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Human class divisions break down, most elementally, to concerns of money: those who have it, those who do not. From the obscenely wealthy to the heinously impoverished, mankind thus arranges itself on a grossly unfair economic continuum. And while its existence can be paralyzing, it’s not particularly complex in terms of narrative. As a general rule, social inequality and unfairness are best handled by saints and revolutionaries, high-minded visionaries with charisma who inspire a legion of impassioned followers, not by writers of fiction.
But there exist other class divisions that are less quantitatively measured, more opaque and shifty, than the possession of filthy lucre. Gustave Flaubert explored this less tangible sense of class with his best character, Emma Bovary. Whatever zeal and passion the writer employed to create her was not of the high-minded variety, but manifested itself rather in the penetrating exploration of a flawed being—a being whose pettinesses and feverish desires speak not only to the reader, but, one senses, also confess the writer’s own weaknesses. "Madame Bovary, c’es mois!" he declared after all.
Fiction succeeds to the extent that the writer is genuinely invested in his character; the character must bear a frightening resemblance, in some small or large way, to her author. Such closeness becomes readily apparent to the reader in the real world, even though the realm in which Gustave Flaubert and Emma Bovary overlap is that of fantasy. And perhaps it’s fantasy that levels the most devastating class distinction of them all, being, as it is, immeasurable and infinite; its very existence implies an impassable rift. Paradoxically, in order for a dreamer to realize a fantasy he must invent another to take his place, a representative in the land of the irreal.
Like Flaubert, Emma Bovary read books and believed in romance; like Emma Bovary, Flaubert was dissatisfied with the one life he’d been given to live. Flaubert saw all around him the lackluster ways life measured up against imagination, a breach his fictional counterpart attempts to fill with love affairs—adoration, pageantry, obsession. Flaubert, encountering the same gulf, filled it by creating Emma. A love affair is like a work of fiction because into it goes all of the imaginative power its participants have to offer, creating out of nothing something real, something incendiary and naughty and somewhat forbidden, something secret. Something frivolous yet essential.
Flaubert and Emma most closely share a tendency toward the Romantic. Unlike the Revolutionary, the Romantic battles an elusive enemy. A love affair, after all, does not serve the species. A novel does not feed a literal hunger. The Romantic will forever pine for what isn’t and thereby remain in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction; a perfectionist in his approach to art, Flaubert’s reach always seemed to exceed his grasp. The Romantic is burdened by nostalgia, that wily siren, and fantasy. But the endurance of Madame Bovary is a testimony to the endurance of the Romantic, and the peculiar need to have unfulfilled desire dramatically enacted. Emma’s romanticizing encounter with the Duc de Laverdiere provides a case in point: before her sits a man drooling as he eats, yet she perceives the mystique surrounding him, his notorious “life of debauchery, filled with duels, wagers, abductions of women.” Between Emma and the world she inhabits lies the scrim of fantasy and romance, and so she can be nothing more than “an actress at her debut,” not a woman in her life. Naturally this divide concerns money and status, but far more demanding and haunting and insatiable to Emma is her attraction to magic and illusion, costume and possibility. She cannot truly perceive what presents itself to her, so blind is she to the real, so smitten by the imagined (and thereby unachievable). The real is imperfect; the envisioned, of course, is perfection. And that’s what the artist always finally offers up: the flawed and blemished version of the work he had in mind.
An Excerpt from
Gustave Flaubert’s
MADAME
BOVARY
TRANSLATED BY LYDIA DAVIS
(forthcoming from Viking in September*)
Monsieur and Madame Edouard Manet, 1868-69 (oil on canvas), Degas, Edgar (1834-1917) / Municipal Museum of Art, Kitakyushu, Japan / The Bridgeman Art Library
But toward the end of September, something extraordinary occurred in her life: she was invited to La Vaubyessard, the home of the Marquis d’Andervilliers.
Secretary of State during the Restoration, the marquis, seeking to reenter political life, had long been preparing for his candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies. In winter, he would make generous distributions of firewood, and at departmental council meetings, he was always eloquent in demanding better roads for his district. He had had, during the very hot weather, an abscess in his mouth, of which Charles had relieved him as though miraculously, by giving it just the right nick of his lancet. The steward, sent to Tostes to pay for the operation, reported, that evening, that he had seen some superb cherries in the doctor’s little garden. Now, the cherry trees at La Vaubyessard were not doing well, Monsieur the Marquis asked Bovary for some cuttings, took it upon himself to thank him for them in person, noticed Emma, thought that she had a pretty figure and that she did not greet him like a peasant; and so at the château they did not believe they were going beyond the bounds of condescension, nor, on the other hand, making a blunder, by inviting the young couple.
