EMMA AND THE OTHER PHILISTINES---Episode 9

                           Continuing With Structural Transition 

   In Yonville just before Leon leaves for Paris, a more complex structural transition takes place from Emma and her mood to Leon and his, and then to his departure. While making this transition Flaubert, as he does several times in the book, takes advantage of the structural meanderings of the transition to review a few of his characters, picking up and rapidly checking, as it were, some of their traits. We start with Emma  returning home after her frustrating interview with the priest(seeking to calm the fever that Leon has aroused), annoyed that all is calm in the house while within she is tumult. Irritably, she pushes away th advances of her young daughter Berthe, who falls and cuts her cheek. Charles hastens to Homais, the druggist, for some sticking plaster which he affixes to Berthe's cheek. He assures Emma that the cut is not serious but she chooses not to come down to dinner and, instead, remains with Berthe until the child falls asleep. After dinner Charles returns the sticking plaster and stays at the pharmacy where Homais and his wife discuss with him the dangers of childhood. Taking Leon aside, Charles asks him to price in Rouen the making of a daguerrotype of himself that in his pathetic smugness he proposes to give to Emma. Homais suspects that Leon is having some love affair in Rouen , and the innkeeper Madame Lefrancois questions the tax collector Binet about him. Leon's talk with Binet helps, perhaps, to crystallize his weariness at loving Emma with no result. His cowardice at changing his place is reviewed, and then he makes up his mind to go to Paris. Flaubert has attained what he wanted, and the flawless transition is established from Emma's mood to Leon's mood and his decision to leave Yonville. Later, we shall find another careful transition when Rodolphe Boulanger is introduced. 

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{ On January 15, 1853, as he was about to begin part two, Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet : "It has taken me five days to write one page . . . What troubles me in my book is the insufficiency of the so-called amusing element. There is little action. But I maintain that images are action. It is harder to sustain a book's interest by this means., but if one fails it is the fault of style. I have now lined up five chapters of my second part in which nothing happens. It is a continuous picture of small-town life and of an inactive romance, a romance that is especially difficult to paint because it is simultaneously timid and deep, but alas without any inner wild passion. Leon, my young lover, is of a temperate nature. Already in the first part of the book I had something of this kind : my husband loves his wife somewhat in the same way as my lover does. Both are mediocrities in the same environment, but still they have to be differentiated. If I succeed, it will be a marvelous bit, because it means painting color upon color and without well-defined tones." Everything, says, Flaubert, is a matter of style, or more exactly of the particular turn and aspect one gives to things. 


   Emma's vague promise of happiness coming from her feeling for Leon innocently leads to Lheureux (ironically a well-chosen name, "the happy one," for the diabolical engine of fate). Lheureux, the draper and moneylender, arrives with the trappings of happiness. In the same breath he tells Emma confidentially that he lends money ; asks after the health of a cafe keeper, Tellier, whom he presumes her husband is treating ; and says that he, too, will have to consult the doctor one day about a pain in his back. All these premonitions, artistically speaking. Flaubert will plan it in such a way that Lheureux will lend money to Emma, as he had lent money to Tellier, and will ruin her as he ruins Tellier before the old fellow dies ; moreover, he will take his own ailments to the famous doctor who in a hopeless attempt is called to treat Emma after she takes poison. This is the planning of a work of art.
   Desperate with her love for Leon, "Domestic mediocrity drove her to luxurious fancies, connubial tenderness to adulterous desires." Daydreaming of her school days in the convent, "she felt herself soft and quite deserted. like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it." { About the scene with the cure' Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet in mid-April 1853 : "At last I am beginning to see a glimmer of light in that damned dialogue of the prism priest scene . . . I want to express the following situation : my little woman in a fit of religious emotion goes to the village church ; at its door she finds th parish priest. Although stupid, vulgar, this priest of mine is a good, even excellent fellow ; but his mind dwells entirely on physical things (the troubles of the poor, lack of food or firewood), and he does not perceive moral torments, vague mystic aspirations ; he is very chaste and practices all his duties. The episode is to have at most six or seven pages without a single reflection or explanation coming from the author (all in direct dialogue). " We shall note that this episode is composed after the counterpoint method : the cure' answering answering what he thinks Emma is saying, or rather answering imaginary stock questions in a routine conversation with a parishioner, and she is voicing a kind of complaining inner note that he does not heed ---and all the time the children are fooling in the church and distracting the good priest's attention from the little he has to say to her.