Mary McCarthy
ON MADAME BOVARY
When Flaubert made his famous statement-"Madame
Bovary is me"-he was echoing one of his favorite authors, Cervantes.
According to the story, Cervantes was asked on his deathbed whom he
meant to depict in Don Quixote. "Myself," he answered. In Cervantes's
case, this must have been true, quite simply and terribly, whether or not
he ever said
it.
In Flaubert's, the answer was an evasion. He was tired
of being asked about the "real-life original" of his heroine. In fact, there
was
one; there may even have been two. First and most important was
Delphine Delamare, nee Couturier, the wife of a village doctor in the
Bray region in Normandy, not far from where Flaubert lived. In 1848,
she took poison, leaving behind her an unpaid bill from a circulating
library in Rouen; the Delamares' furniture was sold at public auction
to satisfy her creditors. Her case was in the newspapers, and Flaubert's
friends had suggested it to him as the subject for a novel, on the writing–
course principle of "Write about what you know." When
Madame
Bovary
appeared in 1857, Dr. Delamare, like Charles Bovary, had died
of grief, but the other principals were still living: Rodolphe, Leon, the
servant Felicite. And many years later, in the village of Ry- the original
of Yonville l'Abbaye-Delphine Delamare's smart double curtains, yel–
low and black, were still talked about by her neighbors. Today her house
is gone, but her garden is there, the property of the village pharmacist,
who displays in his shop what purports to be Monsieur Homais's counter.
The real Monsieur Homais was probably legion. Flaubert is said to have
spent a month while writing
Madame Bovary
in a hotel at Forges-Ies–
Eaux studying the local pharmacist, a red-hot anticlericalist and diehard
republican, whom he had already spotted and banded, but he is also
said to have had his eye on other atheistical druggists, birds of the same
feather, in the neighborhood.
In short,
Madame Bovary
revived a scandal that had been a nine–
days' wonder in the locality, and Flaubert no doubt was sick of the gossip
