Discussion Questions

The narrator examines Charles's cap piece by piece and says that its "mute ugliness" has "depths of expression," like the face of an imbecile. Why does the novel open with an object that seems to say more than the boy who wears it?

Charles imagines that marriage to the widow chosen by his mother will make him freer, but it is the woman who begins to command him. What does this sequence show about how Charles enters each phase of life and about who decides for him?

The narrator says that Charles "did not seek to ask himself" why he went to the Bertaux with pleasure, and that, if he thought about it, he would attribute his zeal to the seriousness of the case. What does a desire mean when it refuses to be named, and who notices it before Charles himself?

When the first wife's advertised fortune turns out to be a lie, the marriage collapses and she dies soon after. What does the narrator suggest about what held that marriage together, and how does this compare with what brings Charles back to the Bertaux?

On a hot afternoon, with the house empty, Emma serves the liqueur, barely pours any into her own glass, laughs at not feeling anything, and licks the bottom of his glass, while Charles watches her in silence. Who leads this scene, and what does it show about the desire of each of the two?

Emma would have preferred to marry "at midnight, by torchlight," and her father did not understand that idea at all. What does this desire reveal about what she expects from marriage, and why does the narrator record it only in passing, in the middle of everyone else's preparations?

The confectioner from Yvetot brings a cardboard temple with colonnades, a tower of cake and, at the top, a Cupid on a chocolate swing, and the guests cry out in admiration. What does this piece say about the idea of love that circulates in marriage, and why does the narrator describe it floor by floor?

The next day, the narrator says that it is Charles who would have taken himself for the "virgin of the day before," while the bride lets nothing show. What does this inversion reveal about the two of them, and why does the scene reach us through the eyes of the guests?

In the marriage bedroom, Charles, noticing that Emma looks at the bouquet of orange blossoms of his first wife, takes it to the attic, and Emma wonders what they would do with hers "if by chance she should die." Why does the novel link marriage and death through an object, and why is it Emma who makes this link?

Emma concludes that she was wrong to think herself in love, because the happiness that should have been born of love did not come, and she begins to seek what is meant "exactly" by happiness, passion and intoxication, words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books. Does the mistake lie in the marriage, in Emma, or in the words?

At the convent, Emma loved the church for its flowers and music for the words of its songs, and invented small sins to stay longer kneeling in the confessional. Is this devotion or appetite? What changes in the reading of the scene if the answer is appetite?

Emma seeks "emotions, not landscapes," and rejects as useless everything that does not serve the immediate consumption of her heart. What kind of observer of the world does that produce, and what does she fail to see?

Charles's conversation is "flat as a street sidewalk," and everyone's ideas parade through it "without arousing emotion, laughter or daydreaming." Is this monotony in Charles, in Emma, or in what she expects from a conversation?

The narrator compares Emma's life to an attic whose little window faces north, where boredom, "a silent spider," spins its web in every corner of the heart. Why is the narrator's image harder than any complaint Emma makes aloud?

Emma spends the ball before old portraits, iced champagne, and pomegranates and pineapples she had never seen, and then waltzes, although she does not know how to waltz, with a man she barely knows. In what sense does the ball seduce her more through things than through people?

After the ball, Emma feels that the trip has opened "a hole" in her life, like the great crevasses that a storm opens in the mountains in a single night. What had to be missing from this life for a single night to be enough to tear it apart?

Emma smells the lining of the cigar case, imagines whose it might have been, and invents a mistress who would have embroidered it, into whose stitches "each stitch of the needle" would have fixed a hope or a memory. What does she do when she reads an entire life into an object, and how is that like the way she reads novels?

Amid the bustle of the move, Emma throws the bridal bouquet into the fire and watches it burn, and the paper corollas rise up the chimney "like black butterflies." What does this gesture, made without a word, mean, and why does the narrator place it precisely when the couple is about to leave?

The narrator walks through Yonville from the bridge to the church and to the town hall shaped like a Greek temple, and says that what most draws the eye is Homais's pharmacy, with his name in gold on the sign and again on the laboratory door. What order of values does this route reveal, and what is left in it for the church?

As soon as the abbé leaves the kitchen of the Golden Lion, after politely refusing the drink offered him, Homais calls that refusal "hypocrisy" and speaks of priests who drink in secret. What does the scene suggest about who holds the word in Yonville, and why does the priest appear only in passing while the pharmacist holds forth?

During dinner, Emma and Léon discover identical tastes: the sunset at the seaside, the lakes and waterfalls of Switzerland, the books read by the fireside. Are they discovering each other or reciting the same catalogue? What changes in the scene depending on the answer?

