Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  3 ridiculus sum “I am ridiculous.” A definition which holds true for Bovary during much of the novel.

  4 innumerable cringings The original “servilités” is an abstract noun and never usually in the plural, thus sounding similarly odd to a French ear.

  5 It would be impossible now for any of us The reappearance of the opening voice, Charles’s schoolfellow; he recalls the cap in meticulous detail, yet has no memory of Charles himself, and subsequently dissolves as a narratological device. Authorial lapse, or modernist irony?

  6 Anacharsis The Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce by Abbé Barthélemy (1716–95), a work much used in nineteenth-century French education.

  7 The river The Robec, then flowing through one of the poorest, most industrialized areas of Rouen, changed color according to the dyes jettisoned into it. Its symbolic possibilities seem (typically of the novel) to be outweighed by its matter-of-fact presentation.

  8 infatuated with Béranger Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857), the proto-socialist, highly influential poet and songwriter, despised by Flaubert.

  9 his medical officer’s Charles is a mere officier de santé in the strict medical hierarchy of the time; as such, he was not allowed to practice outside his department, and could carry out only minor operations unless supervised by a qualified doctor.

  10 ivories of Dieppe From the seventeenth century on, Dieppe was an important ivory-carving center, reaching its apogee in the mid-nineteenth century when it produced everything from crucifixes to snuffboxes.

  11 bandeaux This confusing hairdressing term from the 1830s (borrowed by the English) appears several times in the original. It can either refer to a hair tie or, as always in Madame Bovary, the sides of the hair when drawn smoothly across the ears into a knot or chignon at the back. The side hair does then resemble “bands” or, as here, a single swathe.

  12 lashed whip In French, “nerf de boeuf”; this highly charged scene climaxes on a term which also meant “bull’s pizzle.”

  13 barton-yard Southern English dialect for “farmyard,” reflecting Flaubert’s Norman term, masure.

  14 And besides … heart? This passage is present in the final manuscript copy and the first edition, but missing in all subsequent editions, perhaps due to a misreading of the repeated “la veuve”; its restoration gives a sequential logic to the physical description that follows.

  15 long, hungry teeth The figurative expression “avoir les dents longues” means to be ambitious or ravenous. Here, Flaubert seems to be playing with both the literal and the figurative meanings.

  16 The base … at the summit This famous description of the suggestive and top-heavy wedding cake is a stylistic echo of both the wedding procession and, in the opening chapter, Charles’s schoolboy cap. In this scene, by contrast, we have no description of Charles’s dress: he is described only as “empty-handed.”

  17 pebble-stone heaps Used for road mending: called in French mètres de caillou, being a cubic meter in size.

  18 He felt as sad as an unfurnished house Similes outnumber metaphors in Madame Bovary, and take a variety of forms, from the parodic to the down-to-earth.

  19 shivered all over A cut line in the manuscript makes clear that the canvas-hung wallpaper was shivering because of a draft through the open door.

  20 the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales Flaubert took copious notes from this, the first encyclopedic dictionary of medicine (1812–22).

  21 silk kerchief The kerchief usually covered the head, being drawn over the nightcap.

  22 he stepped up … she cried out An example of Flaubert’s characteristic ternary (threefold) structure, often used within a single sentence.

  23 Paul et Virginie A popular Enlightenment novel by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, published in 1787. Much influenced by Rousseau, it is set on the island of Mauritius and pitches nature’s utopic innocence against upper-class corruption.

  24 Mademoiselle de La Vallière Louis XIV’s mistress, Louise de la Vallière (1644–1710) became a Carmelite nun and a favorite nineteenth-century example of pious conversion.

  25 Abbé Frayssinous’s Conférences These lectures were published under the title Défense du Christianisme (1825; A Defence of Christianity) and helped inaugurate the restoration of religion following the Revolution. The royalist François-René Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) played a similar role, but in a poetic style that Flaubert much admired.

