Chapter summary
Father Rouault brings Charles Bovary seventy-five francs for the leg, plus a turkey, and comforts him over his widowhood by telling of his own mourning. The death of the first wife frees Charles to desire without guilt, and he returns to the Bertaux, freer and better regarded in the region. One afternoon, in the heat, with the house empty, Emma Bovary offers him a glass of curaçao in the kitchen, barely puts anything into her own glass, laughs at not feeling anything, and licks the bottom of his glass. Rouault, who would not mind getting rid of his daughter, notices Charles's blush and decides to accept the proposal. Charles spends three days putting off the request, and it is the farmer himself, on the road, who arranges the signal: if the answer is yes, he will throw open the shutter of the window, and, after half an hour and nineteen more minutes by the clock, it opens. The marriage can only take place after the mourning, in the following spring.
Analysis
Eh bien, tout doucement, un jour chassant l’autre, un printemps sur un hiver et un automne par-dessus un été, ça a coulé brin à brin, miette à miette; ça s’en est allé, c’est parti, c’est descendu, je veux dire, car il vous reste toujours quelque chose au fond, comme qui dirait... un poids, là, sur la poitrine!
, well, very gradually, one day chasing the next, a spring over a winter and an autumn over a summer, it all trickled away thread by thread, crumb by crumb; it went off, it left, it went down, I mean, because there is always something left at the bottom, as they say... a weight, here, on the chest!
Rouault speaks of mourning like someone who has lived through it: the fields to stay alone in, the weeping at the foot of the tree, the foolish things said to God, the anger at thinking of others embracing their wives. The cure he describes is not a priest's consolation but the passing of the seasons, and he corrects himself in the middle of the sentence, because the weight does not go away. It is the truest speech about marital love in Part I, and it comes from a farmer who, soon after, invites the widower to see his daughter.
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