Madame Bovary

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published, in six instalments, 1856

This translation first published in the United States of America 2010

This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2010

Translation and introduction copyright © Lydia Davis, 2010

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-141-96685-4

Introduction

Suggestions for Further Reading

Chronology

MADAME BOVARY

PART I

PART II

PART III

Notes

Readers who do not want to know the details or the denouement of the plot should read this introduction only after they have read the novel.

“Yesterday evening, I started my novel. Now I begin to see stylistic difficulties that horrify me. To be simple is no small matter.” This is what Flaubert wrote to his friend, lover, and fellow writer Louise Colet on the evening of September 20, 1851, and the novel he was referring to was
Madame Bovary.
He was just under thirty years old.

Picture a large man, handsome though fleshy and prematurely balding, with clear blue-green eyes and a voice that could be loud and gruff (he was known to “bellow,” both while trying out his sentences and while having dinner with his friends), bent over his desk, working by lamplight with a goose-quill pen (he abhorred a metal nib). He writes very slowly and painfully, drafting—and revising—much more material than he will keep in the end. His concentration is deep, intense, and enduring; he stays with his work for many hours at a time. His mother will sometimes leave the house all afternoon to do an errand in town and find him, on her return, in exactly the same position as when she left.

Generally he starts work in the early afternoon and works until the early hours of the morning, breaking only for dinner. His study is a spacious room on the second floor that looks out past a tulip tree over a tow-path to the river. Despite the many hours of meticulous work, he often then, at one or two in the morning, writes a long letter to Colet, perhaps as a form of release. It is thanks to these letters, which continued until their breakup two and a half years later, that we can follow so closely the progress of his work on the novel.

Because he discards a good deal of material, and prunes back severely the material he keeps, he produces very few finished pages—he variously reports one page per week, one every four days, thirteen pages in three months, thirty pages in three months, ninety pages in a year. (This in contrast with the ease of his first version of
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
, drafted earlier—five hundred pages in eighteen months, he said.) Yet he makes steady progress. His closest friend, the poet Louis Bouilhet, comes almost without fail every Sunday, when Flaubert reads aloud to him what he has done that week. Bouilhet responds, often severely: he likes it very much, or Flaubert should cut further, or there are too many metaphors.

Flaubert spent about four and a half years writing the novel, staying closeted with his work for months at a time, only periodically taking the train to Paris for some days of city life and sociability with friends, though he did not always stop working when he was there.

He finished it sometime in March of 1856; it was then accepted for publication by his longtime friend Maxime Du Camp, one of the editors of
La Revue de Paris
, and was published serially in that journal in six installments from October 1 to December 15. Henry James describes coming upon it in this form “when a very young person in Paris” and picking it up “from the parental table.” “The cover … was yellow, if I mistake not.” He recalls “taking it in with so surprised an interest,” as he read it “standing there before the fire, my back against the low beplushed and begarnished French chimney piece.”

Although certain scenes had been cut from this version as a precaution—which perhaps had the opposite effect, of arousing suspicions—the government brought charges against it for being a danger to morality and religion. The trial took place on January 29, 1857, and lasted one day; Flaubert and the magazine were acquitted a week later. When the book appeared as a single volume that April, it bore a second dedication, to Marie-Antoine-Jules Sénard, the forceful and eloquent Rouen lawyer who had defended him.

The very approach that made the novel vulnerable to prosecution by the Second Empire government was what made it so radical for fiction of its day—it depicted the lives of its characters objectively, without idealizing, without romanticizing, and without intent to instruct or to draw a moral lesson. The novel, soon to be labeled “realist” by his contemporaries, though Flaubert resisted the label, as he resisted belonging to any
literary “school,” is now viewed as the first masterpiece of realist fiction. Yet its radical nature is paradoxically difficult for us to see: its approach is familiar to us for the very reason that
Madame Bovary
permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter.

Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in his family’s apartment in a wing of the hospital of which his father was chief surgeon, in the port city of Rouen. He showed an interest in writing from a very early age and published his first work at sixteen but was persuaded by his father to attend law school. Suffering his first epileptic attack at age twenty-three, he was forced (though without reluctance) to give up his law studies and from then on devoted himself almost exclusively to writing. By that time he had already begun the first version of his novel
A Sentimental Education.

The family had acquired a large, comfortable house overlooking the Seine in the hamlet of Croisset, a few miles from Rouen, and it was here that he settled. After the death of both his father and his sister in 1846, the household was to consist, for many years, of Flaubert, his mother, and his little niece Caroline, whom he helped to raise, as well as the servants who looked after them. Aside from some traveling, some vacations by the seaside at Trouville, and some intervals of living in Paris, he spent most of the rest of his life at Croisset.

Drawn to the exotic, he wrote a draft of another novel,
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
, but suspended work on it in 1849 when Bouilhet and Du Camp so disliked it, after a marathon four-day reading, that they suggested he throw it in the fire. He did not abandon either of his early novels, however: he was to finish
A Sentimental Education
in 1869 and
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
in 1872.

He had, therefore, written a great deal, though to the literary world he was unknown, before he began what was to be his first published novel.

To counter Flaubert’s tendency to wax lyrical and effusive in response to exotic materials, Bouilhet suggested he take as subject for his next novel something quite mundane. The story of Madame Bovary is based, in fact, on two local dramas: the adultery and subsequent suicide of one Delphine Delamare, the wife of a local public health officer, and the disastrous spending habits and ultimate financial ruin of Louise Pradier,
the wife of a sculptor Flaubert knew personally. A third influence on the novel was the regional fiction of Balzac, whom Flaubert greatly admired. The book would be about not only a woman whose character fatally determined the course of her life but also the place in which she lived and its confining effect on her. After first considering Flanders as a setting, Flaubert settled on his native Normandy, so familiar to him.

The main action of the novel unfolds squarely within the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830–48), an interval of relative calm in French history and, for Flaubert, the years that had embraced his adolescence and early adulthood. Unlike
A Sentimental Education
, the novel contains little hint of political unrest: here the drama is domestic and local, and the larger outside world hardly intrudes.

It was during the reign of Louis-Philippe, who was known as the
roi bourgeois
, or “Citizen King,” because of his bourgeois manner and dress, that the middle class was most explicitly defining itself as distinct from the working class and the nobility. And one of Flaubert’s motivating forces in his approach to the material of the novel was his scorn for the bourgeoisie, though he readily included himself among them. What he despised, really, was a certain type of bourgeois attitude—later codified in his
Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
. It included certain traits such as intellectual and spiritual superficiality, raw ambition, shallow culture, a love of material things, greed, and above all a mindless parroting of sentiments and beliefs. He delighted in attacking this kind of thinking wherever he witnessed it: his letters are full of jabs and gibes, whether against a pompous cousin
visiting Croisset for the day or a fellow writer in Paris who prided himself on being invited to dine with a government minister.