Madame Bovary Readalong - crinolines, carriages and lovers this way, 1 October

[StColumbofNavron]

Following the successful Anna Karenina readalong (almost coming to a close), Emma Bovary has come up in conversation as a comparison piece. You don't need to have read Anna Karenina though to join in.

We start on 1 October, mark your spot.

The goal is to read one chapter per day. There are three parts, 35 chapters and we'll take a day break between each part. It is fine to post as we go along but no further than the chapter for that day.

I have opted for the Aveling Marx translation (Wordsworth Classics) as that is what is on my shelf, however, more on translations below.

https://welovetranslations.com/2022/04/08/whats-the-best-translation-of-madame-bovary-part-1/
https://welovetranslations.com/2022/04/08/whats-the-best-translation-of-madame-bovary-part-2/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/21/translating-madame-bovary-adam-thorpe

Part 1
1 01-Oct
2 02-Oct
3 03-Oct
4 04-Oct
5 05-Oct
6 06-Oct
7 07-Oct
8 08-Oct
9 09-Oct

BREAK 10-Oct

Part 2
1 11-Oct
2 12-Oct
3 13-Oct
4 14-Oct
5 15-Oct
6 16-Oct
7 17-Oct
8 18-Oct
9 19-Oct
10 20-Oct
11 21-Oct
12 22-Oct
13 23-Oct
14 24-Oct
15 25-Oct

BREAK 26-Oct

Part 3 27-Oct
1 28-Oct
2 29-Oct
3 30-Oct
4 31-Oct
5 01-Nov
6 02-Nov
7 03-Nov
8 04-Nov
9 05-Nov
10 06-Nov
11 07-Nov

Part 3, Chapter 5

• Thursdays are Emma’s Rouen days. She leaves on the Hirondelle at an ungodly hour of the morning, excited and anxious to see her lover.
• When she arrives, Léon comes to meet her. The two go to the same hotel room every week, and spend all day in bed, drinking champagne, eating, talking, and generally enjoying each other.
• Léon is enchanted both by Emma herself and by the idea that he has a real, live mistress.
• The end of their days together come fast, and each week they dramatically part. Before heading home in the Hirondelle, Emma gets her hair done in preparation for her return home.
• The stagecoach encounters a particularly unfortunate beggar on its trip – a blind man, whose horrifically infected eye-sockets are described in excruciating detail. Emma is afraid of him, though Hivert makes fun of the poor man.
• Charles is always waiting at home for Emma; she despairs on the inside upon arriving back in Yonville. She starts to care less about things at home, and never even yells at Félicité anymore.
• Justin still hangs around, attempting be useful, and cultivating his crush on Emma.
• The rest of the week passes in a haze of longing, until Emma and Léon are together again.
• In the safety of their hotel room, the lovers talk about their hopes, dreams, and fears; Emma admits to Léon that she has loved another man who left.
• Emma begins to think again about Paris, and wonders if they might be happier there.
• At home, Emma is extra careful to make Charles happy. Once, he almost finds something out – he ran into the woman that Emma supposedly takes piano lessons from, and she didn’t know anything about Emma.
• Emma, afraid of being found out, makes up an excuse, then shows up later with a receipt for the lessons. From then on, it’s just lies, lies, lies.
• Emma decides to take an extra hotel room in Rouen, just in case she encounters someone from the village in the city.
• One day, Monsieur Lheureux catches up to her, asking for all the money the Bovarys owe him.
• As always, he’s thought of a temporary way out, through which he will certainly profit. He knows about a small piece of property Charles inherited, and encourages Emma to sell it. Since she has power of attorney, she has the right to do so. He’s even lined up a buyer, a man called Langlois.
• The sale goes through quickly, and Lheureux assures Emma she did the right thing. She attempts to pay him back, but he instead gives her four more promissory notes.
• Oh no! Emma and Charles just keep sinking deeper and deeper into debt. This is getting scary. Despite the thousands of francs they owe the merchant, Emma orders a whole passel of new things. When presented with the bill, Charles ends up signing yet another sketchy promissory note.
• Charles’s mom, who’s visiting, bluntly states how foolish she finds this new round of purchases. She lets slip the fact that Charles has agreed to revoke the power of attorney he granted to Emma.
• Emma freaks out.
• For the first time, Charles rebels against his mother – at the worst possible time! She’s the only one who demonstrates any common sense here, but Charles keeps defending Emma. His mother ends up leaving angrily.
• Charles, defeated by both the women in his life, has another power of attorney agreement drawn up to make Emma happy.
• Emma and Léon celebrate this renewal of her legal rights the next time they meet. Emma gets wilder and wilder – he doesn’t understand what’s going on with her, but he still finds her charming.
• One Thursday, Emma doesn’t return to Yonville. Charles, a bit frantic, drives to Rouen himself in the dead of night to try and find her. He runs around the city looking for her everywhere.
• Eventually, as he’s about to go to the piano teacher’s house, Emma herself comes out of nowhere, explaining that she was ill. Miraculously, Charles believes her.
• This incident actually gives Emma even more independence – she tells Charles that she can’t feel free when he’s always worrying about her. He gives her more space, which she promptly takes advantage of, heading into Rouen with the most ridiculous excuses every time she wants to see Léon.
• This recklessness starts to take its toll on Léon, however; his employers are unhappy with his constant absence. But he’s easily led by his mistress, and he continues to escape work to meet her. He also does basically whatever she tells him to, from dressing all in black to attempting love poems in her honor (unfortunately, he can never come up with rhymes, and has to copy them).

