Flaubert opens his novel with what appears, at first, to be a joke at a minor character's expense. The narrator is a schoolboy — a we, a collective nous — and a new boy is brought in. He is fifteen. He is awkwardly large. He is from the country. He has a ridiculous cap of composite materials that the schoolmaster makes him remove, put on, and remove again. He cannot say his own name clearly; he garbles it; it is written down as Charbovari. The class laughs. Charles Bovary, too stupefied to cry, stands there with the cap.

And then — in one of the most famous structural decisions in the nineteenth-century novel — the narrator we, after a few paragraphs, simply disappears. The schoolmate vanishes. The book becomes third-person. Charles's story goes on. He finishes school badly, he becomes an officier de santé — a second-tier provincial medical practitioner, not a full physician — he marries an older widow his mother has picked out, the widow dies, and he then sets his eye, without quite knowing what he is doing, on a farmer's daughter named Emma Rouault, whose father he is treating for a broken leg. He marries her. She is his wife. And now the book can begin.

But Flaubert has done something on these opening pages that the rest of the novel is going to pay off in full. He has given us the exact measure of the man Emma is marrying. Charles Bovary is not a bad husband. He is not a cruel one. He is simply, flatly, the same unimaginative fifteen-year-old with a composite cap that he was on the first page. He has, as an adult, a patient kindness that never rises to interest. He loves his food. He loves his slippers. He loves his wife in a way that never for one instant reaches her. He has no curiosity about her. He has no capacity to notice when she is unhappy. He eats after she has stopped. He falls asleep a few minutes before she does. He is utterly faithful, utterly generous, utterly earnest, and utterly, utterly dull.

This is Flaubert's trap. A story in which a young woman is trapped in a marriage with a monster is an old story and a simple one. The great cruelty of Madame Bovary is that Emma is trapped in a marriage with a good man who is also a bore. Flaubert is refusing the reader any easy judgment. Charles is nice. Charles is innocent. Charles does not deserve, by any common measure, what is going to happen to him. And yet every page of the rest of the novel is going to come from the fact that his wife cannot breathe in the same room with him.

The opening is the calmest chapter in the book. It is a sunlit schoolroom. A boy in a bad cap is being laughed at. Flaubert has set up, quietly, the man whose perfect blandness is going to kill the woman he loves.

Charles has attended a wealthy marquis in the country for a minor ailment. The marquis, in gratitude, has invited Dr and Madame Bovary to a ball. Emma has bought a dress. She has spent a week preparing. She arrives at the Château de la Vaubyessard on a September evening and steps out of their provincial carriage into a driveway lined with lanterns, footmen, lamps, music. She has, in her twenty-three years, never seen anything like it.

The ball is the whole of her future interior life compressed into one evening. There are counts. There are horses in the stables whose ordinary stalls are more luxurious than her bedroom. There is a cotillion. There are lemon ices brought in on silver plates. A viscount asks her to dance; his coat-sleeve brushes her cheek; she can smell his cologne. An old duke dribbles sauce onto the tablecloth and is served the next course without comment. The women around her wear dresses that Emma has seen only in the Paris fashion magazines she reads at the pharmacist's. And in a small side room, just before midnight, a window is opened to cool the dancers. Emma looks out. Peasants from the village have crowded up to the window to see in. She sees her own old life looking at her through the glass, from outside, and she turns her back on it with the confidence of someone who believes, for an hour, that she is now on the right side of the window.

And then it is morning. The ball is over. The Bovarys take their carriage home. They arrive back at their plain provincial house in Tostes. Charles, tired, sleeps. Emma is awake. She puts her white ball gloves in a drawer. She puts her silk dress in another drawer. She lies in bed and stares at the ceiling. And from that morning on, for the remainder of her life, a memory of one evening at a château will be the weight she measures her actual life against.

Flaubert gives us the sentence in this scene's epigraph. The memory of the ball became an occupation for her. She turns it over. She relives it. She imagines, over and over, how she would live now if she belonged to that other world. She copies the monogram of the viscount off a cigar-case she finds dropped from his carriage in the driveway. She reads more and worse novels, the kind where women wear silk gowns and meet strangers in boxes at the opera. She begins, gently and systemically, to hate her own house.

This is how Flaubert begins the slide. Emma does not hate Charles yet. She does not yet plan to cheat on him. She simply, each morning, wakes up into a life that has been slightly spoiled for her by the knowledge that another life exists. The novel is going to spend three hundred pages letting that slight spoiling ripen into the thing that kills her. The ball itself was not ruinous. The memory is.

