43
" Mais oui, Madame Bovary, c’est bien lui, Gustave Flaubert. [25] Her excesses are his, her passionate mysticism an analogue to his mystical subservience to the author’s craft. Her pathos, which the author’s irony barely alludes to, is the pathetic irreality of the visionary from the hermitage in Croisset. He said as much, moreover, if not with direct reference to his own self, which he never wished to turn out into the world. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
52
" who exists, who daily and hourly transcends himself, in resistance to others and the world, to negate what he has been and become what he will be. I lodge my accusation because you, in your stupid hermitage, served only your words and their euphony, and would not look at me with the eyes of a compassionate person. Liberté: You denied it to me. Égalité: You could not bear seeing me, the petit bourgeois, as an equal of the haut bourgeois Gustave Flaubert. Fraternité: You did not care to be my brother in suffering, you preferred to play the role of the indulgent judge. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
56
" Speak to me, Emma, just a single soothing word, stroke my hair again, say what you confessed in death, that I was good—that at least I was good. And know, please—but you cannot know, the dead are deaf, the cerebrum decays, and with it, what a person was. "
― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man