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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Romantic Disenchantment - 5 Classic Novels brings together transcendent works of the Romantic and realist literary movements, exploring the intricate disillusionments that shadow the ideals of love and society. This collection represents a broad array of literary styles from sensitive irony and social commentary to deeply investigative character studies. With each novel a profound contemplation in its own right, the anthology encapsulates tales of emotional complexity and societal critique, inviting readers to navigate the tension between idealism and the often harsh realities of life. These works yield standout narratives, resonant in their timeless examination of human desires and disillusionments. The anthology showcases the collective genius of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton. Each author conveys the prevailing sentiments of their era while contributing uniquely to the theme of romantic disenchantment. Their works reflect pivotal historical moments and the cultural shifts towards realism in literature. Unified in their quest to depict the intricacies of social and personal ideals, these authors craft stories that reflect diverse perspectives and illuminate societal truths, influenced by their distinct backgrounds and the wider literary movements of their times. This collection invites readers to explore a rich tapestry of narrative and thematic complexity in one volume, offering a remarkable journey through the interwoven paths of societal norms, personal desires, and inevitable disillusionments. Romantic Disenchantment serves not only as an educational compendium of classic literature but also as a dialogue across generations about the enduring intricacies of the human heart. Its breadth of perspectives and masterful storytelling makes it a must-read for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of literary brilliance and the nuances of romantic and societal expectations.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Romantic Disenchantment - 5 Classic Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection assembles Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence to chart a shared arc from yearning to reckoning. Each novel probes how romantic aspiration encounters social form—kinship, class, money, reputation—and what remains when ideals are tested by circumstance. Romantic disenchantment here is not mere cynicism; it is a moral and aesthetic inquiry into the costs of desire and the possibilities of renewal. Together, these works show how the classic novel makes private feeling legible while exposing the pressures that shape, discipline, and sometimes deform it.
Our curatorial aim is to follow the marriage plot beyond its conventional horizon, attending to the afterlives of courtship, the friction between conscience and appetite, and the way social codes regulate attention, speech, and time. By situating these narratives in conversation, the collection foregrounds how interiority becomes an ethical arena. It traces an evolving realism that adopts irony, analysis, and restraint to examine desire without capitulating to either sentimentality or nihilism. The gathering spans national traditions yet converges on a common question: how can love survive the weight of custom, ambition, and memory without losing its capacity for judgement.
Presented side by side rather than encountered in isolation, the novels reveal structural rhymes and divergences that sharpen their insights. Persuasion’s tempered hope converses with Madame Bovary’s acid disenchantment; Family Happiness interrogates the ethics of attachment; Middlemarch widens the lens to civic entanglement; The Age of Innocence dissects conformity as a social art. Read together, they show disenchantment as a disciplined clarity, not a collapse of value. This design privileges comparative attention: readers can trace shifts in setting, temperament, and moral emphasis that become less visible when each work is approached as a self-sufficient, solitary statement.
The selection also charts an aesthetic itinerary: from Austen’s poised minimalism through Flaubert’s corrosive exactitude, Tolstoy’s spiritual candor, Eliot’s capacious intelligence, and Wharton’s elegiac precision. The variations demonstrate how classic realism evolved not only in subject but in mood and method, translating romantic desire into narrative forms attentive to consequence. Each book tests the elasticity of the marriage plot, asking how a life might be shaped when infatuation wanes, when institutions insist, and when self-knowledge exacts a toll. The organizing principle is simple and demanding: follow feeling until it meets the world, then stay to witness the reckoning.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Across the volume, certain motifs repeat with telling variation. Letters, visits, and public gatherings stage the choreography of attention and reputation. Domestic interiors—drawing rooms, parlors, shops—double as theaters of aspiration and constraint. Journeys promise transformation yet often confirm the gravity of home. Money appears as credit, dowry, or debt, translating longing into account. The sea’s promise in Persuasion resonates against the restless consumer desire of Madame Bovary, while the civic spaces of Middlemarch and the ceremonious rooms of The Age of Innocence render social expectation almost architectural. Family Happiness underscores how solitude and companionship alternately refine and distort perception.
The tonal spectrum creates a productive dialogue. Austen pairs scruple with delicacy, locating strength in patience and reconsideration. Flaubert cultivates irony sharp enough to strip illusion while preserving psychological nuance. Tolstoy moves with meditative seriousness, examining conscience as a lived practice. Eliot blends analytic breadth with compassionate judgment, opening the social frame. Wharton’s elegant austerity measures the cost of obedience to custom. Taken together, these tonalities show disenchantment as a repertoire rather than a verdict. Hope, satire, resignation, and resolve coexist, enabling recurring predicaments to refract differently across provincial England, provincial France, Russian estates, and New York drawing rooms.
Moral dilemmas recur with different emphases. The desire for distinction collides with obligations to family, community, or vocation. Passion demands self-expression; prudence asks for restraint. Dreams of self-improvement tempt characters to treat others as instruments, a tension explored with clinical clarity in Madame Bovary and with institutional scope in Middlemarch. Persuasion explores how conviction matures without hardening into pride. Family Happiness examines the volatility of intimate ideals when confronted by time. The Age of Innocence poses the question of whether loyalty can coexist with authenticity under exacting norms. These resonances allow each novel to test another’s implicit claims.