I've managed to fall behind again already. The uni term is kicking my butt, so to speak 😬

Emma is repeating the same possessive behaviour with Léon as she did with Rodolphe. It's a kind of destructive passion. I like how Gradesaver gives a complete bullet point for 'Emma freaks out'. This is a full, complete statement of fact.

I think it is interesting how Flaubert acknowledges female desire and sexuality as a thing. I haven't really seen that in a book before. She doesn't seem to obligingly feel shame, self loathing or disgust and definitley likes sex.

Agreed! Yes, definitely! There's a line in chapter six about the string of her corset. It seems a very daring description for the times. I'll see if I can find it...

'She would undress roughly, tearing the thin string of her corset, which would whistle around her hips like a slithering snake'.

Wow! And letting all her clothes drop to the floor. I think I missed a lot of the nuances in the French edition. I certainly don't remember these details.

Part 3, Chapter 6

• On his many trips back to Yonville, Léon often has dinner with Homais, and thus feels obliged to invite him to come visit in Rouen. One Thursday, Homais unexpectedly takes him up on the offer.
• Emma is shocked to see the pharmacist waiting for the Hirondelle – he’s excited about his trip to the city, and tells her all about his plans to revisit the places of his youth. Emma is not pleased.
• Upon arrival in Rouen, Homais dashes off to find Léon, and drags him into a café. They proceed to linger there for hours as Homais reminisces about the good old days.
• In the meantime, Emma is getting impatient. She waits for Léon all afternoon in their hotel room.
• Back at the café, Homais starts teasing Léon about his mistress. Worried that the pharmacist knows something, Léon plays dumb – it turns out that Homais thinks that Léon is in love with Félicité.
• This sets Homais off on a long diatribe about women. He goes on and on, as is his way, and Léon loses his patience. He rushes off, claiming to have an appointment.
• The pharmacist follows him all the way to the hotel. Léon rushes upstairs, and finds Emma distraught. He attempts to console her, but is called away again by Homais. He promises to return.
• Léon keeps trying to come up with new ways to get rid of the pharmacist. He says he has to work; Homais wants to come to the office. It’s impossible to escape this man.
• Finally, Léon gives in to the pushy pharmacist, and they stop to visit a friend of Homais’s. However, in the end, Léon manages to escape and run to the hotel – but Emma is gone.
• Emma decides first that she hates Léon, then that she’s being too harsh on him. The pair reconciles, but things are different.
• In the following days, Emma and Léon’s relationship sours. She still attempts to throw herself at him, hoping to find happiness again, but it’s no use.
• Léon starts to wonder if Emma’s going a little mad. She makes him nervous now, and he also starts to resent her domination. However, unfortunately for Léon, he still melts into a little puddle of love every time he sees her.
• Emma actually is getting more than a little obsessive – she wants to know what Léon is doing all the time, and even thinks of having him followed.
• Nothing makes her happy anymore and, once again, she looks back on her life and wonders where it all went wrong. Sound familiar? It should – this has all happened before. Life seems hopeless once again.
