His wife had adored him once on a time; she had bored him with a thousand servilities that had only estranged him the more.  Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable.  She had suffered so much without complaint at first, until she had seem him going after all the village drabs, and until a score of bad houses sent him back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk.  Then her pride revolted.  After that she was silent, burying her anger in a dumb stoicism that she maintained till her death.  She was constantly going about looking after business matters.  She called on the lawyers, the president, remembered when bills fell due, got them renewed, and at home ironed, sewed, washed, looked after the workmen, paid the accounts, while he, troubling himself about nothing, eternally besotted in sleepy sulkiness, whence he only roused himself to say disagreeable things to her, sat smoking by the fire and spitting into the cinders.

When she had a child, it had to be sent out to nurse.  When he came home, the lad was spoilt as if he were a prince.  His mother stuffed him with jam; his father let him run about barefoot, and, playing the philosopher, even said he might as well go about quite naked like the young of animals.  As opposed to the maternal ideas, he had a certain virile idea of childhood on which he sought to mould his son, wishing him to be brought up hardily, like a Spartan, to give him a strong constitution.  He sent him to bed without any fire, taught him to drink off large draughts of rum and to jeer at religious processions.  But, peaceable by nature, the lad answered only poorly to his notions.  His mother always kept him near her; she cut out cardboard for him, told him tales, entertained him with endless monologues full of melancholy gaiety and charming nonsense.  In her life’s isolation she centered on the child’s head all her shattered, broken little vanities.  She dreamed of high station; she already saw him, tall, handsome, clever, settled as an engineer or in the law.  She taught him to read, and even, on an old piano, she had taught him two or three little songs.  But to all this Monsieur Bovary, caring little for letters, said, “It was not worth while.  Would they ever have the means to send him to a public school, to buy him a practice, or start him in business?  Besides, with cheek a man always gets on in the world.”  Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child knocked about the village.

He went after the labourers, drove away with clods of earth the ravens that were flying about.  He ate blackberries along the hedges, minded the geese with a long switch, went haymaking during harvest, ran about in the woods, played hop-scotch under the church porch on rainy days, and at great fetes begged the beadle to let him toll the bells, that he might hang all his weight on the long rope and feel himself borne upward by it in its swing.  Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong on hand, fresh of colour.