Going to sleep in the new house, Emma reasons that, "since the part already lived had been bad," the part left for her to live "would surely be better." What is logical and what is illusion in this reasoning, and what has the reader already seen in the earlier places that she seems to ignore?

Emma wanted a son because, she thinks, "A man, at least, is free," and she faints on learning that a girl was born. The text leaves open whether this is a protest against the condition of women or just another fantasy that reality contradicts: which elements of the chapter support each reading?

Emma chooses the daughter's name because she heard the marquise, at the ball, call a young woman by it. What does a name taken from a party the girl will never attend reveal about the place Emma reserves for her daughter in her own story?

Emma believes that love "had to arise suddenly, with great tumult and flashes," like a storm falling on life. If so, what does she do with what she feels for Léon, which grows slowly, amid card games, borrowed books and small favors?

Léon writes declarations that he tears up afterward and gives up when Charles invites him to go out with him, while Emma does not ask herself whether she loves him. What does each of the two avoid by not saying anything, and what does the neighborhood gain by speaking for them?

The narrator gives Emma's virtue, among other reasons, the pride of being able to say "I am virtuous" and of looking at herself in the mirror in poses of resignation, while behind her stand anger and greed. A virtue made for the mirror is still virtue, but who is its audience?

The narrator says that domestic mediocrity incited Emma to luxurious fantasies, and matrimonial tenderness to adulterous desires. Why does Charles's tenderness produce in her the opposite of what one would expect, and what does this say about what she wants from a husband?

Emma goes to church looking for something she cannot name, and the priest, busy with the catechism boys, calls himself a "doctor of souls" and attributes her discomfort to digestion. What does she ask for without managing to say it, and what prevents the priest from hearing her: distraction, incompetence or his own office?

After pushing Berthe, who falls and cuts her cheek, Emma tells Charles that the girl fell playing and, watching over her sleep, thinks: "how ugly this child is!" What does the sentence reveal about Emma, and what does the narrator gain by recording the thought without condemning it?

After Léon leaves, Emma recreates him more and more beautiful and curses herself for not having loved him, though she had avoided him while he was within reach. Why does absence make a desire grow that presence did not feed, and what does this say about what Emma truly desires?

Before exchanging a word with Emma, Rodolphe compares her to a carp longing for water "on a kitchen table" and decides she will be his. What kind of reader of people is Rodolphe, and where does his image hit the mark about Emma, and where does it miss?

The councillor's speech and the announcement of the prizes for cattle and fertilizer, rising from the platform, and Rodolphe's courtship, in the room above, alternate sentence by sentence. What happens to words of love when they are heard beside praise of the king and fertilizer prizes, and who benefits from that effect, Rodolphe or Emma?

The servant Catherine Leroux climbs onto the platform without understanding why she is being pushed, receives the medal for fifty-four years of service, and says she will give it to the priest so he can have masses said. What does the narrator do with this figure in the middle of the show's rhetoric, and what does she have that neither the councillor nor Rodolphe have?

Rodolphe reasons that if Emma loved him from the first day, "she must love me even more," and concludes: "let us go on!" Why does the narrator show his calculation first and only afterward the seductive speech, and what does Emma lose by hearing only the second layer?

After giving in, Emma repeats before the mirror "I have a lover! A lover!", savoring the idea "as if it were the arrival of a new puberty." To whom is she addressing this sentence: to Rodolphe, to herself, or to the heroines of the novels she has read?

The narrator compares Emma's great love to the water of a river that its own bed absorbs, "uncovering the mud." Did the love diminish because Rodolphe changed, because Emma expected too much, or because this is how love ends? Which elements of the chapter support each answer?

After counting the illusions she spent "in maidenhood, in marriage, and in love," Emma asks who makes her so unhappy and looks around her: a clear day, the fire lit, the daughter laughing on the hay. What does the scene suggest about the cause of her unhappiness?

Homais convinces Hippolyte through vanity ("Are you not a man, for heaven's sake?") and through the promise that it will cost him no money, and the narrator compares Charles, at the moment of the incision, to Ambroise Paré, Dupuytren, and Gensoul. What does the grandiose comparison do to the operation, and to the one who conducts it?

Faced with Charles in a panic, Emma feels a humiliation of her own: the one "of having imagined that such a man could have any value." Who is responsible for that hope having existed, and what does the fact that she bet on the operation say about what she expects from her husband?