Lines of influence and recalibration are discernible. Austen helped codify the courtship narrative whose ethical stakes Eliot later broadens into a social vocation. Flaubert’s innovations in free indirect style and rigorous attention to desire anticipate the psychological fineness that Wharton adapts to an American milieu. Tolstoy’s spiritual introspection converses with Eliot’s moral philosophy, each insisting that feeling acquires meaning within patterns of action. Wharton reexamines the etiquette of renunciation already central to Austen, amplifying its institutional dimensions. The result is a conversation across languages and settings in which disenchantment refines perception rather than abolishing the claims of affection.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
The collection remains vital because its central conflict—between private longing and public form—remains unresolved. Contemporary cultures still script desire through narratives of success, taste, and self-fashioning, then judge the results by communal norms. These novels expose that double bind without surrendering to cynicism. Their portrayals of attention, patience, compromise, and courage feel instructive precisely because they accept finitude. Romantic disenchantment becomes a schooling in reality: the work of distinguishing durable commitments from dazzling impulses. In an age saturated with promise and performance, the measured intelligence of these books clarifies how imagination can deepen, not distort, fidelity.
Critical recognition has long situated these works near the center of the realist tradition and the modern novel’s ethical ambitions. They have been repeatedly studied for their innovations in narrative perspective, their analyses of social networks, and their searching treatment of marriage as both aspiration and discipline. The novels continue to anchor discussions of gender, class, and the economics of desire, not as case studies but as living arguments about how people become accountable to themselves and others. Their durability reflects intellectual range: they invite structural analysis, moral reflection, and stylistic appreciation without exhausting interpretive or imaginative possibilities.
Their cultural afterlives are extensive. The titles have inspired stage and screen interpretations, visual homages, and widespread citation in essays and public discourse. Debates over romantic autonomy, social conformity, and the ethics of ambition frequently return to these narratives as touchstones. The novels’ scenes, aphorisms, and character types circulate beyond literature, shaping idioms for discussing compromise, reputation, and desire. This sustained visibility has not simplified them; instead, renewed attention keeps reopening their ambiguities. Their careful calibrations of hope and limit continue to challenge reductive readings, ensuring that disenchantment remains a generative lens rather than a terminal verdict.
Assembled under the sign of Romantic Disenchantment, the five novels illuminate how disenchantment can protect value by refusing illusion. The juxtaposition underscores that clarity is not the enemy of feeling but its ally: endurance becomes imaginable when ideals are rearticulated in the language of responsibility. The collection invites slow reading across differences of nation and temperament, encouraging comparative insight without erasing singularity. By tracing convergences and rifts among Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Eliot, and Wharton, the volume models literary history as conversation rather than ascent, and suggests that the most durable romance may be with truthfulness itself.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
The novels gathered here occupy the long nineteenth century’s contested ground, where old hierarchies met expanding markets and new publics. Across France, Russia, Britain, and the United States, landed elites confronted burgeoning professional classes, urban growth, and the social claims of individuals newly conscious of rights and desires. Revolutions and reforms redrew boundaries of authority; wars reallocated prestige and wealth. Parish vestries, salons, county elections, and private clubs served as arenas of power no less than parliaments and ministries. The private life of courtship and marriage—seemingly intimate—was shaped by these forces, becoming a subtle theater for negotiating status, property, and moral legitimacy.
Madame Bovary emerges from post-revolutionary France’s uneasy settlement between provincial respectability and national ambition. Set amid the July Monarchy’s provincial bureaucracy yet published under the Second Empire, it bears the imprint of centralized administration, expanding credit, and a burgeoning consumer culture enabled by railways and mass advertising. The legal climate was vigilant: its publication provoked a widely publicized obscenity trial, dramatizing the state’s claim to police morality and the press. Flaubert’s scrutiny of doctors, shopkeepers, clerks, and notaries explores how petty power circulates below the level of grand politics, where signature, ledger, and prescription shape destinies as decisively as decrees.
Family Happiness is situated in Russia on the eve of the Emancipation of the Serfs. The Crimean War had exposed administrative weakness and moral disquiet, opening debates on reform that would culminate in 1861. Tolstoy’s focus on estate life, domestic governance, and the burdens of paternal authority reflects a society where legal dependency structured everyday relations. The gentry’s obligations to dependents coexisted with cosmopolitan travel and cultural aspiration. Questions about education, philanthropy, and stewardship shaped expectations for marriage and household management. A changing press and the circulation of reformist ideas pressed upon private conscience, turning the home into a crucible of national self-examination.
Persuasion is anchored in Britain’s post-Napoleonic settlement, when naval victories conferred new honor on a professional service outside the hereditary aristocracy. Prize money and wartime promotion complicated patterns of inheritance, while peacetime economies pressured indebted landowners. The legal framework of entail preserved estates yet constrained daughters, and the fashionable resort city offered a marketplace of rank where reputation could be made or unmade. Austen’s attention to courtesy and tact measures the moral currency within a society balancing deference with merit, and her sailors’ mobility registers a nation whose imperial and commercial networks had reshaped social horizons and ideals of worth.
Middlemarch is set during the agitation surrounding the first parliamentary Reform Bill, an event that sharpened questions about representation, patronage, and the place of the professions. Provincial politics, clerical income, and municipal improvements reveal the mesh of interests binding town and countryside. Medical institutions sought authority amid competing theories and practices; banking and speculation tested trust in emerging financial systems. The novel’s date also captures the early encroachment of railways and new scientific confidence, without eclipsing the weight of tradition. Eliot anatomizes compromise and conviction in a culture negotiating broader suffrage, civic accountability, and the expertise of doctors, scholars, and reformers.