One Wednesday, at three o’clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, seated in their boc, left for La Vaubyessard, with a large trunk fastened on behind and a hatbox positioned in front of the apron. Charles had, in addition, a cardboard box between his legs.
They arrived at nightfall, as the lamps in the park were being lit to guide the carriages.
Chapter 8
The château, modern in its construction, Italian in style, with two projecting wings and three flights of steps in front, stretched across the far end of an immense lawn on which a few cows were grazing among widely spaced clumps of tall trees, while little rounded bouquets of shrubs, rhododendrons, mock oranges, and snowballs lifted their tufts of green at unequal heights along the curved line of the sandy drive. A stream ran under a bridge; through the mist one could make out buildings with thatched roofs scattered over the meadow, which was bordered by two gently sloping wooded hillsides, and in the back, in two parallel lines among the groves of trees, stood the coach houses and stables, remains of the old château that had been pulled down.
Charles’s boc stopped in front of the center flight of steps; servants appeared; the marquis came forward and, offering his arm to the doctor’s wife, led her into the entrance hall.
It was very lofty, paved with marble flagstones, and the sound of footsteps and voices echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a straight staircase, and to the left a gallery that looked out on the garden led to the billiards room, from which one could hear, at the door, the caroming of the ivory balls. As she was passing through it on her way to the drawing room, Emma saw men with serious faces standing around the game, their chins resting on their high cravats, all of them decorated, smiling silently as they made their shots. Against the dark woodwork of the wainscoting, large gilded frames bore, along their lower edges, names written in black letters. She read: “Jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers d’Yverbonville, Comte de La Vaubyessard and Baron de La Fresnaye, killed at the Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587.” And on another: “Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d’Andervilliers de La Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Knight of the Order of Saint Michael, wounded in combat at La Hougue-Saint-Vaast, May 29, 1692, died at La Vaubyessard, January 23, 1693.” Then, one could barely make out those that came after, because the light from the lamps, directed down onto the green cloth of the billiards table, left the room floating in shadow. Burnishing the horizontal canvases, it broke over them in fine crests, following the cracks in the varnish; and from all those great black squares bordered in gold there would emerge, here and there, some lighter part of the paint, a pale forehead, a pair of eyes looking at you, wigs uncoiling over the powdery shoulders of red coats, or the buckle of a garter high up on a plump calf.
The marquis opened the door of the drawing room; one of the ladies stood up (the marquise herself), came forward to meet Emma, and asked her to sit down next to her, on a love seat, where she began talking to her in a friendly way, as if she had known her for a long time. She was a woman of about forty, with lovely shoulders, an aquiline nose, a drawling voice, who was wearing, that evening, on her chestnut hair, a simple lace fichu that hung down behind in a triangle. A fair-haired young person was sitting beside her, in a tall-backed chair; and some gentlemen, each of whom had a little flower in his jacket buttonhole, were chatting with the ladies all around the fireplace.
At seven o’clock, dinner was served. The men, who were more numerous, sat at the first table, in the entrance hall, and the ladies at the second, in the dining room, with the marquis and the marquise.
As she went in, Emma felt enveloped in warm air, a mingling of the scents of the flowers and fine linen, the savor of the meats and the smell of the truffles. The candles in the candelabras cast long flames over the silver dish covers; the facets of the crystal glasses, covered in a dull mist, reflected a pale glimmer from one to the other; clusters of flowers stood in a line down the whole length of the table; and in the broad-rimmed plates, napkins folded in the shape of bishops’ miters each held, in the opening between its two folds, a small oval roll. The red claws of the lobsters overhung the edges of the platters; large fruits were piled on moss in openwork baskets; the quails wore their feathers; coils of steam rose into the air; and grave as a judge in his silk stockings, knee breeches, white tie, and jabot, the butler conveyed the platters, already carved, between the shoulders of the guests, and with a flick of his spoon would cause the piece one had chosen to leap forth. On the tall porcelain stove with its copper bands, a statue of a woman draped to the chin stared motionless at the room full of people.
