Emma And The Other Philistines---Episode 7

           AREN'T THERE ANY GOOD GUYS IN THE NOVEL ?

    Who are the "good" people of the book ? Obviously, the villain is Lheureux, but who, besides poor Charles, are the good characters ? Somewhat obviously, Emma's father, old Rouault, somewhat unconvincingly, the boy Justin, whom we glimpse crying on Emma's grave, a bleak note ; and speaking of Dickensian notes let us not forget two other unfortunate children, Emma's little daughter, and of course that other little Dickensian girl, that girl of thirteen, hunchbacked, a little bleak housemaid, a dingy nymphet, who serves Lheureux as clerk,  a glimpse to ponder. Who else in the book do we have as good people? The best person is the third doctor, the great Lariviere, although we might hate the transparent tear he sheds over the dying Emma. Some might even say : Flaubert's father had been a doctor, and so this is Flaubert senior shedding a tear over the misfortunes of the character that his son has created. 

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A question : can we call Madame Bovary realistic or naturalistic ? Good question. 
   A novel in which a young and healthy husband night after night never wakes to find himself clutching, or being clutched by,  his beautiful wife ; never hears the sand and pebbles thrown at the shutters by a lover ; never receives an anonymous letter from some local busybody. 
   A novel in which the biggest busybody of them all, Homais ----Monsieur Homais, whom we might have expected to have kept a statistical eye upon all the cuckolds of his beloved Yonville, actually never notices, never learns anything about Emma's affairs ;
   A novel in which little Justin---a nervous young boy of fourteen who faints at the sight of blood and smashes crockery out of sheer nervousness --- should go weep in the dead of night (where ?) in a cemetery on the grave of a woman whose ghost might come to reproach him for not having refused to give her the key to death ; 
   A novel in which a young woman who has not been riding for several years---if indeed she ever did ride when she lived on her father's farm--- now gallops away to the woods with perfect poise, and never complains of any stiffness in the joints afterwards ;
   A novel in which many other implausible details abound---such as the naiveté of a certain cabdriver ---such a novel has been called a landmark of so-called realism, whatever that is. 
   What a given generation feels as naturalism in a writer seems to an older generation to be exaggeration of drab detail, and to a younger generation not enough drab detail. The isms go; the ist dies; art remains. 

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   Flaubert had a special device which may be called the counterpoint method, or the method of parallel interlinings and interruptions of two or more conversations or trains of thought. The first example comes after Leon Dupuis has been introduced. Leon, 
a young man, a notary's clerk, is brought in by the device of 
describing Emma as he sees her,  in the red glow of the fireplace at the inn which seems to shine through her. Farther on, when another man, Rodolphe Boulanger, comes into her presence, she is also shown through his eyes, but Emma as seen through Rodolphe's eyes is of a more sensual quality than the on-the-whole-pure image that Leon perceives. Incidentally, Leon's hair is described later as brown ; here, he is blond, or looks so to Flaubert, by the light of the fire especially kindled to illume Emma. 
   Now comes the contrapuntal theme in the conversation at the inn on the first arrival in Yonville of Emma and Charles. In Flaubert's biography, we learned that exactly one year after his starting to compose the book, Flaubert wrote his mistress Louise Colet on September 19, 1852 : "What a nuisance my Bovary is . . . This scene at the inn may take me three months for all I know. At times I am on the brink of tears --- so keenly do I feel my helplessness. But I prefer my brain to burst rather than to skip that scene. I have to place simultaneously, in the same conversation, five or six people (who talk), several others(who are talked about), the whole region, descriptions of persons and things ---and amid all this, I have to show a gentleman and a lady who begin to fall in love with each other because they have tastes in common. And if I only had enough room ! But the fact is that the scene should be rapid and yet not dry, ample without being lumpy." 
   So in the large parlor of the inn a conversation starts. Four people are involved. On the one hand, a dialogue between Emma and Leon, whom she has just met, which is interrupted by monologues and sundry remarks on Homais's part, who is conversing mainly with Charles Bovary, for Homais is eager to get on good terms with the new doctor. 
   In this scene the first movement consists of a brisk interchange among all four : "Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his cap, for fear of catching a cold in the head; then, turning to his neighbor ---
    "Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in our 'Hirondelle'." 
   "That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I like change of place." 
   "It is so dreary," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the same places." 
   "If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in the saddle ---"
   "But," Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant (than to ride) ---when one can," he added. (The horse theme slips in and out here.) 
   The second movement consists of a long speech by Homais, ending in his giving some tips to Charles about a house to buy. "Moreover," said the druggist, "the practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world . . . for people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the doctor or the druggist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad, and we even have a few men of ninety in our parish. The thermometer falls in winter to 4 degrees, and in the hottest season rises to 25 or 30 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur at the maximum, or otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit, not more. And, as a matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the Saint-Jean hills on the other ; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapors given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone) , and which pumping up the humus from the soil, mixing together all those different emanations, unites them into a bundle, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long-run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata ---- the heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or whence it should come ---that is to say, the southern side ---by the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia." 

   In the middle of the speech he makes a mistake: there is always a little chink in the philistine armor. His thermometer should read 86 Fahrenheit, not 54; he forgot to add 32 when switching from one system to the other. He almost makes another fumble in speaking of exhaled air but he recovers the ball. He tries to cram all his knowledge of physics and chemistry into one elephantine sentence ; he has a good memory for odds and ends derived from newspapers and pamphlets, but that is all.