Chapter summary
With Emma Bovary dead, Charles Bovary has to be dragged out of the room, and Homais returns to his affairs, including spreading the word that Emma took arsenic thinking it was sugar; it is the priest who convinces Charles to decide the burial, and he writes that he wants her buried in her wedding dress, white shoes, and a wreath, in three coffins, of oak, mahogany, and lead. During two nights of wake, Homais and Abbé Bournisien discuss religion and celibacy without listening to each other and fall asleep before the body, which the widow Bovary, Félicité, and the innkeeper's wife dress for the burial, and Homais cuts with scissors the lock of hair that Charles asks for. The workmen fit the oak coffin inside the other two, and uncle Rouault arrives and faints in the square when he sees the black cloth.
Analysis
Charles writes the order for the burial because he cannot say it: he sobs in the study and writes the request in a commanding tone, wedding dress, white shoes, three coffins, green velvet, and that no one should tell him anything. When Homais objects to the velvet, he throws him out: you did not like her. Homais speaks of expense and the priest of submission to God, and Charles, who curses, refuses everything except what he himself wrote.
Charles falls into a mourning without form (repeated sentences, an empty gaze); Homais returns to work the same day, because the pharmacy and the newspaper do not stop for the death of someone else. Beside the body, at night, the pharmacist and the priest argue about religion, citing authorities against each other without listening, each armed with his own bookshelf. The first exchange already shows the method of the two:
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