• One day, the financial situation gets even worse – it turns out that Lheureux has turned Emma’s debt over to one of his associates, one Monsieur Vinçart. Emma sends the messenger away, claiming that she’ll pay up later. Unfortunately, the next day an official protest of non-payment shows up. Yikes.
• Emma runs to complain to Lheureux. He plays dumb, then attempts to shift the blame over to the mysterious Monsieur Vinçart. Emma leaves, somewhat pacified, and even accepts some fabric from the merchant (which, of course, she’ll have to pay for later).
• Emma steps it up a notch, and figures out ways to get some money. The money from both Emma’s and Charles’s families has run out, so she starts billing patients behind Charles’s back.
• She manages to limp along in this fashion for a while, paying off her debt in small portions, then signing more of those awful promissory notes. Clearly, Emma doesn’t really get what’s going on – when she tries to figure it out, she gets confused and gives up, which is so not the right thing to do.
• The house falls into disrepair; Emma snaps whenever anyone asks her about it.
• Poor Charles is still madly in love with Emma, and can’t figure out what’s going on with her. They don’t even sleep in the same bed anymore – Emma stays in the bedroom, reading horror novels all night, while Charles is exiled to the attic.
• Emma’s only happiness comes from her weekly escapes to Rouen. She still enjoys the luxury of the hotel room, and helps Léon pay for the room, despite her debts.
• He suggests that they might try a cheaper place, but Emma isn’t down with that. They stick with the expensive hotel.
• To pay for this, Emma sells some of her things – she even asks Léon to pawn the fancy spoons her father gave her for her wedding. He’s uncomfortable with this, and begins to wonder if his friends and family are right in telling him to ditch the mistress.
• Léon vows never to see Emma again, and this resolve diminishes her power over him. Now he’s bored by her melodramatic outbursts.
• Just as in her affair with Rodolphe, Emma also feels the excitement go out of the relationship. She blames Léon, and wishes something terrible might happen so she can have an excuse to get out of their entanglement, but she’s too cowardly to actually say anything to him.
• All the while, Emma imagines another ideal man, one made up of her assorted memories and desires, who can carry her away from her dull, humdrum life. Again, her fantasy world begins to consume reality.
• One Thursday, Emma stays the night in Rouen, partying it up with Léon and his friends at a masked ball. She is horrified by the company she finds herself in – the other women present are prostitutes. She faints, revives, then flees the party, disgusted with herself.
• Back in Yonville the next afternoon, Emma arrives home to a dreadful surprise: her house is being seized by governmental order! An official document had been sent the day before, demanding that she pay the whopping sum of eight thousand francs within twenty four hours.
• She doesn’t believe it can possibly be true – the ridiculous enormity of the sum makes her think that it’s just Lheureux trying to scare her.
• She goes to visit the merchant, confident that they can work something out.
• But Lheureux is not in a forgiving mood. It’s payback time – literally. Emma realizes that this is serious business. She even tries to use her feminine wiles on Lheureux, but it’s no use; he only wants his money.
• Lheureux heartlessly kicks Emma out of the office, desperate and helpless.

