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Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert · novel, 1857·9 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version9 hrs → 50 sec
  • Charles Bovary's schoolboy debut is public humiliation. The whole class jeers when the new boy garbles his own name into 'Charbovari,' and his elaborate, absurd cap becomes a running joke before he even sits down. Flaubert spends four pages on that cap alone, previewing a man built for mockery.
  • Emma's fantasies outrun any man in the room. At the agricultural fair, mid-seduction by Rodolphe, she drifts into memories of waltzing with a Viscount at Vaubyessard and catches herself imagining Leon at the coach window, all while Rodolphe's hand is still on hers. Three men occupy her attention in one paragraph; none of them is Charles.
  • A famous seduction gets cut with manure prices. Flaubert intercuts Rodolphe's declarations of destiny, 'I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!', with the councillor's prize announcements: 'Manures!' 'For a merino ram!' The romance and the ceremony run as literally the same sentence.
  • She lies to a teenage boy to get the poison. Emma tricks Justin into unlocking Homais's poison closet, labelled 'Capharnaum,' by claiming she needs to kill rats, then goes straight to the third shelf, grabs the blue jar of arsenic, and eats it by the handful. 'She seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful and majestic as a phantom,' Flaubert writes of the boy watching her do it.
  • She dies slowly, in front of her own daughter. Her suicide note reads only 'Accuse no one'; she vomits blood and her body covers in brown spots. When toddler Berthe is brought to the bed she recoils and cries, 'I am frightened!' while Charles keeps insisting to Canivet that she looks better.
  • Flaubert closes on the wrong man's triumph. Charles is found dead in the garden by his own daughter, a lock of Emma's hair still in his fist, while Berthe ends up sent to a cotton factory to earn her keep. The novel's actual final line belongs to Homais, the pompous chemist: 'He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.'
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the novel that got its author prosecuted for obscenity and still defined literary realism, refusing every romantic convention by letting its heroine's appetite for a bigger life get her killed by her own hand while the fools around her prosper.

A doctor's wife burns through two lovers and a mountain of debt chasing a romance the provinces can't supply, then lies her way into the pharmacist's poison closet and eats arsenic straight from the jar with her bare hand.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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