MADAME BOVARY
573
(3 ) Immoderate tendency toward seduction, toward domina–
tion and even all the lowest means of seduction, descending to the
affectation of dress, perfume, and cosmetics-the whole thing to be
summed up in two words: dandyism, a love exclusively of dominating.
And yet Madame Bovary does give herself; carried away by the
sophisms of her imagination, she gives herself magnificently, gen–
erously, and in a manner altogether masculine, to these male fools
who are not her equals, exactly as poets yield themselves to their
female fools.
A further proof of the quite virile quality that feeds her arterial
veins is the fact that the unfortunate woman shows less concern over
the external and visible limitations, the blinding provincialisms of her
husband, than over that complete absence of genius, that intellectual
inferiority so well demonstrated by the stupid operation of the
club-foot.
And in this connection, reread the pages which deal with this
episode, so unjustly regarded as parasitic, since it actually serves to
throw into highlight the whole personality of the character . . . A
black anger, concentrated over a long period, bursts forth in the
whole Bovary household; doors slam; the stupefied husband, who
has been unable to give to his romantic wife any intellectual satis–
faction, is shut up in his bedroom. He is in a state of penitence–
the criminal fool! And Madame Bovary, desperate, cries out, like
some little Lady Macbeth shackled to an incompetent captain: "Ah,
if only I were
at least
the wife of one those old stooped and bald–
headed scholars whose eyes, with their shielding green spectacles, are
always aimed straight at the documents of knowledge! I would
proudly rock myself in his arms. I would at least be the consort of
an intellectual king. But to be the galley-mate of this idiot who can–
not set the broken foot of a patient, oh !"
This woman is really quite sublime in her way, in her limited
environment and confronted with her limited horizon.
Even in her education at the convent I find evidence of the
equivocal temperament of Madame Bovary. The good sisters observe
in this young girl an extraordinary capacity for life, for getting the
most of life, for measuring its possibilities of satisfaction-in short, the
man of action!
All the while the young girl was being deliciously intoxicated by
the colors of the stained glass, by the oriental tints which the long
carved windows cast on her convent-school prayer book. She was
gorging herself with the solemn music of vespers, and, by a paradox for