Madame Bovary noticed that several of the ladies had not put their gloves in their glasses.
Meanwhile, at the head of the table, alone among all these women, bent over his full plate, his napkin knotted behind him like a child, an old man sat eating, drops of sauce falling from his mouth. His eyes were rimmed with red and he wore his hair in a short pigtail wound in black ribbon. This was the marquis’ father-in-law, the old Duc de Laverdière, once a favorite of the Comte d’Artois, in the days of the hunting parties at Le Vaudreuil, home of the Marquis de Conflans, and he had been, they said, the lover of Queen Marie Antoinette, between Monsieur de Coligny and Monsieur de Lauzun. He had led a riotous life of debauchery, filled with duels, wagers, abductions of women, he had devoured his fortune and alarmed all his family. A servant, behind his chair, named loudly in his ear the dishes he pointed at with his finger, stammering; and Emma’s eyes returned again and again of their own accord to this old man with his pendulous lips, as to something extraordinary and august. He had lived at Court and slept in the beds of queens!
Iced champagne was served. Emma shivered over every inch of her skin as she felt that cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates or eaten pineapple. Even the powdered sugar seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere.
Afterward, the ladies went up to their rooms to get ready for the ball.
Emma prepared herself with the meticulous care of an actress at her debut. She arranged her hair as the hairdresser had advised, and slipped into her barege gown, laid out on the bed. Charles’s pants were tight around his stomach.
“My foot straps are going to bother me when I dance.”
“Dance?” repeated Emma.
“Yes!”
“You’re out of your mind! They would make fun of you. Stay in your seat. Besides, it’s more suitable for a doctor,” she added.
Charles said nothing more. He was walking back and forth, waiting for Emma to finish dressing.
He saw her from behind in the mirror, between two candles. Her dark eyes seemed darker. Her bands of hair, gently swelling out over her ears, shone with a blue luster; a rose in her chignon trembled on its pliant stem, with artificial drops of water at the tips of its leaves. Her dress was pale saffron, set off by three sprays of pompon roses mingled with greenery.
Charles came to kiss her on the shoulder.
“Leave me alone!” she said. “You’re rumpling me.”
One could hear a violin ritornello and the sounds of a horn. She went down the stairs, resisting an impulse to run.
The quadrilles had begun. People were arriving. They were pushing each other. She positioned herself near the door, on a bench.
When the contra dance was over, the floor was left free for the men who stood around chatting in groups and the liveried servants carrying large trays. Along the line of seated women, painted fans were fluttering, smiling faces were half-hidden behind bouquets, and little gold-stoppered bottles twirled in half-open hands whose white gloves showed the outline of their nails and hugged their flesh at the wrist. Lace trimmings, diamond brooches, medallion bracelets, trembled on bodices, sparkled on chests, clinked on bare arms. Hair well pressed down over the forehead and twisted at the nape bore garlands, bunches, or sprays of myosotis, jasmine, pomegranate blossoms, wheatears, or cornflowers. Red-turbaned mothers scowled serenely in their seats.
Emma’s heart beat a little faster when, her partner holding her by the tips of her fingers, she took her place in line and waited for the stroke of the bow to start them off. But her anxiety soon vanished; and swaying to the rhythm of the orchestra, she glided forward with gentle motions of her neck. A smile would rise to her lips at certain subtleties from the violin, which sometimes played alone when the other instruments were silent; one could hear the bright sound of gold louis being flung down on the cloth surfaces of the tables in the next room; then everything would start up again at the same time, the cornet would send forth a resonant note, feet would tread rhythmically again, skirts balloon out and brush the floor, hands join together, part; and the same eyes that had lowered before you one moment would come back to stare into your own.
A few of the men (perhaps fifteen) between the ages of twenty-five and forty, scattered among the dancers or chatting in doorways, were distinguished from the rest of the crowd by a family resemblance, despite their differences in age, dress, or feature.
Their coats, better cut, seemed made of suppler cloth, and their hair, brought forward in curls at their temples, glazed by finer pomades. They had the complexion of wealth, that white skin that is set off by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the finish of handsome furniture, and that is maintained in its health by a prudent regimen of exquisite foods. Their necks turned comfortably in low cravats; their long side-whiskers rested upon down-turned collars; they wiped their lips on handkerchiefs embroidered with large monograms and redolent of a pleasing scent. Those who were beginning to age had a youthful look, while something mature overlay the faces of the younger. In their indifferent gazes floated the tranquility of passions daily gratified; and through their gentle manners penetrated that peculiar brutality imparted by domination in fairly unexacting matters, in which one’s strength is exerted and one’s vanity tickled—the handling of thoroughbred horses and the pursuit of fallen women.
