Gustave Flaubert

[The priest] dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions: first on the eyes, which had so coveted all earthly splendors; then on the nostrils, so greedy for mild breezes and the smells of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to utter lies, which had moaned with pride and cried out in lust; then on the hands, which had so delighted in the touch of smooth material; and lastly on the soles of the feet, which had once been so quick when she hastened to satiate her desires and which now would never walk again.

What killed Emma Bovary?  

The proximate cause of her death was the arsenic she swallowed.  But the ultimate cause was her desperate longing for romance.

Emma's unsuccessful quest for love resulted not only in her death, but also in the ruin of her poor, clueless husband and her innocent daughter.  

Ford Madox Ford's 1915 novel, The Good Soldier, opens with this sentence: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."  The Good Soldier is a heartbreaking book, but Madame Bovary is the saddest story I have ever read. 

Emma Bovary's deathbed

Gustave Flaubert

  "Oh! It's just that I love you!" she would go on; "I love you so much I can't do without you . . . ."

     He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. . . . Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

(From Lydia Davis's 2010 translation of Madame Bovary.)

Emma Bovary was a romantic, a woman who was "gasping for love like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water."  But her creator, Gustave Flaubert, was a realist -- an author who was determined to be objective about his characters.  Poor Emma never had a chance.

Isabelle Huppert as Emma Bovary 

Gustave Flaubert

Yesterday evening, I started my novel. Now I begin to see stylistic difficulties that horrify me. To be simple is no small matter.

From a September 20, 1851 letter to his friend, lover, and fellow writer Louise Colet. Flaubert was 29 years old when he started to write Madame Bovary -- the first truly modern novel -- 160 years ago today.  He finished it about five years later.

When Proust revised his work, it got longer.  When Flaubert revised his, it got shorter.

Flaubert as a young man