Chapter summary
At home, Rodolphe Boulanger rereads old letters from women, hesitates, and writes the letter of rupture, which he sends the next day hidden under vine leaves in a basket of apricots. Emma Bovary finds the letter in the parlor, runs to the attic, and after a crisis at the window, goes down to dinner, where Charles Bovary tells her about the apricots and says Rodolphe has gone on a trip. On seeing Rodolphe's blue tilbury pass through the square, she collapses; a brain fever follows, and for forty-three days Charles does not leave her side for a moment, abandons his patients, and calls Doctor Larivière, and during her convalescence he begins to worry about the lack of money.
Analysis
Rodolphe writes the letter and sends it under the vine leaves because he has already given up leaving (he cannot expatriate himself or carry a child) and because that was how he used to send her fruit and game. Before writing, he rereads letters from other women, and what unites them, in the text, is leveling: one same level of love that made them equal. Writing to Emma as he would to one of them is what frees him.
Rodolphe writes the letter of rupture the way one assembles a product: he tests sentences, discards the excuse of a lost fortune, and chooses the word that "always produces an effect." "No!... What I would wish is to seat you on a throne!" he writes in the letter. A little earlier he had written, in the same letter, the sentence he himself judges "a word that always produces an effect":
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