Quotes from Madame Bovary

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

Halfway through Emma's first year of marriage to Charles. Flaubert puts the two impulses in the same sentence to make the joke and the diagnosis at once. Emma's wish for tragedy and her wish for Parisian shops are not different wishes; they are the same wish for a life that feels like the novels she has read. The book argues, sentence by sentence, that this wish destroys whoever holds it.

“She confused, in her desire, the sensualities of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment.”

Flaubert's verdict on the convent-educated Emma. Two pairs (luxury/heart, manners/sentiment) collapse into each other in her psychology. The novel's whole tragedy is in this confusion: Emma cannot distinguish between the texture of a silk dress and the feeling of being loved, because the novels she grew up on did not distinguish either. Flaubert is naming a reading injury, not a moral failing.

“She was the mistress of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas, the vague she of all the volumes of poetry.”

Emma during her affair with Rodolphe. The sentence does precise sociological work. Emma cannot be present in her own affair because she is too busy being the heroine of an imagined affair. The vague she of poetry is the model she is trying to copy. Flaubert is making a structural argument that bad literature produces bad lives by giving people the wrong sentences to feel with.

“Charles's conversation was as flat as a street pavement.”

Emma's most quoted complaint about her husband. The simile is brutal because it is correct: pavement is exactly what Charles's mind is, level and dependable and walked over by others. Flaubert lets Emma see this clearly. The novel is not interested in defending Charles against her judgement; it is interested in showing that her judgement, however accurate, does not justify what she does next.

“It's the fault of fatality!”

Charles to Rodolphe after Emma's death, when he meets him by chance in a field. The line is the only thing the dying Charles has left of intellectual self-defence: a single word borrowed from the novels Emma used to read. Flaubert ends the book by showing the contagion of Emma's vocabulary: Charles, who never read a novel, dies pronouncing the word fatality. Bad sentences travel.

“He was completely happy and without a care in the world.”

Charles in the first weeks of his marriage. The sentence is shocking only on reread, because the reader knows what is coming. Flaubert was famous for spending whole afternoons on the rhythm of a single phrase; this one is calibrated to be flat enough to feel almost neutral. The whole novel turns on the gap between Charles's happiness and Emma's, and Flaubert refuses to side with either of them.

“Anything but this monotonous life of hers.”

Emma in Tostes, where Charles has his first practice. The sentence is the engine of the entire novel: anything but. Flaubert does not let his heroine want something specific; he lets her want away from something. The structure of her desire is negative, and negative desire is, in Flaubert's argument, the most expensive kind, because it can be satisfied only briefly and never for long.

“Yonville is a market town twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville and the Beauvais roads.”

The opening sentence of Part Two, describing the village where the affair will take place. Flaubert makes the prose so neutral, so guidebook-like, that the reader almost laughs. The point is that Yonville is exactly the kind of nowhere-in-particular that a woman like Emma will destroy herself trying to escape. Geography, in Madame Bovary, is destiny.

“She had to suffer for her own folly.”

Emma in her last weeks, trying to raise money to cover her debts. Flaubert places the verdict in her own thoughts. She knows. The novel's cruellest device is that Emma is not unaware; she can see her folly clearly and cannot stop performing it. The horror of the book is not a woman who does not understand herself; it is a woman who understands herself completely and still cannot escape.

“Just then there was heard under the window a thick, prolonged shout.”

The Blind Beggar's song reaching Emma as she dies of arsenic poisoning. Flaubert places this beggar through the whole novel as a kind of moral chorus: he sings a coarse erotic ballad about a girl in a field. He arrives at her deathbed without explanation. Flaubert refuses to let Emma die romantically; the beggar interrupts the scene with the cheap song that her own affairs have been variations on.

“He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.”

The last sentence of the novel, about the apothecary Homais, the village's most loathsome opportunist. Flaubert ends with Homais being awarded a state honour. Emma is dead, Charles is dead, the child is sent away. The man who profited from all of it is decorated. The cruelty of the ending is structural: the novel's last gesture is to show society rewarding the wrong people, on time, with paperwork.