Here I relate, I do not cite.  It takes the husband first at college, and it must be stated that the boy already gave evidence of the kind of husband he would make.  He is excessively heavy and timid, so timid that when he arrives at the college and is asked his name, he responds:  “Charbovari” He is so dull that he works continually without advancing.  He is never the first, nor is he the last in his class; he is the type, if not of the cipher at least of the laughing-stock of the college.  After finishing his studies here, he goes to study medicine at Rouen, in a fourth-story room overlooking the Seine, which his mother rented for him, in the house of a dyer of her acquaintance.  Here he studies his medical books, and arrives little by little, not at the degree of doctor of medicine, but that of health officer.  He frequented the inns, failed in his studies, but as for the rest, he had no other passion than that of playing dominoes.  This is M. Bovary.

The time comes for him to marry.  His mother finds him a wife in the widow of a sheriff’s officer of Dieppe; she is virtuous and plain, is forty-five years old, and has six thousand a year income.  Only, the lawyer who had her capital to invest set out one fine morning for America, and the younger Madame Bovary was so much affected, so struck down by this unexpected blow that she died of it.  Here we have the first marriage and the first scene.

M. Bovary, now being a widower, begins to think of marrying again.  He questions his memory; there is no need of going far; there immediately comes to his mind the daughter of a neighboring farmer, Mile.  Emma Rouault, who had strangely aroused Madame Bovary’s suspicions.  Farmer Rouault had but one daughter, and she had been brought up by the Ursuline sisters at Rouen.  She was little interested in matters of the farm; her father was anxious for her to marry.  The health officer presented himself, there was no difficulty about the dot, and you understand that with such a disposition on both sides, these things are quickly settled.  The marriage takes place.  M. Bovary is at his wife’s knees, is the happiest of men and the blindest of husbands.  His sole occupation is anticipating his wife’s wishes.

Here the role of M. Bovary ends; that of Madame Bovary becomes the serious work of the book.

Gentlemen, does Madame Bovary love her husband, or try to love him?  No; and from the beginning there has been what we might call the scene of initiation.  From the moment of her marriage, another horizon stretched itself out before her, a new life appeared to her.  The proprietor of Vaubyessard Castle gave a grand entertainment.  He invited the health officer and his wife, and this was for her an initiation into all the ardour of voluptuousness!  There she discovered the Duke of Laverdiere who had had some success at Court; she waltzed with a viscount and experienced an unusual disturbance of mind.  From this moment she lived a new life; her husband and all her surroundings became insupportable to her.  One day, in looking over some furniture, she hit a piece of wire which tore her finger; it was the wire from her wedding bouquet.