How the French Invented Love (27 page)

But it would be wrong to think of Flaubert solely as a realist—a term he himself repudiated later in life. Though
Madame Bovary
does indeed puncture and destroy Emma Bovary’s romantic illusions, we can never forget Flaubert’s assertion that he and Madame Bovary were, at some level, the same person. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” he declared. How else could he have created that pathetic creature with whom so many readers have empathized and so many women have identified?

Let me confess at the onset, I was one of those teenage girls who identified completely with Emma Bovary. It seemed inconceivable to me that such a beautiful young woman with a fertile imagination should be asked to settle for a mediocre country doctor lacking all distinction. She who had dreamed of refinements above her station as a farmer’s daughter was understandably disappointed by her humdrum marriage and driven to look elsewhere for romance. I can’t say that I admired her as I did the morally upright characters in British novels, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, but I did sympathize with her and bemoan her fate.

Several years later, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, I took a course on Flaubert with the then-famous Professor René Jasinski and read
Madame Bovary
again. This time I was pregnant with my first child and had trouble staying awake in Jasinski’s after-lunch class. (I learned later that the medication I was taking had the side effect of making me drowsy.) Nonetheless, I struggled through the course and wrote a paper on Emma Bovary that expressed how much she had descended in my esteem. Emma’s romantic reveries were no longer ones I could identify with, and Emma herself just seemed misguided and shallow. Two months after the course had ended, the birth of my daughter compelled me to dislike Emma even more. There I was with a delicious baby girl, and Emma did not have the slightest affection for her own daughter. Bad wife! Bad mother! How could I have loved the book so much when I was fifteen?

Still later, in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, I read
Madame Bovary
for a third time with insights provided by the now-famous Professor René Girard, then my dissertation director and presently a member of the Académie Française. I came to see Emma Bovary in the light of what Girard called “mimetic desire”—that is, she desired what she had learned to desire through a third party. The romantic novels she had read were, as she remembered, “all about love, lovers, sweethearts . . . gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains.” Words like “passion” and “felicity,” “which had appeared so beautiful in books,” had given her a false notion of what love could be. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire made sense to me because I knew how books, movies, and movie magazines had affected my girlfriends and me in the formation of our romantic desires. (Of course, at Johns Hopkins, you were supposed to avoid movies, unless it was one of Ingmar Bergman’s.)

This third reading of
Madame Bovary
, which was not to be my last, opened my mind to the multiple layers of meaning within the book. I began to see how romanticism and realism, illusion and disillusion, comedy and tragedy, sociology and psychology, lyricism and materialism, pathos and irony, all formed a web of interconnected threads fostering different interpretations. As a fifteen-year-old, I had been drawn into Emma’s romantic fantasies. As a young wife and mother, I rejected them and adopted a down-to-earth stance toward love and marriage. As a more sophisticated reader, I could appreciate the true greatness of
Madame Bovary
as a consummate work of art. Flaubert had insisted that his prose be as rigorous as poetry: every word must count, every sentence must ring true. The total work must be so rich and tightly constructed that we never doubt its credibility, that we become captivated by its characters and plot and take away feelings and thoughts that linger long after we have read the last page. For our purposes,
Madame Bovary
represents not only a rebirth of the cynical seduction theme that had been present in France for centuries, but also as a touchstone for a new anti-romantic vision of love.

M
adame Bovary
begins and ends not with the heroine herself but with the story of Charles Bovary, Emma’s future husband. This neat framing device situates her within the confines of marriage to a man who is physically unattractive and congenitally unimaginative. As a schoolboy, he wears a bizarre cap, “one of those sorry objects, whose mute ugliness has depths of expression, like the face of an imbecile.”
³
Whew! Charles is an ugly duckling who will always remain an ugly duckling. As a newly minted
officier de santé
—a health officer or second-class doctor—he is married off by his parents to a financially comfortable widow twice his age and is destined for a mundane life until he meets Emma. Seeing her for the first time at her family’s farm, where Charles has come to set her father’s fractured leg, he is struck by “the whiteness of her fingernails” and “her full lips, which she had a habit of biting in her moments of silence.” These expressions of refinement and sensuality, clues to her character, draw Charles back to the farm after his first wife’s death and inspire him to ask for Emma’s hand.

