Madame Bovary: Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Emma often examines the cigar case, breathes its expensive smell, and imagines that it was given to the Viscount by a beautiful lover. She fantasizes that the Viscount is in Paris, and longs to go there herself. She takes countless sad imaginary journeys along a Paris street map. She reads fashion magazines, society columns, and more romance novels, trying desperately to connect herself to the Viscount and his life. Her reading leads her to imagine Paris in three parts: the political, the aristocratic, and the artistic. Each world seems wonderfully exciting, and the rest of life seems banal and irrelevant.

Emma hires a new maid, an obedient young girl named Félicité whom she trains to behave like a lady’s maid. Emma buys beautiful negligées and little household refinements to console herself. Charles delights in all these feminine mysteries. His business is prospering, and he is very well-respected. Emma hates his professional complacency and his bad manners, but he always manages to interpret her displeasure as a mark of concern and affection.

A year passes, and Emma becomes increasingly bored and desperate for some sort of change. She is too depressed to read or play piano, so she spends her days observing small marks of decay in the house and garden, and staring at the monotonous routine outside her window. She looks at the run-down wig shop and watches a street performer play an organ; on top of the organ there are miniature dancers in a tiny salon. She is miserable all day, but she feels worst at mealtimes, when she experiences a particular “rancid staleness.” She loses her appetite and stops taking care of the house. When Charles’s mother or her father come to visit, she is impatient and rude. Soon she develops a vague nervous ailment, and Charles decides that she needs a change of scenery. When they leave Tostes, she is pregnant.