  26 Mary Stuart … Jeanne d’Arc, Héloïse, Agnès Sorel, La Belle Ferronière and Clémence Isaure Mary Stuart (1542–87): Queen of Scotland and Queen consort of France, eventually executed for treason by Elizabeth I. Jeanne d’Arc, or Joan of Arc (1412–31), the illiterate farm girl who led the French army to victory during the Hundred Years’ War, burned as a heretic in Rouen by the English, canonized in 1920. Héloïse d’Argenteuil (1101–64): the ill-fated mutual passion of the scholars Héloïse and Abelard has been called the first modern love affair, documented by their remarkable letters. Agnès Sorel (1422–50) was the favorite mistress of Charles VII; she died—possibly murdered—from mercury poisoning. La Belle Ferronnière was a mistress of François I, via whom the vengeful husband was said to have passed on syphilis to the king. Clémence Isaure, a medieval poetess of Toulouse, revealed in Flaubert’s time to have been an invention of the troubadours, devoted herself to poetry after her lover was killed in battle.

  27 Saint Louis … Louis XIV Nineteenth-century French schoolchildren would have been familiar with these anecdotal snippets of history. The pious King Louis IX (1214–70) was said to have administered justice under a vast oak tree; Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (1476–1524), was known as the fearless and faultless knight, famous for his magnanimity and strategic brilliance in battle. The cunning and ruthlessness of Louis XI (1423–83) earned him the sobriquet “The Spider King,” but unified France; the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy), in which thousands of French Protestants were slaughtered by the Catholic majority, began on the night of 23–24 August 1572. The Béarnais crest refers to the white plume on the helmet of Henri of Navarre (1553–1610), under which the king rode into battle. Louis XIV (1638–1715), the absolute monarch known as the Sun King, builder of the lavish Palace of Versailles.

  28 bonnet-grecs The bonnet-grec is a tasseled, fezlike cap, appearing with this name in, for instance, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). “Indispensable to the studious man. Lends majesty to the face” (Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas).

  29 Lamartinian The poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was a deeply influential figure in the French romantic movement, and detested by Flaubert for having “no ear.”

  30 pellets of breadcrumbs Used at the time as pencil erasers.

  31 mouthwash bowls Known euphemistically in English as finger bowls, they were little bowls of rosewater with a cup, to rinse one’s mouth for the dessert.

  32 quite good enough for the country Flaubert uses italics not only in the usual way, but also when he wishes to draw attention to the manner in which a consumerist society saturates its discourse with received ideas, recycled phrases, banal epithets. Here, as elsewhere, the italicized phrase lies somewhere between style indirect libre and direct dialogue, or is reported speech not quite in quotation marks.

  33 She called Djali Emma’s greyhound bitch (a breed made fashionable by Lamartine) is named after Esmeralda’s goat in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831). This celebrated scene includes the first time we hear Emma’s voice since her single question to Charles (“Are you looking for something?” p.19). Here she again poses a question, but an interior and more essential one.

  34 several ladies had not put their gloves in their glass A woman put her glove in her glass to signal that she would not be drinking wine, as was expected in polite society.

  35 Trafalgar puddings Pudding à la Trafalgar, or jam roly-poly and custard.

  36 La Marjolaine The medieval love song “Compagn
ons de la Marjolaine” (“Fellowship of the Marjoram”). Young men and women would go in a group to dance in the meadow where the marjoram flowers: a knight asks them for a girl to marry.

  37 the Bois Familiar term for the Bois de Boulogne, on the outskirts of Paris.

  38 Eugène Sue A socialist dandy, Sue (1804–57) exposed the seamy side of the Industrial Revolution in popular, serialized melodramas.

  39 Yonville-l’Abbaye Said to be based on the village of Ry, the Normandy home of the unfortunate Delphine Delamare, the town’s lengthy opening documentation is essential to our understanding of Emma’s plight. Flaubert himself insisted the “place does not exist”; Ry now does its best to conform to the fictive version.

  PART TWO

  1 Cupid, finger to his lips Probably a reproduction of Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s famous Seated Cupid (1757), reaching for an arrow as he urges secrecy.

  2 Charles X’s reign An ultra-reactionary Catholic, Charles-Philippe reigned from 1824 until the July Revolution of 1830.

  3 the Charter The constitution of the new monarchy of 1830, the “Gallic cock” being the ancient symbol of Gaul.

