Chapter summary
With love, Emma Bovary begins to fear being discovered: one morning, returning from the house of Rodolphe Boulanger, she almost faints with fright on seeing the barrel of Binet's carbine, who was hunting wild ducks hidden in a barrel, and that evening she finds him at the pharmacy buying products to clean his hunting gear, which costs her hours of anguish. During the winter, three or four times a week, Rodolphe meets her at night in the garden and, when it rains, in the consulting room of Charles Bovary, where Emma asks him whether he has the pistol to defend herself from her husband, and he answers with scorn for Charles. Little by little Emma's exaltation bores him, and he stops hiding his indifference. In spring the basket from old Rouault arrives, with a turkey and a letter, and the memory of her father's house and the pleasure of hugging Berthe Bovary bring Emma to a surge of tenderness for her daughter; Rodolphe, finding her serious, misses three meetings, and it is then that she regrets it and asks herself whether it would not have been better to love Charles.
Analysis
The scares with Binet in the barrel and at the pharmacy show what Emma now fears losing: Rodolphe is already indispensable to her. The text links Emma's regret to Rodolphe's withdrawal, who missed three meetings and treated her with irony, and not to the affection she felt for her daughter: it is the lover's coldness that makes her look at Charles. And the desire for sacrifice that comes over her finds no support in Charles.
Sure of being loved, Rodolphe stops constraining himself and changes his manners, and the text measures the loss with a metaphor of a river:
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