MADAME BOVARY. 'Madame Bovary,> the first and best-known novel of Flaubert, a type and model for the fiction of the next gen eration, was the first and is probably still the best of minute reproductions of the platitudes of modern life. It was published in 1856 when Flaubert was already 35, the fully matured and laboriously executed expression of his effort to make writing a means of emancipation from self. The French literary historian Lanson thinks it may well prove °the masterpiece of contemporary fiction." Flaubert's own educa tion had been out. of key with his provincial surroundings, and he chose natures similarly out of tune with their environment for the first object of his study, with a painstaking ac cumulation of °significant little facts" quite in the spirit of Taine's psychology and literary criticism. Flaubert had worked on 'Madame Boyar,' at least since 1852, °eighteen hours out of the twenty-four," he tells George Sand, and adds, °I seek something better than success, I seek to please myself." The novel attracted immediate and wide attention, presently stimu lated prosecution of the author for alleged immorality, a celebrated case, ending in a curiously qualified acquittal. The court plead ings and judgment, printed at Flaubert's in sistence with subsequent French editions of the novel, throw strange light on the moral ideas of the last decade of the Second Empire.
'Madame Bovary' marks the transition from the fiction of romantic fancy to that of close realistic observation, preferably of the petty, the puerile and the commonplace. The theme is the banality of provincial life, as Flaubert saw and felt it; the lesson is the futility and danger of a sentimental revolt from the com monplace when vulgar souls indulge in roman tic aspirations. Briefly the story is this: Charles Bovary, a °medical man,° though not an M.D., fatuously good, timidly banal, is shown us first as a dull pupil, then unsympathetically married, then a widower attracted to a farmer's daughter, Emma, the book's chief subject, whom he marries, apparently the less initiated of the two. Emma's convent education beyond her station had been supplemented b' romantic poetry and fiction, in Flaubert's opinion a de liberate perversion, whose degrading and im moral results he proposes to show. Charles was happy; Emma ever restlessly reaching out toward a fulfilment of her romantic aspira tions. Chance brought her to an aristocratic
ball. Dormant emotions were awakened. °She desired at the same moment to die and to live in Paris." Leon, a law student, served her for a platonic attachment, presently to be suc ceeded by Rodolphe, after Emma had sought sentimental consolation in religion, quite in vain. Rodolphe's carnally-minded courtship, a bitterly ironically parody of romanticism, is successful; but from dreams of bliss Emma is relentlessly drawn down to and below the com monplace. Both weary, Emma again seeks refuge in religion, but meeting the now more sophisticated Leon yields once more, and plunges Charles into debt while still seeming to him more charming than ever, as she descends the last steps of dissimulated corruption. Abandoned by Leon, once more rejected by Rodolphe, she escapes life by poison, holding even beyond death the infatuated love of Charles. who, even though at last undeceived, dies with a lock of her hair in his hand.
Incidental to the story are some admirable character studies of provincial types, notably M. Homais. druggist-demagogue and material ist, incarnation for Flaubert of °triumphant democracy,° a by-word for the narrow, provin cial philistine, who has given his name to a social species. His counterfoil is the parish priest, Bourrisien, whose cure of souls is a perfunctory, well-meaning, uncomprehending fatuity. More subordinate but strongly individ ual are the sacristan Lestihoudois, the notary Guillaumin, and the merchant-money-lender Lhereux.
Apart from its subtle psychology 'Madame Boyar,' won and holds admiration for its phrases of flashing irony, its vivid narration and fine descriptive passages, hut no less for its linguistic euphony, a matter to which Flaubert gave untiring and at times almost morbid at tention. Ethically it reflects its author's sombre pessimism. To Flaubert all spiritual aspiration seems foredoomed to failure. For himself be sought forgetfulness in the pursuit of art for art's sake. In this book he presents neither a character to imitate nor an act to ad mire. Yet 'Madame Bovary' is, in Bourget's phrase. °the very ideal of the literary artist" There are translations by W. Walton and others. Consult Whitehouse, H. R., 'The Life of Lamartine' (2 vols., New York 1919).