"Madame Bovary," by Gustave Flaubert --Episode 4

                                 More Flaubert Imagery

   The wedding procession winding its way through the fields should be compared with the funeral procession, with dead Emma, winding its way through other fields at the end of the book. In the wedding :"The procession, at first united like one colored scarf that undulated across the fields, along the narrow path winding among the green wheat, soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons as its scroll. Then came the married pair,  the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell ; the children stayed behind amusing themselves plucking the fruiting bells from the oak-stems, or playing among themselves unseen. Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground ; from time to time she stopped to lift its hem, and then delicately with her gloved fingers, she picked off bits of coarse grass and small spikes of thistles, while Charles, his hand unoccupied, waited until she had finished. Old Rouault, with a new silk hat and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands down to the nails, gave his arm to Madame Bovary senior. As to Monsieur Bovary senior, who, really despising all these folks, had come simply in a frock-coat of military cut with one row of buttons---he was passing bar-room compliments to a young peasant girl with fair hair. She bowed, blushed, and did not know what to say. The other wedding guests talked of their business or played the fool behind each other's backs, tuning themselves up for the coming fun. If one listened closely one could always catch the squeaking (cricket's note) of the fiddler, who went on playing across the fields." 

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Emma is being buried. "The six men,  three on either side, walked 
slowly , panting a little. The priests, the choristers, and the two choir-boys recited the De Profundis, and their voices echoed over the fields, rising and falling. Sometimes they disappeared in the windings of the path ; but the great silver cross rose always between the trees.  ( Compare the fiddler at the wedding.) 
   The women followed in black cloaks with turned-down hoods ; each of them in her hand carried a large lighted candle, and Charles felt himself weakening at this continual repetition of prayers and torches, beneath this oppressive odor of wax and of cassocks. A fresh breeze was blowing ; the rye and colza ("cabbage seed") were green, dew-droplets trembled at the roadsides and on the hawthorn hedges. All sorts of joyous sounds filled the air; the jolting of a cart rolling afar off in the ruts, the crowing of a cock, repeated again and again, or the gamboling of a foal running away under the apple trees. The pure sky was fretted with luminous clouds ; a bluish haze rested upon the huts covered with iris. Charles as he passed recognized each courtyard. He remembered mornings like this, when, after visiting some patient, he came out from one and returned to her. ( Curiously enough, he does not remember the wedding procession ; the reader is in a better position than he.) 
 The black cloth bestrewn with white beads blew up from time to time, laying bare the coffin. The tired bearers walked more slowly, and it advanced with constant jerks, like a boat that pitches with every wave." 

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   After the wedding our young man's bliss in his daily life is pictured in another subtly sensuous paragraph. And here again we are forced to improve on the poor translations : "In bed, in the morning, by her side, his elbow on the pillow, he watched the sunlight as it touched the golden bloom on her cheeks half hidden by the scallops of her nightcap. At close range her eyes looked strangely large, especially when on waking up she opened and shut them. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, layers of successive colors, which, denser at the bottom, grew lighter toward the surface of the cornea." ( A lithe echo of the layers theme.) 

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   In chapter 6 Emma's childhood is shown in retrospect in terms of shallow romanesque culture, in terms of the books she read and what she got from those books. Emma is a great reader of romances, of more or less exotic novels, of romantic verse. Some of the authors she knows are first-rate, such as Walter Scott or Victor Hugo; others are not quite first-rate, such as Bernadine de Saint-Pierre or Lamartine. But good or bad this is not the point. The point is that she is a bad reader. She reads books emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character's place. Flaubert does a very subtle thing. In several passages he lists all the romantic cliches dear to Emma's heart; but his cunning choice of these cheap images and their cadenced arrangement along the curving phrase produce an effect of harmony and art. In the convent, the novels she read "were all love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postillions killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, somber forests, heart-aches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, 'gentlemen' brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed and weeping like tombstone urns. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, sleeked her hands over with dust of books from old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, under the foils of ogives, pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching the approach of a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields." 
 He uses the same artistic trick when listing Homais's vulgarities. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that matters in books.