The Age of Innocence looks back on post–Civil War New York, where industrial fortunes rose alongside a vigilant old-money establishment. A tightly policed regime of dinners, boxes, and visiting cards enforced boundaries against divorce, scandal, and foreign influence even as transatlantic travel intensified. Corporate consolidation and immigration transformed the city, but the novel’s elite enclave maintained continuity through ceremony and surveillance. Women’s legal identities were limited, philanthropic work substituted for public power, and reputations carried economic value. Wharton presents a society preserving its authority by ritualizing taste and propriety, defending its lineage against the disruptive energies of capitalism and desire.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Across these works, realism becomes the principal instrument for examining conscience, motive, and social ritual. Persuasion’s disciplined irony and nuanced attention to feeling signal a late refinement of the domestic novel. Madame Bovary advances an exacting prose that refuses consoling rhetoric, testing the capacity of style to register illusion and boredom. Middlemarch extends the realist canvas to encompass institutions and networks of consequence. Family Happiness distills ethical inquiry into the intimate negotiations of married life. The Age of Innocence fuses sociological precision with elegiac restraint, narrating how conventions domesticate passion. Together they trace realism’s movement from deft interiority to panoramic moral cartography.
Philosophy, science, and social thought supplied these novels with fresh frameworks for depicting character and change. Secular moral reasoning and historical approaches to belief encouraged writers to ground ethical conflict in experience rather than revelation. Debates over utility, sympathy, and social welfare recast private decisions as public in consequence. Evolutionary thought and statistical governance promoted narratives of gradual transformation and unintended outcomes. In Russia, talk of reform and the ethics of stewardship reoriented noble identity. In France, skepticism toward bourgeois moralism sharpened satiric edge. In Britain and America, empirical habits and institutional growth endowed everyday choices with civic weight.
Narrative technique codified these intellectual shifts. Free indirect style permits access to fluctuating consciousness while preserving critical distance; it is central to Persuasion, Madame Bovary, and Middlemarch. Varied omniscience—sometimes compassionate, sometimes impersonal—organizes judgment without preaching. Letters, diaries, and reported conversation simulate a documentary grain, letting social worlds reveal themselves through minor speech acts. Serial publication, especially important for Middlemarch, trained readers to parse pattern and contingency over time. Tolstoy’s pared focus in Family Happiness demonstrates how domestic scales can carry philosophical gravity. Wharton’s meticulously focalized narration exposes how etiquette operates as an internalized code, felt as fate.
Aesthetic controversy accompanied such formal daring. The period’s gatekeepers demanded edification, yet these novels often disentangle moral insight from overt lesson. Madame Bovary’s prosecution crystallized anxieties that realism could glamorize transgression simply by naming it. Review culture and circulating libraries mediated access, rewarding works that balanced frankness with decorum. The debate between the novel of manners and the novel of ideas runs through the collection, as authors test whether psychological truth and social critique require the same narrative instruments. The result is a poetics of scruple: fastidious description, disciplined irony, and an insistence that style and ethics are inseparable.
Innovations in infrastructure and media shaped both subject and form. Railways compressed distance, making provincial life permeable to metropolitan fashions and news. Expanding postal services, telegraphy, and a robust press accelerated rumor, reputation, and the circulation of advice. Advances in medicine and public health reframed professional authority, a central pressure in Middlemarch. Credit systems, catalogues, and shopfront displays created new temptations and traps, visible in Madame Bovary’s economy of desire. Photography and illustrated periodicals trained readers to expect vivid surfaces, to which Wharton’s interiors and Austen’s calibrated drawing rooms offer literary counterparts—compositions in light, texture, and choreographed gesture.
Gender ideology and law provided both constraint and plot machinery. Coverture in England, marital authority under the French civil tradition, and Russian paternal prerogatives curtailed women’s property and mobility, while reforms gradually altered the terrain. Debates over divorce, guardianship, and inheritance clarified how the household functioned as a legal entity intersecting with class privilege. These novels test the promises of companionate marriage against economic reality and social expectation, not to dismantle intimacy but to expose its political scaffolding. By dramatizing consent, persuasion, and responsibility, they turn the seemingly private choice of a spouse into an index of civic virtue and structural inequality.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Reception histories mirror the political fortunes of their cultures. Madame Bovary, once prosecuted, became a touchstone for artistic autonomy and stylistic rigor. Persuasion, initially overshadowed by earlier works, grew in stature for its maturity of feeling and economy of means. Middlemarch, admired from the start, has been repeatedly affirmed as a capacious account of social complexity. Family Happiness, long read as a quiet study, ascended in esteem as critics valued its ethical compression. The Age of Innocence, written after a global war, offered retrospective critique that later readers recognized as a diagnosis of modern nostalgia and institutional self-defense.
Feminist criticism reoriented interpretive priorities, reading heroines as strategic agents within coercive systems rather than as emblems of sentiment. Scholarship mapped legal disabilities, labor expectations, and patterns of surveillance that animate courtship plots. Persuasion’s ethics of constancy and choice, Madame Bovary’s entanglement with consumer fantasy, Middlemarch’s negotiations between vocation and marriage, Family Happiness’s exploration of autonomy within conjugal life, and The Age of Innocence’s choreography of reputational power have all been revisited for their insights into gendered double standards. This reframing emphasized the novels’ diagnostic prowess: their capacity to expose how affection is managed by law, credit, and custom.