  4 The Hirondelle The Swallow, the name of Flaubert’s fictional stagecoach from Rouen.

  5 the selfishness of a bourgeois “I make Literature for myself as a bourgeois turns napkin rings in his attic” (Flaubert, letter to George Sand, 6 September 1871).

  6 My God … principles of ’89! Homais’s list glibly lumps together the key reference points for an enlightened rationalism: Socrates, the father of Western philosophy (469–399 BC); Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), the inventor, diplomat, statesman of genius and New World hero to the French; François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), the anti-clerical Enlightenment writer and philosopher; Béranger, the subversive songwriter (see previous note); and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 –78), whose educational treatise Émile: or, On Education was banned and then burned in 1762 due to the cited “Profession” section, which promoted a revolutionary “natural religion.” The “immortal principles” are those of the French Revolution (1789), during which the infamous Robespierre inaugurated the Festival of the Supreme Being (obliquely referred to by Homais) and a new state religion based on rational devotion. No one is listening to Homais, of course.

  7 news, explanations and baskets Flaubert is fond of the comically disparate triplet, mixing abstract and concrete nouns.

  8 a young man with fair hair Like Emma’s eyes, Léon’s hair is inconsistent, passing from blond to “auburn” (see this page).

  9 fifty-four Fahrenheit This should be eighty-six Fahrenheit.

  10 “Isn’t it?” The dissonance in the reply, resulting from a late authorial cut, happily reflects Emma’s dreamy state. Flaubert commented on this “grotesque” duet: “The irony takes nothing away from the pathos, on the contrary it exaggerates it” (Letter to Louise Colet, 9 October 1852).

  11 The Rouen Beacon When the editors asked Flaubert to swap the real Journal de Rouen for an invented name, he wrote agonizedly to Louis Bouilhet: “I don’t know what to do … it will break the rhythm of my poor phrases!” Thus Fanal (Beacon).

  12 until the end of dinner “Never in my life have I written anything more difficult than what I am doing now—trivial dialogue. This inn scene may take me three months … but I’d die rather than skirt round it” (Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 19 September 1852).

  13 the 19th Ventôse, Year XI, Article 1 This being 3 March 1803 in the Republican calendar (1793–1806). Flaubert took much trouble with his research into pharmaceutical legislation.

  14 Athalie The eponymous heroine of Racine’s last play (1691).

  15 The God of the Simple Folk An anti-clerical song by Béranger (see note above).

  16 The War of the Gods A violently anti-Christian poem by the influential libertine poet Chevalier de Parny (1753–1814).

  17 the six weeks of the Virgin The customary lying-in period after a birth.

  18 a Mathieu Laensberg almanac These were hugely popular almanacs with a touch of the arcane, produced in Liège, sold door-to-door by peddlers.

  19 L’Illustration The most celebrated nineteenth-century quality journal began publication in 1843; therefore it was, according to the novel’s (fluctuating) internal chronology, brand new.

  20 “my respects to your husband!” “Frankly there are moments when I almost feel like vomiting, physically … This [direct dialogue] must be no more than six or seven pages long, and without a single reflection or analysis …” (Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 13 April 1853).

  21 to the Arts Here Flaubert cut an extended and much-drafted description of an Italian master of fireworks setting out lamps on the Mairie.

  22 rat in his cheese A literary reference to one of Jean La Fontaine’s Fables (VII, 3, “The Rat Who Retired from the World”) lost on the inn’s landlady and so self-confirming Homais’s superiority.

  23 the counsel of science! Homais is in the vanguard; France was a leading exponent of la chimie agricole—agricultural chemistry—from the midcentury onward, with experimental farms like Georges Ville’s at Vincennes analyzing manure. Flaubert, while acutely suspicious of technological progress and regarding science as another “superstition,” claimed that “poetry is as exact a science as geometry” and demanded of the writer the same objectivity and rigor as was found in the laboratory.