A few steps from Emma, a gentleman in a blue coat was deep into Italy with a pale young woman in pearls. They were marveling over the size of the pillars in Saint Peter’s, over Tivoli, Vesuvius, Castellammare, and the Cascine, the roses of Genoa, the Colosseum by moonlight. Emma was listening with her other ear to a conversation full of words she did not understand. People were gathered around a very young man who, the week before, had beaten Miss Arabella and Romulus and won two thousand louis by jumping a ditch in England. One man was complaining about his racers getting fat; another that printing mistakes had garbled the name of his horse.
The air in the ballroom was heavy; the lamps were growing dim. People were drifting back into the billiards room. A servant climbing up onto a chair broke two windowpanes; at the noise of the shattered glass, Madame Bovary turned her head and noticed in the garden, against the window, the faces of countrypeople looking in. Then the memory of Les Bertaux returned to her. She saw the farm again, the muddy pond, her father in a smock under the apple trees, and she saw herself again, as she used to be, skimming cream with her finger from the pans of milk in the milk house. But under the dazzling splendors of the present hour, her past life, so distinct until now, was vanishing altogether, and she almost doubted that she had ever lived it. She was here; and then, surrounding the ball, there was nothing left but darkness, spread out over all the rest. She was at that moment eating a maraschino ice, holding it with her left hand in a silver-gilt shell, and half closing her eyes, the spoon between her teeth.
Near her, a lady dropped her fan. A dancer was passing.
“I wonder if you would be so kind, sir,” said the lady, “as to pick up my fan for me. It’s here behind the couch!”
The gentleman bowed, and as he was extending his arm, Emma saw the hand of the young lady toss something white, folded in a triangle, into his hat. The gentleman, retrieving the fan, gave it to the lady respectfully; she inclined her head in thanks and inhaled her bouquet.
After supper, at which there were many Spanish wines and Rhine wines, soups made of shellfish and soups made of almond milk, Trafalgar puddings and all sorts of cold meats with jellies around them that quivered in the platters, the carriages, one after another, began to leave. By drawing aside a corner of the muslin curtain, one could see the glow of their lamps slipping away into the darkness. The benches cleared; a few cardplayers still remained; the musicians cooled the tips of their fingers on their tongues; Charles was half-asleep, his back resting against a door.
At three o’clock in the morning, the cotillion began. Emma did not know how to waltz. Everyone was waltzing, even Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers, and the marquise; no one was left but the guests of the château, a dozen people or so.
Nevertheless, one of the waltzers, whom they familiarly called Vicomte, and whose very low-cut vest seemed molded to his chest, came up to Madame Bovary and for the second time invited her to dance, assuring her that he would guide her and that she would manage perfectly well.
They began slowly, then went faster. They were turning: everything was turning around them, the lamps, the furniture, the paneled walls, the parquet floor, like a disk on a spindle. As they passed close to the doors, the hem of Emma’s dress would catch against his pants; their legs would slip in between one another; he lowered his gaze to her, she raised hers to him; a numbness came over her, she stopped. They set off again; and with a quicker motion, the vicomte, drawing her along, disappeared with her to the far end of the gallery, where, breathing hard, she nearly fell and, for a moment, leaned her head on his chest. And then, still whirling, but more gently, he returned her to her seat; she leaned back against the wall and put her hand over her eyes.
When she opened them, she saw a lady sitting on a stool in the middle of the drawing room with three waltzers on their knees in front of her. She chose the vicomte, and the violin began again.
People were looking at them. They would pass by and come back, she holding her body motionless and her chin lowered, and he in the same posture as before, his back arched, his elbow rounded, his mouth forward. That woman certainly could waltz! They went on for a long time and wore out everyone else.
People chatted for a few minutes more, and after the good-byes, or rather the good-mornings, the guests of the château went to bed.
Charles was dragging himself up by the banister, his knees were giving way under him. He had spent five hours straight standing by the tables, watching them play whist without understanding anything about it. And so he gave a great sigh of contentment after pulling off his boots.
