What It Is
The closed-curtain carriage in which Emma Bovary and Léon spend hours crossing Rouen and its outskirts aimlessly, in Part III, Chapter 1. The cab appears only in that scene.
Where It Appears
In Part III, Chapter 1 the cab is the end of the escape from the cathedral, where the planned meeting had collided with Emma's prayer and with a tireless guide.
Léon was fleeing, because he had the impression that his love [...] was now going to evaporate
At the church door, while a boy goes to fetch the carriage, Emma hesitates and says it is not proper. Léon decides her with an argument about place, not feeling.
"Why not?" the clerk replied. "It's done all the time in Paris!"
To the coachman, who asks where to, Léon gives no destination at all, and the carriage begins obeying only a voice that, from inside, orders it onward.
"Wherever you like!" Léon replied, pushing Emma into the carriage
It is the city that sees the carriage, from outside.
a carriage with its blinds drawn keeps appearing like this, more closed than a tomb and shaken like a ship
The only sign that comes out from inside, at midday, is also seen from outside: a bare hand and torn papers blowing in the wind. At six o'clock the carriage stops in a lane in the Beauvoisine quarter, and a woman with a lowered veil, whom the text does not name, climbs down.
a bare hand came through the small yellow fabric curtains and threw out pieces of torn paper that scattered in the wind
What It Means
In Part III, Chapter 1, Flaubert never shows what happens inside the cab, only its effect on those who watch from outside, and the image can be read as a summary of the chapter: Emma's love always needs an enclosed space, in motion, without a fixed address. The wandering cab can be set beside the fixed routine of the Thursdays in Part III, Chapter 5 (same stagecoach, same hairdresser, same route) as the same pattern at two scales: Emma does not know how to inhabit a place, she only crosses it in search of sensation.
Relationships
- Default themes: Desire.
- Characters: Emma Bovary, Léon.
- Neighboring symbols: Yonville, the fixed place from which Emma leaves for Rouen every Thursday.