Who He Is
Hippolyte Tautain, stable boy at the Golden Lion inn in Yonville, the man with the club foot operated on by Charles Bovary in Chapter 11 of Part II.
Trajectory
In Chapter 11 of Part II Homais convinces Charles to operate on him for the prestige, and attacks Hippolyte's own vanity, who yields only to the village's conspiracy and because it costs him no money.
Are you not a man, for heaven's sake? What would you do if you had to serve in the army and fight for your country?
The narrator compares the moment of the incision to historic surgeons.
Neither Ambroise Paré, applying for the first time since Celsus, after fifteen centuries, the immediate ligature of an artery, nor Dupuytren, when about to open an abscess through a thick layer of brain, nor Gensoul, when he performed the first removal of the upper jaw, probably felt their hearts pound so hard
Homais writes the article for the newspaper the same night, which gives the patient his name, surname, and trade.
operated on a crippled foot of Hippolyte Tautain, stable boy for twenty-five years at the Golden Lion hotel
Five days later the crisis begins, the leg gangrenes, and Canivet amputates the thigh; during the amputation, a piercing scream crosses the silence of the village and reaches the Bovarys' house. In Chapter 12 of Part II Emma Bovary offers him a wooden leg, the order for which passes through Lheureux and which Charles pays for; Hippolyte, without the courage to wear such a handsome leg every day, asks for a simpler one, and goes back to walking through the village.
whenever Charles heard from afar the dry knock of his wooden leg on the pavement, he would hurry to take another path
In Part III he still carries Emma's suitcases with the artificial leg (Chapter 2) and, on the night of the poisoning, goes to Neufchâtel when Charles writes to Dr. Canivet (Chapter 8). In Chapter 10 of Part III he appears at Emma's funeral mass.
It was Hippolyte, the young man from the Golden Lion. He had put on his new leg.
Themes Embodied
In Chapters 9 to 15 of Part II, the surgery can be read as the experiment in which Charles's mediocrity, which Emma already knew in secret, becomes a fact recorded in a newspaper and discussed in the square. Homais comes out of the disaster unharmed.
Relationships
- Charles Bovary: the doctor who operates on him, pays for the wooden leg, and then flees the sound of it in the street.
- Homais: who promotes the operation and writes the article.
- Emma Bovary: who offers him the wooden leg, and to whose funeral he goes with the new leg.
- Lheureux: who takes charge of the order for the wooden leg.
- Symbol linked to him: Yonville.