Write your own Madame Bovary story

Charles Bovary

Charles Bovary is a modest, good-natured country doctor practicing in the Norman village of Tostes. Raised by a domineering mother and a dissolute father, he is hardworking but mediocre, achieving his medical qualification only through rote effort. He is deeply, almost passively in love with Emma Rouault, whom he courts after treating her father's broken leg.

Emma Rouault (Madame Bovary)

Emma is the daughter of prosperous farmer Père Rouault, educated at the Ursuline Convent and possessing refined tastes in music, drawing, and literature far beyond her rural surroundings. Beautiful, restless, and quietly dissatisfied, she dislikes country life and harbors vague romantic longings for something grander. She marries Charles and moves with him to Tostes.

Père Rouault

Père Rouault is a well-off but financially stretched Norman farmer who owns the Bertaux farm. Warm-hearted and gregarious, he is fond of good food, old cider, and storytelling. He is widowed and relies on Emma to manage the household, and he willingly gives her hand in marriage to Charles.

Héloïse Dubuc (First Madame Bovary)

Héloïse Dubuc is the widow Charles is pushed into marrying by his mother before he meets Emma. She is older, physically unappealing, hypochondriac, and domineering, controlling Charles's finances and social conduct. She dies suddenly of a hemorrhage after the discovery that her supposed fortune is largely fictitious.

Monsieur Bovary Senior

Charles's father is a charming, boastful, and reckless retired assistant-surgeon-major who squandered his wife's dowry and retreated in failure to the Norman countryside. He has strong opinions on child-rearing and masculinity but little discipline, living sourly on the border of Caux and Picardy.

Madame Bovary Senior (Charles's Mother)

Charles's mother is an industrious, strong-willed woman who compensated for her husband's failures by managing the family's affairs and channeling her ambitions into her son. She arranges both Charles's medical education and his first marriage, and visits Tostes where she clashes with her daughters-in-law.

Monsieur Roger (Class-Master)

Monsieur Roger is the schoolroom teacher present when the young Charles Bovary arrives as a new pupil. He is mildly sardonic, ordering Charles to conjugate 'ridiculus sum' as punishment after the class erupts in laughter over his name.

Tostes

Tostes is a small Norman village where Charles establishes his medical practice as successor to an aged local doctor. It is a quiet, provincial settlement where Charles and Emma begin their married life. The isolation and dullness of the village weigh heavily on Emma.

The Bertaux

The Bertaux is Père Rouault's prosperous farm, a substantial property with stables, granaries, sheepfolds, a pond, and a well-kept courtyard planted with symmetrical trees. It is the setting for Charles's first meeting with Emma and their courtship, and is located roughly eighteen miles from Tostes across country.

Rouen

Rouen is the major regional city where Charles is sent to study medicine, living in a rented room overlooking the Eau-de-Robec canal. The city represents education and urban life, though Charles falls into idleness there and nearly fails his exams. Emma's trousseau is later partly ordered from Rouen.

The Ursuline Convent

The Ursuline Convent is the school where Emma Rouault received her education, learning dancing, geography, drawing, embroidery, and piano. Her convent upbringing gave her tastes and sensibilities that sit uneasily with provincial farm life and shape her romantic longings.

The School at Rouen (Charles's Boyhood College)

The unnamed secondary school in Rouen is where Charles Bovary first appears as a new pupil, awkward and country-bred, subjected to the mockery of his classmates over his strange composite cap and mispronounced name. It establishes Charles's lifelong pattern of earnest but undistinguished effort.

Charles Bovary's Composite Cap

On his first day at school, the young Charles carries an extraordinary, grotesque cap combining elements of bearskin, shako, billycock, sealskin, and nightcap, stiffened with whalebone and decorated with velvet lozenges, a cardboard polygon, and a hanging gold tassel. The cap becomes the object of the entire class's ridicule and symbolises his provincial awkwardness and social displacement.

Emma's Silk Sunshade

During one of Charles's visits to the Bertaux, Emma stands on the threshold holding a silk sunshade the colour of pigeons' breasts. The sunlight filtering through it casts shifting hues on her skin, creating an image of delicate, almost ethereal beauty that intensifies Charles's infatuation.

Provincial Norman Society and Class

The novel is steeped in the hierarchies of mid-nineteenth-century Norman provincial life, where a man's profession, income, and wife's dowry determine his social standing. Farmers, doctors, notaries, and merchants form distinct strata, and marriages are negotiated with careful attention to money and property. Rural life is depicted as monotonous and hemmed in by gossip, obligation, and economic anxiety.

Medical Practice in Rural France

Country doctors in this setting are general practitioners who ride on horseback to farmhouses at all hours to treat broken bones, attend the sick, and perform minor surgery. Their income depends on patients who often pay late or not at all, and their social respectability is tied closely to their professional reputation in the local community.

The Romantic Disillusionment Theme

A pervasive tension in this world exists between the romantic ideals absorbed through convent education, novels, and music, and the dull reality of provincial bourgeois life. Characters like Emma hunger for poetry, passion, and elegance while surrounded by muddy farmyards and mediocre husbands, a gap that drives personal and social catastrophe.

Charles Bovary's Life Before Emma

Charles is introduced at school around age fifteen, studies medicine in Rouen with mixed success, fails his first medical exam, passes on the second attempt, and sets up practice in Tostes. His mother arranges his first marriage to the widow Héloïse Dubuc; Héloïse dies after her false fortune is exposed, leaving Charles a widower. He subsequently meets Emma Rouault while treating Père Rouault's broken leg, courts her over several months, and marries her in a large country wedding attended by forty-three guests.