The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gustave Flaubert · a novel in three parts · thirty-five chapters · Michel Lévy, 1857; the text settled for Charpentier, 1873 · scored on Flaubert’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and Lydia Davis’s translation (2010) for sense
Mode
Novel of provincial life and of adultery; the tragedy of a reader, told as a comedy of manners and an anatomy of an age
Mythos
Quixote transposed to a woman and to the bourgeois century: the reader who tries to live what she has read; the tempter who keeps accounts; the blind man on the road as fate
Phase
From Charles’s first day at school to the pharmacist’s cross of honour, through two marriages, Tostes, Yonville and the hotel rooms of Rouen
Presentation
Fiction; three parts of nine, fifteen and eleven chapters, under two dedications; a first-person plural that vanishes in the first chapter, then an impersonal narration in free indirect style
Register
From Emma’s worn romantic vocabulary and Homais’s progressive jargon to the councillor’s oratory, the priest’s platitudes and the flat sentence on which a scene falls
Scale
One woman, her husband and their child; two small towns, Rouen, and a château for one night
Governing Proposition
A country doctor’s wife, whose longing was formed in a convent on keepsakes and romances, seeks in two lovers, a ball and a draper’s credit the life her reading promised, and takes arsenic when the bills fall due; her husband is ruined and dies after her, and the pharmacist next door is decorated. The wager of the novel is that a self made of borrowed images desires truly, and is destroyed by a world that sells it those images on credit, and that a narration which judges no one, its meaning carried by the placing of its sentences, can show both without a word of comment.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Nous étions à l’Étude, quand le Proviseur entra”
“We were in prep when the headmaster came in.” The novel named for Emma Bovary opens in a schoolroom, in the first person plural of the boys who watch a new pupil arrive, and the first thing it looks at long and hard is his cap. The new boy is Charles Bovary. The “nous” who see him are never heard from again: the voice that opened the book is gone before the first chapter ends, and returns nowhere. The book that follows is told by no one who can be found, and it has begun outside its heroine, with a dull boy and an object.
Charles becomes an officier de santé, a medical man licensed below the rank of doctor, and his mother marries him to a widow, Héloïse. Called out to the farm at Les Bertaux, he meets the farmer Rouault’s daughter, Emma; the widow dies, and he marries Emma and takes her home to Tostes. The novel is built in three parts of nine, fifteen and eleven chapters, thirty-five in all. The first runs from Charles’s schooldays through the marriage, Tostes and a ball; the second is Yonville, with Léon, the agricultural show, Rodolphe, the clubfoot and the opera at Rouen; the third is Rouen again, Léon again, the debts, the arsenic and Charles’s end. The book begins with Charles and ends with the pharmacist. Emma’s life is set inside theirs.
Flaubert began it in September 1851, after reading the first Tentation de saint Antoine to Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp, and finished it in the spring of 1856. In letters to Louise Colet he recorded the labour of those years and the wish for “un livre sur rien”
“a book about nothing”. The Revue de Paris ran it from 1 October to 15 December 1856, with cuts imposed by its editors, the cab scene among them, and Flaubert printed a protest. Author, printer and publisher were prosecuted for offence to public morals and religion. At the trial in January 1857 Ernest Pinard prosecuted and Marie-Antoine-Jules Senard defended, and on 7 February 1857 all three were acquitted. Michel Lévy issued the book in two volumes that April, dedicated to Senard and to Bouilhet; the text Flaubert settled for Charpentier in 1873 is the standard.
Movement II
At Tostes the book goes back to the convent where Emma was schooled, and shows where her longing came from: keepsakes, Scott, Lamartine, the engravings and romances that told her what love, passion and rapture would be like. The desire was formed before it had an object, and the rest of the book is its search for one. Marriage to Charles brings none of the feelings the words had promised, and she cannot believe that the words were false. She concludes instead that the feelings exist somewhere else, for other people, in other places.
Then, for one night, other places open. The Bovarys are asked to a ball at the château of La Vaubyessard, and Emma dances, sees a world of titles and ease, and goes home. On the road home she picks up a cigar case. She keeps it, and imagines whose it was; she follows the streets of Paris on a map. The days at Tostes are given in the imperfect tense, the tense of what kept happening, so that habit and boredom take duration in the grammar itself: nothing occurs, and the nothing goes on.
She grows ill with it, and Charles, who notices nothing else, notices that, and moves the household to another town. In the garden at Tostes there was a plaster curé reading his breviary; it falls to pieces on the move. Her wedding bouquet is burned. Emma is carrying a child, and the daughter, Berthe, will be born in Yonville and handed to a wet nurse. Into the new house comes Lheureux, the draper, with his scarves, offering to wait for payment as long as she likes. Nothing in the book will be more patient.