The Bovarys have moved. Charles, in search of a better medical practice, has taken them to the village of Yonville-l'Abbaye, a slightly larger Norman village with a pharmacist, a priest, a notary, a tax-collector, an inn, and not much else. Emma has had a child. She has been unhappy, quietly, for another year or two. She has fallen somewhat in love with the pharmacist's clerk, a gentle young man named Léon, and he with her; they have not acted on it; Léon has left for Paris. And a local gentleman bachelor, Rodolphe Boulanger, has looked at her across an inn table and decided, with the bored professionalism of a man who has seduced a great many wives of country doctors, that he will have her too.

The village holds its annual agricultural fair. Booths are set up in the square. A platform has been erected for the speeches. A president from the prefecture has come down to give an address on agriculture and civic virtue. There are prizes to be given out — for manure, for heifers, for the best-kept old servant. The square smells of cows. Flaubert has put Rodolphe and Emma in an upstairs room of the town hall, at a window overlooking the square, during the speeches.

And what Flaubert then writes is one of the greatest sustained pieces of ironic cross-cutting in nineteenth-century literature. He writes the seduction scene and the speech simultaneously. Rodolphe murmurs, in a low voice. The president, outside the window, declaims. The reader gets both, a line at a time. Rodolphe says: we have been brought together by a fate greater than ourselves. The president says: to the cultivator who has most distinguished himself in the breeding of merino sheep. Rodolphe says: our souls have known each other forever. The president says: manure, applied in the correct season. Rodolphe says: Emma, you cannot imagine the torment of my heart. The president says: to the servant Catherine Leroux, who has worked for the same household for fifty-four years, the medal.

Emma hears the seduction. The reader hears both. Flaubert has engineered, in one page of his novel, a devastating moral argument. The language of romantic love, in 1856, in a French provincial village, has become indistinguishable from the language of a county fair. Rodolphe's phrases are clichés. The president's phrases are clichés. Nobody in the square is saying anything of his own. And Emma, who has spent years reading novels, is unable to hear the clichés as clichés. She is flattered. She believes him. She will, within two chapters, be his mistress.

The scene is the moral centre of the book. Flaubert is saying that Emma's tragedy is not that she falls in love with the wrong man. Emma's tragedy is that she has no language in which to fall in love that has not already been ruined by somebody else. The phrases she reaches for have been used at a thousand county fairs, by a thousand Rodolphes, to a thousand Madame Bovaries, at the exact moment a mayor was announcing a prize for the best-kept cow.

The affair has gone on for months. Emma has come to believe, as the affair progresses, that she and Rodolphe will leave together. She has begun to plan. She has bought a small trunk. She has ordered a travelling cloak. She has begun to behave, to the pharmacist and the neighbours, like a woman about to leave her life. Rodolphe, in the intervals of the affair, has agreed to each successive plan. He has, he says, only to arrange his affairs. They will leave on a certain Monday. They will go to Paris, to Genoa, to wherever she likes.

And on the Sunday afternoon before the Monday, Rodolphe sits alone in his study at his manor house and realizes, with the small click of a man arriving at his own mind, that he is not going to go. He does not want to leave. He does not want to run off with another man's wife. He does not want to live with Emma on the road. He wants the affair to end. He wants it to end in a way that lets him keep his reputation and lets her, at a distance, think well of him.

Flaubert gives us the composition of the letter. Rodolphe takes out paper. He chews the pen. He starts and crosses out. He is not, the narrator tells us without pity, a naturally cruel man. He is a man of ordinary abilities who is currently in a small awkward situation and is looking, without much self-examination, for the phrases that will get him out of it. He remembers phrases from novels he has read. He tries: Courage, Emma, courage. He tries: I shall not be the cause of your unhappiness. He tries: The world is cruel to a man of my station. He tries — and settles on — a sad, dignified letter that blames fate for their parting and suggests, without quite saying it, that it is for her own good.

And then, in the gesture that tips the scene into horror, he reaches for a peach. He has been sent a basket of peaches from his orchards. He lifts a peach. He considers it. He squeezes a drop of juice over the top corner of the letter, to suggest a tear. He folds the letter. He seals it. He puts the letter at the bottom of the peach basket. He rings for his servant. He tells the servant to deliver the basket to Madame Bovary.

