Chapter summary
At the beginning of April, when the Angelus bells ring, Emma Bovary goes to church ready for any devotion that will absorb her soul and make her forget her existence. She finds Abbé Bournisien busy with the catechism boys; he calls himself a "doctor of souls," talks about a sick cow and, when Emma tries to say that there are people who have bread and nothing else, he completes the sentence with fire for the winter and does not understand what she means. He attributes her discomfort to digestion, the two stand face to face in silence, and he returns to the catechism, claiming that duty comes above all.
Back from church, irritated, Emma pushes Berthe Bovary away with her elbow; the girl falls against the chest of drawers and cuts her cheek, and Emma tells Charles Bovary that the daughter fell while playing. Watching over the girl's sleep, she thinks she is ugly.
Léon, tired of loving without hope and of Yonville, gets his mother's consent to go finish his law degree in Paris; he spends a month packing trunks and postponing, until his mother writes again ordering him to hurry because of the exam. He leaves with a restrained farewell, in Charles's absence: he asks to kiss Berthe, Emma rests her forehead against the window glass, and the two exchange a handshake "in the English manner," without a kiss. That same night Homais announces that the agricultural shows may be held in Yonville.
Analysis
Emma goes to church drawn by the memory of the convent, and what the text says she seeks is put plainly: any devotion that absorbs the soul and makes the whole of existence disappear. It is not faith; it is disappearing. That is why the question she tries to put to the priest finds no listener: he hears indigestion where she says misery, and his duty lies with the catechism boys.
The scene with Abbé Bournisien is the exact counterpoint to the rhetoric of "infinity" that Emma and Léon exchanged in chapter 2. Emma goes to church looking for something (she herself cannot name what) and finds a priest distracted by the mischief of the catechism boys, who treats her anguish as indigestion:
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