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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Gustave Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary - Interactive Bilingual Edition' is a classic novel that explores the life of Emma Bovary, a restless and disillusioned woman who seeks passion and excitement outside the confines of her provincial life. Set in 19th-century France, Flaubert's novel expertly delves into themes of love, desire, and the consequences of indulging in unrealistic fantasies. The interactive bilingual edition allows readers to engage with the text in both English and French, providing an immersive experience for language learners and literary enthusiasts alike. Flaubert's precise prose and keen psychological insights make 'Madame Bovary' a timeless masterpiece that continues to captivate readers today. Flaubert's meticulous attention to detail and dedication to realism in his writing can be attributed to his background as a trained lawyer with a deep interest in human behavior and society. His commitment to crafting vivid and authentic characters shines through in 'Madame Bovary,' making it a must-read for those interested in 19th-century literature, French culture, or the complexities of human nature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Madame Bovary - Interactive Bilingual Edition (English / French)
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Introduction
Between the quiet routines of provincial life and the blazing promise of imagined happiness stretches a perilous gap where yearning grows louder than reality, and it is into this gap that a young woman, her town, and a whole century’s ideals lean, tremble, and sway.
Madame Bovary is the best-known novel of Gustave Flaubert, composed largely between 1851 and 1856, first serialized in 1856 and published in book form in 1857. Set in nineteenth-century provincial Normandy, it follows Emma, the wife of a country doctor, as she confronts the distance between romantic expectation and everyday existence. Flaubert, a meticulous craftsman of prose, set himself the task of rendering ordinary life with exactness while tracing the fluctuations of a consciousness hungry for intensity. The premise is simple and piercing: marriage, work, and social convention offer stability, yet a more dazzling story beckons from books, shop windows, and daydreams.
Flaubert’s revolutionary achievement lies in the narrative voice that seems both impersonal and intimately attuned to his characters’ sensations. Through free indirect discourse, the language of the narrator absorbs the shades of a character’s thought, allowing irony and empathy to coexist in the same sentence. This technique, paired with an obsession for precision in diction and cadence, gives the book its paradoxical clarity: feelings appear sharp, yet never announced; judgments are implied, yet seldom declared. Scenes are built from the friction of detail and desire—textures of fabric, the chill of a room, a line on a bill—accumulating into psychological truth.
Upon its appearance, the novel quickly became a cultural event, not least because it was prosecuted in 1857 for offending public morality. The court ultimately acquitted Flaubert, but the trial fixed the book in the public imagination as both daring and exact. Its notoriety drew readers; its artistry kept them. From that moment, Madame Bovary stood as a touchstone for realism: a demonstration that the lives of doctors, shopkeepers, and clerks could carry the weight of tragedy, satire, and philosophy. The scandal has long faded, yet the novel’s reputation for unsparing clarity and formal rigor has only deepened.
The novel’s influence radiates through the history of the modern novel. Its subtle handling of point of view and interiority helped consolidate techniques that later writers would expand in new directions. Henry James considered Flaubert a master of craft; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust learned from the liberties of free indirect discourse and the possibilities of style-centered narration. Vladimir Nabokov praised the book’s structure and imagery in his lectures. Beyond specific names, countless novelists and translators have treated Madame Bovary as a school of exactness, returning to it for its disciplined sentences and its cool, penetrating intelligence.
At its core, the novel examines desire’s restlessness and the stories we tell ourselves to give desire a shape. It portrays the magnetism of luxury and spectacle, the comfort and constraint of marriage, the pull of social aspiration, and the ache of boredom—what later generations would simply call ennui. Flaubert shows how cultural fantasies—learned from romances, advertisements, and gossip—slip into private feeling, turning ordinary rooms into stages where expectations and disappointments perform. The book is not a moral tract but a study in perception: how hopes attach themselves to objects, rituals, and words, and how reality resists those projections.
Flaubert wrote amid the transformations of nineteenth-century France, when expanding commerce, print culture, and transportation were altering everyday life. Provincial towns felt these changes unevenly: new goods and ideas arrived, but older habits persisted. The novel registers this texture of transition without grand pronouncements. Pharmacies display the latest wares; newspapers circulate slogans and gossip; public ceremonies mingle earnestness and theater. The medical profession, shopkeepers, and minor officials embody a rising bourgeois order. Against this background, Emma’s longings are both personal and historically situated, intensified by a world increasingly organized around consumption, novelty, and display—forces that promise fulfillment yet rarely satisfy.
The book’s characters are observed with a steady, searching gaze that refuses caricature even when it reveals folly. Emma is presented as sensitive, imaginative, and vulnerable to the seductions of rhetoric and ornament. Charles, her husband, is a conscientious country doctor whose limitations are ordinary rather than villainous. Around them unfolds a community of voices—shopkeepers, professionals, officials—each with their rhythms of speech and horizon of concern. The narration slips close to these minds and then withdraws, allowing readers to occupy, and then to measure, their perspectives. This movement generates both sympathy and critique without resorting to intrusive commentary or sentimentality.
Readers often remark on the density and musicality of Flaubert’s prose, which threads motifs across chapters and binds scenes through echo and contrast. Objects recur and change their meaning: clothing, furnishings, books, landscapes, and public entertainments form a symbolic economy that mirrors the characters’ shifting desires. The structure balances intimate interiors with civic gatherings, private reverie with commercial transactions. Precision governs the descriptions, yet the overall effect is fluid, almost cinematic. The result is a narrative that feels inevitable without being predictable, one where the smallest invoice or gesture can tilt the emotional balance and illuminate a character’s inner weather.
