MADAME BOVARY
185
worldly way of knowing what is going on under his nose. His next blun–
der, at the opera, is to spill a glass of orgeat down the back of a cotton
spinner's wife. He has no imagination, Emma thinks, no "soul." When
they find the green silk cigar case that must belong to the vicomte, on
the way home from the ball at Vaubyessard, Charles's only reaction is
to note that it contains two smokable cigars.
Yet this provincial, this philistine is the only real romantic in the
novel-he and the boy Justin, Monsieur Homais's downtrodden appren–
tice, who dreams over Emma's fichus and underdrawers while Felicite
irons in the kitchen. These two, the man and the boy, despised and re–
jected, are capable of "eternal love." Justin lets Emma have her death
(the arsenic) because he cannot refuse her, just as Charles lets her have
her every desire. The boy's passion drives him
to
books, instead of the
other way around: Monsieur Homais catches him reading a book on
"Married Love," with illustrations. Justin is only a child and he weeps
like a child on Emma's grave. Charles is a man, a provider, and he has
a true man's solicitude for the weaker creature. He sheds tears when he
sees Emma eat her first bread and jam after her brain fever. This heavy,
maladroit man is a person of the utmost delicacy of feeling.
If
he is easy
to deceive, it is because his mind is pure. It never enters his head that
Emma can be anything but good.
He first meets her in the kitchen of her father's farmhouse. He has
been waked up at night to go set Farmer Rouault's leg, in a scene rem–
iniscent of a genre painting: "Fetching the Doctor." A succession of
genre scenes follows that evoke the Dutch masters of light-Vermeer
and Pieter de Hooch: Emma making the bandage, pricking her fingers
with the needle and putting them into her mouth to suck while the
doctor watches; Emma in the kitchen sewing a white stocking, darting
her tongue into a liqueur glass of
cura~ao;
Emma in the farmyard under
a silk parasol. Charles's senses are heated as she cools her cheek against
her palm and her palm against the great andirons, and his mind is
buzzing, like the flies crawling up the empty cider glasses, as he looks
at her bare shoulders with little drops of sweat on them. He is a man,
and she is a young lady; his bewilderment and bewitchment arise from
this fusion of the sensual and the sacred. For him, marriage with Emma
is a sacrament, and the reader never sees him in the act of love with
her, as though Charles, ever tactful, reverently drew the bed curtains.
Why did she marry him? Flaubert does not really say. "To get away
from the farm" is not enough. Would she have married Monsieur
Homais if he had come courting? There are a number of questions
about Emma's inner life that Flaubert does not ask. But thanks to
