Chapter summary
Here the ball stops being a memory and becomes an illness. Emma Bovary opens the cigar case (see The Green Cigar Case) alone, smells the lining, wonders whose it might have been, whether the Viscount's, and invents a love story for its owner: perhaps a gift from his mistress, embroidered for hours. She buys a map of Paris and runs her finger over it, subscribes to fashion magazines and reads Balzac and George Sand, looking in books for the indirect satisfaction she already sought as a child, now with the name of a city and the face of the Viscount to fix her desire on.
Charles Bovary trots through the countryside as an unambitious doctor and reads a medical journal that puts him to sleep in five minutes, and Emma, who would like to see the name Bovary become illustrious, grows irritated with him even over the way he eats his soup. She spends her days looking at the solitude of her life like sailors in distress who search far off for a white sail, not knowing what event will come or where the wind will blow from, but waiting for it every morning and being astonished that it does not arrive. She counts the weeks until October, the month when the Marquis might give another ball, and watches September pass without a letter or a visit. She then gives up drawing, embroidery and the piano, because playing was worth something only as a spectacle and Tostes has no audience: why play, who would hear her?
The harsh winter comes, with the fits of nerves and Charles's prescriptions, valerian and camphor baths. His former master in Rouen confirms that it is a nervous illness and orders a change of air; Charles, who reads the ailment as an effect of the place, weighs the cost of leaving four years of a practice that was beginning to take hold, writes to the apothecary of Yonville to learn the population, rivals and income, and decides on the move as a remedy for an ailment he does not understand. While packing, Emma pricks her fingers on a wire and sees that it belongs to her own bridal bouquet, kept in a drawer, its flowers yellowed with dust and its ribbons frayed, and she throws it into the fire, watching until the last corolla rises up the chimney. Part I ends with her pregnant, leaving for Yonville in March.
Analysis
Un souffle d’amour avait passé parmi les mailles du canevas; chaque coup d’aiguille avait fixé là une espérance ou un souvenir, et tous ces fils de soie entrelacés n’étaient que la continuité de la même passion silencieuse
, a breath of love had passed through the meshes of the canvas; each stitch of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and all those intertwined silk threads were only the continuation of the same silent passion.
Emma does not know whose the cigar case is: the text only gives it a smell of verbena and tobacco. From that she builds a pensive embroiderer, hours of needlework, a Viscount who took her on some random day, and the story serves so that a passion exists, even if it belongs to someone else. The object is worth something because it comes from outside Tostes, and what she repeats, in the next sentence, is the name of Paris.
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