This interactive bilingual edition presents the novel’s French alongside an English translation, inviting readers to hear how meaning moves between languages. Seeing the two texts in conversation clarifies shades of tone—irony, tenderness, dryness—and helps demystify Flaubert’s reputation for exact wording. Readers can test idioms, weigh connotations, and notice rhythmic effects that translations render differently. For students of French, the novel offers rich, mid-nineteenth-century prose; for readers in English, it offers a chance to check nuance quickly without breaking the reading flow. The interactive format encourages active attention, turning comparison into a method for appreciating craft rather than a distraction.
Approach the book with patience and curiosity for its surfaces: rooms arranged with care, inventories of goods, the choreography of conversations. Let the narration’s quiet ironies emerge gradually; they depend on context more than punch lines. When the English phrasing puzzles, glance at the French to see how a metaphor or register functions. When the French seems dense, consult the English for orientation and then return. Move at a pace that allows the novel’s echoes to accumulate. Above all, remember that the narrative’s power resides in attention—your attention mirroring Flaubert’s—as patterns, contrasts, and desires reveal their intricate design.
Madame Bovary endures because it speaks to a condition that remains ours: the tension between the lives we inhabit and the lives we imagine. Its world of shop windows, promotions, advice, and performances anticipates a modern landscape saturated with images and promises. The novel asks how people fashion selves from what culture supplies, and what happens when those scripts fail. In bringing English and French into dialogue, this edition also stages a quieter drama—the pursuit of precision across languages. Both pursuits reward sustained attention. They explain why Flaubert’s novel, once a scandal, continues to feel bracingly contemporary and inexhaustible.
Synopsis
Madame Bovary opens with the unassuming figure of Charles Bovary, a timid boy who grows into a provincial doctor in nineteenth-century Normandy. His early chapters sketch a modest upbringing, limited ambition, and the routines of rural practice, establishing a world of small towns, inherited manners, and subdued aspirations. Gustave Flaubert’s precise, observant narration presents this milieu without overt judgment, letting details accumulate: clothing, rooms, gestures, and the social hierarchies that bind people in place. Against this backdrop of ordinary life, the novel prepares a contrast between prosaic realities and imagined splendor, a tension that will increasingly dominate the fates of its central characters.
Charles’s first marriage, arranged for practical comfort, proves stifling and uninspired. Called to a nearby farm to treat a broken leg, he meets Emma Rouault, the farmer’s daughter, whose convent education and reading have filled her with refined tastes and romantic expectations. After the death of Charles’s wife, he marries Emma, imagining mutual happiness. The wedding festivities hint at differing sensibilities: for Charles, respectable contentment; for Emma, a promise of elegance and intensity. Flaubert sets the union within a sturdy provincial framework while tracing the silent birth of discontent, as Emma’s inward life begins to test the limits of the everyday household she has entered.
Domestic life in Tostes soon reveals a gap between Emma’s hopes and the rhythms of medical calls, accounting, and routine visits. A glittering invitation to a grand chateau exposes her to aristocratic spectacle—music, choreography, and polished conversation—that lingers like perfume after the guests depart. The return to village chores darkens her mood, and vague ailments suggest an unrest no remedy can reach. Charles, sincere yet unimaginative, does not perceive the scale of her dissatisfaction. A change of scene seems a solution, and a move to the market town of Yonville-l’Abbaye offers new acquaintances, new spaces to decorate, and an opportunity to begin again.
In Yonville, the pharmacist Homais presides over a circle defined by opinion, enterprise, and self-regard, while the curate Bournisien embodies a more conventional moral authority. Emma gives birth to a daughter, Berthe, but maternity does not quiet her longing for heightened feeling and a more refined life. The young law clerk Léon Dupuis admires Emma’s tastes and shares her enthusiasm for art, poetry, and conversation, creating a subtle current of mutual understanding. Bound by propriety, each hesitates. The recognition of affinity, however, makes routine more painful. Léon departs for the city to pursue advancement, leaving Emma to contemplate what her desires actually demand.
Into this vacancy steps Rodolphe Boulanger, a worldly landowner whose confidence and attentiveness flatter Emma’s sense of being destined for passion. Flaubert observes their meetings with careful irony, balancing grand declarations with the everyday settings in which they are made. Emma gravitates toward the idea of escape, translating her readings into plans for a life remade. The promises she cherishes, however, meet the constraints of money, reputation, and fear. When expectation collides with reality, the shock registers both physically and morally, and Emma’s health suffers. Charles’s tender care, sincere though naïve, cannot address the deeper rift between ideal and experience.
A trip to Rouen—presented as a cultural excursion to restore spirits—reintroduces the world of theaters, illuminated streets, and cultivated talk. There, Emma encounters Léon again, and the affinity once deferred resumes with greater urgency. Flaubert details the strategies of secrecy: letters, rendezvous, and the careful partitioning of days. The exhilaration of transgression intertwines with practical costs, as the merchant Lheureux extends credit for fashionable goods and household improvements. Romantic aspiration becomes entangled with consumption and display, enlarging Emma’s sense of self even as it tightens material obligations. The narrative’s tempo quickens, alternating between rapture and calculation, concealment and the pressure of appearances.
Credit hardens into debt, and the merchant’s genial patience gives way to demands backed by legal instruments. Emma, accustomed to thinking of happiness as a matter of intensity, looks for decisive gestures to undo accumulating constraints. She seeks help in different quarters, encountering the limits of friendship, professional discretion, and social solidarity. Flaubert’s portrait of the town grows sharper: gossip as currency, advice as self-justification, and benevolence measured by risk. Meanwhile, the domestic sphere strains under absences, excuses, and the practical needs of a child who cannot share adult illusions. With options narrowing, Emma’s improvisations reveal the harsh arithmetic of desire and debt.
