may have felt for them.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Flaubert’s irony is hard, maybe even wicked, in any case profoundly unfair. Let us take a look at one of the most important figures from Madame Bovary, the apothecary Homais, and then proceed from his example. In him, bourgeois enlightenment, the heritage of our civilization, the indispensable fundament of every socialist utopia, finds itself cast into monstrous ridicule.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“This man is a consummate writer, in line with that dictum of Thomas Mann’s: one for whom writing is especially hard.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“I demand a closed chamber, for regrettably, what the accused has proposed to reveal here is a danger to public morals. The defendant, infected by his wife’s dissoluteness, which judicial language lacks words to describe, is the most appalling specimen I have ever come across in the long course of my life as a guardian of order and morals. Look at him, how he sits there, his gaze unmoved, at his table at the inn, hatching his plans for murder, necrophilia, and sodomy, le visage blême, serrant dans la main gauche la fiole avec le poison [50]—the palefaced killer!”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“The young notary Léon Dupuis and the landholder Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger, a venerable nobleman in the best years of his life, were the victims of this poisoner. Two heads fell: now the blade must fall on the neck of the murderer, so the people of this country do not despair of justice on earth, and whoever hatches murderous plans may know that he will have no more indulgence here on earth than up above in the kingdom of God.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“The doctor prescribes, the apothecary follows his recommendations methodically. You deserve your sleep just as I deserve my Legion of Honor. I will write down the dosages on a scrap of paper and will affix it to the bottle, though you know perfectly well when quantity ceases to be mere quantity and takes on the qualities of a toxin. It is up to you to decide whether you should call on Doctor Canivet in his capacity as consulting doctor or proceed on your own. . . .” “On my own. On my own account, at my own risk.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“and who, if he is made to play the pitiful role of the cuckold, deserves pathos, the highest blossoming of the strength of written art.—”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“that the haut bourgeois should detest the petit, and the cultivated the lowbrow; for the barber-surgeon from Yonville, the famous doctor’s son could summon arrogant pity, but not sympathetic compassion.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“for Charles was dumb and the bourgeois author eclectic and erudite, and he hated stupidity (or what he took to be such) with the same hatred he harbored for that sin which he, a bourgeois through and through, would not forgive even Emma, his beloved, his transformed”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“How the subject is determined through objective circumstances and yet remains a subject, endowed with full existential freedom: this would only be illuminated through dialectical reason, the totalization of knowledge that would not be systematically considered until one hundred years after the appearance of Bovary, by Jean-Paul Sartre.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Flaubert’s Charles Bovary was a dimwit; such a person doesn’t reason, he takes things as they come, chimneys and change and corruption, same as wind and bad weather and the irritable impatience of his bride, when she said over and over amid his awkward approaches at tenderness and his prattling: Laisse-moi! But a realist storyteller would have had to fill in the empty gaps.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“ate the same meals over and over with the same dependable hunger, embraced his wife at regular intervals, saddled his horse today as he had yesterday, the same way he would do tomorrow: bourgeois moderation is expressed through the metronome of the workday, along with occasional festivities, and this abrogates any feeling of temporality. Charles”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“The operation turned out badly—what can you say? More than once in Rouen I’ve seen a patient meet his end in the operating room under the well-groomed hands of Dr. Achille-Cléophas Flaubert. That is how it goes in our line of work, which you don’t know a damned thing about. One time you get lucky, the next you don’t, that’s the end of the story. So undress and lie down next to me, and I will claim my conjugal rights, just as I perform my marital duties as a sound husband and provider. Not a word more!”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“And yet, holding fast to the precarious stability of quotidian jargon, accepting without argument the ludic maxims conceived by the bourgeois Flaubert, it remains permissible to move beyond the element of play and to question the reality of this country doctor now present in the imaginative life of millions, over whom the ownership claims of the bourgeois landowner from Croisset have long expired—even without hope of any “real” insight.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“So Gustave Flaubert was playing as he composed Madame Bovary, groaning under the crushing weight of words; and the game plays out further in these pages, albeit according to a different set of rules. Charles Bovary, the poor man from whom everything was stripped away, love, his beloved, his possessions, and even his memory—for, as he is forced to realize, he has lived in error—was treated by Gustave Flaubert as a quantité négligeable.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“And I didn’t take it hard, at least young Léon would have been an understanding schoolmate, devoted and ready to serve, nothing like the haughty, highborn Gustave.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Now that I am enlightened, through mourning and the letters in the secret drawer, I would say to you,”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Born poor, little earned besides, brought up dumb, little learned besides. Your penknife, Gustave Flaubert, and oui and merci, all too mean and too meager.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“However we might be deceived by his irony, which would prove fatal for false romanticism, he took the side of Emma and her finally murderous passion with its contempt for the bourgeois subject. He failed to see the citoyen, in both Homais and the country doctor; he only saw, only fashioned, the bourgeois that he himself was, endowing him with the repellent traits of the merchant Lheureux.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“What remains then is fatalité, the mysterious fate behind which Flaubert the naysayer, Flaubert the runaway, hides. I’m good for nothing? I’m a dodgy scribbler? I’m not a useful member of society?—Eh bien, tant pis! C’est la faute de la fatalité.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“it!”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Mais oui, Madame Bovary, c’est bien lui, Gustave Flaubert. [25] Her excesses are his, her passionate mysticism an analogue to his mystical subservience to the author’s craft. Her pathos, which the author’s irony barely alludes to, is the pathetic irreality of the visionary from the hermitage in Croisset. He said as much, moreover, if not with direct reference to his own self, which he never wished to turn out into the world.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Charles, too, is a bearer of values, bourgeois and social ones, no less deserving of mention than the proletarian and communal values of the old maid, which flicker tenderly as the stage lights fall on them in passing. But no, there is nothing! Charles Bovary, country doctor, is the uncouth weakling his wife takes him for; and the morsel of compassion the author patronizingly offers him now and then is a pittance.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“And to close: the true and sad biography of Delphine Delamare, the doctor’s wife from the village of Ry. A banal affaire d’adultère, probably discussed in the Flaubert household, which the author’s friends Bouilhet and Du Camp suggest to him as a theme for a novel. He must be “healed” of the superfluous phantasms”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“What may be achieved, perhaps, is nothing more than this: to gaze at Sartre’s mountains of thought, but from a distance, so that only the contours are visible in the mental heavens, and not to get lost amid the peaks and valleys. Sartre’s Flaubert is the Sartre-Flaubert, and should remain such. It is now left to others to discover their own Flaubert-Flaubert according to the map each sketches out for himself. For what it’s worth, we have an example before us now.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“The most admirable, if certainly most capricious interpretation, is the one expounded by Jean-Paul Sartre in his redoubtable work on Flaubert, in the third volume, to be exact: there, when he speaks of the societally conditioned “objective neurosis” that history imposed not only on Flaubert, but on all of the authors who were his contemporaries, he sees nothing more nor less than the Hegelian world-spirit.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“And above all: the first draft of the—as his discerning comrades assured him—thoroughly disastrous metaphysical novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“In the grave of unconscious memory, the one and only great love, Elisa Foucault-Schlésinger, around nine years his elder, whom Gustave met in Trouville, too young to be in passion’s thrall; Elisa, whom he loved as he loved no other woman in his life, save for his mother, who always hovered as a kindly but stern shadow over the house in Croisset.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“and so many more! That the country doctor failed to notice his”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man