Class and empire studies deepened the archive these novels summon. Discussions of naval prestige and landed depletion in Persuasion now register the material afterlife of war and global trade. Middlemarch’s provincial institutions are read as nodes in wider capitalist and scientific networks. Madame Bovary’s provincial consumerism is linked to national markets and state centralization. Family Happiness’s estate ethics are weighed against the looming transformation of rural labor. The Age of Innocence’s transatlantic rituals are parsed as protective strategies of an elite facing financial democratization. In each case, domestic interiors become observatories from which to chart long-distance forces shaping intimate life.
Adaptations across stage, radio, television, and film renewed attention to tone, pacing, and visual codes. Production design for Persuasion and The Age of Innocence has foregrounded how space enforces intimacy or exclusion. Screen versions of Madame Bovary debate whether irony can survive lush surfaces, while Middlemarch’s serial structure finds natural affinities with episodic formats. Family Happiness, more compact, invites chamber adaptations that accent inwardness. These re-mediations have clarified how gesture, costume, and architecture operate as narrative syntax, and they have introduced new readers to prose that balances social critique with a scrupled sympathy for fallible motives.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century upheavals continued to reshape interpretation. After revolutions and world wars, readers recognized in these novels the fragility of institutions once thought permanent. Debates over professional ethics, public health, and expert authority renewed Middlemarch’s relevance; consumer debt and spectacle lent Madame Bovary fresh urgency. Shifts in marriage law and norms reframed Persuasion and Family Happiness as case studies in negotiated freedom. The Age of Innocence’s portrait of exclusion resonated amid renewed scrutiny of gatekeeping elites. Translation, textual scholarship, and digital archives have diversified access, ensuring that arguments about judgment, sympathy, and social form remain vibrantly unsettled.
Romantic Disenchantment - 5 Classic Novels
Romantic Disenchantment: The Collapse of Idealized Love
Society, Duty, and the Institutional Shaping of Desire
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
Part I
Chapter One
We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a “new fellow,” not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.
The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice —
“Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care; he’ll be in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one of the upper classes, as becomes his age.”
The “new fellow,” standing in the corner behind the door so that he could hardly be seen, was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut square on his forehead like a village chorister’s; he looked reliable, but very ill at ease. Although he was not broad-shouldered, his short school jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have been tight about the arm-holes, and showed at the opening of the cuffs red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, looked out from beneath yellow trousers, drawn tight by braces, He wore stout, ill-cleaned, hob-nailed boots.
We began repeating the lesson. He listened with all his ears, as attentive as if at a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and when at two o’clock the bell rang, the master was obliged to tell him to fall into line with the rest of us.
When we came back to work, we were in the habit of throwing our caps on the ground so as to have our hands more free; we used from the door to toss them under the form, so that they hit against the wall and made a lot of dust: it was “the thing.”
But, whether he had not noticed the trick, or did not dare to attempt it, the “new fellow,” was still holding his cap on his knees even after prayers were over. It was one of those headgears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton nightcap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile’s face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the manner of a tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone.
“Rise,” said the master.
He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh. He stooped to pick it up. A neighbor knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it up once more.
“Get rid of your helmet,” said the master, who was a bit of a wag.
There was a burst of laughter from the boys, which so thoroughly put the poor lad out of countenance that he did not know whether to keep his cap in his hand, leave it on the ground, or put it on his head. He sat down again and placed it on his knee.
“Rise,” repeated the master, “and tell me your name.”
The new boy articulated in a stammering voice an unintelligible name.
“Again!”
The same sputtering of syllables was heard, drowned by the tittering of the class.
“Louder!” cried the master; “louder!”
The “new fellow” then took a supreme resolution, opened an inordinately large mouth, and shouted at the top of his voice as if calling someone in the word “Charbovari.”
A hubbub broke out, rose in crescendo with bursts of shrill voices (they yelled, barked, stamped, repeated “Charbovari! Charbovari”), then died away into single notes, growing quieter only with great difficulty, and now and again suddenly recommencing along the line of a form whence rose here and there, like a damp cracker going off, a stifled laugh.
However, amid a rain of impositions, order was gradually reestablished in the class; and the master having succeeded in catching the name of “Charles Bovary,” having had it dictated to him, spelt out, and re-read, at once ordered the poor devil to go and sit down on the punishment form at the foot of the master’s desk. He got up, but before going hesitated.
“What are you looking for?” asked the master.
“My c-a-p,” timidly said the “new fellow,” casting troubled looks round him.
“Five hundred lines for all the class!” shouted in a furious voice stopped, like the Quos ego*, a fresh outburst. “Silence!” continued the master indignantly, wiping his brow with his handkerchief, which he had just taken from his cap. “As to you, ‘new boy,’ you will conjugate ‘ridiculus sum’** twenty times.”
Then, in a gentler tone, “Come, you’ll find your cap again; it hasn’t been stolen.”
*A quotation from the Aeneid signifying a threat.
**I am ridiculous.
Quiet was restored. Heads bent over desks, and the “new fellow” remained for two hours in an exemplary attitude, although from time to time some paper pellet flipped from the tip of a pen came bang in his face. But he wiped his face with one hand and continued motionless, his eyes lowered.
