Emma And The Other Philistines ---Episode 8

    Continuing With The Conversation At The Inn When Emma 
                       First Arrives In Yonville ----continued 

Just as Homais's speech is a jumble of pseudoscience and journalese, so in the third movement the conversation between Emma and Leon is a trickle of stale poetization. "At any rate, you have some walks in the neighborhood ?" continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.
   "Oh, very few," he answered. "There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset." 
   "I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets," she resumed, "but especially by the side of the sea." 
   "Oh, I adore the sea!" said Monsieur Leon. 
   "And then does it not seem to you," continued Madame Bovary, "that the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite,

the ideal?"
   "It is the same with mountainous landscapes," continued Leon. 

   It is very important to mark that the Leon-Emma team is as trivial, trite, and platitudinous in their pseudo artistic emotions as the pompous and fundamentally ignorant Homais is in regard to science. False art and false science meet here. { In a letter to his mistress on October 9, 1852, Flaubert indicates the subtle point of the scene : "I am in the act of composing a conversation between a young man and a young woman about literature, the sea, mountains, music, and all other so-called poetic subjects. It may all seem to be seriously meant to the average reader, but in point of fact the grotesque is my real intention. It will be the first time, I think, that a novel appears where fun is made of the leading lady and her young man. But irony does not impair pathos ---on the contrary, irony enhances the pathetic side." } 
   Leon reveals his ineptitude, the chink in his armor, when he mentions the pianist : "A cousin of mine who traveled in Switzerland last year told me that one could not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of incredible size across torrents, log cabins suspended over precipices, and a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy ; and I no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some imposing site." How the sights of Switzerland must move you to prayer, to ecstasy ! No wonder a famous musician used to play his piano in front of some magnificent landscape in order to stimulate his imagination. This is superb !
   Shortly we find the whole bible of the bad reader---- all a good reader does not do. " My wife doesn't care about gardening," said Charles ; "although she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room, reading."
   "Like me," replied Leon. "And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?" 
   "What, indeed ?" she said, fixing her large black eyes wide upon him. 
   "One thinks of nothing," he continued ; "the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy to see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, toys with details, or follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes." 
   "That is true! that is true !", she said.
   
    Books are not written for those who are fond of poems that make one weep or those who like noble characters in prose as Leon and Emma think. Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the characters in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories ; but this what Emma and Leon do. "Has it ever happened to you," Leon went on, "to come across some vague idea of your own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment ?" 
   "I have experienced it," She replied.
   "That is why," he said, "I especially love the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears." 
   "Stillin the long-run it is tiring," continued Emma. "Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature."
   "Yes, indeed," observed the clerk, "works, o touching the heart, miss , it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness." 

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     Flaubert set himself the task of giving his book a highly artistic structure. In addition to the counterpoint, one of his tricks was to make his transitions from one subject to another within the chapters 
as elegant and smooth as possible. In Madame Bovary there is a continual movement within the chapters. Some scholars call this device structural transition. We shall inspect some of the examples of it.