Great Paper: "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert ~A Romance Destiny~

Great Paper: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

~A Romance Destiny~ 

In the earlier half of the story of Madam Bovary, The young character, Emma, is just a sprouting flower bud in the wide fields of life. Wide and colorful, Emma experiences the world with the eyes of a young dream filled youth. Although her days are filled with the rigid structure of catholicism in the early 1700’s, her heart and head are filled with all sorts of romantic fantasies, that drift with her self from day to day. Although you can see in the book how these romanticisms carry on into, and throughout her entire life, it is funny to see that even as a little girl the thoughts of fantasy, dreams, and wishes can be carried so deeply within an individual.  

______________________________________________________________________________________

"When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town to place her in the convent. They stopped at an inn in the St.Gervias quarter, where, at their supper, they used painted plates that set forth the story of Mademoiselle de la Villiere. The explanatory legends, chipped here and there by the scratching of knives, all glorified religion, the tenderness of the heart, and the pomps of court.

Far from being bored at the first at the convent, she took pleasure in the society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, took her down to the chapel, which one entered from the refectory by a long corridor. She played very little during recreation hours, knew her catechism well, and it was always she who answered Monsieur Le Vicaire’s difficult questions. 

Living thus, without ever leaving the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, amid these pale faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she was lulled softly by the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes of the altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the light of the tapers. Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing for the whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill. She went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined, her face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest. The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that reoccur in the sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness. 

In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the Lectures of Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the “Genie du Chrisianisme,” as a recreation. How she listened at first to the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies reechoing through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the shop parlous of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well; She knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs. 

Atoned to clam aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. 

She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions and not landscapes."