This is the quiet centre of Flaubert's moral vision. Rodolphe is not a villain in the theatrical sense. He is not plotting. He is not rubbing his hands. He is a well-off provincial bachelor who has found the arrangement mildly inconvenient and is managing, with faint care, the inconvenience's end. The peach-juice tear is not malice. It is taste. It is a man selecting, as he selects his gaming jacket, the right small gesture for the right light letter. And it will destroy a woman he claims to have loved.

Emma reads the letter upstairs in her attic, alone, in a terrible long silence. She nearly throws herself out of the window. She does not. She comes back downstairs at dinnertime. She sits down. She eats. And the book begins, from that hour, its final movement: a Madame Bovary whose interior life has been broken and who will now, by small steady steps, destroy everything around her on the way out.

Emma has been ill for months after Rodolphe's letter. Charles, worried, is persuaded by the pharmacist that an evening at the opera in Rouen will do her good. They go. The opera is Lucia di Lammermoor, a romantic tragedy in which a Scottish noblewoman is forced into a marriage she does not want, goes mad, and stabs her unwanted husband on her wedding night. It is, the narrator suggests without stressing the point, not an ideal evening out for a provincial wife recently betrayed.

Emma watches. She does not know the opera. She does not understand Italian. She finds, nonetheless, that the music moves her. She cries in several places. She imagines, as the prima donna sings, that she herself is Lucia and that all the loves of her life have been forced marriages. Charles, next to her, eats a lozenge and watches the prima donna's ankles.

During the intermission Léon appears at their box. Léon, the gentle clerk who had loved Emma in Yonville three years ago and had gone to Paris and was now finishing law school in Rouen, has seen them in the audience and come up to greet them. He has grown up. He has a thin moustache. He wears a better coat. He is, at twenty-three, almost a man of the world. Charles, delighted, invites him to dine with them the next day. Emma watches Léon over her fan.

By the end of the next afternoon they have met alone. By the end of that evening, in a cathedral tour during which a verger tries in vain to point out the architecture, they have failed to say anything honest to each other and have instead arranged a discreet meeting for the day after. By the end of the week, Emma is hiring rooms at the Hôtel de Boulogne in Rouen, and taking regular coaches into the city from Yonville on the pretext of piano lessons, and is Léon's mistress.

This is the book's saddest second movement. The first affair ruined her. The second affair is a kind of attempt to repeat the ruin and get it right this time. Léon is gentler than Rodolphe. He is genuinely attached to her. He is also, being twenty-three, being provincial, being ambitious, not a man who is going to ruin his career to elope with the wife of a country doctor. He will, over the next year, slowly tire of her. She will, over the same year, go steadily further into debt at the draper Lheureux's — buying gifts for Léon, buying silk for Rouen, buying the costume in which to be the Emma Bovary Léon fell in love with — until the debts are past anything Charles's income could possibly cover.

Flaubert is very clear about the shape of the second affair. The first affair was a woman falling in love with romantic love. The second affair is a woman refusing to learn from the first. Emma has not acquired self-knowledge. She has acquired, instead, a habit of seeking the same feeling in the same language from a different man. The opera at Rouen is where it restarts. The prima donna is still singing when Emma's new ruin walks into the box.

Monsieur Lheureux is the draper of Yonville. He is a quiet, patient, ugly little man in a neat coat. He has been, for three years, the one person in the village who understood what Emma Bovary was doing. He has sold her fabrics. He has sold her gloves. He has advanced her loans. He has taken Charles's signature on promissory notes for sums Charles did not know existed. He has, by the calm method of a provincial moneylender — compound the interest, buy up the promissory notes from other creditors, consolidate the debt, demand partial payment in a hurry, threaten seizure — brought the Bovary household to a point Emma has not previously allowed herself to see.

The bailiffs arrive on a Saturday morning. They have a court order. They have an inventory to complete. They walk through the house. They write down the chairs, the piano, the bed, the silver. They write down Charles's medical books. They write down the child's cradle. They walk out with a completed list. The household is, by law, to be sold at public auction in seven days to satisfy a debt of eight thousand francs.

