Chapter summary
One night a peasant arrives in Tostes with a note calling the doctor to the Bertaux, the farm of Father Rouault, to mend a broken leg. Charles Bovary makes the journey at dawn, finds the fracture simple, and meets the farmer's daughter, Emma Bovary, who receives him at the door: he notices her nails, and the narrator says that true beauty lay in her eyes. The cure lasts forty-six days, and Charles starts going back to the Bertaux twice a week, and more, without asking himself why he does it with pleasure.
The wife, Héloïse, discovers that the girl was raised in the Ursuline convent, hears of dancing, drawing and the piano, becomes jealous of her husband's open face, and makes him swear, with his hand on the prayer book, that he will not go back there; Charles gives in out of weariness. In the spring, the notary who kept the widow Dubuc's money runs off with the office safe, and the announced fortune turns out to be a lie: the house in Dieppe was mortgaged to its foundations. Charles's parents come to Tostes, accuse Héloïse of having lied, and make scenes; Charles tries to defend her, and they leave angry. Eight days later she coughs up blood and, the next day, dies.
Analysis
Héloïse reacts to what she hears about the girl: the education at the Ursuline convent, the dancing, the drawing, the piano. She links all of it to her husband's open face when he goes to see her and to the new vest he wears even at risk of rain, and her jealousy, more than any decision of Charles's, keeps him away for a while: he gives in out of weariness and swears on the prayer book. Charles obeys his wife as he had obeyed his mother.
The reason for the visits is a desire that Charles does not yet recognize. Quant à Charles, il ne chercha point à se demander pourquoi il venait aux Bertaux avec plaisir
, as for Charles, he did not try to ask himself why he went to the Bertaux with pleasure.
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