Chapter summary
On the day of the agricultural show, Yonville (see Yonville) dresses up, the National Guard from Buchy and Binet's firemen parade, and Homais, a member of the advisory committee, goes up to the platform. On the way, the landlady of the Golden Lion tells Homais that Lheureux is going to seize Tellier, owner of the French Café and Emma's rival, over bills of exchange. Rodolphe Boulanger joins Emma Bovary and leads her to the council chamber of the town hall; while the councillor Lieuvain, who has come in place of the civil governor of the department (the préfet), delivers his speech, and the jury chairman announces the prizes for cattle, fertilizer, and flax, he courts her, until he takes her hand. The servant Catherine Leroux receives a medal for fifty-four years of service, and two days later Homais publishes an enthusiastic article about the festivities in the Fanal de Rouen.
Analysis
Rodolphe uses the show because he planned it: at the end of the previous chapter he had decided that Emma would be there and that he would start boldly, so he sends Lheureux away, slips past Homais, and takes her to the town hall room. The text shows Emma listening with her mind elsewhere: while Rodolphe speaks, she smells in his hair the same scent of vanilla and lemon she had smelled on the Viscount with whom she waltzed, and she sees, in the background, the stagecoach that brought and took away Léon.
The central scene of chapters 1 to 8 of Part II. Flaubert sets up three simultaneous speeches, two coming from the platform below and one whispered in the room above: the official speech of councillor Lieuvain (praise of the king, of industry, of agriculture, of "duty," and the "who could be surprised that this should happen"), Rodolphe's whispered seduction of Emma (destiny, soulmates), and the chairman announcing the prizes for cattle and fertilizer. The three voices alternate sentence by sentence, with no typographical hierarchy: the effect is that the vocabulary of absolute love sounds, next to the prizes for pigs and the praise of the king, as conventional and mechanical as the two other speeches surrounding it.
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