Chapter summary
Charles Bovary enters the novel as the new boy in a school class, seen by a classmate who narrates in the first-person plural. He is a country boy, about fifteen, in clothes too short and too tight, who keeps his cap on his knees while the others throw it to the floor as he comes in. The narrator describes this cap piece by piece, with the same clinical attention he will later give to Emma Bovary: a mixture of a fur hat, a kepi and a cotton cap, of mute ugliness and a shiny peak. The class laughs when the cap falls, the teacher orders the boy to say his name, he mumbles something unintelligible and, told to speak louder, shouts at the top of his lungs, and the class understands "Charbovari," a nickname he will be shouted from then on. The teacher punishes the class with five hundred lines and Charles with twenty copies of "ridiculus sum." This cap is the first object in the novel to carry more meaning than it should, a habit of style that Flaubert repeats to the end.
The narrator then tells where he comes from. The father, a former assistant surgeon in the army, married for a dowry, lived two or three years off his wife's fortune, lost money in a factory and now lives embittered on a leased property; he wants to raise his son in the Spartan manner, sending him to sleep without a fire and to walk without shoes. The mother fills him with sweets and stories and dreams of an illustrious position for him, while the father answers every study plan by saying it is not worth it, because with brazenness a man always gets on in the world. Only at twelve, at his mother's insistence, does Charles begin to study with the village priest, in short and poorly followed lessons, and later he is sent to the college in Rouen, where he always stays in the middle of the class.
Sent to study medicine, Charles does not understand the lectures, abandons them for the tavern and dominoes, and fails the first examination for health officer. His mother excuses him, blames the failure on the injustice of the examiners, and he passes the second time by memorizing the questions. She then sets him up as a doctor in Tostes, beside the only old doctor in the village, whose death she was waiting for, and chooses his wife for him: the widow Dubuc, older, of an ungrateful appearance and with a declared income, who begins to command him in everything.
Analysis
une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d’expression comme le visage d’un imbécile
, one of those poor things, in short, whose mute ugliness has depths of expression, like the face of an imbecile.
It is the class that describes the cap, and it is through the cap, before any word from the boy, that the class judges him. The narrator gives it as new, with a shiny peak, complicated embroidery and a gold thread at the top: an object that strives to impress and only provokes laughter. Charles, not knowing whether to hold it, leave it on the floor or put it on his head, is left without a way out, and it is in this bind that he shouts his name and turns it into a nickname.
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