Chapter summary
The narrator goes through the house in Tostes room by room, and the marriage with Emma Bovary would be the happy turn of the plot, if not for the detail the chapter carefully plants: in the couple's bedroom is still the bouquet of orange blossoms of the dead bride. Charles Bovary carries it up to the attic without realizing what he has done. Emma looks at it and thinks of her own bouquet, imagining what would become of it if she died. It is the first time the novel links marriage to death through an image, and the link returns when Emma burns her own wedding bouquet (Chapter 9) and when she is buried in her wedding dress (Part III, Chapter 9).
Analysis
Charles notices that Emma looks at the other woman's bouquet and takes it to the attic, in a gesture of tidying that does not see what it means. Emma, seated, thinks of her own, packed in a box, and wonders what they would do with it if by chance she should die. The text gives no fear and no mourning, it gives daydreaming: the newlywed already sees herself in the place of the one who came before her.
In the first days Emma redecorates the house, and Charles, who never dreamed of so much, lives surrounded by happiness: a gesture of her hands in his hair, the straw hat at the window, his whole life fitting within the circumference of her petticoat. The chapter closes with the sentence in which Emma concludes that she was wrong to judge herself in love, the problem she has even before the ball.
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