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Madame Bovary · Part III

Chapter 6

LoveMarriageMoney and WealthDream and Fantasy

Chapter summary

Homais appears in Rouen at the invitation of Léon, who owed him a return of dinners, and holds him for hours in cafés and on walks while Emma Bovary waits for him at the hotel, furious; the relationship cools, and Léon, pressured by an anonymous letter sent to his mother and by a warning from his employer, begins to see Emma as a risk to his career. At home, Emma lives on goods bought on credit and on new bills (Lheureux passes one of seven hundred francs to Vinçart, who protests it, and exchanges it for four of two hundred and fifty), while boredom with Léon and the phantom of an ideal lover fill her letters. After a night of masks, on Mi-Carême day, she returns to Yonville and finds a summons to pay eight thousand francs within twenty-four hours. When she goes to Lheureux, he denies any extension and shuts the door.

Analysis

Léon moves away out of calculation: an anonymous letter to his mother, the sermon from his employer about the abyss and the harm to his future, the chance to become the first clerk. Emma continues out of habit or corruption, and the end of the chapter comes from debt and not from love: the summons for eight thousand francs arrives after the night of masks in which she fainted, and the text says that, reading the summons, she guessed all of Lheureux's maneuvers and the end of his indulgences.

Homais's scene in Rouen is comic on the surface, but it reveals what the couple has already lost: they can no longer protect their own time together from trivial interruptions. The boredom advances to the point where the narrator himself names what is happening, in the most direct sentence of Part III about what these chapters show:

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