[Up: Flaubert] MBov Salam SentimE StAnt 3Tales B&P [home]
I think GF was stung by criticism that MB had too many metaphors, and he avoided them in Sentimental Education. Many chapters of MB have none. The characters' dreams and fantasies also share the quality of metaphors, but I haven't included them.
(Warning to students: I'm not distinguishing metaphors from similes here.)
some leitmotifs: room, shadow, bird, mountain, ocean, ship, star, clothing, storm, butterfly, vapor, snake, plant, journey
Part One
hat: "one of those pathetic objects whose mute unloveliness conveys the infinitely wistful expression we may sometimes note on the face of an idiot"
laughter: "a titter would fizz along a whole row, or a stifled explosion sputter out here and there, like a half-extinguished fuse"
CB's mother: "she became, as she grew older (as wine left uncorked will turn into vinegar), morose, shrewish, and irritable"
medschool lecture-topics: "names of whose etymology he was completely ignorant and which seemed to him like so many mysterious portals leading to sanctuaries peopled with august shadows"
CB at medschool: "He got through his little daily task like a mill horse that plods round and round in the same place with his eyes blindfolded, never knowing in the least what it is he is grinding at."
CB's 1st wife: "she was plain, as dry as a chip and as spotty as a fig-pudding"
wedding-guests: "very short jackets with two buttons in the small of the back, close together like a pair of eyes, the abbreviated tails of which looked as if they had been cut out of a single block with a carpenter's chisel"
"The procession, at first keeping well together, resembled a coloured scarf as it undulated through the countryside"
Emma's father: "He felt as gloomy as an empty house."
CB's rounds: "steep lanes where the trees hung over like the hood of a cradle"
CB: "ruminating on his good fortune, even as men who have well dined recall the savour of the delicacies they have eaten"
Emma and CB: "she would push him away, half-playful, half-impatient, as you do with a child that will cling on behind you"
Emma w/nuns: "she did what horses do when you hold them in too tight: she pulled up short and jerked the bit from her mouth."
Emma's early emotion w/CB: "that wonderful passion which, till then, had hovered like a great bird with roseate wings, floating in the splendour of poetic skies"
Emma on CB: "if, just once, his eyes had read her thoughts, it seemed to her that abundant riches would have fallen from her heart, even as falls, at the lightest touch, the ripe fruitage of a wall-tree"
"Charles's conversation was as flat as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas but his own promenaded there all in their humdrum dress"
CB's dress: "the rest of the boot being stretched out in a straight line as though the foot inside it were made of wood"
CB's mother: "she felt as if she had been thrown over, as if she had been robbed of something that belonged to her"
CB's embrace: "It was just another habit added to the rest, like a humdrum dessert rounding off a humdrum dinner"
Emma walks the dog: "Her thoughts, vagrant at first, strayed hither and thither, wandering as they listed, like her dog"
"for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart"
Emma: "the serried trunks of the trees, planted in regular lines, gloomed like a dark colonnade against a background of gold"
"Her journey to la Vaubyessard had made a gap in her life, like those great chasms that a storm will sometimes cleave in the mountains in a single night."
"Her heart was like the soles of those shoes. Wealth and luxury had rubbed against it and left upon it something that would never wear away."
the name 'Paris': "It boomed in her ears like the great bell of a cathedral; it seemed to glow with golden fire even on the labels of her pomade pots."
"And so Paris, in Emma's eyes, gleamed vaster than the ocean, and was bathed in an atmosphere of rose and gold."
"Did not love require, even as tropical plants, a duly prepared soil, a particular temperature?"
Emma's good housekeeping: "It was like gold-dust sprinkled along the narrow pathway of his life"
Emma on CB: "his eyes, which were beady enough to begin with, looked as if they would be squeezed up into his forehead by his podgy cheeks"
"Like a shipwrecked mariner, she gazed out wistfully over the wide solitude of her life, if so be she might catch the white gleam of a sail away on the dim horizon. She knew not what it would be, this longed-for barque; what wind would waft it to her, or to what shores it would bear her away. She knew not if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, burdened with anguish or freighted with joy."
"The future was like a corridor in which there was no light, and at the end of it, only a door fast closed."
Emma's garden: "The trailing vine looked like a great moping serpent"
Emma listening to music: "her thoughts went leaping with the music, swung from dream to dream, from wistfulness to wistfulness"
"It seemed as though all the bitterness of life was served up to her on her plate and that with the fumes of the stew there rose up from her inmost being all manner of other sickly exhalations."
