Madame Flaubert and lament his marital unhappiness, his untimely death; Flaubert’s niece remembered her well and was convinced that the old lady’s complaints about her daughter-in-law’s misconduct were the basis for Madame Bovary. In an inventory of Delamare’s property and papers, made on his decease, an I.O.U. of three hundred francs to “Madame Flaubert” has recently been found.
Dr. Delamare had died, presumably of grief, like Charles Bovary, long before Madame Bovary appeared, in 1857; he survived his wife by only twenty-one months. But other principals in the Delamare drama (rumor gave her many lovers) and a chorus of commentators were still living. And many years later, in the village of Ry—which advertises itself as the original of Yonville l’Abbaye—Delphine Delamare’s smart double curtains, yellow and black, were still talked about by her neighbors, like her blue-and-silver wallpaper. Today her house is gone (two different houses have competed for that title), her tombstone has been lost or stolen, but her garden is there, the property of the village pharmacist, who displays in his shop what purports to be Monsieur Homais’ counter.
The real Monsieur Homais was probably legion. Flaubert is said to have spent a month at Forges-les-Eaux studying the local pharmacist, a red-hot anti-clerical and diehard republican, whom he had already spotted and banded, but he is also thought to have had his eye on other atheistical druggists, birds of the same feather, in the neighborhood.
In short, Madame Bovary revived and spread a scandal (a second suspected Rodolphe was uncovered at Neufchâtel-en-Bray) that had been a nine-days’ wonder in the locality, and Flaubert was no doubt sick of the gossip and somewhat remorseful, like most authors, for what he had started, tired too maybe of hearing his mother tax him with what he had “done” to poor Delamare’s memory. At the same time, as an author, he must have resented the cheapening efforts of real life to claim for itself material he had transmuted with such pain in his study; even in her name, “Delphine Delamare” sounds like a hack’s alias for Emma Bovary.
The gossip was not silenced by his denials. Indeed, it proliferated, breeding on the novel itself—impossible to know how much elderly witnesses, interviewed in Ry forty years later, had had their memories refreshed by contact with the novel. Was the Delamares’ elegant furniture really sold at auction to satisfy her creditors? And the unfortunate doctor’s “two hundred rose stocks de belle variété”? What about the “mahogany Gothic prie-dieu embroidered in subdued blue and yellow gros point?” by Delphine Delamare? In 1890, on the word of one authority, it could be seen in Rouen, the cushion considerably faded. In 1905, the servant Felicité (her real name was Augustine), aged seventy-nine, was still talking to visitors about her mistress, differing stoutly with others who remembered her on the color of her hair. “No. Not blond. Chestnut.” After Madame Bovary, figures in the Delamare story, real or fancied, must have spent their lives as marked men. The rumored “Rodolphe,” a veritable Cain, was said to have emigrated to America, then come back and shot himself on a Parisian boulevard. If that happened to an actual country gentleman of the vicinity named Louis Campion (and there is no record of such a suicide), it cannot have been part of Flaubert’s intention. And the gossip, as always, must have been wrong quite a bit of the time. Even given Flaubert’s passion for documentation, he cannot have set out to make an exact copy of the village of Ry and its inhabitants. How well, in fact, he could have known it, except as the site of the Delamare drama, is a matter of doubt.
He must have passed through it, on his way from Rouen, and certainly the village, even now, shows correspondences with the décor of the novel, though, as in a dream, nothing is in quite its right place: the
Dr. Delamare had died, presumably of grief, like Charles Bovary, long before Madame Bovary appeared, in 1857; he survived his wife by only twenty-one months. But other principals in the Delamare drama (rumor gave her many lovers) and a chorus of commentators were still living. And many years later, in the village of Ry—which advertises itself as the original of Yonville l’Abbaye—Delphine Delamare’s smart double curtains, yellow and black, were still talked about by her neighbors, like her blue-and-silver wallpaper. Today her house is gone (two different houses have competed for that title), her tombstone has been lost or stolen, but her garden is there, the property of the village pharmacist, who displays in his shop what purports to be Monsieur Homais’ counter.
The real Monsieur Homais was probably legion. Flaubert is said to have spent a month at Forges-les-Eaux studying the local pharmacist, a red-hot anti-clerical and diehard republican, whom he had already spotted and banded, but he is also thought to have had his eye on other atheistical druggists, birds of the same feather, in the neighborhood.
In short, Madame Bovary revived and spread a scandal (a second suspected Rodolphe was uncovered at Neufchâtel-en-Bray) that had been a nine-days’ wonder in the locality, and Flaubert was no doubt sick of the gossip and somewhat remorseful, like most authors, for what he had started, tired too maybe of hearing his mother tax him with what he had “done” to poor Delamare’s memory. At the same time, as an author, he must have resented the cheapening efforts of real life to claim for itself material he had transmuted with such pain in his study; even in her name, “Delphine Delamare” sounds like a hack’s alias for Emma Bovary.
The gossip was not silenced by his denials. Indeed, it proliferated, breeding on the novel itself—impossible to know how much elderly witnesses, interviewed in Ry forty years later, had had their memories refreshed by contact with the novel. Was the Delamares’ elegant furniture really sold at auction to satisfy her creditors? And the unfortunate doctor’s “two hundred rose stocks de belle variété”? What about the “mahogany Gothic prie-dieu embroidered in subdued blue and yellow gros point?” by Delphine Delamare? In 1890, on the word of one authority, it could be seen in Rouen, the cushion considerably faded. In 1905, the servant Felicité (her real name was Augustine), aged seventy-nine, was still talking to visitors about her mistress, differing stoutly with others who remembered her on the color of her hair. “No. Not blond. Chestnut.” After Madame Bovary, figures in the Delamare story, real or fancied, must have spent their lives as marked men. The rumored “Rodolphe,” a veritable Cain, was said to have emigrated to America, then come back and shot himself on a Parisian boulevard. If that happened to an actual country gentleman of the vicinity named Louis Campion (and there is no record of such a suicide), it cannot have been part of Flaubert’s intention. And the gossip, as always, must have been wrong quite a bit of the time. Even given Flaubert’s passion for documentation, he cannot have set out to make an exact copy of the village of Ry and its inhabitants. How well, in fact, he could have known it, except as the site of the Delamare drama, is a matter of doubt.
He must have passed through it, on his way from Rouen, and certainly the village, even now, shows correspondences with the décor of the novel, though, as in a dream, nothing is in quite its right place: the
Similar Books
