Chapter summary
With the first chills, Emma Bovary begins to live in the sitting room and to watch from the window the comings and goings of Léon, while Homais appears every night, at dinner, repeating the same greeting. Léon and Emma draw closer during evenings at the pharmacist's house, with the exchange of books and small favors, and the neighborhood concludes that they are in love. Léon torments himself without managing to declare himself, writes letters that he tears up and, when Charles Bovary invites him to visit patients, gives up the declaration and leaves with him; Emma, for her part, does not ask herself whether she loves him.
Analysis
Léon gives up the declaration just when Charles invites him to get into the carriage to visit patients: he accepts at once, bids Emma farewell and goes, because he thinks her husband is, in a way, something of hers too, and accompanying him is a way of staying near Emma. He is afraid of displeasing and ashamed of being shy; he writes and tears up; the neighborhood, seeing the rug she gave him, has already decided that they are lovers. Emma does not question herself: intimacy is public before it is named.
The evenings at the pharmacist's house (card games, dominoes, reading of verses) build the intimacy between Léon and Emma without anything happening: it is the phase of silent complicity, of the plants in each other's windows, of the rug given as a gift that the whole village reads as proof of romance before there is even romance. In this setting Flaubert leaves the definition of love that will govern Emma's reading of herself, a love that exists only as a total event, never as a daily choice, and for that reason incompatible with any possible husband.
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