In the evening, at preparation, he pulled out his pens from his desk, arranged his small belongings, and carefully ruled his paper. We saw him working conscientiously, looking up every word in the dictionary, and taking the greatest pains. Thanks, no doubt, to the willingness he showed, he had not to go down to the class below. But though he knew his rules passably, he had little finish in composition. It was the cure of his village who had taught him his first Latin; his parents, from motives of economy, having sent him to school as late as possible.
His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Bartolome Bovary, retired assistant-surgeon-major, compromised about 1812 in certain conscription scandals, and forced at this time to leave the service, had taken advantage of his fine figure to get hold of a dowry of sixty thousand francs that offered in the person of a hosier’s daughter who had fallen in love with his good looks. A fine man, a great talker, making his spurs ring as he walked, wearing whiskers that ran into his moustache, his fingers always garnished with rings and dressed in loud colours, he had the dash of a military man with the easy go of a commercial traveller.
Once married, he lived for three or four years on his wife’s fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking long porcelain pipes, not coming in at night till after the theatre, and haunting cafes. The fatherin-law died, leaving little; he was indignant at this, “went in for the business,” lost some money in it, then retired to the country, where he thought he would make money.
But, as he knew no more about farming than calico, as he rode his horses instead of sending them to plough, drank his cider in bottle instead of selling it in cask, ate the finest poultry in his farmyard, and greased his hunting-boots with the fat of his pigs, he was not long in finding out that he would do better to give up all speculation.
For two hundred francs a year he managed to live on the border of the provinces of Caux and Picardy, in a kind of place half farm, half private house; and here, soured, eaten up with regrets, cursing his luck, jealous of everyone, he shut himself up at the age of forty-five, sick of men, he said, and determined to live at peace.
His wife had adored him once on a time; she had bored him with a thousand servilities that had only estranged him the more. Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She had suffered so much without complaint at first, until she had seem him going after all the village drabs, and until a score of bad houses sent him back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk. Then her pride revolted. After that she was silent, burying her anger in a dumb stoicism that she maintained till her death. She was constantly going about looking after business matters. She called on the lawyers, the president, remembered when bills fell due, got them renewed, and at home ironed, sewed, washed, looked after the workmen, paid the accounts, while he, troubling himself about nothing, eternally besotted in sleepy sulkiness, whence he only roused himself to say disagreeable things to her, sat smoking by the fire and spitting into the cinders.
When she had a child, it had to be sent out to nurse. When he came home, the lad was spoilt as if he were a prince. His mother stuffed him with jam; his father let him run about barefoot, and, playing the philosopher, even said he might as well go about quite naked like the young of animals. As opposed to the maternal ideas, he had a certain virile idea of childhood on which he sought to mould his son, wishing him to be brought up hardily, like a Spartan, to give him a strong constitution. He sent him to bed without any fire, taught him to drink off large draughts of rum and to jeer at religious processions. But, peaceable by nature, the lad answered only poorly to his notions. His mother always kept him near her; she cut out cardboard for him, told him tales, entertained him with endless monologues full of melancholy gaiety and charming nonsense. In her life’s isolation she centered on the child’s head all her shattered, broken little vanities. She dreamed of high station; she already saw him, tall, handsome, clever, settled as an engineer or in the law. She taught him to read, and even, on an old piano, she had taught him two or three little songs. But to all this Monsieur Bovary, caring little for letters, said, “It was not worth while. Would they ever have the means to send him to a public school, to buy him a practice, or start him in business? Besides, with cheek a man always gets on in the world.” Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child knocked about the village.
He went after the labourers, drove away with clods of earth the ravens that were flying about. He ate blackberries along the hedges, minded the geese with a long switch, went haymaking during harvest, ran about in the woods, played hop-scotch under the church porch on rainy days, and at great fetes begged the beadle to let him toll the bells, that he might hang all his weight on the long rope and feel himself borne upward by it in its swing. Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong on hand, fresh of colour.
When he was twelve years old his mother had her own way; he began lessons. The cure took him in hand; but the lessons were so short and irregular that they could not be of much use. They were given at spare moments in the sacristy, standing up, hurriedly, between a baptism and a burial; or else the cure, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil after the Angelus*. They went up to his room and settled down; the flies and moths fluttered round the candle. It was close, the child fell asleep, and the good man, beginning to doze with his hands on his stomach, was soon snoring with his mouth wide open. On other occasions, when Monsieur le Cure, on his way back after administering the viaticum to some sick person in the neighbourhood, caught sight of Charles playing about the fields, he called him, lectured him for a quarter of an hour and took advantage of the occasion to make him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree. The rain interrupted them or an acquaintance passed. All the same he was always pleased with him, and even said the “young man” had a very good memory.
*A devotion said at morning, noon, and evening, at the sound
of a bell. Here, the evening prayer.
Charles could not go on like this. Madame Bovary took strong steps. Ashamed, or rather tired out, Monsieur Bovary gave in without a struggle, and they waited one year longer, so that the lad should take his first communion.
Six months more passed, and the year after Charles was finally sent to school at Rouen, where his father took him towards the end of October, at the time of the St. Romain fair.
It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him. He was a youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in school-hours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well in the refectory. He had in loco parentis* a wholesale ironmonger in the Rue Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the boats, and then brought him back to college at seven o’clock before supper. Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother with red ink and three wafers; then he went over his history notebooks, or read an old volume of “Anarchasis” that was knocking about the study. When he went for walks he talked to the servant, who, like himself, came from the country.
*In place of a parent.
By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once even he got a certificate in natural history. But at the end of his third year his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study medicine, convinced that he could even take his degree by himself.
