Susan Thomas Springer

“A meal taken alone with her, an evening walk together along the road, the feel of her hair beneath his hand, the sight of her straw-hat hanging from the hasp of a window — all these things, and many others, in which, till then Charles had never suspected happiness to reside, went now to make up the continuity of his bliss.”

But this bliss is not to last in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. This 1857 novel has a moral relevant today with its themes of longing for other loves and a higher social class rather than enjoying what you have. Flaubert wrote about Bovary’s affairs in terms which were shocking for the time and he was tried for violation of public morals. But today it’s not very scandalous and we can appreciate Flaubert’s story which conveys the heroine’s bored and excited moods through his writing style. Heureux lecture !