MADAME BOVARY
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who would conceive of the act of writing as a rapturous loss of identity.
Poets have often expressed the wish for otherness, for fusion-to be their
mistress' sparrow or her girdle or the breeze that caressed her temples
and wantoned with her ribbons, but Flaubert was the first to realize this
wish in prose, in the disguise of a realistic story. The climax of the
horseback ride was, of course, a coupling, in which all of Nature joined
in a gigantic throbbing
pa7'touze
while Flaubert's pen flew. He was
writing a book, and yet from his account you would think he was
read–
ing
one. "What a delicious thing reading is-not to be you any more
but to flow through the whole universe you're reading about . . ."
etc., etc.
Compare this, in fact, to the rapt exchange of platitudes between
Leon and Emma on the night of their first meeting, at dinner at the
Lion d'Or. "'. . . is there anything better, really, than sitting by the
fire with a book while the wind beats on your window panes and the
lamp is burning?' 'Isn't it so?' she said, fixing him with her large black
eyes wide open. 'One forgets everything,' he continued. 'The hours go
by. Without leaving your chair you stroll through imagined landscapes
as if they were real, and your thoughts interweave with the story, linger–
ing over details or leaping ahead with the plot. Your imagination con–
fuses itself with the characters, and it seems as if it were your own heart
beating inside their clothes.' 'How true! How true!' she said."
The threadbare magic carpet, evidently, is shared by author and
reader, who are both escaping from the mean provincial life close at
hand. Yet
Madame Bovary
is one of a series of novels-including
Don
Quixote
and
Northanger Abbey--that
illustrate the evil effects of read–
ing.
All
reading, in the case of
Madame Bovary,
not simply the reading
of romances. The books Emma fed on were not all trash, by any means;
in the convent she had read Chateaubriand; as a girl on the farm, she
read
Paul et Virginie.
The best-sellers she liked were of varying quality:
Eugene Sue, Balzac, George Sand, and Walter Scott. She tried to im–
prove her mind with history and philosophy, starting one "deep" book
after another and leaving them all unfinished. Reading was undermining
her health, according to her mother-in-law, who thought the thing to
do was to stop her subscription to the lending library in Rouen. It ought
to be,against the law, declared the old lady, for circulating libraries to
supply people with novels and books against religion, that mock at priests
in speeches taken from Voltaire. Flaubert is making fun of Madame
Bovary, Senior, and yet he too felt that Emma's reading was unhealthy.
And for the kind of reason her mother-in-law would give: books put
ideas in Emma's head. It is characteristic of Flaubert that his own no-