His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer’s she knew, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his board, got him furniture, table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with the supply of wood that was to warm the poor child.
Then at the end of a week she departed, after a thousand injunctions to be good now that he was going to be left to himself.
The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him; lectures on anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics, without counting hygiene and materia medica — all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.
He understood nothing of it all; it was all very well to listen — he did not follow. Still he worked; he had bound notebooks, he attended all the courses, never missed a single lecture. He did his little daily task like a mill-horse, who goes round and round with his eyes bandaged, not knowing what work he is doing.
To spare him expense his mother sent him every week by the carrier a piece of veal baked in the oven, with which he lunched when he came back from the hospital, while he sat kicking his feet against the wall. After this he had to run off to lectures, to the operation-room, to the hospital, and return to his home at the other end of the town. In the evening, after the poor dinner of his landlord, he went back to his room and set to work again in his wet clothes, which smoked as he sat in front of the hot stove.
On the fine summer evenings, at the time when the close streets are empty, when the servants are playing shuttle-cock at the doors, he opened his window and leaned out. The river, that makes of this quarter of Rouen a wretched little Venice, flowed beneath him, between the bridges and the railings, yellow, violet, or blue. Working men, kneeling on the banks, washed their bare arms in the water. On poles projecting from the attics, skeins of cotton were drying in the air. Opposite, beyond the roots spread the pure heaven with the red sun setting. How pleasant it must be at home! How fresh under the beech-tree! And he expanded his nostrils to breathe in the sweet odours of the country which did not reach him.
He grew thin, his figure became taller, his face took a saddened look that made it nearly interesting. Naturally, through indifference, he abandoned all the resolutions he had made. Once he missed a lecture; the next day all the lectures; and, enjoying his idleness, little by little, he gave up work altogether. He got into the habit of going to the public-house, and had a passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every evening in the dirty public room, to push about on marble tables the small sheep bones with black dots, seemed to him a fine proof of his freedom, which raised him in his own esteem. It was beginning to see life, the sweetness of stolen pleasures; and when he entered, he put his hand on the door-handle with a joy almost sensual. Then many things hidden within him came out; he learnt couplets by heart and sang them to his boon companions, became enthusiastic about Beranger, learnt how to make punch, and, finally, how to make love.
Thanks to these preparatory labours, he failed completely in his examination for an ordinary degree. He was expected home the same night to celebrate his success. He started on foot, stopped at the beginning of the village, sent for his mother, and told her all. She excused him, threw the blame of his failure on the injustice of the examiners, encouraged him a little, and took upon herself to set matters straight. It was only five years later that Monsieur Bovary knew the truth; it was old then, and he accepted it. Moreover, he could not believe that a man born of him could be a fool.
So Charles set to work again and crammed for his examination, ceaselessly learning all the old questions by heart. He passed pretty well. What a happy day for his mother! They gave a grand dinner.
Where should he go to practice? To Tostes, where there was only one old doctor. For a long time Madame Bovary had been on the lookout for his death, and the old fellow had barely been packed off when Charles was installed, opposite his place, as his successor.
But it was not everything to have brought up a son, to have had him taught medicine, and discovered Tostes, where he could practice it; he must have a wife. She found him one — the widow of a bailiff at Dieppe — who was forty-five and had an income of twelve hundred francs. Though she was ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds, Madame Dubuc had no lack of suitors. To attain her ends Madame Bovary had to oust them all, and she even succeeded in very cleverly baffling the intrigues of a port-butcher backed up by the priests.
Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was master; he had to say this and not say that in company, to fast every Friday, dress as she liked, harass at her bidding those patients who did not pay. She opened his letter, watched his comings and goings, and listened at the partition-wall when women came to consult him in his surgery.
She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles returned in the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets, put them round his neck, and having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he was neglecting her, he loved another. She had been warned she would be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love.
Chapter Two
One night towards eleven o’clock they were awakened by the noise of a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant opened the garret-window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below. He came for the doctor, had a letter for him. Natasie came downstairs shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left his horse, and, following the servant, suddenly came in behind her. He pulled out from his wool cap with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in a rag and presented it gingerly to Charles, who rested on his elbow on the pillow to read it. Natasie, standing near the bed, held the light. Madame in modesty had turned to the wall and showed only her back.
This letter, sealed with a small seal in blue wax, begged Monsieur Bovary to come immediately to the farm of the Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now from Tostes to the Bertaux was a good eighteen miles across country by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. It was a dark night; Madame Bovary junior was afraid of accidents for her husband. So it was decided the stable-boy should go on first; Charles would start three hours later when the moon rose. A boy was to be sent to meet him, and show him the way to the farm, and open the gates for him.
Towards four o’clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his cloak, set out for the Bertaux. Still sleepy from the warmth of his bed, he let himself be lulled by the quiet trot of his horse. When it stopped of its own accord in front of those holes surrounded with thorns that are dug on the margin of furrows, Charles awoke with a start, suddenly remembered the broken leg, and tried to call to mind all the fractures he knew. The rain had stopped, day was breaking, and on the branches of the leafless trees birds roosted motionless, their little feathers bristling in the cold morning wind. The flat country stretched as far as eye could see, and the tufts of trees round the farms at long intervals seemed like dark violet stains on the cast grey surface, that on the horizon faded into the gloom of the sky.