Emma, for the first time in the novel, is afraid in the plainest possible way. She runs to every person she has known. She goes to the notary, who offers to settle the debt if she will become his mistress. She refuses, offended — even now she refuses — and leaves. She goes to Léon in Rouen. Léon, who has been visibly cooling, puts her off. She goes to Rodolphe, the old lover, whom she has not seen in three years. Rodolphe receives her with a patient polite courtesy. He tells her he has no three thousand francs to lend. He is telling the truth. He is not a wealthy man. He has, in fact, no three thousand francs. But he also — and this is what breaks her — is visibly, in his drawing room, indifferent to whether she lives or dies. He would give her the three thousand if he could, and he would equally not notice if she did not come back.

She walks from Rodolphe's house across the fields on foot. She goes through the village to the pharmacy of Monsieur Homais, the self-important local freethinker. She asks Homais's apprentice, as if in a fit of curiosity, to show her the shelf where the poisons are kept. She is shown. She opens the jar of arsenic. She puts a handful of the white powder into her palm. She puts her palm to her mouth. She closes her mouth and leaves.

It takes her a long time to die. Flaubert gives us the death as a pathologist would give it. She is in bed. Charles, not yet understanding what she has done, is terrified. She confesses, between convulsions, what she has done. The doctors are called. Nothing helps. She dies, horribly, in the plain second-floor bedroom of the Yonville house, on a day that is not narratively important, with a rain falling outside. The village priest gives her the last rites. She dies with her eyes open.

Charles does not understand. Charles, whose only fault has ever been failure to notice, is the one in whose arms she dies. He believes, for some weeks afterwards, that she has died of grief over her debts. It is only later, months later, when he is going through her drawer after her death, that he finds Rodolphe's letters. And then, over a further period, Léon's. And Charles, who in three hundred pages has never once noticed his own wife, finally understands everything at the same time. He is dead himself, of grief, within the year. Their daughter Berthe is sent to a cotton mill.

Flaubert's last page is perhaps the most bitter in the French novel. Charles has died in his garden, slumped on a bench, holding in his hand a lock of Emma's hair that he had kept since her death. The maid finds him. Their child Berthe is alone in the world. An aunt takes her in. The aunt is poor. Berthe is sent, within a year, to work in a cotton mill, where she will live, the narrator tells us flatly, on the earnings of her own small hands.

And the novel's final paragraph pivots, with Flaubert's perfect icy tact, not to Berthe but to the pharmacist Homais. Homais — the village pharmacist, the endlessly pontificating freethinker, the man who has been a secondary villain for three hundred pages, the man whose ambition and bad advice and ideological vanity have helped grind the Bovary household into the cotton mill — is thriving. His apothecary practice is the best in Yonville. He has bought up the lease on the old grain store next door and expanded. His children are doing well at school. He writes articles for the local newspaper on the progress of secular enlightenment. He has been campaigning, for years, for a medal.

And on the last line of the book, the medal has come. He has received the croix d'honneur. The Legion of Honour. The official public recognition of the French Republic that this is a man of civic merit. Homais, on the last sentence of the novel, is sitting at his window in Yonville-l'Abbaye, pinning the red ribbon to his lapel, looking out at his small prosperous square, where his employees are opening the shop for the morning's trade.

And that is the end of Madame Bovary. Emma has died badly. Charles has died badly. Their child has been sent to a mill. And the man who did the most talking, the most preening, the most theorizing, the most enabling, the most preaching on the subject of his own virtue, has been honoured by the state for his service to humanity and will now live out the rest of his life as a respected citizen in the house across the square from the bedroom in which the novel's heroine died.

Flaubert is telling us, on the closing page, what he has been telling us the whole time: a provincial bourgeois society rewards the Homaises. It rewards the bores. It rewards the phrasemakers. It rewards the men who survive by talking. The Emmas, who are stupider than the Homaises in some ways and smarter in most others, die in their own upstairs rooms with arsenic on their tongues. The Charleses, who are too good for any of this, die of grief on a garden bench. And the man who owned the shelf where the arsenic was kept, who advised on the failed surgery that ruined Charles's career, who delivered the funeral oration over Emma's grave in a language she would have recognized as the language of the agricultural fair, gets the cross of honour.

This is the ending the Second Empire prosecuted Flaubert for. He has not, they said, condemned his characters. He has not, they said, rewarded the virtuous. He has simply shown — with the camera-eye that made him the inventor of the modern novel — who gets honoured and who gets buried in a small French village in the middle of the nineteenth century, and has let his readers draw the conclusions themselves. He was acquitted. He knew he would be. The last paragraph, he said, was worth the trial.