Passage commentary Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

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Nathalie Hitimana

English IBS A1

Passage commentary

Madame Bovary,

 by Gustave Flaubert

“He was so happy and had not a single care in the world. A meal together, and evening walk along the road, the way she put her hand up to her hair, the sigh of the straw hat hanging from a window latch, along with all the other little things that Charles has never even dreamed of, now made up the circle of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, close together on the pillow he gazed at the sunlight playing in the golden down on her cheeks, half hidden by the scalloped edges of her bonnet. So very close, her eyes seemed even bigger, especially when she first awoke and her eyelids fluttered into life. Black in the shadows, and deep blue in full daylight, as if the colors were floating layer upon layer, thickest in the depths, coming clear and bright towards the surface. His eye drifted away into the deep, and there he saw himself in miniature, head and shoulder, with his nightcap on his head and his shirt unbuttoned. He would get up. She would go to the window to watch him leaving; and she would lean on the sill, between the two pots of geraniums, in her dressing gown, which was wrapped loose about her. Charles, down bellow, was buckling his spurs, one foot on the mounting-block; and she would carry on talking to him from above, biting a piece from a flower on a leaf, blowing it down to him, and it glided, it floated, it turned half circles in the air like a bird, catching, before it fell to earth, in the tangled mane of the old white mare, standing still at the door. Charles, from his horse, blew her a kiss; she waved to him, she closed the window, he was gone. And so he went, along the open road, unrolling in an endless dusty ribbon, down sunken lanes curtained over with trees on footpaths where the corn grew knee-high, with the sun upon his shoulders and the morning air in his lungs, his heart filled with the night’s  enjoyments, tranquil the spirit and contended the flesh, he went along, ruminating over his happiness, like those who, after a meal, still relish the taste of the truffles.”   (Page 25-26)

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        Gustave Flauberts’ novel Madame Bovary is very descriptive, each event and character is described with so much detail. This passage taken from page 25  of the book, shows how Flaubert uses color, movement and nature imagery to depict Charles’s happiness. This passage contradicts to many events that come after in the novel, Emma seems to be happy in this passage because  she is not complaining or wishing she was somewhere else. Flaubert uses the word “happy” to describe how Charles is feeling; Charles has just gotten married to a woman he loves after being left a widow ...

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