EMMA AND THE OTHER PHILISTINES --- Episode 10

             More About Flaubert's Use Of Structural Transition 
             {Continuing With Scene Where Leon Leaves For Paris} 


     Emma's apparent virtue frightens off Leon so that when he leaves for Paris the way is clear for a more forward lover. The transition is going to be from Emma's illness following Leon's departure to her meeting with Rodolphe and then the scene of the county fair. The meeting is a first-class illustration of structural transition which took Flaubert many days to compose. His intention is to introduce Rodolphe Boulanger, a local country gentleman, at heart exactly the same kind of cheap vulgarian as his predecessor, but with a dashing, brutal charm about him. The transition goes as follows : Charles hd invited his mother to come to Yonville in order to decide what to do about Emma's condition, for she is pining away. The mother comes, decides that Emma reads too many books, evil novels, and undertakes to discontinue Emma's subscription at the lending library when she passes through Rouen on her way home. The mother leaves on a Wednesday, which is the market day at Yonville. Leaning out of the window to watch the Wednesday crowds, Emma sees a gentleman in a green velvet coat(green is what Charles picks for her pall) coming to Bovary's house with a farm boy who wants to be bled. In the study downstairs when the patient faints Charles shouts for Emma to come down. (It should be noted that Charles is consistently instrumental, in a really fateful way, in introducing Emma to her lovers or helping her in continuing to see them.) It is Rodolphe who watches (with the reader) the following lovely scene : "Madame Bovary began taking off his tie. The strings of his shirt had got into a knot, and for a few minutes her light fingers kept running about the young fellow's neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her cambric handkerchief ; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and then blew upon them softly. The yokel revived . . . 
   Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the movement she made in sinking to a squatting position, her dress (it was a summer dress with four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) ballooned out around her on the stone floor of the room ; and as Emma, stooping, swayed  little on her haunches as she stretched out her arms, the ballooning stuff f her skirt dimpled with the inflections of her body." 

                           THE COUNTY FAIR EPISODE 

   The county fair episode is instrumental in bringing Rodolphe and Emma together. On July 15, 1853, Flaubert wrote :"Tonight I have made a preliminary sketch of my great scene of the county fair. It will be huge --- about thirty manuscript pages. This is what I want to do. While describing that rural show (where all the secondary characters of the book appear, speak, and act) I shall pursue . . . between its details and on the front of the stage a continuous dialogue between a lady and a gentleman who is turning his charm on her. Moreover, I have in the middle of the solemn speech of a councilor and at the end something I have quite finished writing, namely a newspaper article by Homais, who gives an account of the festivities in his best philosophic, poetic, and progressive style." The thirty pages of the episode took three months to write. In another letter, of September 7, 1853, Flaubert noted :"How difficult it is . . . A tough chapter. I have therein all the characters of my book intermingled in action and in dialogue, and . . . a big landscape that envelops them.  If I succeed it will be most symphonic." On October 12, 1853  : "If ever the values of a symphony have been transferred to literature, it will be in this chapter of my book. It must be a vibrating totality of sounds. One should hear simultaneously the bellowing of the bulls, the murmur of love, and the phrases of the politicians . The sun shines on it, and there are gusts of wind that set big white bonnets astir. . . I obtain dramatic movement merely through dialogue interplay and character contrast." 
   As if this were a show in young love's honor, Flaubert brings all the characters together in the marketplace for a demonstration of style : this is what the chapter really is about. The couple, Rodolphe (symbol of bogus passion) and Emma (the victim), are linked up with Homais (the bogus guardian of the poison of which she will die), Lheureux (who stands for the financial ruin and shame that will rush her to the jar of arsenic), and there is Charles (connubial comfort). 
   In grouping the characters at the beginning of the county fair, Flaubert does something especially significant in regard to the moneylending draper Lheureux and Emma. Some time before, it will be recalled , Lheureuxwhen offering Emma his services---articles of wear and if need be, money ---was curiously concerned with the illness of Tellier, the proprietor of the cafe opposite the inn. Now the landlady of the inn tells Homais, not without satisfaction, that the cafe opposite is going to close. It is clear that Lheureux has discovered that the proprietor's health is getting steadily worse and that it is high time to get back from him the swollen sums he has loaned him, and as a result poor Tellier is now bankrupt. "What an appalling disaster!" exclaims Homais, who, says Flaubert ironically, finds expressions suitable to all circumstances. But there is something behind this irony. For just as Homais exclaims "What an appalling disaster!" in his fatuous, exaggerated, pompous way, at the same time the landlady points across the square, saying, "And there goes Lheureux, he is bowing to Madame Bovary, she's taking Monsieur Boulanger's arm." The beauty of this structural line is that Lheureux, who has ruined the cafe owner, is thematically linked here with Emma, who will perish because of Lheureux as much as because of her lovers ---and her death really will be an "appalling disaster" The ironic and the pathetic are beautifully intertwined in Flaubert's novel.