"country folk, whose hearts usually retain something of the hardness of their ancestors' toilworn hands"
burning bouquet: "It blazed up like a handful of dry straw, and then lay glowing like a red bush on the ashes, slowly crumbling to pieces. She watched it burn. The cardboard berries popped, the wire writhed and twisted, the gold braid melted, and the paper blossoms, shrivelling up, hovered a moment like black butterflies and at last flew up the chimney."
Part Two
Yonville: "making the country look like a wide mantle with a green velvet cape edged with a band of silver braid"
Yonville: "You can see it a long way off, sprawling along by the river-bank like a neatherd who has flung himself down by the stream for a noonday nap."
"thatched roofs, like fur caps pulled down over the eyes"
church BVM-statue: "her cheeks becrimsoned like an idol from the Sandwich Islands"
Homais: "he appeared to take life as easily as the goldfinch suspended above his head in its wicker cage"
new house: "Emma felt the chill of the plaster descending on her shoulders like a shroud of clammy linen"
hypothetical daughter: "Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, is tied to a string and flutters in every wind."
Emma w/Leon: "Coming delights, like the shores of tropic isles, exhale across the spreading seas their perfume-laden airs, the native softness of the clime; and they who breathe them, their spirits lulled as if by wine, scan not, nor try to scan, the faint, far-off horizon."
Emma: "Love, she thought, was something that must come suddenly, with a great display of thunder and lightning, descending on one's life like a tempest from above, turning it topsy-turvy, whirling away one's resolutions like leaves and bearing one onward, heart and soul, towards the abyss. She never bethought herself how on the terrace of a house the rain forms itself into little lakes when the gutters are choked, and she was going on quite unaware of her peril, when all of a sudden she discovered-- a crack in the wall!"
Leon: "his big blue eyes, raised upwards to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain tarns in which the skies are mirrored"
Lheureux: "His fat, flabby, beardless face looked as if it had been stained with a weak solution of liquorice"
scarves: "their golden spangles sparkled like little stars in the twilight"
Emma: "as she kissed and hugged the child she launched out into flights of poetry that would have reminded any but Yonville folk of Sachette in 'Notre-Dame'"
Leon of Emma: "in his heart, he saw her rising ever higher and higher, freeing herself from earthly trammels, like a soul floating heavenwards in some glorious apotheosis... she seemed like one passing through the world without so much as touching it, bearing on her brow the shadowy promise of some glorious and heavenly destiny... you felt a sort of icy charm when you were with her, the kind of shiver that comes over you in a church from the perfume of flowers and the cold of the marble"
Emma of Leon: "her thoughts were for ever settling on that particular house, like the 'Lion d'Or' pigeons that came to wet their pink toes and white wings in the gutters there"
Emma of CB: "Wasn't he the greatest stumbling-block, the cause of every ill and, as it were, the galling buckle of that manifold bond that hemmed her in on every side?"
Emma thinks of running away with Leon: "forthwith a kind of yawning chasm would open within her, filled with foreboding shadows"
Yonville: "the gardens, like the women, seemed to be adorning themselves for the high days of summer"
Emma's religious nostalgia: "she felt all yielding and helpless like a downy feather from a bird's breast, eddying in the storm"
church lamp: "Seen from afar, it looked like a whitish stain quivering on the oil."
Emma's house: "The various pieces of furniture in their places seemed to become more motionless and to be lost in the gloom as though on a darkling ocean"
Leon departs: "long rays of sunlight like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy"
"The next day, for Emma, was like a funeral. Everything seemed to be wrapped in a sort of black atmosphere which floated confusedly about the exterior of things, and grief plunged into the deep places of her soul, making soft moan, like the wintry wind in some deserted chateau. She was dreaming the dreams that come to one when one has bade farewell to something that will never return, the lassitude that comes over one when something is finally over and done with- the pain, in a word, which accompanies the interruption of a habit, the sudden cessation of a prolonged vibration."
"Henceforth the memory of Leon became, as it were, the centre, the focus of her sorrow. It glowed and sparkled amid the surrounding gloom more brightly than a derelict fire, left by travellers journeying across some Russian steppe to burn itself out in the snow. She hurried towards it, she crouched down beside it, she stirred most carefully its fading embers, she cast about her for anything and everything that might make them burn the brighter, and her most faint and far-off memories, as well as the things that happened today or yesterday, things imagined and things felt, her dreams of love that melted into air, her hopes of happiness that snapped like dead branches in the wind, her barren virtue, her fallen hopes, the daily domestic round- she gathered them all together and made of them the wherewithal to feed the embers of her melancholy."
