Chapter summary
After Léon's departure, Emma Bovary curses herself for not having loved him and recreates him in memory, taller, more beautiful and vaguer than he was. When the love for him fades and the bad days of Tostes return, she buys a Gothic prie-dieu, a blue cashmere dress and a stole, and spends weeks in mourning and whims, until she faints and spits blood, while Charles Bovary weeps in his study. He calls his mother, who considers Emma idle, thinks she lacks occupations and manual work, and orders the subscription to the Rouen library cancelled.
On a market day, the landowner Rodolphe Boulanger, owner of La Huchette, brings in a peasant who complains of ants crawling all over his body to be bled by Charles, and meets Emma. While the apprentice Justin faints at the sight of the blood, Emma loosens his tie and dampens his temples with vinegar.
Walking home on foot, Rodolphe compares Emma to a carp that longs for water on a kitchen table and concludes that with three words of flattery she would adore him, although he already wonders how to get rid of her later. He tells himself that she will be his, weighs the obstacles (the little girl, the maid, the neighbors, the husband) and chooses the short path: game gifts, a pretext for bleeding, and the approaching agricultural shows, where he will see her.
Analysis
Emma curses herself for not having loved Léon and recreates him in memory higher and softer than he was: absence feeds desire, because she is tangled up in the difficulties of going to meet him, and the desire, increased by regret, grows more active. With nowhere to put that movement, she buys (a prie-dieu, cashmere, a scarf), overspends, and ends up spitting blood, while Charles weeps in his study.
With Léon gone, Emma sinks into a mourning without a funeral: she rearranges his memory into images that grow ever more beautiful, and she cultivates the habit of buying objects (a stole, cashmere, a Gothic prie-dieu), as if trying to fill with possessions what was really the absence of a person. Charles's mother arrives, diagnoses a lack of obligatory occupations and manual work, and decides to cancel the Rouen library subscription, an attempt at moral hygiene that comes too late and does not understand the cause.
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