Throughout, the novel’s style is as central as its events. Flaubert’s free indirect discourse slides between narrator and character, allowing Emma’s sentiments to color the description while maintaining an ironic distance. Objects—ribbons, furniture, bills—register inner states; public ceremonies expose private vacancies. The alternation of registers, from lofty lyricism to mundane inventory, forms a critique of clichés that pass for feeling. The provincial bourgeoisie appears not as villains but as agents of a moral climate shaped by convenience, reputation, and calculation. In this web, Emma’s imagination is both protest and trap, her search for intensity shaped by the very language that misleads her.
Madame Bovary endures for its uncompromising realism, its exploration of desire confronting social and economic limits, and its exacting artistry, which sparked controversy on publication in 1857. Without disclosing later turns of the plot, the novel closes on the consequences of choices made within narrow horizons, where money, honor, and longing pull in opposing directions. In a bilingual English–French presentation, readers can attend to the precision of Flaubert’s phrasing and the challenges of translation, deepening appreciation of tone and nuance. The book’s broader message sits in its patient unveiling of illusion’s cost and the ordinary structures that give those illusions power.
Historical Context
Madame Bovary unfolds in provincial Normandy in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a world structured by the Napoleonic Civil Code, the Catholic parish, and the centralized administration overseen by prefects and subprefects. The fictional locales of Tostes and Yonville-l’Abbaye echo small towns near Rouen, where notaries, pharmacists, doctors, and shopkeepers compose the local elite. Landed families, tenant farmers, and artisans interact through markets, fairs, and municipal events. The routine of Sundays, processions, and communal festivals sets a rhythm that frames individual ambitions. Against this careful backdrop, the novel observes how everyday institutions shape desire, respectability, and reputation in the French provinces.
The political atmosphere that informs the novel’s world includes the July Monarchy (1830–1848), established after the July Revolution. King Louis-Philippe’s regime styled itself liberal and constitutional while privileging property and bourgeois order. Municipal offices and departmental councils became arenas for local notable families and professionals who prized moderation and stability. This encouraged a culture of outward propriety and self-improvement rhetoric. Madame Bovary’s portraits of small-town officials, dignitaries, and self-satisfied professionals resonate with this climate: ceremonious speeches, concern for appearances, and a belief in “progress” coexist with the narrow horizons of provincial life.
The upheavals of 1848, which brought the Second Republic and universal male suffrage, soon gave way to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état (1851) and the Second Empire (1852–1870). Writing the novel during the Second Empire, Flaubert worked under a regime that emphasized order, prosperity, and public morality while regulating the press. His 1857 prosecution for “outrage to public morals and religion” illustrates the climate: the courts scrutinized literature deemed corrosive to mores. Although acquitted, Flaubert’s trial shows how a conservative moral order sought to police representations of desire and hypocrisy—the very subjects the novel anatomizes in provincial settings.
A crucial social development shaping the novel’s milieu was the rise of bourgeois professions. The medical field had been reorganized by the law of 1803 (19 ventôse an XI), which created a hierarchy that included full physicians and lower-tier officiers de santé, and regulated pharmacists. In small towns, doctors depended on reputation and referrals; pharmacists dispensed remedies while cultivating enlightened prestige. Flaubert, the son of a prominent Rouen hospital surgeon, observed these circles closely. Madame Bovary registers their rivalries and ambitions, showing how professional status, certificates, and scientific talk conferred authority even when competence and judgment proved uneven.
Religion remained woven into public and private life through the Concordat of 1801, which restored the Catholic Church’s formal role in France while keeping it under state oversight. The nineteenth century saw a Catholic revival, and the Falloux Law of 1850 expanded the Church’s presence in education, especially for girls’ schools and convents. Parish priests mediated charity, instruction, and rites of passage. The novel’s scenes involving clergy and religious practices reflect a society negotiating between devotional culture and bourgeois skepticism. The friction between anticlerical talk and habitual observance was common in towns where parish life and modern professions overlapped.
The legal framework of the Napoleonic Civil Code governed marriage, property, and personal status. In the period evoked by the novel, married women lacked full legal capacity without their husband’s authorization; notaries registered dowries and contracts, and guardianship rules structured family finances. Divorce, permitted during the Revolution, had been abolished in 1816 and would not return until 1884, leaving only limited legal separations. The Penal Code punished female adultery more severely than male. These constraints narrowed choices and heightened the stakes of reputation, debt, and household management, providing the social pressure that courses through Madame Bovary’s drama.
Normandy’s economy combined market-oriented farming with artisanal trades. Dairy, orchard produce, and grain flowed through local fairs and regional markets. Agricultural societies, backed by prefects, organized comices agricoles—agricultural shows that awarded prizes for improved breeding, tools, and yields. The 1830s and 1840s promoted such events as symbols of peaceful progress after revolutionary turbulence. Flaubert’s celebrated fair scene, with official speeches lauding thrift and productivity, echoes this rhetoric while exposing the dissonance between public exhortations and private concerns. The setting captures how rural modernization advanced alongside stubborn provincial hierarchies.
Consumer temptation and credit networks formed another decisive backdrop. In small towns, drapers and haberdashers offered Parisian novelties on installment-like credit, using promissory notes and renewals that could spiral into unmanageable debt. Bailiffs and notaries enforced obligations with protests of unpaid notes and property seizures. While the great Parisian department stores were just emerging—Le Bon Marché dates to 1852—provincial retailers eagerly relayed fashion and trinkets to clients. Advertising, almanacs, and shop displays fostered new desires. The novel mirrors this world of purchases deferred and fantasies financed, where commerce infiltrates domestic life.
Technological change widened horizons. Before the railways, stagecoaches and mail services linked towns to cities; steamboats plied the Seine between Rouen and Paris from the 1830s. The Paris–Rouen railway opened in 1843, followed by extensions toward Le Havre, accelerating travel and commerce in Normandy. Improved roads and faster post brought urban amusements closer—opera, theater, and shopping—as well as news and fashions. Such infrastructure fed provincial imaginations with visions of metropolitan life. Madame Bovary registers how mobility, even when limited, becomes a conduit for dreams of refinement and escape that rub against local expectations.
