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On Madame Bovary he worked six years, and in writing Salâmmbo, which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for documentary evidences.
The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the time of the trouble she had getting up of nights. "I'm that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I'm sure you might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that'd last me a month, and I'd take it of a morning with some milk." After submitting to her thanks, Madame Bovary left.
"Hallo! you've a pretty bouquet," he said, noticing Leon's violets on the chimney. "Yes," she replied indifferently; "it's a bouquet I bought just now from a beggar." Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears, against them, smelt them delicately. She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water. The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived.
If we were seeking to prove that an author can put NOTHING BUT HIMSELF into his art, we should ask for no more impressive illustions than precisely, Madame Bovary and Salammbo. These two masterpieces disclose to reflection, no less patently than the works of George Sand, their purpose and their meaning.
At the end of the church a lamp was burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and the corners. "Where is the curé?" asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it.
The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to despair, he thought.
When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism; and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality.
You find Madame Bovary lascivious in Flaubert's description, but there is not a man, and I will not except you, who, having taken part in a ball like that and seen that sort of waltz, has not had in mind the wish that his wife or his daughter refrain from this pleasure which has in it so much of the untamed.
When a man of some genius, as Gustave Flaubert in "Madame Bovary," undertakes to paint Nature, he sets details otherwise revolting in such relief that the very novelty and boldness of the attempt put us off our guard, and we are in danger of admitting as beauties what, after all, are only audacities.
"He's Boudet the carpenter's son; his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he could learn quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. 'Mont Riboudet. The other day I repeated that jest to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?" She seemed not to hear him.
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