Charles from time to time opened his eyes, his mind grew weary, and, sleep coming upon him, he soon fell into a doze wherein, his recent sensations blending with memories, he became conscious of a double self, at once student and married man, lying in his bed as but now, and crossing the operation theatre as of old. The warm smell of poultices mingled in his brain with the fresh odour of dew; he heard the iron rings rattling along the curtain-rods of the bed and saw his wife sleeping. As he passed Vassonville he came upon a boy sitting on the grass at the edge of a ditch.
“Are you the doctor?” asked the child.
And on Charles’s answer he took his wooden shoes in his hands and ran on in front of him.
The general practitioner, riding along, gathered from his guide’s talk that Monsieur Rouault must be one of the well-to-do farmers.
He had broken his leg the evening before on his way home from a Twelfth-night feast at a neighbour’s. His wife had been dead for two years. There was with him only his daughter, who helped him to keep house.
The ruts were becoming deeper; they were approaching the Bertaux.
The little lad, slipping through a hole in the hedge, disappeared; then he came back to the end of a courtyard to open the gate. The horse slipped on the wet grass; Charles had to stoop to pass under the branches. The watchdogs in their kennels barked, dragging at their chains. As he entered the Bertaux, the horse took fright and stumbled.
It was a substantial-looking farm. In the stables, over the top of the open doors, one could see great cart-horses quietly feeding from new racks. Right along the outbuildings extended a large dunghill, from which manure liquid oozed, while amidst fowls and turkeys, five or six peacocks, a luxury in Chauchois farmyards, were foraging on the top of it. The sheepfold was long, the barn high, with walls smooth as your hand. Under the cart-shed were two large carts and four ploughs, with their whips, shafts and harnesses complete, whose fleeces of blue wool were getting soiled by the fine dust that fell from the granaries. The courtyard sloped upwards, planted with trees set out symmetrically, and the chattering noise of a flock of geese was heard near the pond.
A young woman in a blue merino dress with three flounces came to the threshold of the door to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she led to the kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The servant’s breakfast was boiling beside it in small pots of all sizes. Some damp clothes were drying inside the chimney-corner. The shovel, tongs, and the nozzle of the bellows, all of colossal size, shone like polished steel, while along the walls hung many pots and pans in which the clear flame of the hearth, mingling with the first rays of the sun coming in through the window, was mirrored fitfully.
Charles went up the first floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed, sweating under his bedclothes, having thrown his cotton nightcap right away from him. He was a fat little man of fifty, with white skin and blue eyes, the forepart of his head bald, and he wore earrings. By his side on a chair stood a large decanter of brandy, whence he poured himself a little from time to time to keep up his spirits; but as soon as he caught sight of the doctor his elation subsided, and instead of swearing, as he had been doing for the last twelve hours, began to groan freely.
The fracture was a simple one, without any kind of complication.
Charles could not have hoped for an easier case. Then calling to mind the devices of his masters at the bedsides of patients, he comforted the sufferer with all sorts of kindly remarks, those Caresses of the surgeon that are like the oil they put on bistouries. In order to make some splints a bundle of laths was brought up from the carthouse. Charles selected one, cut it into two pieces and planed it with a fragment of windowpane, while the servant tore up sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads. As she was a long time before she found her work-case, her father grew impatient; she did not answer, but as she sewed she pricked her fingers, which she then put to her mouth to suck them. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips, more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles; besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines. Her real beauty was in her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness.
The bandaging over, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to “pick a bit” before he left.
Charles went down into the room on the ground floor. Knives and forks and silver goblets were laid for two on a little table at the foot of a huge bed that had a canopy of printed cotton with figures representing Turks. There was an odour of iris-root and damp sheets that escaped from a large oak chest opposite the window. On the floor in corners were sacks of flour stuck upright in rows. These were the overflow from the neighbouring granary, to which three stone steps led. By way of decoration for the apartment, hanging to a nail in the middle of the wall, whose green paint scaled off from the effects of the saltpetre, was a crayon head of Minerva in gold frame, underneath which was written in Gothic letters “To dear Papa.”
First they spoke of the patient, then of the weather, of the great cold, of the wolves that infested the fields at night.
Mademoiselle Rouault did not at all like the country, especially now that she had to look after the farm almost alone. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate. This showed something of her full lips, that she had a habit of biting when silent.
Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two black folds seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was parted in the middle by a delicate line that curved slightly with the curve of the head; and, just showing the tip of the ear, it was joined behind in a thick chignon, with a wavy movement at the temples that the country doctor saw now for the first time in his life. The upper part of her cheek was rose-coloured. She had, like a man, thrust in between two buttons of her bodice a tortoiseshell eyeglass.
When Charles, after bidding farewell to old Rouault, returned to the room before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the window, looking into the garden, where the bean props had been knocked down by the wind. She turned round. “Are you looking for anything?” she asked.
“My whip, if you please,” he answered.
He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had fallen to the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma saw it, and bent over the flour sacks.
Charles out of politeness made a dash also, and as he stretched out his arm, at the same moment felt his breast brush against the back of the young girl bending beneath him. She drew herself up, scarlet, and looked at him over her shoulder as she handed him his whip.
Instead of returning to the Bertaux in three days as he had promised, he went back the very next day, then regularly twice a week, without counting the visits he paid now and then as if by accident.
Everything, moreover, went well; the patient progressed favourably; and when, at the end of forty-six days, old Rouault was seen trying to walk alone in his “den,” Monsieur Bovary began to be looked upon as a man of great capacity. Old Rouault said that he could not have been cured better by the first doctor of Yvetot, or even of Rouen.
