131. MADAME BOVARY

Gustave Flaubert  1857
Translated from French by Francis Steegmuller

In this classic book with wondrous prose, Emma Bovary is a madame with an absolutely restless heart. Intense feelings of disenchantment, unfulfillment and discontent surround her life.  She is forever in search of luxury, ardent love and passion and mistakenly assumes that a better lover and an altogether better life awaits her. And so she forgets her daughter Berthe and deceives her husband Charles, all in this endless search. What fraud, lies and cunning manipulations will she commit to attain it? Whose lives will she hurt ruin and destroy? 

'We were in the study-hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the handyman carrying a large desk.'(opening line)

'Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "rapture"--- words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.'(40)

'She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among things; and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification --- for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.'(42)

'She  might have been glad to confide all these things to someone. But how speak about so elusive a malaise, one that keeps changing its shape like the clouds and its direction like the winds?'(47)

'Indeed the closer to her things were, the further away from her thoughts turned. Everything immediately surrounding her --- boring countryside, inane petty bourgeois, the mediocrity of daily life --- seemed to her the exception rather than the rule. She had been caught in it all by some accident: out beyond, there stretched as far as eye could see the immense territory of rapture and passions. In her longing she made no difference between the pleasures of luxury and the joys of the heart, between elegant living and sensitive feeling.'(68)

'Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waste of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be--- tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwales with rapture.  But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.'(72-73)

"Have you ever had the experience," Leon went on, "of running across in a book some vague idea you've had, some image that you realize has been lurking all the time in the back of your mind and now seems to express absolutely your most subtle feelings?"(99)

'Future joys are like tropic shores: out into the immensity that lies before them they waft their native softness, a fragrant breeze that drugs the traveler into drowsiness and makes him careless of what awaits him on the horizon beyond his view.'(113)

'As for Emma, she never tried to find out whether she was in love with him. Love, to her, was something that comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightning --- a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings. It never occurred to her that if the drainpipes of a house are clogged, the rain may collect in pools on the roof; and she suspected no danger until suddenly she discovered a crack in the wall.'(119)

'He had had such things said to him so many times that none of them had any freshness for him. Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language.'(224)

'Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.'(224)

'With her ever-changing moods, by turns brooding and gay, chattering and silent, fiery and casual, she aroused in him a thousand desires, awakening instincts or memories.'(313)

'Lying became a need, a mania, a positive joy --- to such a point that if she said that she had walked down the right-hand side of a street the day before, it meant that she had gone down the left.'(319)

'But casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.'(333)

'No matter: she wasn't happy, and never had been. Why was life so unsatisfactory? Why did everything she leaned on crumble instantly to dust?'(334)

First Vintage Classic Edition January 1992
411 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for : Victorian Challenge 
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