Chapter summary
The chapter goes back to Emma Bovary's past, beginning with the convent, to explain where the vocabulary of the previous chapter comes from. She enters at thirteen, and she does not lose her faith through disbelief, she loses it through sensory satiety: she loved the church for its flowers, music for the lyrics of its songs, and religion for its mystical languor, never for its doctrine, and she invented sins to stay longer in the confessional. At the same time, an old seamstress who comes to mend the linen secretly lends the older pupils cheap novels, full of love, lovers and persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, and Walter Scott and the keepsake books with engravings complete the repertoire. Emma consumes both registers, devotional and romantic, without ever distinguishing between them.
Analysis
The effect is a sensibility trained to recognize only emotions in the form of cliché, and it is the key to reading the chapter and the whole book: Emma is not sensitive to the world, she is sensitive to what the world can give her in sensation.
Il fallait qu’elle pût retirer des choses une sorte de profit personnel; et elle rejetait comme inutile tout ce qui ne contribuait pas à la consommation immédiate de son cœur [...] étant de tempérament plus sentimentale qu’artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages
, she wanted to get some personal profit from things, and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate consumption of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions, not landscapes.
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