Rodolphe, who has already heard identical sentences from other women, only vaguely believes in the naivety of Emma's, and the narrator answers that the human word is "like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes for dancing bears, when what we want is to move the stars to pity." Whom does this sentence judge: Rodolphe, and also the narrator himself, who has only words too?

Emma orders from Lheureux a cloak, a trunk, and a sleeping bag for the escape, while Rodolphe, walking back across the prairie, decides that he will not leave. Why does the narrator hand the reader his decision before Emma knows it, and what does this change in the reading of her preparations?

Rodolphe writes the letter of rupture and chooses "Fate is to blame!", a phrase that, he himself thinks, "always produces an effect." If the word is effective and at the same time false, what does it mean that it works on Emma and on whoever reads it?

In the attic, Emma rereads the letter and thinks: "Why not end it all? Who would stop her?" and concludes that she is free. Only Charles's cry calls her back: what does the text suggest by placing the interruption in the hands of the husband she despises?

Kneeling at the Gothic prie-dieu, Emma addresses the Lord with "the same words of tenderness" she murmured to her lover, and rises with "a vague feeling of an immense deception." What stays the same when the object of love changes, and why does devotion end this way?

The abbé asks the bishop's bookseller for a work "intended for a lady who was full of grace," and manuals and pious novels arrive, which Emma reads in a hurry and without profit. What does the text suggest when it entrusts Emma's spiritual cure to someone who does not know what she is suffering from?

In the opera, Emma thinks she could have given her life to "some great and steadfast heart," but soon concludes that this happiness was "a lie invented to cause the despair of all desire." Which of the two Emmas is right, the one who laments or the one who distrusts, and why does the narrator leave the two thoughts side by side?

Charles brings Léon to the box and, at the end, insists that Emma stay in Rouen, "as long as you have the slightest impression that it may do you good." What effect does it have to place in Charles's hands, without his noticing, what Emma now desires?

When Emma says it is not decent to get into the cab, Léon answers: "It is common practice in Paris!", and the narrator says that this word, "as an irresistible argument," decided her. What kind of argument is this, and why does a place suffice to decide a moral question?

The narrator never shows what happens inside the cab, only the carriage "more closed than a tomb and shaken like a ship" and a hand that throws torn papers through the curtain. What is gained by leaving the scene off-screen, and what does the reader do with the gap?

When Charles, in tears, embraces her to kiss her, Emma is seized by "the memory of the other" and passes her hand over her face. What effect does it have that the narrator leaves this other unnamed, and why does the mourning husband's kiss bring him back?

Lheureux returns several times, always with a new pretext, "insinuating to Emma some advice about the power of attorney," and says that then "we could do some little deals," without Emma understanding. Why does the trap arrive as kindness and attention, and what does Emma learn from this way of getting close?

On the way back from the boat ride, the boatman mentions a reveler whom they called "Adolphe…, Dodolphe… I think," and Emma shivers. Why does a name said by halves, by a stranger, weigh more than any memory Emma could tell Léon?

Emma gives Léon instructions so precise about the double envelope that he is amazed at her "amorous cunning." What does the speed with which she masters the technique of secrecy say about Emma, and about what Léon does not yet know of her?

To have a license to go to Rouen every week, Emma feigns a passion for the piano and argues that lessons "are only worthwhile if followed." What irony is there in the fact that the alibi's argument also serves as the rule for the adultery itself?

After Emma stops playing, it is Charles who again proposes the lessons and who gives her permission to go to town. What part of Emma's secret depends on the goodwill of her husband, and what does this say about his blindness: naivety, generosity, or convenience?

From above, Rouen seems to Emma a Babylon, as if the "hundred and twenty thousand souls who throbbed there" sent her the vapor of the passions she attributed to them. What does distance do to the city, and what does the Thursday routine do to love?

Léon copies a sonnet from an album because Emma asks him for verses, and the narrator says that it was he who "behaved as if he were a mistress." What does the reversal of roles show about what Emma seeks in a lover, and about what Léon agrees to be?

The narrator says that Emma "now found in adultery all the insipidity of marriage." If the problem was not the husband, what was it, and what does this say about what she sought in changing men?

In the letters to Léon, Emma sees "another man, a phantom constructed from her most ardent memories, her most beautiful readings, her strongest desires." If the addressee is already a phantom, to whom is she writing, and what role remains for the flesh-and-blood Léon?

During the seizure, Emma's life is exposed "down to its most intimate corners," "like a corpse undergoing an autopsy," to the gaze of three men. What does the narrator suggest by describing the loss of the goods as a violation of the body, and why does this happen before the bailiff and two witnesses?

