Madame Bovary
1856
A masterpiece of literary realism that shattered conventions and scandalized 19th-century France, Madame Bovary tells the tragic story of Emma Rouault, a doctor’s wife trapped in the gray tedium of provincial Yonville. Dreaming of the passionate romance she consumed in cheap novels, Emma pursues affairs with aristocratic Rodolphe and solicitor Leon, while drowning in debt to keep up appearances. Her desperate escape attempts only deepen her despair, leading toward a conclusion as inevitable as it is devastating. Flaubert’s revolutionary prose dissects every nuance of his characters’ inner lives while maintaining sharp observational distance on the petty bourgeois world they inhabit. The novel’s power lies not in judgment but in profound sympathy for a woman destroyed by the gap between her fantasies and her reality. It remains essential reading for anyone drawn to fiction about longing, illusion, and the deadly costs of wanting too much from life.
Editions
X-Ray
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."””
— Gustave Flaubert
“What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?””
— Gustave Flaubert
“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.””
— Gustave Flaubert
“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.””
— Gustave Flaubert