A vibrant print culture saturated nineteenth-century France. Newspapers with feuilletons popularized serial fiction; lending libraries and bookshops circulated romances, historical novels, and poetry. Translations of Walter Scott and Byron, alongside Balzac’s Comédie humaine and George Sand’s novels, shaped tastes. Fashion plates and illustrated magazines broadened the repertoire of desires and poses. Flaubert, while steeped in this culture, reacted against sentimental formulas, pursuing stylistic precision and an impersonal narrative stance. Madame Bovary’s pointed attention to secondhand phrases and borrowed feelings critiques how literature and journalism could feed illusions in readers without the means to realize them.
The age’s intellectual mood leaned toward science and positivism. Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) articulated a faith in scientific method and progress that influenced educators and professionals. In provincial settings, pharmacists and doctors often became local apostles of rational improvement, organizing lectures, collecting classifications, and displaying medals. Yet popular science mingled with pedantry and self-advertisement. Flaubert exploits this ambivalence by showing how the rhetoric of reason can mask vanity or superficiality. The novel’s tensions between clergy and “enlightened” laymen reflect broader national debates over knowledge, authority, and the proper foundations of social order.
Medical practice was in transition. Procedures such as subcutaneous tenotomy for clubfoot, introduced in the 1830s, promised corrective interventions, while anesthesia—ether in 1846 and chloroform in 1847—entered French surgery unevenly, slower in the provinces than in Parisian hospitals. Regulation separated licensed physicians, officiers de santé, and pharmacists, but gaps in training and oversight remained. Flaubert’s father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert (1784–1846), served as chief surgeon at the Rouen hospital, giving the writer firsthand familiarity with medical milieus. Madame Bovary’s depictions of treatments, consultations, and therapeutic pretensions reflect the period’s mix of innovation, ambition, and error.
Even as the novel dwells in the province, Paris looms as an emblem of modernity and desire. Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann’s vast urban works (from 1853) cut boulevards, built parks, and showcased imperial order. The Exposition Universelle of 1855 celebrated industry and luxury, while new retail palaces transformed shopping into spectacle. Provincial readers encountered Paris through illustrated press, travel guides, and shop inventories, generating fantasies of elegance. Madame Bovary captures the fascination with the capital’s refinements and the distance between glamorous images and provincial means, revealing how national modernization produced unequal experiences of the “modern.”
Gender norms in mid-nineteenth-century France assigned women to domestic virtue and family management, reinforced by legal dependence and limited access to careers. Girls of the middling classes often received schooling in convents or pensionnats, emphasizing religion, needlework, music, and polite accomplishments. Public roles were constrained; respectability hinged on behavior and appearances. Reading offered one of the few private spaces for exploration of feeling and ambition. The novel’s attention to a woman’s longings and frustrations situates itself within these norms, showing both the appeal of romantic narratives and the structural limits imposed by law, custom, and material circumstance.
Normandy’s specific textures also inform the book’s world. The region combined prosperous farming—dairy, cider apples, flax—with burgeoning industry in Rouen, a major textile center linked to the Seine. Market towns displayed half-timbered houses, parish churches, and administrative buildings that encoded status in their very stones. Seasonal fairs, pilgrimages, and local festivals punctuated rural time. Flaubert, born in Rouen in 1821 and writing at his family home in Croisset on the Seine, drew on this environment with exacting detail. The novel’s landscapes, weather, and interiors evoke a Normandy where old customs meet the market’s expanding claims.
Flaubert’s literary project emerged from this context. He began Madame Bovary in 1851 and serialized it in 1856 in the Revue de Paris. In early 1857, imperial prosecutor Ernest Pinard brought charges of offending public morals and religion. The case, tried under the Second Empire’s regime of press control, ended in acquittal but cemented the book’s notoriety. Published in volume in 1857, Madame Bovary quickly became a touchstone in debates about realism, style, and morality. That same year the state also prosecuted Baudelaire, underscoring official anxieties about modern literature’s frank treatment of desire, hypocrisy, and social pretense.
The novel’s realism belongs to a larger nineteenth-century movement. Balzac, Stendhal, and others had mapped society with documentary zeal; Flaubert added an unprecedented stylistic rigor—searching for le mot juste and refining free indirect discourse to fuse narrator and character idioms without overt commentary. This formal precision serves historical ends: it reproduces the clichés, sales talk, and pieties of the time while letting readers perceive their workings. Madame Bovary thus documents the discourses—religious, scientific, commercial, administrative—that governed provincial life, revealing how individuals internalized, repeated, and were constrained by them in ways that feel both ordinary and consequential to history’s texture.
Author Biography
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was a French novelist whose exacting prose and commitment to narrative impersonality helped define modern realism. Writing during the upheavals of mid‑nineteenth‑century France—from the July Monarchy through the Second Empire—he pursued an ideal of stylistic perfection often summarized as the search for “le mot juste.” His major works, including Madame Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, and the late Three Tales, display a rigorous attention to form and detail that influenced generations of writers. Though he resisted moralizing and political program in literature, his depictions of desire, disappointment, and received opinion offered a durable critique of complacency in both provincial and metropolitan life.
Raised in Rouen, Flaubert received a classical education at the Collège Royal (later Lycée Pierre‑Corneille) before studying law in Paris. He soon turned from legal training to literature, following a nervous illness that prompted retreat to Croisset on the Seine, where he would live and work for much of his life. His early reading and ambitions were shaped by Romantic aesthetics, yet he increasingly aligned himself with a disciplined, objective prose that rejected overt authorial judgment. Friendships with writers such as Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp provided critical dialogue. He absorbed currents from French Romanticism and emergent realism while maintaining allegiance to painstaking craft over doctrine.