Charles and Emma’s two-day country wedding begins with a realistic picture of guests arriving in carriages, one-horse chaises, two-wheeled cars, open gigs, vans, wagons, and carts, followed by a description of farming people in their best attire—women with bonnets, fichus, and gold watch chains; men with frock coats, tailcoats, and long jackets. Then a lyrical portrayal of the procession, “united like a single colorful scarf, undulating over the countryside,” zeroes in on the fiddler with his beribboned violin leading the married couple, relatives, friends, and children to the town hall. After the ceremony, food was laid out under the cart shed, and the guests ate copiously until night. The pièce de résistance was a wedding cake in the form of a temple with a small Cupid balanced in a chocolate swing. Emma would have preferred a midnight wedding with torches, but such romantic ideas had been dismissed in favor of an old-fashioned celebration suitable for country folk. After the couple had retired for the night, they were not spared some of the usual wedding tricks: a fishmonger squirted water through the keyhole of their bedroom. The next day, Charles looked elated, whereas the bride gave nothing away.

This wedding scene, like a painting by Flaubert’s contemporary Courbet, aimed at representing life as one saw it with one’s eyes and heard it with one’s ears. Of course, Flaubert, like Courbet and any other major artist, shaped external reality according to an inner vision. Forget grottos and mountains where lovers experience romantic transports. Instead, the author gave us an irreverent picture of love and marriage that often bordered on satire.

It is only after Emma settles into her new home that we begin to know her from the inside. We learn that she had attended a convent school, where she had enjoyed the sensual aspects of the church service: “the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the fonts, and the glow of the candles.” She had developed a cult for the beheaded Scottish queen, Mary Stuart, and other famous women like Joan of Arc, Héloïse, and Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII. Some role models! She read the French poetry of Lamartine and the English novels of Walter Scott, which ill prepared her for her future role as the wife of a modest country doctor. Little wonder that she expected more of life than her husband’s coarse manners and tiresome conversation, “flat as a sidewalk.” Before long Emma was asking herself: “Oh, dear God! Why did I ever marry?”

Subsequently her romantic imagination became increasingly insistent. Disillusioned by marriage and her domestic surroundings, Emma sought consolation by conjuring up what might have been. She tried to imagine events that could have led to a different husband and a different life. Emma’s dissatisfaction with her present situation and her melancholy yearning for unknown romantic fulfillment have come to be called “bovarism.”

At this point in the novel, an extraordinary event occurs: Emma and Charles are invited to a ball by a local marquis! The ball at Vaubyessard introduces Emma to the aristocratic luxury she had dreamed of. This is what she wants. Everything in the château where they spend the night seems designed to produce a fairy-tale romance, where superior men and women with porcelain skin and fine clothes move about in an aura of satiated pleasure. Emma takes delight in every elegant detail—the flowers and furniture, food and wines, and especially the cotillion that begins at three in the morning. Though she does not know how to waltz, she finds herself in the arms of a knowledgeable viscount, who whirls her around the ballroom at an ecstatic pace.

The aristocratic ball preceded by the farm wedding and followed later in the book by an agricultural fair offer a panoramic view of nineteenth-century provincial society. The town of Yonville-l’Abbaye, where most of the action takes place, resembles villages Flaubert knew personally in the region around his family home near Rouen. Whereas Emma’s roots are among the peasant farmers and
petits bourgeois
who gather together for her wedding and the agricultural fair, her romantic head is filled with images of the local nobility. Love, as she fashions it, must come with the luxuries found in a class above her own. These material cravings are part and parcel of her adulterous liaisons and will trigger her eventual downfall.