Movement III
Yonville is a market town with a pharmacist, Homais, who reads the newspapers, believes in progress and has an opinion on everything; a tax collector, Binet, who turns napkin rings on his lathe; a curé, Bournisien, who cannot hear what Emma is trying to tell him when she comes to him in distress; and a young clerk, Léon, who likes music and poetry as she does. The two of them talk the language of the books they have both read, and love goes unspoken. When she goes to the church for help, the church is deaf; when she goes to the draper, the draper is kind.
The agricultural show (II.8) is the book’s great set piece and its argument in small. On a platform below, a councillor from the prefecture speaks of agriculture, manure and the virtues of the state; at a window above, Rodolphe Boulanger, a landowner who has decided to have Emma, speaks to her of souls, destiny and passion. The narration cuts between the two speeches, phrase against phrase, until they run together and are one speech. An old farm servant comes up to receive a medal for a lifetime of service, and the crowd laughs. The seduction and the oratory are proved to be made of the same words.
Rodolphe takes Emma riding into the woods, and she comes home and looks at herself in the glass: “J’ai un amant! un amant!”
“I have a lover! a lover!” She has entered the books at last. Charles, urged by Homais, operates on the clubfoot of Hippolyte, the stable boy at the inn; if it works he will be the man she wanted; it fails, the leg has to be cut off, and she turns finally to Rodolphe. To him her declarations sound like every declaration he has heard, and the narration, in a rare general sentence, gives the reason: “la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles”
“human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.” When Rodolphe is gone she turns, for a time, to piety.
Movement IV
Charles takes her to the opera at Rouen to raise her spirits, and there she meets Léon again, a clerk in the city now, more forward than he was. He persuades her into a cab (III.1). The cab drives all day through the streets of Rouen and its outskirts, its blinds drawn, the driver lost and despairing, and the book gives nothing but the names of the places it passes and, at the end, a hand at the window scattering scraps of paper. It is the scene the serial’s editors cut. The knowledge is in what is not shown. Afterwards Emma goes to Rouen every week, for a music lesson she does not take, and a hotel room becomes her home.
The bills mount. Lheureux, who has waited so long, renews them, lends, lends again, and at the right moment calls them in. The descent is one more loan and one more lie, repeated: a power of attorney, a sale, a forged receipt for the lessons. On the road between Rouen and Yonville a blind man with a ruined face runs after the coach and sings. The bailiffs come to make an inventory of the house. Emma goes to everyone: the notary, the tax collector, Léon, Rodolphe. None will give her the money. The debt, not the adultery, is what kills her.
She goes into Homais’s storeroom, takes a handful of arsenic and eats it (III.8). The dying is long and physical, given hour by hour; Charles, who understands nothing, sends for help, and the great doctor Larivière comes from Rouen, sees at once that nothing can be done, and goes. The priest gives the last rites, anointing each of the senses that sinned. Under the window the blind man sings: “Souvent la chaleur d’un beau jour / Fait rêver fillette à l’amour”
“Often the warmth of a fine day / Makes a young girl dream of love.” Emma sits up, laughs, and dies.
Movement V
Homais and Bournisien keep the vigil over the body. They argue about prayer and providence, the pharmacist for science and the priest for the church; they eat; they doze in their chairs; they wake and argue again. Beside them lies the woman whose agony the book gave an hour before. Neither the science nor the church has anything to say to what happened. The farce and the death are told in the same even sentences, and they belong to one world.
Charles finds the letters and learns everything, and goes on loving her. He pays her debts, sells what he has, falls into the grip of the same creditors and keeps her ways as if to keep her. When at last he meets the man who was her lover, he says the one grand phrase of his life, and it is borrowed: “C’est la faute de la fatalité!”
“It is the fault of fate!” Soon after he is found dead on the bench in the arbour, holding a lock of black hair. Berthe, passed from her grandmother to a poor aunt, is sent at the end to earn her living in a cotton mill.
The pharmacist prospers. He has seen off three doctors at Yonville, and the authorities treat him with care, and public opinion is his. The book that opened on a schoolroom and a boy’s cap closes on him, outside Emma as it began: “Il vient de recevoir la croix d’honneur.”