Flaubert’s apprenticeship included youthful works and an ambitious dramatic prose poem, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. After reading an early version to close literary friends around 1849, he was encouraged to set it aside. He then turned to a subject closer to contemporary life, developing Madame Bovary. The novel was serialized in 1856 before appearing in book form in 1857. Its portrayal of a provincial milieu, tightly controlled point of view, and fusion of meticulous detail with psychological nuance announced a new standard for narrative discipline. Flaubert’s letters from this period reveal a theory of impersonal art that would guide his major projects.
Madame Bovary’s publication brought Flaubert notoriety and a landmark obscenity trial in 1857. Prosecutors objected to what they saw as moral laxity in the novel’s representation of desire and disillusionment. Flaubert and his publisher were acquitted, and the controversy amplified the book’s success. The episode clarified his stance that literature should not preach but render phenomena precisely, with the author’s presence effaced behind the prose. His innovations in free indirect discourse and rhythmic sentence construction became hallmarks of his style. In subsequent years, admirers and detractors alike recognized a new standard of exactitude and tonal control in the French novel.
After the trial, Flaubert pursued very different subjects. Salammbô (1862), set in ancient Carthage, drew on exhaustive research, including a documentation trip to North Africa in 1858, and combined erudition with sensuous description. Sentimental Education (1869) returned to contemporary history and youthful aspiration, tracing the intersection of private desire and public change. The earlier two‑year journey he undertook with Maxime Du Camp (1849–1851) through the Eastern Mediterranean also supplied notes and impressions that enriched his settings and descriptive methods. While Salammbô found popular favor, Sentimental Education initially met a cooler reception, later rising in critical esteem for its complex temporal design and disenchanted clarity.
The 1870s were marked by national upheaval and personal strain, circumstances that sharpened Flaubert’s satirical edge. He revisited his long‑standing fascination with spiritual trial in the thoroughly reworked The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), then achieved a late triumph with Three Tales (1877), a model of concision and tonal variety. He devoted his final years to Bouvard et Pécuchet, an unfinished encyclopedic satire on knowledge and credulity, published posthumously in 1881 alongside the complementary Dictionary of Received Ideas. Financial difficulties in the decade pressed him to accept demanding projects, but his standards of revision and research remained uncompromising to the end.
Flaubert died in 1880 at Croisset, near Rouen, leaving a reputation that only grew in the twentieth century. His principles—impersonality, precision, and the fusion of narrative technique with ethical skepticism—became foundational for later realists and modernists. Writers across Europe and beyond learned from his free indirect style, architectonic composition, and unsparing attention to cliché. Madame Bovary remains a touchstone in debates over realism and representation, while works like Sentimental Education and Bouvard et Pécuchet anticipate modern concerns about history, knowledge, and irony. His extensive correspondence, widely read, continues to illuminate a craft ethic that still challenges novelists today.
Madame Bovary - Interactive Bilingual Edition (English / French)
French
Madame Bovary
Table of Contents / Table des matières:
Table of Contents
French
Part I
Chapter One
We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a “new fellow,” not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.
The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice —
“Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care; he’ll be in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one of the upper classes, as becomes his age.”
The “new fellow,” standing in the corner behind the door so that he could hardly be seen, was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut square on his forehead like a village chorister’s; he looked reliable, but very ill at ease. Although he was not broad-shouldered, his short school jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have been tight about the arm-holes, and showed at the opening of the cuffs red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, looked out from beneath yellow trousers, drawn tight by braces, He wore stout, ill-cleaned, hob-nailed boots.
We began repeating the lesson. He listened with all his ears, as attentive as if at a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and when at two o’clock the bell rang, the master was obliged to tell him to fall into line with the rest of us.
When we came back to work, we were in the habit of throwing our caps on the ground so as to have our hands more free; we used from the door to toss them under the form, so that they hit against the wall and made a lot of dust: it was “the thing.”
But, whether he had not noticed the trick, or did not dare to attempt it, the “new fellow,” was still holding his cap on his knees even after prayers were over. It was one of those headgears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton nightcap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile’s face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the manner of a tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone.
“Rise,” said the master.
He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh. He stooped to pick it up. A neighbor knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it up once more.
“Get rid of your helmet,” said the master, who was a bit of a wag.
There was a burst of laughter from the boys, which so thoroughly put the poor lad out of countenance that he did not know whether to keep his cap in his hand, leave it on the ground, or put it on his head. He sat down again and placed it on his knee.
“Rise,” repeated the master, “and tell me your name.”
The new boy articulated in a stammering voice an unintelligible name.
“Again!”
The same sputtering of syllables was heard, drowned by the tittering of the class.
“Louder!” cried the master; “louder!”
The “new fellow” then took a supreme resolution, opened an inordinately large mouth, and shouted at the top of his voice as if calling someone in the word “Charbovari.”
A hubbub broke out, rose in crescendo with bursts of shrill voices (they yelled, barked, stamped, repeated “Charbovari! Charbovari”), then died away into single notes, growing quieter only with great difficulty, and now and again suddenly recommencing along the line of a form whence rose here and there, like a damp cracker going off, a stifled laugh.
However, amid a rain of impositions, order was gradually reestablished in the class; and the master having succeeded in catching the name of “Charles Bovary,” having had it dictated to him, spelt out, and re-read, at once ordered the poor devil to go and sit down on the punishment form at the foot of the master’s desk. He got up, but before going hesitated.
“What are you looking for?” asked the master.
“My c-a-p,” timidly said the “new fellow,” casting troubled looks round him.
