Madame Bovary: A New Translation
Emma Rouault grew up reading romantic novels in a Norman convent and emerged with an appetite for beauty, passion, and high society that her education had cultivated and her circumstances could never satisfy. She marries Charles Bovary - a country health officer of modest practice and modest expectations - hoping that marriage will feel like the novels. It does not. She has a daughter. She discovers Yonville's one intelligent young man and keeps him at arm's length through heroic effort. When he leaves for Paris, a wealthy landowner takes his place. He seduces her easily. She makes plans for them to flee. He writes her a careful letter of goodbye.
She nearly dies. She recovers. She finds L on again, older now, in Rouen. This time she does not keep him at arm's length. She borrows money to finance the affair - from the draper Lheureux, who is patient about repayment in the way that a trap is patient. Her debts compound. She appeals to everyone she can think of and is refused by all of them. She takes arsenic from the pharmacist's storeroom and dies in prolonged agony. Charles finds her love letters, understands everything he had refused to understand, and dies alone in his garden. Their daughter Berthe ends the novel working in a cotton mill. The pharmacist Homais receives the L gion d'honneur.
First serialized in the Revue de Paris from October to December 1856, Madame Bovary was immediately prosecuted for "offense against public morals" - the same charge brought six months later against Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal by the same prosecutor. Flaubert was acquitted in February 1857. The novel appeared in book form in April and became a bestseller. What had disturbed the prosecution was not the content of Emma's affairs but the manner of their narration: a prose so intimate with its subject, so precisely calibrated between sympathy and irony, that it seemed to refuse to condemn what it described. Flaubert had spent nearly five years writing it, reportedly passing entire days on single pages in his pursuit of le mot juste - the exactly right word. The refusal to judge Emma was entirely deliberate.
The philosopher Jules de Gaultier later named the condition Flaubert had rendered so exactly that it required its own word: bovarysme - the tendency to see oneself as other than one is, to live in permanent misrepresentation of one's actual circumstances. It is still in the dictionary. The novel that gave it its name remains the standard against which psychological realism in fiction continues to be measured.
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