So beautifully written....

In admiration of Frederick Brown:

Flaubert’s last chapters round out a perfectly coherent vision. His heroines? »
suicide and the way she kills herself are of a piece with her desire for some-
thing transcendently fulfilling, which had shaped her character around a des-Q?‘
perate emptiness. Poison suits Emma. Throughout the novel food tends toi‘ 1
sicken her or, on the contrary, to lose all material relevance in her
world. When guests at her wedding feast eat, she sees peasant mouths
stuffed, but when patricians at the Andervilliers chateau gather around a
with victuals piled high amid bouquets of flowers, cut crystal, and
cloches, she sees a beautiful tableau mort. The woman who starves, hating
body, cannot nourish others, least of all the unwanted daughter farmed
to a wet nurse for suckling. Only once does she eat with appetite, and that
the meal she makes of death. “[She] seized the blue jar, tore out the
stuck her hand inside and, bringing out a fistful of arsenic, wolfed down
white powder.” The anorexic gluttony of her last supper prepares one for
incorporeal lust of her farewell. “The priest got up with a crucifix in
whereupon she craned her neck as if to have her thirst quenched and
all that was left of her strength in one last kiss, the most passionate she
ever given, planting her lips on the body of the Man-God.“
*Many years later, answering a questionnaire from Hippolyte Taine about the
 fl
After Emma’s ultimate  Charles’s n grie , an erein s
the conceptual beauty of Madame B01/ary. Forming a circle of incompre-
hension, it begins with Charles the dim-witted country boy mocked by
younger classmates at a Rouen collegiate school and ends with Charles the
mourner bereft of a wife he had never known, whose infidelities, once re-
vealed to him, make her at once more inaccessible and more desirable. As
Emma had always sought reality in romantic communion with paltry stand-
ins for the Man-God, so had poor Charles always sought his own image in
the opaque mirror of his idol’s mind. Especially poignant is Flaubert’s de-
scription of Charles as a young husband peering into Emma’s eyes when
she opens them in the morning.
Mornings lying face-to-face, he’d watch the sunlight play over the golden down
on her cheeks, partly covered by the scallops of her nightcap. Seen from so close,
her eyes loomed large, especially when she fluttered her lids upon awakening.
Black in the shade and dark blue in broad daylight, it’s as if their color were lay-
ered in depth, more opaque toward the back but brightening as it approached
the enameled surface. His own eye got lost in these depths, where he saw him-
self from the shoulders up, a miniature bust with a silk scarf wrapped around his
head and his nightshirt open.
The mineral cave of her inner being sightlessly reflects a tiny, insignificant
votary. Idols don’t see, they reflect, like the “inscrutable Sphinx” in Baude-
laire’s poem “La Beauté,” who fascinates her “docile lovers” with “pure
mirrors that make everything more beautiful.” (In a letter to Baudelaire
about Les Fleurs du mal, Flaubert singled out “La Beauté” for praise.) ‘After
Emma’s death, Charles still loses himself in her eyes. The mirror remains, as
Charles, trying to resuscitate Emma in his very person, strikes poses that
might have won him her approval. “To please her, as if she were still alive,
he embraced her predilections, her ideas. He bought patent leather boots,
he took to wearing white cravats, he slicked his mustache with perfumed
Wax, he signed promissory notes, as she had done. She was corrupting him
from beyond the grave.” Finally each dies in character, she by her own
hand, he passively, of a broken heart, hopelessly entranced by the woman
who visited herself on him like a whirlwind, rendering him unfit for a life
proportionate to his nature.