Madame Bovary , a dual language, French-English book: Bilingual (French Edition)

.Madame Bovary has become both the principal masterpiece of realism and the work that established the realist movement on the European scene. It set the standard for modern psychological novels. It is a commonplace story of adultery transformed by Flaubert into a profound human tragedy.A young village boy, Charles Bovary, does not fit in at his new school, and is ridiculed by his new classmates. Both as a child and later as a doctor, Charles is mediocre, dull and unambitious. He barely manages to become a second-rate country doctor. His mother marries him off to a widow who dies soon afterward, leaving Charles much less money than he expected.Charles soon falls in love with his patient's daughter, Emma, a beautiful farm girl, raised in a convent. Charles proposes and the father happily accepts.Marriage doesn’t live up to Emma’s romantic expectations. When in a convent as a young girl, she read novels and dreamed of love and marriage as a solution to all her problems.After an invitation to an ball at the home of a wealthy nobleman who was Charles' s patient, she begins to dream of a more sophisticated life. She grows bored and depressed with of village life, and eventually becomes ill.After Emma becomes pregnant, Charles decides to move to a different town, Yonville, in hopes of reviving Emma's health.In the new environment, the Bovarys meet Homais, the town pharmacist, a pompous person. Emma meets a law clerk, Leon, who, like her, is bored with rural life and loves to escape through romantic novels. Leon falls in love with Emma but grows tired of waiting and leaves for Paris to study law. His departure makes Emma miserable. She gives birth to her daughter Berthe, but she wanted a son.At an agricultural fair, a wealthy neighbor named Rodolphe, is attracted by Emma’s beauty, and declares his love to her. He seduces her, and they begin having a passionate affair. Emma's indiscretion often led the townspeople all gossip about her. Charles, however, suspects nothing. His adoration for his wife makes him blind to her indiscretions.When Charles and Homais, the pharmacist, try to experiment a surgical technique to treat a club-footed man named Hippolyte and end up having to call in another doctor to amputate the leg, Charles's professionalism is damagedDisgusted with her husband’s incompetence, Emma becomes more passionately involved with Rodolphe. She borrows money to buy him gifts and suggests that they run off together and take little Berthe with them. Soon enough, Rodolphe grows bored with Emma’s demanding affections and refuses to elope with her. He leaves her. Heartbroken, Emma grows desperately ill and nearly dies.When Emma recovers, Charles is in financial trouble and has to borrow money to pay off Emma’s debts and to pay for her treatment.One night Charles takes Emma to the opera in the nearby city of Rouen. There, they encounter Leon. This meeting reignites the old romantic flame between Emma and Leon, and they start a love affair. Emma secretly goes to Rouen to see Leon, and borrows more and falls deeper in debt to the moneylender Lheureux, the the money lender who lends at exorbitant interest rates. Due to carelessness in her love affair with Leon, her acquaintances nearly discover her infidelity.Over time, Emma grows bored with Leon and becomes demanding. Eventually, Lheureux, the money lender orders the seizure of Emma’s property in order to get his money back. She tries to raise the money, appealing to Leon and to all the town’s businessmen. She even tries to prostitute herself by offering herself to Rodolphe in exchange for the money. He refuses. Driven to despair, she commits suicide by eating arsenic.Charles, still unaware of what she had been doing idealizes the memory of his wife. Finally, he finds her letters from Rodolphe and Leon. He dies alone in his garden, and Berthe is sent off to work in a cotton mill. Read more