Part 3, Chapter 7

• The next day, the town bailiff, Maître Hareng, comes to the house to make an inventory of its goods.
• After they leave, Emma and Félicité try not to give anything away to Charles, who is somehow still blissfully ignorant of all of this.
• The government even sent a guard to make sure Emma doesn’t do a runner; he stays obediently in the attic so Charles doesn’t notice.
• The next day, Emma goes to Rouen to ask everyone she knows there for money.
• Finally, she comes to Léon’s house. They go to their room in the Hôtel du Boulogne, where she proceeds to throw herself upon his mercy. However, he doesn’t have eight thousand francs worth of mercy – who does?
• Léon attempts to tell her that things aren’t as bad as she thinks – he claims that things will be fine if she pacifies Lheureux with a smaller amount, like three thousand francs. He obediently goes out for a while, supposedly looking for money somewhere, and comes back empty-handed.
• Emma, who’s going off the deep-end right now, tries to force Léon to steal the money from his employer. Just when he’s about to give in to her will, he remembers that his rich friend Morel will be back in town that evening – he promises to bring Emma the money the next day.
• But Emma is dubious, and Léon is uncomfortable. He was sure that Emma would believe this lie, but instead she doesn’t look any better. He makes a quick exit.
• Wandering disconsolately through the town, Emma is almost run over by a passing carriage. She recognizes the man inside – it’s the Viscount.
• She feels even worse than ever.
• On the way home, she encounters Homais in the Hirondelle, bringing home his wife’s favorite rolls from a bakery in Rouen.
• They encounter the blind beggar, as usual. Homais is offended by this spectacle, and babbles on about what the blind man should do to cure his condition. Homais gives the beggar a coin, then actually asks for change (who does that?).
• Hivert, cruel man that he is, makes the beggar do a dog impression. Emma, full of pity and disgust, gives him a five-franc coin, all the money she has in the world. It seems like a noble gesture to her.
• Emma’s feelings all desert her – she’s just apathetic now. She hopes that something dramatic might occur – like Lheureux’s death.
• Unfortunately, no such thing happens. Emma awakens to a commotion; a crowd is gathering in the town square where a sign has been posted. All of Emma’s property is officially for sale.
• Emma and Félicité decide that the best course of action is to go to see Monsieur Guillaumin, the notary. It’s a last ditch effort.
• The notary’s house is elegant, and even in her despair, Emma notes that it’s the type of house she should have.
• Apparently, Monsieur Guillaumin is secretly allied with Lheureux, but he lets Emma babble on about her financial troubles anyway. The notary calmly eats his breakfast while she tries to enlist his help.
• The only thing Guillaumin will accept in exchange for his help, it seems, is Emma herself. He makes a move on her as soon as she’s done talking. Disgusted, she flees the scene.
• Back home, Félicité tries to help Emma think of people who can help – someone, anyone. Emma gives up, and imagines what she’ll tell Charles when he gets home. She assumes that he will forgive her for ruining them financially – but she still doesn’t forgive him for the supposed crime of ever meeting her.
• Charles returns, and Emma slips out before he sees her. She high-tails it over to Binet’s, and presumably asks the tax collector if he can help (he can’t).
• Two of the town’s gossiping ladies, Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife, and her friend Madame Caron, observe her, disgusted by her behavior.
• Emma, rejected by the whole town, flees to Madame Rollet’s, where she has a small-scale nervous breakdown (understandably) and sends the wetnurse to see if Léon is at her house.
• In the nurse’s cottage, Emma waits in vain for Léon, who never shows.
• Madame Rollet returns with bad news. Léon is nowhere to be found, Charles is crying, and everyone is looking for her.
• Emma only has one more place to go: she heads off to La Huchette to find Rodolphe, ready to giver herself to him for the three thousand francs.

I read ahead and finished as am going away today. I don't think I'll be giving much away if I saw that it doesn't get any more cheery. I really enjoyed it, thanks @StColumbofNavron for suggesting

It's a grim read, isn't it Almahart. Especially chapter 8. Enjoy your trip away.