“He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.” The world that Emma tried to leave has closed over her without a ripple, and given its decoration to the man who prospered on every failure.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing to take. Flaubert worked by excision, and an episode that looks like a digression proves load-bearing. Charles’s schooldays and first marriage are required: Emma enters a life already formed as dull, and her story is enclosed in his. The agricultural show is the seduction’s instrument, not a set piece beside it. Hippolyte’s clubfoot is Charles’s one chance to become what she wants, and its failure turns her finally to Rodolphe. Binet’s lathe, the blind man, Lheureux’s scarves: each returns. The coda after her death delivers the world’s verdict. What holds the axis off the top is the vanished “nous” of the opening, a frame set up and dropped, and passages in the third part where the descent repeats its steps, one more loan, one more lie, a little past what the argument needs.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a self can be made of borrowed images, and the desire so made is real, insatiable and saleable. Emma’s longing was formed in the convent on keepsakes, Scott and Lamartine, and seeks an object (Léon, Rodolphe, the ball, Paris on a map, a cigar case found on the road), finding each less than the image. The commerce of the age lives on that longing: Lheureux sells it on credit, and the debt, not the adultery, kills her. And the language available to feeling is worn out, hers and her lovers’ alike: the cracked kettle. The finding passed into the language as bovarysme. Held off the top because it discloses by negation: the book sets almost nothing against the condition it exposes, Larivière a glimpse, and the truth is more anatomy than measure.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The irony keeps elevation rationed, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve. But the heights are real, and mostly cold. The dreadful: the arsenic, protracted and physical, the last rites given sense by sense, and the blind man’s song under the window, at which Emma sits up, laughs, and dies. The comic sublime: the agricultural show, where the councillor’s speech about manure and the seducer’s about souls are cut together until they are one speech. The warm heights are fewer: the ride into the woods and the return, “J’ai un amant! un amant!”; the dawn after the cab ride; Charles found dead in the arbour holding a lock of black hair. Height is reached; its frequency is held down by design, and the axis scores both.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, from the inside out. The structure is Quixote’s, transposed to a woman and to the bourgeois century: a reader who tries to live what she has read and is destroyed by the world’s indifference to it. The pattern is load-bearing, not alluded to: the convent reading of the first part is the engine of every later choice. Emma has become an archetype while remaining a doctor’s wife in Normandy who cannot pay for her curtains. Around her stand types who stay people: Homais, the progressive who prospers on every failure; Lheureux, the tempter who keeps accounts; the blind man, a ragged figure of fate who returns at the deathbed as chorus. Held below the highest marks because realism and irony refuse any figure more than social size: there is no sacred order in which Emma’s fall means more than itself, and the book’s myth is a myth of that absence.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is Balzac’s novel of provincial life, Stendhal’s, the Romantic novel of passion Emma herself reads, and the moralising realism of the 1840s. The turn: an adultery in a market town told with no authorial comment and no moral, the narrator withdrawn so far that the prosecutor could not find whom to blame; style made the substance, a book about nothing carried by its sentences; free indirect discourse made the method of a whole novel, so that a character’s clichés are given from within and judged by their placing alone. The stake was paid: four and a half years at a few pages a week, the lyric manner of the Tentation abandoned, editorial cuts, and the prosecution of author, printer and publisher. Free indirect style was not Flaubert’s invention, and Balzac had made provincial life a subject; that holds the axis off the very top.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told by an authorial narrator, Emma would be judged; told in her first person, pitied or excused. The impersonal free indirect style does both and neither: her reveries come in her own worn vocabulary, and the sentence around them, without a word of comment, shows the vocabulary as worn. That double vision is what the book knows. The agricultural show is form as argument: two languages proved one by being spliced. The frame is a second instrument: the book opens on Charles and closes on Charles and Homais, so that Emma’s life is enclosed in the world she tried to leave, which closes over her without a ripple. The cab ride (III.1) is given wholly from outside, and the knowledge is in the withholding. Held off the top by the dropped “nous”, the one place where the form is not the instrument.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: one hundred and sixty-nine years of reading without exhaustion. The trial began the argument over what the book means and whom it blames, and it has not closed. Henry James wrote on it more than once; Proust found its novelty in the grammar, in the imperfect tense and the “and”; Nabokov taught it at Cornell; Sartre gave L’Idiot de la famille to its author; Jonathan Culler read it for its uncertainty, Mario Vargas Llosa as La orgía perpetua, Dominick LaCapra through the trial, and feminist criticism has reopened whether Emma is the book’s victim or its target. Its questions stay open: whether the irony spares anyone, whether her insatiability condemns or vindicates her, whether Charles, the fool, is the book’s one lover. The returns of the blind man, the cigar case and the bouquet are found anew. Held a step down because its moral questions are fewer and its answers firmer.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century, and through it the European novel. The force: the book reorganised what a novel could be. It made the prose of a novel answerable to the standard of poetry, made the narrator’s withdrawal a principle, and made free indirect discourse the novel’s common instrument; after it the novel is a made object before it is a told story, and the modern novel is commonly dated from it. Held a tenth below the top by the part of that reorganisation which L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) completed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Zola and the naturalists took it as their founding book; Maupassant was Flaubert’s pupil; James, Conrad and Ford carried impersonality and the mot juste into English; Joyce learned from it; Kafka read Flaubert as a master; the nouveau roman claimed him; and the novels of adultery that followed, Anna Karenina, La Regenta, O Primo Basílio and Effi Briest, answer it.