When she refuses the notary, who knew of the debt because he was secretly tied to Lheureux, Emma says: "I am to be pitied, but not sold!" What does the sentence refuse and what does it accept, and what does the text gain by giving Emma this dignity precisely in front of the one who profits from her distress?

The narrator says of Rodolphe: "He was not lying." If he had the money, he would have given it, and still the narrator calls the request for money "the coldest and most devastating of all the storms that can fall upon love." If he speaks the truth, of which Emma accuses him, what does the money reveal between them that the words of love had concealed?

In the last rites, the priest anoints the eyes that coveted, the nostrils eager for amorous perfumes, the mouth that opened to lies, the hands and the feet so swift. Is this inventory of the body a judgment, a compassion, or a farewell?

Beside Emma's body, Homais and the abbé argue, and each recommends his own bookshelf to the other: "Read Voltaire!", "Read the Letters of Some Portuguese Jews!" If neither listens to the other, why does the argument take place before the corpse, and what does the body do in the scene?

Charles writes that he wants Emma buried in her wedding dress, white shoes, and a wreath, in three coffins, of oak, of mahogany, and of lead, and people marvel at his "romantic ideas." What does this wish say about what Charles knows and does not know about Emma, and what does the novel do with her first dress?

In the middle of the church, an iron-tipped stick strikes the flagstones, and the narrator explains: "It was Hippolyte, the boy from the Golden Lion. He had put on his new leg." What does this intrusion take from or give to the funeral, and who in the church, besides the reader, knows where that leg came from?

The noise of the coffin wood struck by the stones is described as "the reverberation of eternity," with a "seems to us" that includes the reader. What does it mean to give eternity to the sound of earth on a coffin, and why does the narrator make this concession to the one reading?

Charles meets Rodolphe, says he bears him no ill will and adds: "It was the fault of fate!", and the narrator observes that Rodolphe, "who had engineered that fate," found the phrase too indulgent. The same word serves the one who deceives and the one who forgives: what does this say about the word and about the two men?

The novel ends with a sentence about Homais: "He has just received the Legion of Honor." It comes after the deaths of Emma and Charles and after the spinning factory where Berthe is put to work. What judgment on the world does the book deliver by giving the last sentence to this man?

If Emma had married a man equal to the romantic vocabulary she carried, would the boredom have disappeared, or would the vocabulary always demand more than any real marriage can give?

The narrator never condemns Charles directly; he only shows him. To what extent is this objectivity of free indirect style itself a judgment, all the crueler for not admitting it?

If Léon had stayed in Yonville instead of leaving for Paris, would he have become, in time, a Rodolphe? Chapter 5 already shows Léon finding Emma "so virtuous and unapproachable" that he gives up all hope, the same rhetorical move any seducer makes to justify waiting.

Why does Flaubert place Catherine Leroux just after Rodolphe falls silent and the fingers of the two of them intertwine, and not at another point in the show?

Why does Emma read in Charles's failure the confirmation of a mediocrity "already verified dozens of times," instead of recognizing, in Rodolphe's choice, an equivalent mediocrity in her own capacity to judge people, which the thwarted escape plan will expose soon afterward?

What changes structurally between Emma's fantasy about Rodolphe (ch. 9) and her fantasy about Lagardy (ch. 15), given that both are born from the same appetite? Has she learned something from the interval, or has she only changed object?

If the problem is neither Charles nor Léon, but the structure of Emma's desire (as Part I already suggested), what would happen if she came to live with an "ideal lover"? Chapter 6 answers in advance: she already imagines this lover, and the imagined one is more vivid, and more secure, than any real man she has had.

Why does the novel make the debt grow at exactly the same pace as the boredom? Is it a coincidence of plot, or is Flaubert saying something about the economy of romanticism itself, which always needs more input (clothes, a rug, a trip) to produce the same dose of sensation?

If the axis is calculation against commitment, where does Emma stand? She also calculates (she uses Léon, tries to use Rodolphe, seeks Guillaumin and Binet with her own distress), but she calculates badly and too late, always after she has already truly committed herself to desire. It is the worst possible combination: real emotional commitment, incompetent social calculation.

The epitaph that Homais tries to compose for Emma's tomb (ch. XI) is a comedy in itself: he wants "Sta viator" (Stop, traveler), cannot complete the classical phrase, and the solution he adopts, "Amabilem conjugem calcas," literally means "you tread upon a lovable wife." The decorative erudition of Homais fails exactly at the moment he tries to say something serious, and no one notices.