Emma put a shawl over her shoulders, opened the window, and leaned on her elbows.
The night was dark. A few drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the damp wind, which cooled her eyelids. The music of the dance was still humming in her ears, and she made an effort to stay awake in order to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to leave behind.
The first light of dawn appeared. She looked at the windows of the château for a long time, trying to guess which were the rooms of all those people she had observed the night before. She would have liked to know all about their lives, to enter into them, to become part of them.
But she was shaking with cold. She undressed and curled up between the sheets against Charles, who was asleep.
There were many people at breakfast. The meal lasted ten minutes; no liquor was served, which surprised the doctor. Then Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers collected some pieces of brioche in a little basket, to carry to the swans on the ornamental pond, and they went off to stroll through the greenhouse, where strange plants bristling with hairs rose in pyramidal tiers under hanging vases which, like overcrowded nests of serpents, let fall from their rims long interlaced ropes of green. The orangery, which lay at the far end, led, under cover, to the outbuildings of the château. The Marquis, to entertain the young woman, took her to see the stables. Above the basket-shaped racks, porcelain plaques bore in black the names of the horses. Each animal moved restlessly in its stall when they passed near it clucking their tongues. The floor of the saddle room gleamed to the eye like a drawing-room parquet. The carriage harness rose in the middle on two revolving posts, and the bits, whips, stirrups, curb chains were arranged in a line all the way down the wall.
Charles, meanwhile, went to ask a servant to harness his boc. It was brought out in front of the steps, and after all the bundles had been stowed away in it, the Bovary couple said their thank-yous to the Marquis and Marquise and started back to Tostes.
Emma, silent, was watching the wheels turn. Charles, poised on the very edge of the seat, was driving with his arms apart, and the little horse was going along at an ambling trot between the shafts, which were too wide for it. The slack reins slapped against its rump, soaking up the foam, and the box tied on behind struck the body of the carriage with loud, regular thumps.
They were on the heights of Thibourville when before them, suddenly, several horsemen rode past laughing, cigars in their mouths. Emma thought she recognized the vicomte: she turned around and saw on the horizon only the motion of their heads dipping and rising, with the unequal cadence of the trot or gallop.
A quarter of a league farther on, they had to stop and mend the breeching, which had broken, with some rope.
But Charles, giving the harness one last glance, saw something on the ground, between the legs of his horse; and he picked up a cigar case with a green silk border all around it and a coat of arms in its center like a carriage door.
“There are even two cigars in it,” he said; “that’ll be for tonight after dinner.”
“So you smoke?” she asked.
“Sometimes, when I get the chance.”
He put his find in his pocket and whipped up the pony.
When they reached home, dinner was far from ready. Madame flew into a rage. Nastasie answered rudely.
“Get out!” said Emma. “What impertinence. I’m discharging you.”
For dinner there was onion soup, and a piece of veal with sorrel. Charles, sitting opposite Emma, said, rubbing his hands together happily:
“How nice it is to be back home!”
They could hear Nastasie weeping. He was rather fond of the poor girl. She had kept him company on many an idle evening, in earlier days, when he was a widower. She was his first patient, his oldest acquaintance in the area.
“Have you really let her go?” he said at last.
“Yes. What’s to stop me?” she answered.
Then they warmed themselves in the kitchen while their bedroom was being prepared. Charles began smoking. He smoked with his lips thrust forward, spitting constantly, recoiling at each puff.
“You’ll make yourself ill,” she said scornfully.
He put down his cigar and ran to the pump to swallow a glass of cold water. Emma, seizing the cigar case, flung it quickly to the back of the cupboard.
How long the next day was! She walked in her little garden, going and coming along the same paths, stopping in front of the flowerbeds, the espaliered tree, the plaster curé, contemplating with amazement all these things from the past that she knew so well. How distant the ball already seemed to her! What was it that put such a distance between the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of this day? Her trip to La Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like those great chasms that a storm, in a single night, will sometimes open in the mountains. Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.
And so remembering that ball became an occupation for Emma. Each time Wednesday returned, she would say to herself as she woke: “Ah! A week ago . . . two weeks ago . . . three weeks ago, I was there!” And little by little, the faces became confused in her memory, she forgot the tunes of the contra dances, she no longer saw the liveries and the rooms as distinctly; some of the details vanished, but her longing remained.
* Reprinted by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert.
Copyright © 2010 by Lydia Davis
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