As we might expect, adultery is the highway running through this novel. We are never far from it in French literature, be it in the twelfth century or the nineteenth.
Madame Bovary
will become synonymous with the adulteress in France, on a par with
Anna Karenina
a generation later in Russia. But what a poor, sad adulteress Emma becomes in the hands of Flaubert. Look how he mocks her in her first conversation with the notary’s clerk, Léon Depuis.

    “I think there is nothing as wonderful as a sunset,” she said, “especially at the seaside.”

        “Oh, I love the sea!” said Monsieur Léon.

        “And doesn’t it seem to you,” replied Madame Bovary, “that one’s spirit roams more freely over that limitless expanse, and that contemplating it elevates the soul and gives one glimpses of the infinite, and the ideal?”

    “It is the same with mountainous scenery,” Léon said.

Here we see the cherished ideals of the romantics reduced to banal clichés. Flaubert spares no one, not the would-be lovers, not the village priest, not the local pharmacist.

The notary’s assistant and the doctor’s wife are both too shy and too inexperienced to carry their longings beyond a stage of platonic attraction, at least in the first part of the novel. Such is not the case for Rodolphe Boulanger, a practiced seducer, wealthy and handsome, with an estate on the outskirts of town. Rodolphe sees immediately that Emma is bored by her husband and that she yearns for romance. He says to himself: “She’s gasping for love like a carp for water on a kitchen table. With three pretty compliments, that one would adore me, I’m sure of it! It would be lovely! Charming! . . . Yes, but how to get rid of the woman afterward?” Those sentences sum up Rodolphe’s part of the story: he is successful in seducing her with little more than flowery compliments and expert wiles. The affair is lovely, charming, and delicious while it lasts. And he ultimately gets rid of her with the same cynical ease he had enjoyed when wooing her in the first place.

Emma’s part of the story runs deeper. Here at last is the man she had dreamed of, here at last is the man who will save her from a life of monotonous despair. What could be more romantic than the personality he invents expressly for her? He styles himself as an advocate of passion and an enemy of conventional duty. “Our duty is to feel what is great, to cherish what is beautiful.” He and she were obviously preordained for each other. “Why did we meet? What chance decreed it? It must be that, like two rivers flowing across the intervening distance and converging, our particular inclinations impelled us toward each other.” If this were a romantic novel, such fatal affinities might seem plausible. Instead, because the reader has been clued in to Rodolphe’s intentions, there is no way we can believe he is sincere. The only person duped by his parody of the romantic hero is Emma Bovary.

After she has succumbed to Rodolphe’s advances, she says to herself again and again: “I have a lover! A lover!” She recognizes herself among the “lyrical throng of adulterous women” who were the heroines of the books she had read. Those women, once the instigators of Emma’s romantic fantasies, now welcome her into their fold with sisterly voices.

Emma’s love affair with Rodolphe is played out against the everydayness of provincial life, with its petty triumphs and minor tragedies. The village priest, the secular pharmacist, the greedy merchant enter into Emma’s story as necessary foils for her romantic sensibility. One of these secondary characters, the merchant Lheureux, will contribute substantially to her ultimate demise by abetting her appetite for luxury and drawing her into catastrophic debt.

Emma and Rodolphe make the most of their two-year affair. It comes with all the pleasures of the flesh, all the conventional expressions of love, and all the convoluted deceit that adultery requires. Charles, the consecrated cuckold, makes his daily rounds like a horse with blinders. He sees nothing beyond his good fortune in having a beautiful wife and an adorable daughter.

This “idyllic” period comes to an end when Emma, emotionally exhausted by her duplicitous life, persuades Rodolphe to run off with her. Though he pretends to acquiesce to her plan, in the end he reneges and writes her a letter that begins: “Be brave, Emma! Be brave! I don’t want to ruin your life.” When Emma receives his farewell letter hidden in the bottom of a basket of apricots and then sees Rodolphe’s carriage leaving for Rouen without her, she falls into a delirious state that lasts for forty-three days. Ever-faithful Charles abandons his work to be constantly at her bedside, and after several months, she begins to recuperate. Will Emma have learned her lesson? Of course not.