21
" No doubt, Charles abetted the two adulterous affairs of his Emma, whom he loved, in an implausible, suspect way. Well then, his considerateness showed his stupidity, as we have been assured, and more than once. But love sets a limit to stupidity. No one in his right mind—and the country doctor certainly was, or else he would never have reached the modest status of glorified barber-surgeon—behaves like the cocu, the cuckold of bad jokes the men in the Café du "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
23
" Charles Bovary, officier de santé, dupe, whom all our sympathy is owed, even if we do not wish to detract from our love for Emma, for Madame Bovary, who breaks free of the prison of her time and world, breaks free and falls to earth tragically, where her disconsolate widower wishes to dig her out with his bare hands, once more to press her cadaver to his sorrowful, passionate heart. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
24
" In the grave of unconscious memory, the one and only great love, Elisa Foucault-Schlésinger, around nine years his elder, whom Gustave met in Trouville, too young to be in passion’s thrall; Elisa, whom he loved as he loved no other woman in his life, save for his mother, who always hovered as a kindly but stern shadow over the house in Croisset. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
32
" Flaubert’s irony is hard, maybe even wicked, in any case profoundly unfair. Let us take a look at one of the most important figures from Madame Bovary, the apothecary Homais, and then proceed from his example. In him, bourgeois enlightenment, the heritage of our civilization, the indispensable fundament of every socialist utopia, finds itself cast into monstrous ridicule. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
34
" There is no doubt he is the man of progress in his village, and that he strides before us as a vain bounder and fawner is, fundamentally, beside the point. In his artist’s arrogance, his estrangement from reality, Gustave Flaubert has not seen, has not wanted to see, that Homaises of all sorts were the bearers of bourgeois progress, the forerunners of those who sided with the Radical Party during the Third Republic, the historical progenitors of those who rightly stood with Zola and Clemenceau on the side of Captain Dreyfus. The unrestrained wickedness of Flaubert’s irony becomes clear to us in that diabolic way he has of making the apothecary utter illuminating and irrefutable truths so that in them, through them, the entirety of the bourgeois enlightenment, including the ethics it represents and the scientific view of the world, are reduced to grotesque prattle. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
35
" Totalizing dialectical reason, in its opposition to reason of the disintegrating, analytic sort, is a riddle, the rules governing which I see through, and the utility of which I increasingly doubt. Like all dialectical thinking, it depends on who is wielding it: in Jean-Paul Sartre’s hands, it became a fantastic (in both senses of the word) and sweeping instrument for thought; should an assiduous nobody usurp it, the result would be inhuman glossurgy. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
39
" Charles, too, is a bearer of values, bourgeois and social ones, no less deserving of mention than the proletarian and communal values of the old maid, which flicker tenderly as the stage lights fall on them in passing. But no, there is nothing! Charles Bovary, country doctor, is the uncouth weakling his wife takes him for; and the morsel of compassion the author patronizingly offers him now and then is a pittance. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man