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Madame Bovary · Part II

Chapter 11

MarriageLanguage and Narration

Chapter summary

Homais, a reader of a new method for curing club feet, convinces Emma Bovary and Charles Bovary that operating on the stable boy Hippolyte will bring the doctor fame, and he appeals to the young man's vanity; Hippolyte, lectured by the whole village, gives in mainly because it will cost him no money, since Charles offers the apparatus, a generosity that was Emma's idea. Charles cuts the Achilles tendon, and Homais writes, that same night, a triumphant article for the Fanal de Rouen. Five days later Hippolyte's leg is swollen and, with the apparatus tightened, it ends up gangrenous; Doctor Canivet, called from Neufchâtel, amputates it while Charles waits at home, humiliated, and Emma looks at him with contempt. Charles asks for a kiss, she rejects him with shouts, and the barometer falls from the wall; that night, Rodolphe Boulanger finds her again in the garden.

Analysis

The operation is born of two interests that come together, and neither is the cure. Homais wants the doctor's fame and, with it, his own; Emma wants to lean on something more solid than love, after having regretted Rodolphe. Charles, convinced by both, thinks his wife is an angel on learning that she offered the machine for free. Hippolyte gives in because it costs him nothing. Each has a motive that has nothing to do with the club foot.

Homais convinces Emma and Charles to operate on Hippolyte for the prestige, not for the cure: he wants the article in the newspaper, he wants the snowball to grow. Hippolyte's own persuasion goes through vanity, not science, and ends with the argument that it will cost him no money:

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