MADAME BOVARY
179
dazzling temptation they hold out to him. What is it, exactly? The
temptation to be something other than what he is, a slow, cautious, un–
certain practitioner who
is
terrified to set a simple fracture. Charles has
got nothing out of books; he cannot even stay awake after dinner to per–
use a medical text. He accepts his ignorance innocently as his lot in life
and takes precautions to do as little harm as possible; his pathos as a
doctor is that he is aware of being a potential danger to his patients.
Yet when Hippolyte's club foot is offered him, he falls, like Adam, urged
on by the woman and the serpent. After the operation, Charles's limi–
tations are made public, and the touching hope he had, of securing
Emma's love by being different from what he is, is lost to both of them.
This is the turning point of the book. Emma has met resistance in
Charles, the resistance of inert reality to her desire to make it over, as
she can change the paper in her parlor. In furious disgust she resumes
her relations with Rodolphe, and from then on her extravagances have
an hysterical set aim-revenge on Charles for his incompetence.
Both Emma and Monsieur Homais regard themselves as confined
to a sphere too small for their endowments-hers in sensibility, his in
sense. Emma takes flight into the country, where the chateau is, into
the town; Monsieur Homais's solution is to inflate the village he lives in
by his own self-importance and by judicious publicity.
It
must be re–
membered that if Emma is a reader, Monsieur Homais is not only a
reader but a
writer-the
local correspondent of the
Fanal de Rouen.
That is, they represent the passive and active sides of the same vice.
. No local event has
happened
for Monsieur Homais till he has cast it
into an epic fiction to be sent off to his'paper; for Emma, less inventive,
nothing happens in Yonville I'Abbaye by definition.
Emma surely felt that she had nothing in common with the grotesque
pock-marked druggist in his velvet cap with the gold tassel; he was the
antithesis of refinement. But Monsieur Homais was attracted
to
her and
sensed a kindred spirit. He expressed this in his own way: "She's a wo–
man of great parts who wouldn't
be
out of place in a sub-prefecture."
Homais is a textbook case of the Art of Sinking in prose, and this is the
comic side of his hobbled ambitions; he would like to be a modern Hip–
pocrates, but he is a druggist-halfway between a cook and a doctor.
He is bursting with recipes; he has a recipe for everything. At the same
time, he would like to turn his laboratory, which is a kind of kitchen, into
a consulting room; he has been in trouble with the authorities for praying
doctor-practicing medicine without a license.
Emma's voluptuous dreams in coarser form have tickled the drug–
gist's thoughts. He takes a fatherly interest in Leon, his lodger, seeing