As to Charles, he did not stop to ask himself why it was a pleasure to him to go to the Bertaux. Had he done so, he would, no doubt, have attributed his zeal to the importance of the case, or perhaps to the money he hoped to make by it. Was it for this, however, that his visits to the farm formed a delightful exception to the meagre occupations of his life? On these days he rose early, set off at a gallop, urging on his horse, then got down to wipe his boots in the grass and put on black gloves before entering. He liked going into the courtyard, and noticing the gate turn against his shoulder, the cock crow on the wall, the lads run to meet him. He liked the granary and the stables; he liked old Rouault, who pressed his hand and called him his saviour; he like the small wooden shoes of Mademoiselle Emma on the scoured flags of the kitchen — her high heels made her a little taller; and when she walked in front of him, the wooden soles springing up quickly struck with a sharp sound against the leather of her boots.
She always accompanied him to the first step of the stairs. When his horse had not yet been brought round she stayed there. They had said “Goodbye”; there was no more talking. The open air wrapped her round, playing with the soft down on the back of her neck, or blew to and fro on her hips the apron-strings, that fluttered like streamers. Once, during a thaw the bark of the trees in the yard was oozing, the snow on the roofs of the outbuildings was melting; she stood on the threshold, and went to fetch her sunshade and opened it. The sunshade of silk of the colour of pigeons’ breasts, through which the sun shone, lighted up with shifting hues the white skin of her face. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of water could be heard falling one by one on the stretched silk.
During the first period of Charles’s visits to the Bertaux, Madame Bovary junior never failed to inquire after the invalid, and she had even chosen in the book that she kept on a system of double entry a clean blank page for Monsieur Rouault. But when she heard he had a daughter, she began to make inquiries, and she learnt the Mademoiselle Rouault, brought up at the Ursuline Convent, had received what is called “a good education”; and so knew dancing, geography, drawing, how to embroider and play the piano. That was the last straw.
“So it is for this,” she said to herself, “that his face beams when he goes to see her, and that he puts on his new waistcoat at the risk of spoiling it with the rain. Ah! that woman! That woman!”
And she detested her instinctively. At first she solaced herself by allusions that Charles did not understand, then by casual observations that he let pass for fear of a storm, finally by open apostrophes to which he knew not what to answer. “Why did he go back to the Bertaux now that Monsieur Rouault was cured and that these folks hadn’t paid yet? Ah! it was because a young lady was there, some one who know how to talk, to embroider, to be witty. That was what he cared about; he wanted town misses.” And she went on —
“The daughter of old Rouault a town miss! Get out! Their grandfather was a shepherd, and they have a cousin who was almost had up at the assizes for a nasty blow in a quarrel. It is not worth while making such a fuss, or showing herself at church on Sundays in a silk gown like a countess. Besides, the poor old chap, if it hadn’t been for the colza last year, would have had much ado to pay up his arrears.”
For very weariness Charles left off going to the Bertaux. Heloise made him swear, his hand on the prayer-book, that he would go there no more after much sobbing and many kisses, in a great outburst of love. He obeyed then, but the strength of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct; and he thought, with a kind of naive hypocrisy, that his interdict to see her gave him a sort of right to love her. And then the widow was thin; she had long teeth; wore in all weathers a little black shawl, the edge of which hung down between her shoulder-blades; her bony figure was sheathed in her clothes as if they were a scabbard; they were too short, and displayed her ankles with the laces of her large boots crossed over grey stockings.
Charles’s mother came to see them from time to time, but after a few days the daughter-in-law seemed to put her own edge on her, and then, like two knives, they scarified him with their reflections and observations. It was wrong of him to eat so much.
Why did he always offer a glass of something to everyone who came? What obstinacy not to wear flannels! In the spring it came about that a notary at Ingouville, the holder of the widow Dubuc’s property, one fine day went off, taking with him all the money in his office. Heloise, it is true, still possessed, besides a share in a boat valued at six thousand francs, her house in the Rue St. Francois; and yet, with all this fortune that had been so trumpeted abroad, nothing, excepting perhaps a little furniture and a few clothes, had appeared in the household. The matter had to be gone into. The house at Dieppe was found to be eaten up with mortgages to its foundations; what she had placed with the notary God only knew, and her share in the boat did not exceed one thousand crowns. She had lied, the good lady! In his exasperation, Monsieur Bovary the elder, smashing a chair on the flags, accused his wife of having caused misfortune to the son by harnessing him to such a harridan, whose harness wasn’t worth her hide. They came to Tostes. Explanations followed. There were scenes. Heloise in tears, throwing her arms about her husband, implored him to defend her from his parents.
Charles tried to speak up for her. They grew angry and left the house.
But “the blow had struck home.” A week after, as she was hanging up some washing in her yard, she was seized with a spitting of blood, and the next day, while Charles had his back turned to her drawing the window-curtain, she said, “O God!” gave a sigh and fainted. She was dead! What a surprise! When all was over at the cemetery Charles went home. He found no one downstairs; he went up to the first floor to their room; say her dress still hanging at the foot of the alcove; then, leaning against the writing-table, he stayed until the evening, buried in a sorrowful reverie. She had loved him after all!
Chapter Three
One morning old Rouault brought Charles the money for setting his leg — seventy-five francs in forty-sou pieces, and a turkey. He had heard of his loss, and consoled him as well as he could.