Part 3, Chapter 8

• As she approaches La Huchette, Emma wonders what she can possibly say to her former lover.
• She finds Rodolphe in his room, smoking a pipe and sitting by the fire.
• Emma feebly attempts to win Rodolphe back, telling him that they can be together again. She looks beautiful in her despair, and he’s actually moved – he kisses her and tells her she’s the only woman for him.
• However, Emma picks this moment to confess everything, thinking that she’s in the clear – she lies about how the money was lost, making it look like it’s not her fault. She begs him for three thousand francs.
• Rodolphe is repelled by this outpouring of demands – he realizes that she only came to him for his money. He tells her honestly that he doesn’t even have it.
• Rodolphe, despite his flaws, isn’t a totally evil man. He would have given her the cash if he actually had it – however, he really doesn’t.
• Emma doesn’t believe this; she assumes that he never loved her, and that he’s just holding out on her now. She flips out on him, accusing him of lying to her about his money. She uses his extravagant belongings as proof, and screams at him for everything he’s ever done to her.
• Rodolphe asserts once again that he doesn’t have the money. Emma, furious and desperate, leaves.
• It’s nighttime; Emma’s twenty-four hours are far past up, and she has nothing to give to Lheureux. On her way home, she stops at the pharmacy.
• The Homais family is having dinner, but she doesn’t want to see them. The one she wants is Justin – she convinces him to give her the key to the poison cabinet upstairs, supposedly so she can kill some rats.
• Justin is awed by her beauty, and even though he feels something bad coming, he gives in. As soon as they get to the depository, she rushes to the bottle of arsenic that Homais pointed out on jam-making day so long ago, and begins to eat the white powder.
• Justin is totally freaked out, as he should be. He tries to stop her, but she threatens him, saying that everyone will think it’s Homais’s fault if he says anything.
• After ingesting the poison, Emma goes home, strangely satisfied.
• Charles is a complete mess. He doesn’t understand what’s going on at all – where could all this mysterious debt possibly come from? He goes out in search of Emma, and when he gets back, she’s home already. He asks her brokenly what has happened.
• In response, Emma writes a letter and asks him to open it the next day. She goes to bed without another word.
• Emma observes her body’s reaction with a detached calmness for a while – she assumes that she’ll just go to sleep and not wake up.
• Death by arsenic, however, is not that easy. She awakens with an awful inky taste in her mouth, and is suddenly convulsed with nausea. The poison kicks in, and believe us, it’s not pretty.
• At eight o’clock, Emma starts to vomit. Charles is confused by some of the symptoms, and can’t tell what’s wrong with her.
• Emma is wracked with violent convulsions. In Charles’s terrified eyes, she finally sees the true love that she’s never seen before – but it’s too late.
• Charles desperately reads the letter and goes mad with desperation. Suddenly everyone knows that Emma has been poisoned; Homais sends Justin to fetch Doctors Canivet and Larivière.
• Everyone is freaking out. Homais tries his best to reason through what they should do, and Charles is useless.
• Emma finally realizes that Charles loved her all along, and she tries to soothe him – this only makes his grief worse.
• Berthe is brought in, tired and confused; the child thinks it’s New Year’s, the only time she’s ever allowed to be up late, and expects presents. Soon, though, Berthe is terrified by her mother’s horrible appearance, and is taken away.
• The symptoms seem to stop for a while, and Charles calms down, hoping that Emma will pull through.
• Canivet arrives, and decisively declares that Emma’s stomach must be emptied. They give her a medication to induce vomiting.
• This turns out to be the wrong decision. Emma starts vomiting blood, and she begins to scream horribly. Everyone, even Monsieur Canivet, is horrified.
• Finally, Dr. Larivière arrives. With him comes a new infusion of hope – he’s famous for his knowledge and skill, and everyone looks up to him.
• After seeing Emma, however, even Larivière is grim. Though he’s used to seeing people in misery, he can’t help but tear up at the sight of the distressed family. He tells Charles that there’s nothing to be done.
• Homais, despite his grief, pulls it together enough to invite Dr. Larivière and Monsieur Canivet to lunch. Madame Homais quickly whips up the most extravagant meal she can find.
• Over several courses, Homais describes what he thinks happened to Emma. Nobody can figure out how she poisoned herself; Justin, overhearing this and undoubtedly feeling incredibly guilty, drops a stack of plates.
• Homais’s pride soon consumes any residual concern he might have for poor Charles and Emma. He boastfully goes on an on about his knowledge of poisons and illnesses.
• Homais forces Dr. Larivière to check out all of his children to make sure they’re in good health. Larivière, irritated, makes a snide joke about Homais, and attempts to leave. However, everyone else in the town had a similar idea; they mob the doctor, seeking his opinion on their various physical conditions.
• Larivière rolls off in his coach without seeing Emma again (he urges Canivet to stay with her), and the townspeople agree on the whole that the famous surgeon was pretty useless.
• Next, Father Bournisien shows up to administer the Last Rites to Emma before she dies. Homais goes with him, despite his cynicism about religion.
• Charles has one last moment of hope – it looks as though Emma is better after she receives the priest’s blessing. However, this is just the calm before the storm.
• Suddenly, Emma is seized with a terrible convulsion, and her whole body is wracked with agony.
• From outside, the grating sound of the blind beggar’s voice singing a crude song drifts in.
• Emma cries out, "The blind man!" and laughs hideously (III.8.110).
• She violently jerks back to the mattress, dead.

