186
MARY McCARTHY
Charles, the answer does not matter, because to
him
the whole thing is
a mystery, and like the mysteries of faith to be accepted with holy joy
and not puzzled over. For Charles, Emma is a mystery from start to
finish. The fact that she ministers to his comfort, prepares charming
little dishes, takes care of his house and his patients' accounts, is a part
of the ineffable mystery of her sharing his bed. The reader is persuaded
by Charles's unquestioning faith, to the point where Emma's little gew–
gaws-her watch charms, her monocle, her ivory workbox, the blue
glass vases on her mantlepiece, her silver-gilt thimble--partake of her
seductiveness. More than that, these acquisitions, seen through Charles's
vision, do just what an advertiser would promise: they give Emma
value.
Thus Charles is not only Emma's dupe but the dupe of com–
merce. And yet it works; the reader is convinced that Emma is some–
how
better
than, say, Madame Homais--which is not true.
Through Charles, Emma acquires poetry. But he could not possibly
put into words what she means to
him,
and if he could have articulated
a thought on the subject, would have declared that
she
had brought
poetry into his life. This is so. There was no poetry with his first wife,
the widow. Emma's beauty, of course, is a fact of her nature, and Charles
has responded to it with worship, which is what beauty-a mystery–
deserves. This explains why Charles, though quite deceived by Emma's
character, is not a fool; he has recognized something in her about which
he
cannot
be deceived.
Charles, like Farmer Rouault, is dumbly rooted in the organic world,
where things speak in a simple sign language. A turkey says "Thank you"
every year for a cure, like a votive offering, and two horses in the stable
say that business is doing well. Flaubert is not sentimental about the
peasantry, yet he prefers Nature and those who live with her and come
to resemble her-as old couples come to resemble each other-to the
commercial people of the town and the vulgar aristocrats of the chateaus,
toward whose condition the tradespeople are aspiring. The peasants still
have the virtue of concreteness, and their association with the soil and its
products guarantees that they are largely, so to speak, home-made. Emma
brings her freshness from the cider-presses of the farm, which she hates.
The country people in general are at a kind of halfway stage in the
process of evolution from the animal kingdom to Monsieur Homais.
The farm men who come to Emma's wedding are seen by the author
as collections of strange, out-of-date clothes hung on frames of flesh and
bones-tailcoats and shooting jackets and cutaways and stiff shirts that
have been kept in the wardrobe all year round and issue forth only to go
to weddings ape;} funerals, as if by themselves. These grotesque ani-
