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Madame Bovary · Part III

Chapter 1

LoveDesireLanguage and NarrationReligion

Chapter summary

In Rouen, Léon, back from Paris and no longer as shy as before, goes to the Red Cross inn, where Emma Bovary is staying. The night before, after saying goodbye to Emma and Charles, who had come to Rouen to hear the opera, Léon followed them from afar to the inn and spent the night meditating on a plan. Their confidences of melancholy, in which he says he has written a will asking to be buried in the bedspread she gave him, end in his declaration, which she turns away without closing the matter: she agrees to meet him the next day, at eleven, at the cathedral; at night she writes a letter to cancel the meeting and, not knowing his address, decides to deliver it herself, which she does not manage to do at the cathedral.

In the cathedral, Emma kneels in the chapel of the Virgin, and the sacristan, the temple's guide, drags the two of them past tombs and relics until Léon escapes and sends for a cab. At the church door, while a boy goes to fetch the carriage, Emma says that this is not decent, and Léon answers that it is common practice in Paris, which decides her. To the driver, who asks where to, he says: wherever you like.

With Emma inside, the carriage with its blinds drawn travels through Rouen without a destination until six in the evening. From outside, one sees only the carriage, more closed than a tomb and shaken like a ship, and a bare hand that, between the yellow curtains, throws torn paper to the wind. At six the carriage stops on a lane in the Beauvoisine quarter, and from it a woman in a veil gets out and walks away without turning her head.

Analysis

Léon acts according to a plan made during the night and sustained by the confidence that Paris has given him. Emma writes the letter that cancels the meeting, does not know his address, and decides to deliver it in person; in the cathedral she holds the paper out to Léon and takes it back, and goes to pray in the chapel. The text says she clings, with her wavering virtue, to the Virgin, to the tombs, to every occasion: everything that postpones the decision serves. What decides the scene is Léon fleeing the cathedral, not any choice by Emma.

Léon changes before Emma does. After his law studies in Paris, he has lost the shyness of a provincial clerk and returns to Rouen scorning everything that was not the elegance of the capital. The night before, he followed the couple from afar to the inn and spent the night meditating on a plan. The narrator names the mechanism before staging it:

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