“Five hundred lines for all the class!” shouted in a furious voice stopped, like the Quos ego[1]*, a fresh outburst. “Silence!” continued the master indignantly, wiping his brow with his handkerchief, which he had just taken from his cap. “As to you, ‘new boy,’ you will conjugate ‘ridiculus sum’** twenty times.”
Then, in a gentler tone, “Come, you’ll find your cap again; it hasn’t been stolen.”
*A quotation from the Aeneid signifying a threat.
**I am ridiculous.
Quiet was restored. Heads bent over desks, and the “new fellow” remained for two hours in an exemplary attitude, although from time to time some paper pellet flipped from the tip of a pen came bang in his face. But he wiped his face with one hand and continued motionless, his eyes lowered.
In the evening, at preparation, he pulled out his pens from his desk, arranged his small belongings, and carefully ruled his paper. We saw him working conscientiously, looking up every word in the dictionary, and taking the greatest pains. Thanks, no doubt, to the willingness he showed, he had not to go down to the class below. But though he knew his rules passably, he had little finish in composition. It was the cure of his village who had taught him his first Latin; his parents, from motives of economy, having sent him to school as late as possible.
His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Bartolome Bovary, retired assistant-surgeon-major, compromised about 1812 in certain conscription scandals, and forced at this time to leave the service, had taken advantage of his fine figure to get hold of a dowry of sixty thousand francs that offered in the person of a hosier’s daughter who had fallen in love with his good looks. A fine man, a great talker, making his spurs ring as he walked, wearing whiskers that ran into his moustache, his fingers always garnished with rings and dressed in loud colours, he had the dash of a military man with the easy go of a commercial traveller.
Once married, he lived for three or four years on his wife’s fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking long porcelain pipes, not coming in at night till after the theatre, and haunting cafes. The fatherin-law died, leaving little; he was indignant at this, “went in for the business,” lost some money in it, then retired to the country, where he thought he would make money.
But, as he knew no more about farming than calico, as he rode his horses instead of sending them to plough, drank his cider in bottle instead of selling it in cask, ate the finest poultry in his farmyard, and greased his hunting-boots with the fat of his pigs, he was not long in finding out that he would do better to give up all speculation.
For two hundred francs a year he managed to live on the border of the provinces of Caux and Picardy, in a kind of place half farm, half private house; and here, soured, eaten up with regrets, cursing his luck, jealous of everyone, he shut himself up at the age of forty-five, sick of men, he said, and determined to live at peace.
His wife had adored him once on a time; she had bored him with a thousand servilities that had only estranged him the more. Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She had suffered so much without complaint at first, until she had seem him going after all the village drabs, and until a score of bad houses sent him back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk. Then her pride revolted. After that she was silent, burying her anger in a dumb stoicism that she maintained till her death. She was constantly going about looking after business matters. She called on the lawyers, the president, remembered when bills fell due, got them renewed, and at home ironed, sewed, washed, looked after the workmen, paid the accounts, while he, troubling himself about nothing, eternally besotted in sleepy sulkiness, whence he only roused himself to say disagreeable things to her, sat smoking by the fire and spitting into the cinders.
When she had a child, it had to be sent out to nurse. When he came home, the lad was spoilt as if he were a prince. His mother stuffed him with jam; his father let him run about barefoot, and, playing the philosopher, even said he might as well go about quite naked like the young of animals. As opposed to the maternal ideas, he had a certain virile idea of childhood on which he sought to mould his son, wishing him to be brought up hardily, like a Spartan, to give him a strong constitution. He sent him to bed without any fire, taught him to drink off large draughts of rum and to jeer at religious processions. But, peaceable by nature, the lad answered only poorly to his notions. His mother always kept him near her; she cut out cardboard for him, told him tales, entertained him with endless monologues full of melancholy gaiety and charming nonsense. In her life’s isolation she centered on the child’s head all her shattered, broken little vanities. She dreamed of high station; she already saw him, tall, handsome, clever, settled as an engineer or in the law. She taught him to read, and even, on an old piano, she had taught him two or three little songs. But to all this Monsieur Bovary, caring little for letters, said, “It was not worth while. Would they ever have the means to send him to a public school, to buy him a practice, or start him in business? Besides, with cheek a man always gets on in the world.” Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child knocked about the village.
He went after the labourers, drove away with clods of earth the ravens that were flying about. He ate blackberries along the hedges, minded the geese with a long switch, went haymaking during harvest, ran about in the woods, played hop-scotch under the church porch on rainy days, and at great fetes begged the beadle to let him toll the bells, that he might hang all his weight on the long rope and feel himself borne upward by it in its swing. Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong on hand, fresh of colour.
When he was twelve years old his mother had her own way; he began lessons. The cure took him in hand; but the lessons were so short and irregular that they could not be of much use. They were given at spare moments in the sacristy, standing up, hurriedly, between a baptism and a burial; or else the cure, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil after the Angelus*. They went up to his room and settled down; the flies and moths fluttered round the candle. It was close, the child fell asleep, and the good man, beginning to doze with his hands on his stomach, was soon snoring with his mouth wide open. On other occasions, when Monsieur le Cure, on his way back after administering the viaticum to some sick person in the neighbourhood, caught sight of Charles playing about the fields, he called him, lectured him for a quarter of an hour and took advantage of the occasion to make him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree. The rain interrupted them or an acquaintance passed. All the same he was always pleased with him, and even said the “young man” had a very good memory.
*A devotion said at morning, noon, and evening, at the sound
of a bell. Here, the evening prayer.
Charles could not go on like this. Madame Bovary took strong steps. Ashamed, or rather tired out, Monsieur Bovary gave in without a struggle, and they waited one year longer, so that the lad should take his first communion.
