Chapter summary
On a snowy Sunday in February, the Bovarys, Homais and Léon go half a league from Yonville (see Yonville) to see a flax-spinning mill under construction, and there Emma Bovary, looking at the back of Charles Bovary and then at Léon's face, compares the two. That night, alone, she recalls Léon and concludes that he loves her, and the next day the merchant Lheureux visits her with his case of dry goods and offers her credit, without her buying anything. In the following days Emma becomes an exemplary wife and mother, takes Berthe Bovary from the wet nurse and returns to church; Léon, seeing her beside a satisfied Charles and the little girl on the rug, finds her so virtuous and unapproachable that he loses all hope, and Yonville admires her thrift, her refinement and her charity. Behind the virtue, however, Emma lives on desire and anger toward Charles, and to the maid Félicité, who surprises her crying, she says it is nerves.
Analysis
Once she realizes she loves Léon, Emma pushes him away out of modesty and fright: she thinks she repulsed him too far and that it is no longer time. What Yonville praises as virtue is, in the text, fear and the wish for him to guess. Léon, faced with a woman who seems unapproachable, gives up and promotes her, in his heart, to the figure one admires from afar. Each closes the door the other was expecting to find open.
It is also here that Lheureux appears for the first time as a character of his own, not only as a traveling companion: he enters with the green case, displays embroidered collars and Algerian stoles, and when Emma refuses to buy, he does not insist, merely sows credit for later.
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