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is weighed on its span, one hundred and sixty-nine years, and on the widest presence that span allows. The form survives whole, in the editions of 1857 and 1873, with Flaubert’s manuscripts and drafts preserved; nothing is lost and nothing is charged. It has been in print without a break since 1857, taught in French schools and in courses on the novel everywhere, translated into English many times (Eleanor Marx Aveling in 1886, Steegmuller, Wall and Davis among others) and into most written languages, filmed by Renoir (1934), Minnelli (1949) and Chabrol (1991), and remade by Posy Simmonds as Gemma Bovery (1999). Its surfaces, the July Monarchy, the officiers de santé, provincial credit, are history, and it is read for what they pressed on. A survival under two centuries does not stand with the millennia, and that holds the figure where it is.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The making is load-bearing: the command of the sentence is the book’s argument. Flaubert’s prose is the byword for craft in the novel, and the particulars carry the reputation. The sentence is built for rhythm and weight, tested aloud, often in three members, the paragraph turning on a short last clause. The imperfect tense becomes a medium of consciousness, habit and boredom given duration in the grammar. The transitions are the craft at its finest: the show’s cross-cutting; the cab ride told as an itinerary; a scene falling into one flat sentence, “C’est la faute de la fatalité!” Detail is chosen to bear meaning: the cap, the plaster curé, the burnt bouquet. Judged on the French as far as it can be heard here; sound beyond the sentences known is neither credited nor charged. Held below the top only by the overwrought cap and the dropped frame.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Homais and the curé Bournisien arguing, eating and dozing beside Emma’s corpse, and her agony an hour before; or the old farm servant’s medal for a lifetime of service, given amid laughter, and Emma’s ecstasy on the ride. One law governs them: every feeling and every institution in this world is lived through received forms, which shape and betray what is lived through them. Her passion, Homais’s science, the church’s consolation, the state’s honours and Lheureux’s credit obey it equally, and the irony is applied to all, which the prosecutor took for immorality. The range of tone, from farce to agony, is held without a seam. The range of world is narrower: two small towns, Rouen, a château for one night. Narrowness is not coherence, and that, with the opening “nous”, which obeys no law the book keeps, holds the axis where it is.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Held, not listed, within a narrower circle than the great novels of society. Consciousness: Emma’s, given from within at a depth no novel before it reached, and Charles’s, Léon’s and Homais’s in less. The family: Charles’s two marriages, his mother, the farmer Rouault, Berthe neglected and at the end sent to a cotton mill. Labour and the land: Les Bertaux, the show, the servant’s medal. Commerce and credit: Lheureux’s shop, the bills, the seizure. The state: the councillor, the cross of honour, the medical licences. Science and medicine: the pharmacy, the clubfoot, the arsenic, Larivière. The sacred: the convent, Bournisien’s deafness to Emma’s crisis, her brief piety, the last rites. History stands as ground, in the July Monarchy’s progress and its newspapers. Held a step down because history and the natural order are scenery rather than agents, and because the circle is drawn deliberately small.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, then Pressure on Tradition at 9.5. A command of the sentence that is the book’s argument, from the cross-cut speeches of the agricultural show to the cab ride told as a list of streets; and a reorganisation of the novel, which after this book is a made object before it is a told story, carried into French, English and the novels of adultery that answer it.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.6, held by the irony, which rations elevation by design: the heights are real and mostly cold, from the cut speeches to the blind man’s song at the deathbed, and they are few. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.7, a circle drawn deliberately small, in which history and the natural order are ground rather than agents; then The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, a myth whose irony refuses its figures more than social size. The sound of Flaubert’s French beyond the sentences known here is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.6, The Living Form at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.7. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Mœurs de province, scored as the novel in Flaubert’s French in the text he settled for the Charpentier edition of 1873, the standard text, with its dedications to Marie-Antoine-Jules Senard, his counsel at the trial, and to Louis Bouilhet. The serial of 1856 in the Revue de Paris, cut by its editors, is not the work; nor are the trial documents, Pinard’s indictment, Senard’s defence and the judgment, which later editions append. They are context. The book edition was published by Michel Lévy in two volumes in April 1857. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Flaubert’s French. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own plain English beneath; no published translation is quoted. Translation · Lydia Davis’s (2010) is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense, because it keeps closest to Flaubert’s syntax and punctuation; Francis Steegmuller’s (1957) and Geoffrey Wall’s (Penguin, 1992) are known less closely. None is in hand, none is quoted, and nothing in any of them is charged to the novel. The structure, the scenes and the sentences known by heart are judged in full; the sound and rhythm of Flaubert’s French beyond those sentences are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the novel in words, the chapters of several episodes, the date of the letter in which Flaubert wished for a book about nothing, the dates of several of the critical studies named, and where the manuscripts are kept, are not given. Citations are by part and chapter only where the chapter is certain: II.8 is Part Two, chapter 8.