Rodolphe Boulanger is Emma's first lover: a landowner of thirty-four, owner of the castle of La Huchette, near Yonville, an experienced seducer who decides to conquer her right after meeting her and who abandons her when she wants to run away with him.
He enters in chapter 7 of Part II, bringing Charles a peasant to be bled. On the way back, he already calculates: he imagines that Emma longs for love "as a carp longs for water," and he plans visits and gifts. At the agricultural show, between the official speech and the announcement of the cattle prizes, he speaks to her of an "eternal" morality above that of men and presses her hand. Then he vanishes for six weeks, on purpose, returns, and Emma yields to him on a ride on horseback through the forest.
In time, she becomes for him one among the others: "Emma resembled all his mistresses." When Emma begs him to take her away, Rodolphe agrees, postpones, and, on the "Saturday before" the escape set for 4 September, decides not to go, telling himself that he cannot take on "the responsibility of a child." He writes the letter of rupture testing sentences, chooses "Fate is to blame!" because it seems to him to have a guaranteed effect, and drips a drop of water on the ink to imitate a tear. In Part III, when the ruined Emma asks him for three thousand francs, he answers "I do not have them!"
The novel does not make him a simple villain. Emma recognizes Rodolphe's vocabulary because it is already hers, and the word fate, which served him to absolve himself in the letter, returns on Charles's lips, who knew only the letter.