"Madame Bovary," by Gustave Flaubert---Episode 3

                                This Is The Third Episode

   Madame Bovary the first is the widow of a bailiff. This is the first and false Madame Bovary, so to speak. In Chapter 2 while the first wife was still alive, the second one looms. Just as Charles installed himself opposite the old doctor as his successor, so the future Madame Bovary appears before the old one is dead. Flaubert could not describe her wedding to Charles since that would have spoiled the wedding feast of the next Madame Bovary This is how Flaubert calls the first wife : Madame Dubuc (the name of her first husband), then Madame Bovary, Madame Bovary Junior (in relation to Charles's mother) then Heloise, but the widow Dubuc when her notary absconds with her money in his keeping ; and finally Madame Dubuc. 
   In other words, as seen through the simple mind of Charles, she starts to revert to her initial condition when Charles falls in love with Emma Rouault, passing through the same stages but backward. After her death, when Charles Bovary marries Emma, poor dead Heloise reverts completely to the initial Madame Dubuc. It is Charles who becomes a widower, but his widowhood is somehow transferred to the betrayed and then dead Heloise. Emma never seems to have pitied the pathetic fate of Heloise Bovary. Incidentally, a financial shock assists in causing the death of both ladies.

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      The term romantic has several meanings. When discussing Madame Bovary----the book and the lady herself ----- we shall use romantic in the following sense : "characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind tending to dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature." (Romanesque rather than romanticist.) A romantic person, mentally and emotionally living in the unreal, is profound or shallow depending on the quality of his or her mind. Emma Bovary is intelligent, sensitive, comparatively well educated, but she has a SHALLOW MIND : her charm, beauty, and refinement do not preclude a fatal streak of philistinism in her.  Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional ; and her passion for luxury does not prevent her from revealing once or twice what Flaubert terms a peasant hardness, a strain of rustic practicality. However, her extraordinary physical charm, her unusual grace, her birdlike, hummingbirdlike vivacity --- all of this is irresistibly attractive and enchanting to three men in the book, her husband and her two successive lovers, both of them heels : Rodolphe, who finds in her a dreamy childish tenderness in welcome contrast to the harlots he has been consorting with ; and Leon, an ambitious mediocrity, who is flattered by having a real lady for his mistress. 
   Now what about the husband, Charles Bovary ? He is a dull, heavy, plodding fellow, with no charm, no brains, no culture, and with a complete set of conventional notions and habits. He is a philistine, but he is also a pathetic human being. The two following points are of the utmost importance. What seduces him in Emma and what he finds in her is exactly what Emma herself is looking for and not finding in her romantic daydreams. Charles dimly, but deeply, perceives in her personality an iridescent loveliness, luxury, a dreamy remoteness, poetry, romance. This The second point is that the love Charles almost unwittingly develops for Emma is a real feeling, deep and true, in absolute contrast to the brutal or frivolous emotions experienced by Rodolphe and Leon, her smug and vulgar lovers. So here is the pleasing paradox of Flaubert's fairy tale : the dullest and most inept person in the book is the only one who is redeemed by a divine something in the all-powerful, forgiving, and unswerving love that he bears Emma, alive or dead. There is yet a fourth character in the book who is in love with Emma but that fourth is merely a Dickensian child, Justin. Nevertheless, we should note him for sympathetic attention. 

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   Let's go back to the time when Charles was still married to Heloise Dubuc. In chapter 2 Bovary's horse ---horses play a tremendous part in this book, forming a little theme of their own ---takes him at a dreamy trot to Emma, the daughter of a patient of his, a farmer. Emma, however, is no ordinary farmer's daughter : she is a graceful young lady, brought up in a good boarding school with young ladies of the gentry. So here is Charles Bovary, shaken out from his clammy connubial bed (he never loved that unfortunate first wife of his, oldish, fly-chested and with as many pimples as the spring has buds---the widow of another man, as Flaubert has Charles consider her in his mind), so here is Charles, the young country doctor, shaken out of his dull bed by a messenger and then proceeding to the farm of Les Bertaux to reset the leg of a farmer. As he approaches the farm, his gentle horse all of a sudden shies violently, a subtle premonition that the young man's quiet life will be shattered. 
   We see the farm and then Emma through his eyes as he comes there for the first time, still married to that unfortunate widow. The half a dozen peacocks in the yard seem a vague promise, a lesson in iridescence. 

                 Let's Follow The Little Theme of Emma's Sunshade
                             Towards the End of the Chapter

  Some days later, during a day when the bark of the trees was glossy with dampness and the snow on the roofs of the outbuildings was melting , Emma stood on the threshold ;then she went to fetch her sunshade and opened it. The sunshade of prismatic silk through which the sun shone illumined the white skin of her face with shifting reflected colors. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of water could be heard falling with a precise drumming note, one by one, on the taut moire, the stretched silk. 
   Various items of Emma's sensuous grace are shown through Bovary's eyes : her blue dress with the three flounces, her elegant fingernails, and her hairdo. "Her hair in two bandeaux, or folds, which seemed each of a single piece, so sleek were they, her hair was parted in the middle by a delicate line that dipped slightly as it followed the incurvation of her skull (this is a young doctor looking) ; and the bandeaux just revealed the lobes of her ears (lobes, not upper "tips" as all translations have it; the upper part of the ears was of course covered by those sleek black folds) , her hair knotted behind in a thick chignon. Her cheekbones were rosy."