Six months more passed, and the year after Charles was finally sent to school at Rouen, where his father took him towards the end of October, at the time of the St. Romain fair[2].
It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him. He was a youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in school-hours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well in the refectory. He had in loco parentis* a wholesale ironmonger in the Rue Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the boats, and then brought him back to college at seven o’clock before supper. Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother with red ink and three wafers; then he went over his history notebooks, or read an old volume of “Anarchasis” that was knocking about the study. When he went for walks he talked to the servant, who, like himself, came from the country.
*In place of a parent.
By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once even he got a certificate in natural history. But at the end of his third year his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study medicine, convinced that he could even take his degree by himself.
His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer’s she knew, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his board, got him furniture, table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with the supply of wood that was to warm the poor child.
Then at the end of a week she departed, after a thousand injunctions to be good now that he was going to be left to himself.
The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him; lectures on anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics, without counting hygiene and materia medica — all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.
He understood nothing of it all; it was all very well to listen — he did not follow. Still he worked; he had bound notebooks, he attended all the courses, never missed a single lecture. He did his little daily task like a mill-horse, who goes round and round with his eyes bandaged, not knowing what work he is doing.
To spare him expense his mother sent him every week by the carrier a piece of veal baked in the oven, with which he lunched when he came back from the hospital, while he sat kicking his feet against the wall. After this he had to run off to lectures, to the operation-room, to the hospital, and return to his home at the other end of the town. In the evening, after the poor dinner of his landlord, he went back to his room and set to work again in his wet clothes, which smoked as he sat in front of the hot stove.
On the fine summer evenings, at the time when the close streets are empty, when the servants are playing shuttle-cock at the doors, he opened his window and leaned out. The river, that makes of this quarter of Rouen a wretched little Venice, flowed beneath him, between the bridges and the railings, yellow, violet, or blue. Working men, kneeling on the banks, washed their bare arms in the water. On poles projecting from the attics, skeins of cotton were drying in the air. Opposite, beyond the roots spread the pure heaven with the red sun setting. How pleasant it must be at home! How fresh under the beech-tree! And he expanded his nostrils to breathe in the sweet odours of the country which did not reach him.
He grew thin, his figure became taller, his face took a saddened look that made it nearly interesting. Naturally, through indifference, he abandoned all the resolutions he had made. Once he missed a lecture; the next day all the lectures; and, enjoying his idleness, little by little, he gave up work altogether. He got into the habit of going to the public-house, and had a passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every evening in the dirty public room, to push about on marble tables the small sheep bones with black dots, seemed to him a fine proof of his freedom, which raised him in his own esteem. It was beginning to see life, the sweetness of stolen pleasures; and when he entered, he put his hand on the door-handle with a joy almost sensual. Then many things hidden within him came out; he learnt couplets by heart and sang them to his boon companions, became enthusiastic about Beranger, learnt how to make punch, and, finally, how to make love.
Thanks to these preparatory labours, he failed completely in his examination for an ordinary degree. He was expected home the same night to celebrate his success. He started on foot, stopped at the beginning of the village, sent for his mother, and told her all. She excused him, threw the blame of his failure on the injustice of the examiners, encouraged him a little, and took upon herself to set matters straight. It was only five years later that Monsieur Bovary knew the truth; it was old then, and he accepted it. Moreover, he could not believe that a man born of him could be a fool.
So Charles set to work again and crammed for his examination, ceaselessly learning all the old questions by heart. He passed pretty well. What a happy day for his mother! They gave a grand dinner.
Where should he go to practice? To Tostes, where there was only one old doctor. For a long time Madame Bovary had been on the lookout for his death, and the old fellow had barely been packed off when Charles was installed, opposite his place, as his successor.
But it was not everything to have brought up a son, to have had him taught medicine, and discovered Tostes, where he could practice it; he must have a wife. She found him one — the widow of a bailiff at Dieppe — who was forty-five and had an income of twelve hundred francs. Though she was ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds, Madame Dubuc had no lack of suitors. To attain her ends Madame Bovary had to oust them all, and she even succeeded in very cleverly baffling the intrigues of a port-butcher backed up by the priests.
Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was master; he had to say this and not say that in company, to fast every Friday, dress as she liked, harass at her bidding those patients who did not pay. She opened his letter, watched his comings and goings, and listened at the partition-wall when women came to consult him in his surgery.
She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles returned in the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets, put them round his neck, and having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he was neglecting her, he loved another. She had been warned she would be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love.
French
Chapter Two
One night towards eleven o’clock they were awakened by the noise of a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant opened the garret-window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below. He came for the doctor, had a letter for him. Natasie came downstairs shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left his horse, and, following the servant, suddenly came in behind her. He pulled out from his wool cap with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in a rag and presented it gingerly to Charles, who rested on his elbow on the pillow to read it. Natasie, standing near the bed, held the light. Madame in modesty had turned to the wall and showed only her back.
This letter, sealed with a small seal in blue wax, begged Monsieur Bovary to come immediately to the farm of the Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now from Tostes to the Bertaux was a good eighteen miles across country by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. It was a dark night; Madame Bovary junior was afraid of accidents for her husband. So it was decided the stable-boy should go on first; Charles would start three hours later when the moon rose. A boy was to be sent to meet him, and show him the way to the farm, and open the gates for him.
Towards four o’clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his cloak, set out for the Bertaux. Still sleepy from the warmth of his bed, he let himself be lulled by the quiet trot of his horse. When it stopped of its own accord in front of those holes surrounded with thorns that are dug on the margin of furrows, Charles awoke with a start, suddenly remembered the broken leg, and tried to call to mind all the fractures he knew. The rain had stopped, day was breaking, and on the branches of the leafless trees birds roosted motionless, their little feathers bristling in the cold morning wind. The flat country stretched as far as eye could see, and the tufts of trees round the farms at long intervals seemed like dark violet stains on the cast grey surface, that on the horizon faded into the gloom of the sky.