  24 half-century of servitude “For half a century, the housewives of Pont-l’Evêque envied Madame Aubain her servant, Félicité.” The famous opening sentence of Flaubert’s late masterpiece, Un coeur simple (1877; A Simple Heart), whose obscure heroine seems an intentional counterpoint to Emma.

  25 staddles Trees whose stumps were reserved for coppicing (baliveaux).

  26 in the evening’s blush Speaking of this scene (which he called “their Fuck”), Flaubert said, “It is a delicious thing to write, no longer to be oneself … Today, for instance, as man and woman together, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest, on an autumn afternoon, under yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words they uttered and the red sun that half closed their love-drowned eyes …” (Letter to Louise Colet, 23 December 1853).

  27 ganny cocks A turkey cock in southern English dialect, reflecting Flaubert’s Normandy term picots.

  28 The misspellings Flaubert chose not to reproduce them in the embedded text.

  29 Doctor Duval’s volume Flaubert made copious notes from Vincent Duval’s Traité pratique du pied-bot (1839; A Practical Treatise on the Treatment of Clubfoot). Duval corrected a patient’s clubfoot that Flaubert’s surgeon father had been unable to treat.

  30 Ambroise Paré … Celsus … Dupuytren … Gensoul The list of these famous surgeons includes Achille-Cléophas Flaubert’s remarkable tutor and friend, Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835), chiefly known for inventing the artificial anus.

  31 tenotome A narrow-bladed surgical instrument for cutting tendons. Charles is not authorized to carry out this type of serious operation on his own.

  32 phlyctenae Fluid-filled blisters.

  33 Amor nel cor “Love in my heart.” Louise Colet gave a cigarette case engraved with this motto to Flaubert; in a furious, vengeful poem of the same name, she wrote: “Ah well! in a novel of commercial traveler style, / As nauseating as unwholesome air, / He mocked the gift in a flat-footed phrase, / Yet kept the handsome agate seal.”

  34 Duke of Clarence In Shakespeare’s Richard III, the wicked Richard has his brother stabbed and then drowned in a butt of malmsey wine.

  35 morals The one instance when the subtitle’s key word, the multivalent “moeurs,” is used. Here it clearly means “morals” rather than “manners,” “customs” or “mores.”

  36 Madame Bovary … in harmony Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the novel for its contemporaries was the notion that adultery beautifies.

  37 From time to time … wanness This passage was cut by the Revue de Paris, and not put back despite Flaubert’s express wishes. Left out in the “defi
nitive” 1873 edition, it still seems (at least to this translator) too crucial to omit.

  38 sideways look A favorite pose in portraiture—flirtatious, inviting the viewer in.

  39 manchineel tree A poisonous tree native to the Americas, so deadly that standing beneath it in the rain causes skin blisters.

  40 apricots picked The fruit is symbolically associated with both love and, particularly in the nineteenth century, the female genitals; it is likely to have been the biblical “apple” of Genesis.

  41 That is the question! Homais reduces Hamlet’s “To be or not to be, that is the question” to the level of a newspaper snippet.

  42 Castigat ridendo mores “It [comedy] amends morals by laughing at them,” a phrase coined by Molière’s contemporary Jean de Santeuil (1630–97).

  43 Lucie de Lammermoor The tragic opera by Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor (1836), based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), was performed in this French version in 1839, supervised by the composer: the major changes include a frailer Lucie, manipulated by the more brutish men around her.

  PART THREE

  1 Chaumière … grisettes La Grande Chaumière was a popular Paris dance hall, opened in 1788, already closed when Flaubert was writing this part of the novel. The grisette was an integral feature of bohemian Paris, being an independent working-class woman who combined the roles of artist’s model, multiple lover and, if things went badly, prostitute. Renowned for their beauty and overt sexuality, the grisettes were dismissed by a disappointed Mark Twain as “another romantic fraud.” They were immortalized in the character of Mimi in Puccini’s opera La Bohème.

  2 whatever did not graze the asphalt Asphalt, a new invention, had an erotic significance at this period, attracting an excited response from writers such as Mallarmé or Zola. The bituminous, slippery, dust-free and brightly lit boulevards were a pickup point for prostitutes: the boot clearly belongs to one of the latter.