At the agricultural show, in chapter 8 of Part II, Rodolphe courts Emma in the council room of the Town Hall while, outside, the councillor Lieuvain gives a speech and the jury announces the livestock prizes. The scene alternates the speeches, and love sounds as conventional as the official discourses.
Yonville dresses up for the festivities, the National Guard and the firemen parade, and Homais takes part in the ceremony as a member of the advisory committee. Rodolphe takes Emma up to the first floor of the Town Hall, to an empty room, to watch from above. While Lieuvain praises agriculture and duty, Rodolphe speaks of two moralities: the conventional one, that of men, and "the other, the eternal one, which surrounds everything and rises above everything." Just after the announcement of the prize for the swine breed, he squeezes her hand and feels it "like a captive turtledove trying to take flight again."
At the moment their fingers intertwine, the name of Catherine Leroux is announced, an old servant awarded "for fifty-four years of service on the same farm" with a silver medal worth twenty-five francs. She goes up without understanding why she is being pushed, and says she will give the medal to the prior, so that he will have masses said for her. Homais, beside them, exclaims "What fanaticism!" Two days later, he publishes an enthusiastic article about the event in Le Fanal de Rouen.
The montage of the scene proves through form what the novel sustains: Emma has no vocabulary for her own desire beyond what the novels gave her, and that vocabulary serves equally well for calculated seduction. Set beside the inflated rhetoric of love and country, the servant's unstaged virtue, half a century of work, is worth twenty-five francs and a remark of contempt.