What It Is
A cigar case edged in green silk, with a coat of arms in the center, which Charles Bovary finds fallen on the road, between the horse's legs, on the return from the ball at La Vaubyessard. Emma Bovary throws it to the back of the cupboard and keeps it. The book does not say how it ended up on the road or whose it was: in Part I, Chapter 9, ownership is only a question Emma asks, wondering whether it belonged to the Viscount and imagining it was a gift from one of his mistresses; in Part II, Chapter 12, when recording a second cigar box, the narration calls it "the Viscount's." In Part I, Chapter 8, it can be read as the novel's first fetish object, the first physical fragment of a life that is not her own, which she comes to inhabit by proxy; and in Part I, Chapter 9 the Viscount gives her desire a face.
Where It Appears
In Part I, Chapter 8 Charles finds it on the road. In Part I, Chapter 9 Emma opens it alone, smells the lining, wonders whose it might be, and invents the owner's story.
Un souffle d’amour avait passé parmi les mailles du canevas; chaque coup d’aiguille avait fixé là une espérance ou un souvenir, et tous ces fils de soie entrelacés n’étaient que la continuité de la même passion silencieuse, a breath of love had passed through the meshes of the canvas; each stitch of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and all those intertwined silk threads were only the continuation of the same silent passion.
In Part II, Chapter 12 it does not reappear, but it serves as a model: among the gifts that Rodolphe Boulanger receives from Emma is a second cigar box, which the text says is identical to the first, recording that Emma still kept the one Charles had found. There are two objects, not one.
a cigar box exactly like the Viscount's, which Charles had once found on the road and which Emma kept with her
In Part III, Chapter 1 the cigar case is not mentioned; it serves here only as a term of comparison: the effect of the scene in the hotel room with Léon is what Part I, Chapter 9 had already rehearsed with the cigar case, the gift that dissolves into manufactured nostalgia.
the past, the future, the reminiscences and the dreams, everything was blended in the sweetness of that ecstasy
What It Means
Two meanings can be drawn from it. The first is the mechanism of the object that substitutes for the absent person: the cigar case, then each lover. The second is the argument against reading Emma as a victim only of the poverty of her world: she builds a complete sentimental biography for the owner of an object she found, without knowing who he is, and the problem appears as an inability to inhabit any real world. The line about silent passion could serve as a caption for desire for objects and desire for people.
It is Charles who finds the cigar case, not Emma: the first object of the life that Emma comes to inhabit by proxy reaches her hands through her husband's.
Relationships
- Default themes: Desire, Dream and fantasy.
- Characters: Emma Bovary, Charles Bovary, Rodolphe Boulanger, who receives the second cigar box.
- Neighboring symbols: La Vaubyessard, from which she departs.