7.36 Flaubert — Madame Bovary I — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the opening of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and the chapter on Emma's education, in the original. Recognise Flaubert's style: exact detail, long balanced sentences, and an irony that never announces itself. Understand the novel's central theme, the gap between the life Emma has read about and the life she lives. Follow a narrator who begins as nous , one of Charles's schoolmates, and then disappears. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Il se leva ; sa casquette tomba. He stood up; his cap fell. harceler par son ordre les clients qui ne payaient pas. badger, on her orders, the patients who did not pay. la veuve d’un huissier de Dieppe, qui avait quarante-cinq ans et douze cents livres de rente. the widow of a bailiff from Dieppe, forty-five years old with an income of twelve hundred livres (francs) a year. Charles avait entrevu dans le mariage l’avènement d’une condition meilleure, Charles had glimpsed in marriage the coming of a better condition, son père l’amena lui-même à la ville, pour la mettre au couvent. her father took her to town himself to place her in the convent. Elle cherchait dans sa tête quelque vœu à accomplir. She searched her mind for some vow to fulfil. Prerequisites : 7.35 — this reading follows 7.35 Reading . You read Flaubert's Un cœur simple in 7.22 Reading ; Maupassant, whose Boule de suif you have just finished, was his pupil. The literary words of 5.23 Vocabulary and the archaic forms of 5.28 Vocabulary will help. About this text Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) spent almost five years writing Madame Bovary , sometimes a whole week on a single page. It appeared in the Revue de Paris in 1856 and as a book in 1857, after a trial in which Flaubert was prosecuted for offending public morals and acquitted. It is the story of Emma, a farmer's daughter educated in a convent, who marries a dull country doctor, Charles Bovary, and seeks in adultery and luxury the passion she has read about in novels. It is often called the first modern novel. This lesson gives two passages from the first part, about 3,300 words. The first is the beginning of the first chapter: Charles's arrival at school in Rouen, his famous cap, his studies, and his first marriage to an older widow. The second is the whole of chapter six, which goes back in time to tell what Emma read and dreamed at her convent school. Omissions are marked […] . The text is that of the Œuvres complètes published in Paris by Louis Conard in 1910, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Flaubert The cap. The description of Charles's cap is one long sentence that piles up incompatible elements, du bonnet à poil, du chapska, du chapeau rond , and ends by comparing its ugliness to le visage d'un imbécile . The cap is Charles: composite, clumsy, new and pathetic. Flaubert tells us nothing about his character directly. The vanishing narrator. The novel begins with Nous étions à l'étude , as if told by a schoolboy, and the nous returns a few more times, for the last time in: Il serait maintenant impossible à aucun de nous de se rien rappeler de lui. Then it vanishes for the rest of the book. Charles is so ordinary that even his classmates forget him. Emma's reading. Chapter six is a catalogue of everything Emma has read: Paul et Virginie , Chateaubriand's Génie du christianisme , sentimental novels, Walter Scott, Lamartine, the keepsakes. The long list of cliches, dames persécutées , nacelles au clair de lune , rossignols dans les bosquets , is Flaubert's mockery of romantic literature; Emma takes it all literally. The key sentence. Flaubert says she was de tempérament plus sentimentale qu'artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages . She uses religion, music and books for the feelings they give her. Everything in the rest of the novel follows from this. Reading it a second time, part by part The new boy. A tall, awkward country boy enters the class, holding his strange cap on his knees. When the teacher asks his name, he shouts Charbovari , and the class erupts. The student. Charles works hard and stays in the middle of the class; his parents take him out of school to study medicine. The first marriage. His mother installs him as a doctor at Tostes and marries him to a rich widow of forty-five, who controls everything he does. The convent. Emma, sent to a convent in Rouen at thirteen, loves the chapel for its atmosphere, invents sins to stay longer at confession, and reads in secret the novels lent by an old seamstress. The return. After her mother's death she enjoys being sad, then grows bored; the nuns are glad to see her leave. When Charles comes to her father's farm, she believes she has found the passion of her books. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Madame Bovary We were in the study hall when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy in ordinary clothes and by a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been sleeping woke up, and everyone stood, as if caught at work. The headmaster signalled to us to sit down again; then, turning to the master in charge of the study hall: "Monsieur Roger," he said to him in a low voice, "here is a pupil I am placing in your care; he is entering the fifth form. If his work and his conduct deserve it, he will move up to the senior boys, where his age calls him." Standing in the corner, behind the door, so that he could hardly be seen, the new boy was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut straight across his forehead, like a village choirboy's, and he looked sensible and very ill at ease. Although he was not broad in the shoulders, his short jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have pinched him at the armholes, and through the slits of the cuf