Madame Bovary: A Tale of Provincial Life, Vol. 1 (of 2)
1856
Madame Bovary: A Tale of Provincial Life, Vol. 1 (of 2)
1856
Emma Bovary has read too many novels. That's her tragedy. Married to the decent but deadly dull physician Charles, she escapes into fantasies of passionate romance, wealthy lovers, and a life worthy of the sentimental fiction she's consumed. But provincial Yonville offers none of this, only boredom, silence, and the slow suffocation of unmet desire. When she attempts to rewrite her story through affairs and reckless spending, she discovers that life doesn't follow the rules of romantic literature. Flaubert's masterpiece is a pitiless, beautiful dissection of dreaming itself: the way fantasies become prisons, the way we confuse intensity with meaning, the way wanting more can become the most destructive force in an ordinary life. Written in prose so precise it feels surgical, Madame Bovary invented the modern psychological novel and was so scandalous its author faced an obscenity trial. It remains the definitive portrait of longing, illusion, and the terrible price of refusing reality.
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“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
