Chapter summary
The Bovarys arrive at the Golden Lion inn, where Homais, who had invited himself, and Léon Dupuis, clerk to the notary Guillaumin and bored in Yonville (see Yonville), dine with them. For two and a half hours at the table, Emma Bovary and Léon discover the same tastes, while Homais describes to Charles the villagers and the vacant house of the fugitive Yanoda, which the Bovarys are to occupy. Léon says he will go to Paris the following year to finish his law degree. In the new house, still in disorder, Emma sleeps in Yonville for the first time.
Analysis
The dinner brings together two solitudes with the same repertoire: Léon, who is so bored in Yonville that he delays the meal waiting for some traveler to talk to, and Emma, fresh from the isolation of Tostes. Homais covers the table with information and Charles with horseback rides, and the two young people find in each other the first listener equal to what they say. What draws them together that night is this hunger for an interlocutor, more than any feeling already formed.
At dinner, Léon and Emma build, sentence by sentence, a shared repertoire: the sunset at the seaside, which Emma says lifts the soul with ideas of infinity; the lakes and waterfalls of Switzerland that Léon has heard of; and the books read by the fireside, in which, he says, "thought, entwining itself with fiction," lingers over the details until it seems that the reader himself throbs inside the characters' clothing. It is a catalogue of commonplaces of penny-serial romanticism, as much as a seduction scene. Charles Bovary, beside them, can offer only practical phrases ("constantly obliged to ride on horseback"), and the contrast of register already separates the husband from the couple forming at the table.
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