FLAUBERT'S "MYSTERY PLAY": A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MADAME BOVARY

Renascence, Winter 2005 by Rogers, Peter S

As for the community of Yonville, opinions vary about the parish priest. Homais thinks that one should never consult priests and that they should be bled monthly. The pharmacist believes that Bournisien is uncivil, whereas the innkeeper Madame Lefrançois admires her pastor for having once helped the farmers. Bournisien has not alienated Emma; she turns to him for guidance.

Emma had once spoken to her maid Félicité about her troubled soul. Instead of following the servant's advice to talk to her husband, suddenly, on an April day, she takes the path to church to seek counsel from her pastor. However, children called in for catechism distract him during their conversation. So Emma returns home. Her daughter would like to come near her, but Emma wants to be left alone and pushes the child away, a gesture that links this scene to Emma's visit with the curé. The mother's rejection of her child entails another story that the pharmacist Homais relates about the dangers besetting children. Emma's search for spiritual enlightenment is thus intertwined with the experiences of children who either seek attention or who, like her daughter - and herself - are ignored by those whose words or attention they seek for healing their spiritual or affective wounds. The different paths that punctuate the priest's words or the narrator's description of Emma's search are closely bound together through Flaubert's recourse to religious language in its many facets and to his manipulation of time.

The episode opens with a description of nature and presents Emma at her window, a place which substitutes for theatre in the provinces. She has been observing her gardener Lestiboudois trim the boxwood and then she hears the ringing of the Angelus, the repeated celebration of the Incarnation: "Behold the Handmaid of the Eord. Be it done unto me according to thy word." The bell's toll reminds Emma of her convent days, and the images she recalls appropriately suggest a vision of the Virgin Mary, not unrelated to the dogma of the Assumption. Then, suddenly, Emma leaves home, for "without thinking about it, she took the path to the church" ("et ce fut sans en avoir conscience qu'elle s'achemina vers l'eglise" [143]). By inscribing the word path (chemin) in a verbal form (s'achemina), Flaubert prepares Father Bournisien's own statement about paths to the Lord.

On the way to church, Emma meets Lestiboudois who has just rung the bell and who now returns to his function as gardener. Once at the gate, she encounters a young boy and asks him about the whereabouts of the priest. His answer has a messianic ring to it: "He is going to come" ("Il va venir" [144]). Yet, when Father Bournisien does stumble out of the rectory, before he notices Emma standing by, he kicks a catechism book and complains, "No respect for anything" (126). Ironically, he himself has just shown disdain for this collection of sacred truths, which he then stuffs into his pocket.

An earlier figure of the young boy at the gate was played by the guide who would lead Charles to Monsieur Rouault who had broken his leg celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany. It was decided that a child would "be sent out to meet him, to show him the way to the farm and open the field gates" (14). When Charles does finally encounter this guide, the young man asks whether he is the doctor. In an early draft, the boy follows up Charles's unreported answer with words about his own expectations: "It has been quite some time that I have been hoping for you ..." ("Il y a joliment longtemps, que je suis à vous esperer ..." [sic] [Suffel 221, 28]). Waiting is a matter of hope. A conversation ensues or, rather, Charles listens to the "discourses" of the youngster ("L'officier de santé, chemin faisant, comprit aux discours de son guide que M. Rouault devait être un cultivateur des plus aisés" [70, emphasis added]). Besides writing the word in the plural, Flaubert reinforces the sense of the discourse when he writes that it is "along the way" or, literally, "way making" ("chemin faisant") that Charles understands the guide's words. The style of the sentence emphasizes the path taken since Flaubert places the adverb between the subject and the verb. Flaubert thus closely links the health officer to the way and to the understanding of particular discourses. And by listening to the guide sent to meet him and to show him the way by opening all barriers, Charles is closely allied to the prophet John the Baptist who runs ahead of him. We might recall the words of the Gospel of St. John: