church, the cemetery, the market place, Monsieur Homais’ pharmacy, the Lion d’Or. The “river” behind Madame Delamare’s garden has shrunk to a feeble stream, more of a ditch or drain, really, and the real river runs past the village, not through it. But there are the outlying meadows, the poplars, the long single street, which is an extended place in the novel; “Rodolphe’s château” is pointed out on a nearby road, and along the river there are many cow-crossings made of old planks reminiscent of the one Emma used, at the foot of her garden, going by the wet-nurse’s house to meet her lover. In the courtyard of the Hôtel de Rouen, identified by a marker as the “Lion d’Or,” a suggestible person can believe himself to be in the setting of Madame Bovary.
Human suggestibility, obviously, has magnified and multiplied correspondences in a way no doubt undreamed of by Flaubert. The fame of the novel caused dubious and even false claimants to be presented or present themselves as the genuine originals. A notary in the Oise named Louis Bottais (or Léon Bottet; there is some confusion) pretended to have served as the model for Léon; he was unmasked as an impostor. The progressive pharmacist at Ry, toward the end of the century, modeled himself on Monsieur Homais, who he insisted had been drawn from his father—as though this were reason for family pride.
The net has been cast wider. A second—or third—model for Emma has been found in the wife of Flaubert’s friend the sculptor Pradier, who made the pretty ladies, Lille and Strasbourg, that sit on pedestals like halted patriotic floats on the Place de la Concorde. A “memoir” of this woman, written out in an illiterate script by her confidante, a carpenter’s wife, had fallen into Flaubert’s hands. Did he use it? Louise Pradier was good-looking, silly, extremely unfaithful to her husband, and up to her neck in debt. In the “memoir,” where she is called “Ludovica,” she is being driven to suicide by her debts and adulterous anxieties; her husband, like Charles Bovary, dies of the shock dealt him by the discovery of his wife’s infidelities and the bills she had run up. In reality, Pradier long outlived his separation from Louise, and Louise herself, though she may have talked of it, never threw herself in the Seine. She was living when Madame Bovary came out and she and her Bohemian friends may have been persuaded, whatever the truth was, that she had “sat for” Flaubert.
This endless conjecturing on the part of the public is the price paid by the realistic novelist for “writing about what he knows.” With Salammbô and The Temptation of Saint Anthony, there was no occasion for Flaubert to issue denials. But Madame Bovary was fraught with embarrassment for its author, who foresaw, while still writing it, the offense he was going to give his neighbors by the heavy dosage of Norman “local color” he had put in. And as often happens, whatever he did to change, combine, disguise, invent, probably made matters worse, purely fictive episodes being taken as the literal truth.
There may also have been correspondences with reality invisible to ordinary provincial readers but suspiciously visible to his immediate family: “I know where you got that!” an author’s relations cry, in amusement or reproach. Take the following, as a guess. Dr. Delamare studied under Flaubert’s father, a well-known surgeon, at the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen; whether he was a poor student or not is uncertain. In any case, being dead, he could not be hurt by the book. But there was someone else who conceivably could be: Flaubert’s brother, Achille, also a doctor, highly regarded in local medical circles. He operated on their father; gangrene developed, and Dr. Flaubert died. It is thought that he may have had a diabetic condition, always dangerous for a surgical patient. In any case, the outcome was fatal. A little later, Flaubert’s sister Caroline died of
Human suggestibility, obviously, has magnified and multiplied correspondences in a way no doubt undreamed of by Flaubert. The fame of the novel caused dubious and even false claimants to be presented or present themselves as the genuine originals. A notary in the Oise named Louis Bottais (or Léon Bottet; there is some confusion) pretended to have served as the model for Léon; he was unmasked as an impostor. The progressive pharmacist at Ry, toward the end of the century, modeled himself on Monsieur Homais, who he insisted had been drawn from his father—as though this were reason for family pride.
The net has been cast wider. A second—or third—model for Emma has been found in the wife of Flaubert’s friend the sculptor Pradier, who made the pretty ladies, Lille and Strasbourg, that sit on pedestals like halted patriotic floats on the Place de la Concorde. A “memoir” of this woman, written out in an illiterate script by her confidante, a carpenter’s wife, had fallen into Flaubert’s hands. Did he use it? Louise Pradier was good-looking, silly, extremely unfaithful to her husband, and up to her neck in debt. In the “memoir,” where she is called “Ludovica,” she is being driven to suicide by her debts and adulterous anxieties; her husband, like Charles Bovary, dies of the shock dealt him by the discovery of his wife’s infidelities and the bills she had run up. In reality, Pradier long outlived his separation from Louise, and Louise herself, though she may have talked of it, never threw herself in the Seine. She was living when Madame Bovary came out and she and her Bohemian friends may have been persuaded, whatever the truth was, that she had “sat for” Flaubert.
This endless conjecturing on the part of the public is the price paid by the realistic novelist for “writing about what he knows.” With Salammbô and The Temptation of Saint Anthony, there was no occasion for Flaubert to issue denials. But Madame Bovary was fraught with embarrassment for its author, who foresaw, while still writing it, the offense he was going to give his neighbors by the heavy dosage of Norman “local color” he had put in. And as often happens, whatever he did to change, combine, disguise, invent, probably made matters worse, purely fictive episodes being taken as the literal truth.
There may also have been correspondences with reality invisible to ordinary provincial readers but suspiciously visible to his immediate family: “I know where you got that!” an author’s relations cry, in amusement or reproach. Take the following, as a guess. Dr. Delamare studied under Flaubert’s father, a well-known surgeon, at the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen; whether he was a poor student or not is uncertain. In any case, being dead, he could not be hurt by the book. But there was someone else who conceivably could be: Flaubert’s brother, Achille, also a doctor, highly regarded in local medical circles. He operated on their father; gangrene developed, and Dr. Flaubert died. It is thought that he may have had a diabetic condition, always dangerous for a surgical patient. In any case, the outcome was fatal. A little later, Flaubert’s sister Caroline died of
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