Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man QUOTES

1 " I demand a closed chamber, for regrettably, what the accused has proposed to reveal here is a danger to public morals. The defendant, infected by his wife’s dissoluteness, which judicial language lacks words to describe, is the most appalling specimen I have ever come across in the long course of my life as a guardian of order and morals. Look at him, how he sits there, his gaze unmoved, at his table at the inn, hatching his plans for murder, necrophilia, and sodomy, le visage blême, serrant dans la main gauche la fiole avec le poison [50]—the palefaced killer! "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

2 " Born poor, little earned besides, brought up dumb, little learned besides. Your penknife, Gustave Flaubert, and oui and merci, all too mean and too meager. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

3 " So Gustave Flaubert was playing as he composed Madame Bovary, groaning under the crushing weight of words; and the game plays out further in these pages, albeit according to a different set of rules. Charles Bovary, the poor man from whom everything was stripped away, love, his beloved, his possessions, and even his memory—for, as he is forced to realize, he has lived in error—was treated by Gustave Flaubert as a quantité négligeable. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

4 " And yet, holding fast to the precarious stability of quotidian jargon, accepting without argument the ludic maxims conceived by the bourgeois Flaubert, it remains permissible to move beyond the element of play and to question the reality of this country doctor now present in the imaginative life of millions, over whom the ownership claims of the bourgeois landowner from Croisset have long expired—even without hope of any “real” insight. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

5 " The haut bourgeois Gustave Flaubert, whose income was secured and who found protection in his father’s name against the judges who would ultimately pronounce, as was foreseeable, a balanced verdict on his novel, deeply detested the petit bourgeois, the country doctor, whom he had most likely met with or else had heard disparaging remarks about from his father’s lips, "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

6 " is conceivable. “Enough of these riding excursions with that imposter from La Huchette. Let him debauch himself with his degenerate floozies from Paris. So the farmer’s daughter Rouault isn’t good enough to be the wife of Monsieur, his false Excellency. Well she is too good and too precious to be his whore.” This is not inconceivable, rather the opposite: it suggests itself. For not even the petit bourgeois from the days following the Revolution would truckle under slavishly before someone who happened to live in a castle, go hunting, and dress in finery. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

7 " Now that I am enlightened, through mourning and the letters in the secret drawer, I would say to you, "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

8 " The operation turned out badly—what can you say? More than once in Rouen I’ve seen a patient meet his end in the operating room under the well-groomed hands of Dr. Achille-Cléophas Flaubert. That is how it goes in our line of work, which you don’t know a damned thing about. One time you get lucky, the next you don’t, that’s the end of the story. So undress and lie down next to me, and I will claim my conjugal rights, just as I perform my marital duties as a sound husband and provider. Not a word more! "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

9 " And I didn’t take it hard, at least young Léon would have been an understanding schoolmate, devoted and ready to serve, nothing like the haughty, highborn Gustave. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

10 " It merely remains to say in what his realism consists. What we mean here is not the work’s autonomous reality as a linguistic structure: that is there regardless, whether in Zola or Mallarmé, in Goethe or Hölderlin, in Robbe-Grillet or Simenon. The possibilities and limitations of such a theme would take us too far from Flaubert. What is proposed here is rather an intersubjectively graspable and subjectively experienced reality no less valid for Bovary’s master than for the person who consciously seeks it out. Willingly or not, Gustave Flaubert has distilled this reality into the twin avatars of money and flesh. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

11 " His assets—inherited, not earned—had vanished. If the book had been brought to its end, the hopeless imbeciles Bouvard and Pécuchet would have logically sought refuge in death. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

12 " However we might be deceived by his irony, which would prove fatal for false romanticism, he took the side of Emma and her finally murderous passion with its contempt for the bourgeois subject. He failed to see the citoyen, in both Homais and the country doctor; he only saw, only fashioned, the bourgeois that he himself was, endowing him with the repellent traits of the merchant Lheureux. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

13 " Your penknife, Flaubert. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

14 " 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

15 " and so many more! That the country doctor failed to notice his "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " And above all: the first draft of the—as his discerning comrades assured him—thoroughly disastrous metaphysical novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

19 " The most admirable, if certainly most capricious interpretation, is the one expounded by Jean-Paul Sartre in his redoubtable work on Flaubert, in the third volume, to be exact: there, when he speaks of the societally conditioned “objective neurosis” that history imposed not only on Flaubert, but on all of the authors who were his contemporaries, he sees nothing more nor less than the Hegelian world-spirit. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

20 " What may be achieved, perhaps, is nothing more than this: to gaze at Sartre’s mountains of thought, but from a distance, so that only the contours are visible in the mental heavens, and not to get lost amid the peaks and valleys. Sartre’s Flaubert is the Sartre-Flaubert, and should remain such. It is now left to others to discover their own Flaubert-Flaubert according to the map each sketches out for himself. For what it’s worth, we have an example before us now. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man