The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
Fantasy becomes furniture, letters, bills, and ruin.
Emma Bovary
A doctor’s wife in provincial France trying to make life match the romance, luxury, and intensity she has learned to desire.
Bertaux
A working farm where a doctor's visit turns into wanting the farmer's daughter.
A boy's first humiliation begins before he can even grasp the rules.
Read →The New Fellow’s Cap
But, whether he had not noticed the trick, or did not dare to attempt it, the “new fellow,” was still holding his cap on his knees even after prayers were over. It was one of those head-gears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton night-cap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile’s face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the manner of a tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone.
Charles cannot even manage what the other boys do without thinking: he keeps the cap in his lap when he should have flung it down, because he has not learned the rules of this room and does not dare guess. The cap itself is the boy. It is stitched together from bits of every kind of hat and settles into being none of them, an object with no single identity, and Flaubert lets its "dumb ugliness" tell us what to expect of the dull, shapeless man Charles will turn out to be. That it is new, its peak still shining, only makes it sadder: someone meant well, and it is still ridiculous.
Charles Bovary marries Emma - and she is already disappointed
Charles thinks he has married happiness. Emma thinks she has married escape. Neither is right.
Charles’s school cap
One badly made hat, and a boy is judged and laughed at before he speaks.
Charles Bovary
A devoted country doctor whose kindness cannot read the suffering inside his own house.
Madame Bovary
The cast, locations, objects of note, core concepts, and selected passages in the Author’s Pen - at your own pace.
The Madame Bovary World, as it plays on your phone
- Meet the people. 28 characters, each with a portrait, who they are and what they want.
- Walk the places. 17 places, each pictured, and what happens there.
- Follow the plot. The turns of the story, in order, so you always know where you are.
- Taste the original. 33 key passages in Gustave Flaubert’s own words, each with a short reading of what it is doing.
- The complete book. Every word, in a reader made for your phone. From any passage, one tap opens the book at that very page.
Step inside Madame Bovary
Free, in your inbox in about a minute: the World and the complete book, on your phone.