Oh dear.

I know :(

Do you think Flaubert's treatment of Emma is cruel? The last scene makes me inclined to say yes.

It's a bit lingering, isn't it?

Yes. The return of the beggar singing the crude song was a mean touch, I thought.
Up to now, I thought that Flaubert didn't judge Emma for her actions. He was impartial. He was scornful of the townspeople, but seemed observant of her.

I feel a bit sullied somehow - like we were set to voyeuristically watch the affairs and the overspending, and then forced to watch her get what was coming to her.

Interesting point, Cornish. Yes, I can't argue with that.

Yes, it's quite different from Anna's death in Anna Karenina which was so sad. Emma's is just awful.

I've been reading through my fingers for days - the whole car crash of her finances. I feel like the summaries weren't really picking up on the fact that Lheureux was blackmailing her into getting deeper & deeper into debt, & that even if she had been in a state to untangle herself, he was pressurising her with threats of exposure.

That's true, Sadik. It became very sinister.
I think it was mentioned early on that Lheureux had ruined someone else in Yonville.

I haven’t finished, but I have read it before.

I think it’s a really good companion piece to Anna Karenina. The level of agency, circumstance and motivation of each is entirely different, but the outcome is the same.

I caveat what I am about to say with the fact that 20
years later DH and I are very happy and still together.

But we got married very young and had DS1 immediately. I read Madame Bovary in this context. I was bored, unhappy and supremely unfulfilled and I found myself behaving in a very low level Emma way. I felt trapped and dreamed of the life I should have been having so I really identified with her. I really felt I could understand this boring, provincial existence.

Re-reading it now, I still have a lot of sympathy for her. I struggled for a long time because I didn’t think I could change anything and that would have been even more so for a woman in Emma’s time.

I do think Flaubert was a very talented writer, or as much as I can in translation. I watched a great play about him recently and he came across as neurotic and a man who wanted to change the world with perfect literature but couldn’t better MB and just sank into despair.

I didn't have the maturity to fully appreciate this novel when I read it first time round as a student. I remember feeling impressed by the writing and how Flaubert worked so diligently on the text with numerous revisions, but I didn't relate to Emma's circumstances at all.

Now in middle age I feel sympathetic towards her even though her predicament is largely of her own making. I was wondering if there isn't a little bit of Emma in all of us. Isn't there a quotation by Flaubert identifying with her? I think it's challenging for anyone to be completely happy in their present circumstances and to not look wistfully back to the past or regret the road not taken and imagine themselves somewhere else. It's too easy to fall down the path of temptation and vice. I maintain that Emma isn't a very nice person, but she's very human.

Thanks for sharing your insights StColomb. I can see where you were coming from. This was definitely a great follow-on read from Anna Karenina.

Thank you for that perspective @StColumbofNavron - really thought provoking.

I agree, this was definitely a good follow on to AK, and yes, thank you for your perspectives StColumbo. Overall, I found Emma much more convincing as a character, despite how painful her story was to read. With Anna, it felt improbable o me that she'd have made some of the choices that she did, especially given her devotion to her little boy.

It's interesting though that in both novels the implication was that having a discreet affair would have been possible, certainly nodded at for Anna, & likely possible to keep hidden for Emma.

I've really been enjoying the chapter a day approach (though as noted, I've never before considered chapter length a key feature of a novel ), & I'm thinking to read a British novel of the same era next that also deals with adultery. Suggestions welcome - I'd thought of Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell (published 3 years earlier than MB), or Tess of the D'Urbevilles (though 40 years later), but in both cases the protagonists are working class, so rather different.

In the past I know that Les Miserables has been suggested - partly because it has a nice convenient 365 chapters! Obviously not British though.