To try to dispel the ennui that was consuming her, M. Bovary sacrificed his office and established himself at Yonville.  Here was the scene of the first fall.  We are now in the second number.  Madame arrived at Yonville, and there, the first person she met upon whom she could fix her attention was—­not the notary of the place, but the only clerk of that notary, Leon Dupuis.  This is a young man who is making his own way and is about to set out for the capital.  Any other than M. Bovary would have been disquieted by the visits of the young clerk, but M. Bovary is so ingenuous that he believes in his wife’s virtue.  Leon, wholly inexperienced, has the same idea.  He goes away, and the occasion is lost; but occasions are easily found again.

There was in the neighborhood of Yonville one Rodolphe Boulanger (you understand that I am narrating).  He was a man of thirty-four years old and of a brutal temperament; he had had much success and many easy conquests; he then had an actress for a mistress.  He saw Madame Bovary; she was young and charming; he resolved to make her his mistress.  The thing was easy; three meetings were sufficient to bring it about.  The first time he came to an agricultural meeting, the second time he paid her a visit, the third time he accompanied her on a horseback ride which her husband judged necessary to her health; it was then, in a first visit to the forest, that the fall took place.  Their meetings multiplied after this, at Rodolphe’s chateau and in the health officer’s garden.  The lovers reached the extreme limits of voluptuousness!  Madame Bovary wished to elope with Rodolphe, but while Rodolphe dared not say no, he wrote a letter in which he tried to show her that for many reasons, he could not elope.  Stricken down by the reception of this letter, Madame Bovary had a brain fever, following which typhoid fever declared itself.  The fever killed the love, but the malady remained.  This is the second scene.

We come now to the third scene.  The fall with Rodolphe was followed by a religious reaction, but it was short; Madame Bovary was about to fall anew.  The husband thought the theatre useful in the convalescence of his wife and took her to Rouen.  In a box opposite that occupied by M. and Madame Bovary, was Leon Dupuis, the notary’s young clerk, who had made his way to Paris, and who had now become strangely experienced and knowing.  He went to see Madame Bovary and proposed a rendezvous.  Madame Bovary suggested the cathedral.  On coming out of the cathedral, Leon proposed that they take a cab.  She resisted at first, but Leon told her that this was done in Paris, and there was no further obstacle.  The fall takes place in the cab!  Meetings follow for Leon, as for Rodolphe, at the health officer’s house, and then at a room which they rented in Rouen.  Finally, she became weary of the second love, and here begins the scene of distress; it is the last of the romance.