Charles from time to time opened his eyes, his mind grew weary, and, sleep coming upon him, he soon fell into a doze wherein, his recent sensations blending with memories, he became conscious of a double self, at once student and married man, lying in his bed as but now, and crossing the operation theatre as of old. The warm smell of poultices mingled in his brain with the fresh odour of dew; he heard the iron rings rattling along the curtain-rods of the bed and saw his wife sleeping. As he passed Vassonville he came upon a boy sitting on the grass at the edge of a ditch.
“Are you the doctor?” asked the child.
And on Charles’s answer he took his wooden shoes in his hands and ran on in front of him.
The general practitioner, riding along, gathered from his guide’s talk that Monsieur Rouault must be one of the well-to-do farmers.
He had broken his leg the evening before on his way home from a Twelfth-night feast[3] at a neighbour’s. His wife had been dead for two years. There was with him only his daughter, who helped him to keep house.
The ruts were becoming deeper; they were approaching the Bertaux.
The little lad, slipping through a hole in the hedge, disappeared; then he came back to the end of a courtyard to open the gate. The horse slipped on the wet grass; Charles had to stoop to pass under the branches. The watchdogs in their kennels barked, dragging at their chains. As he entered the Bertaux, the horse took fright and stumbled.
It was a substantial-looking farm. In the stables, over the top of the open doors, one could see great cart-horses quietly feeding from new racks. Right along the outbuildings extended a large dunghill, from which manure liquid oozed, while amidst fowls and turkeys, five or six peacocks, a luxury in Chauchois farmyards, were foraging on the top of it. The sheepfold was long, the barn high, with walls smooth as your hand. Under the cart-shed were two large carts and four ploughs, with their whips, shafts and harnesses complete, whose fleeces of blue wool were getting soiled by the fine dust that fell from the granaries. The courtyard sloped upwards, planted with trees set out symmetrically, and the chattering noise of a flock of geese was heard near the pond.
A young woman in a blue merino dress with three flounces came to the threshold of the door to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she led to the kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The servant’s breakfast was boiling beside it in small pots of all sizes. Some damp clothes were drying inside the chimney-corner. The shovel, tongs, and the nozzle of the bellows, all of colossal size, shone like polished steel, while along the walls hung many pots and pans in which the clear flame of the hearth, mingling with the first rays of the sun coming in through the window, was mirrored fitfully.
Charles went up the first floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed, sweating under his bedclothes, having thrown his cotton nightcap right away from him. He was a fat little man of fifty, with white skin and blue eyes, the forepart of his head bald, and he wore earrings. By his side on a chair stood a large decanter of brandy, whence he poured himself a little from time to time to keep up his spirits; but as soon as he caught sight of the doctor his elation subsided, and instead of swearing, as he had been doing for the last twelve hours, began to groan freely.
The fracture was a simple one, without any kind of complication.
Charles could not have hoped for an easier case. Then calling to mind the devices of his masters at the bedsides of patients, he comforted the sufferer with all sorts of kindly remarks, those Caresses of the surgeon that are like the oil they put on bistouries. In order to make some splints a bundle of laths was brought up from the carthouse. Charles selected one, cut it into two pieces and planed it with a fragment of windowpane, while the servant tore up sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads. As she was a long time before she found her work-case, her father grew impatient; she did not answer, but as she sewed she pricked her fingers, which she then put to her mouth to suck them. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips, more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles; besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines. Her real beauty was in her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness.
The bandaging over, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to “pick a bit” before he left.
Charles went down into the room on the ground floor. Knives and forks and silver goblets were laid for two on a little table at the foot of a huge bed that had a canopy of printed cotton with figures representing Turks. There was an odour of iris-root and damp sheets that escaped from a large oak chest opposite the window. On the floor in corners were sacks of flour stuck upright in rows. These were the overflow from the neighbouring granary, to which three stone steps led. By way of decoration for the apartment, hanging to a nail in the middle of the wall, whose green paint scaled off from the effects of the saltpetre, was a crayon head of Minerva in gold frame, underneath which was written in Gothic letters “To dear Papa.”
First they spoke of the patient, then of the weather, of the great cold, of the wolves that infested the fields at night.
Mademoiselle Rouault did not at all like the country, especially now that she had to look after the farm almost alone. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate. This showed something of her full lips, that she had a habit of biting when silent.
Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two black folds seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was parted in the middle by a delicate line that curved slightly with the curve of the head; and, just showing the tip of the ear, it was joined behind in a thick chignon, with a wavy movement at the temples that the country doctor saw now for the first time in his life. The upper part of her cheek was rose-coloured. She had, like a man, thrust in between two buttons of her bodice a tortoiseshell eyeglass.
When Charles, after bidding farewell to old Rouault, returned to the room before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the window, looking into the garden, where the bean props had been knocked down by the wind. She turned round. “Are you looking for anything?” she asked.
“My whip, if you please,” he answered.
He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had fallen to the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma saw it, and bent over the flour sacks.
Charles out of politeness made a dash also, and as he stretched out his arm, at the same moment felt his breast brush against the back of the young girl bending beneath him. She drew herself up, scarlet, and looked at him over her shoulder as she handed him his whip.
Instead of returning to the Bertaux in three days as he had promised, he went back the very next day, then regularly twice a week, without counting the visits he paid now and then as if by accident.
Everything, moreover, went well; the patient progressed favourably; and when, at the end of forty-six days, old Rouault was seen trying to walk alone in his “den,” Monsieur Bovary began to be looked upon as a man of great capacity. Old Rouault said that he could not have been cured better by the first doctor of Yvetot, or even of Rouen.