"However, the fires died down, perhaps because the fuel was exhausted or because too much was piled upon them. Little by little, absence chilled the flame of love, the pangs of regret were dulled by habit. The glare of the conflagration that had incarnadined her pallid sky was obscured by shadows, and gradually disappeared. So vague and dreamy were her impressions that she mistook her detestation of her husband for longing for her lover, the fires of hate for the warmth of love; but since the storm ceased not to rage and passion burnt to the socket, since no succour came nor any ray of light appeared, she was left groping her way helplessly in the chill of unbroken night."
Justin fainting: "his pupils looked as if they were sinking down into the whites, like blue flowers drowning in milk"
Emma's face: "framed in the oval of her little bonnet with its pale green strings, like the leaves of rushes"
Rodolphe seducing Emma: "This sweetness of sensation pierced through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand caught in a gust of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which invaded her soul."
"the wings of the peasant women's bonnets flapped up and down, fluttering like white butterflies on the wing"
old farmwoman: "All her life she had been used to animals, and she had grown as placid and as mute as they."
ag-fair dinner: "Sweat was running down their faces, and a sort of whitish steam, like the mist that rises from a river of an autumn morning, floated between the hanging lamps."
Rodolphe dreams of Emma: "Her face shone as in a magic mirror in the badges of the shakos; the folds of her gown hung droopingly on the walls, and days of love stretched out in an endless line down the long vistas of the future."
Rodolphe declares love: "her pride, like tired limbs resting in a warm bath, glowed and expanded at such rapturous language"
riding: "the earth, all ruddy-brown like snuff"
"her face seemed bathed in a shadowy bluish light, as though she were floating under azure waves"
"Here and there about her, amid the leaves or on the ground, shone little patches of tremulous light, as if birds of paradise had passed overhead and dropped some feathers in their flight."
"she could feel the blood suffusing her whole body like a stream of milk"
"for her something had happened, something more tremendous than if the mountains had been shifted from their base"
"an azure immensity of boundless space lay round about her, and the glittering peaks of enchanted love rose up before her inward vision. Her ordinary, everyday life seemed to have receded afar, to be somewhere in the shadows between these radiant heights."
"love, so long repressed, leapt forth at last like a bubbling fount of bliss"
Emma's morning visits to Rodolphe: "It was like a spring morning coming into his room."
"little drops of dew that besprent her hair seemed like an aureole of topaz around her countenance"
Emma sneaking: "she would halt, paler and more tremulous than the poplar leaves that fluttered above her head"
rendezvous: "Great shadowy masses bellied out here and there in the darkness, and sometimes, all quivering together, they rose up and bowed forward like huge black waves advancing to overwhelm them."
"in the stillness that enfolded them a word, softly murmured, would fall upon their hearts like the note of a crystal bell and pass, trembling with infinite vibrations, into silence"
"that great love of theirs, in whose waves she was borne along, seemed as if it were growing shallower beneath her, like the waters of a river that was fated to be absorbed in its bed, and lo, she could see the mud!"
Emma's father's letter: "the thoughts that struggled through somehow, like the cackling of a hen half-hidden in a thorn hedge"
Emma's illusions: "shedding them along the path of life like a traveller who leaves behind him some portion of his belongings at every wayside inn"
Emma to Berthe: "asked all sorts of things about her health, as if she had just come back from a journey"
CB's failure: "his imagination, beset with a multitude of conflicting ideas, tossed and tumbled amongst them like an empty cask rolling and wallowing in a heavy sea"
Emma on CB's failure: "her dreams, falling like stricken swallows in the mire"
CB's surgical afterthought: "This extraordinary and wholly unexpected exclamation fell upon her like the thud of a leaden bullet on a silver plate."
"Charles seemed as completely severed from her life, as wholly and irrevocably removed, as impossible and non-existent, as if he were on the point of death and had passed through the fatal crisis beneath her eyes"
Rodolphe on Emma's compliments: "human speech is the broken pot on which we beat out rhythms for a dancing bear, instead of wringing tears from the stars" (la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.)
Emma's love: "her soul sank deep in this sensual flood and lay drowned and shrunken in its depths like the Duke of Clarence in his butt of Malmsey"
"Her yearnings, her sorrows, her joys, her still youthful illusions, had gradually developed her, even as flowers are developed by soil and rain, by sun and wind, and now, at length, she blossomed forth in all the fullness of her nature."
CB of Berthe: "the curtains of the cot glimmered like a little white hut in the shadows beside their bed"
full moon: "mounted quickly among the branches of the poplars, which hid her here and there, like a dark curtain fretted with holes" "this silver gleam seemed to undulate upon the water, far as eye could see, like a headless serpent, all covered with luminous scales. Or it might have been a huge candelabrum, whence, all along, from end to end, there swiftly trickled drops of molten diamond."
"The sweetness of old, forgotten days flooded their hearts again, full and silent as the river that flowed beside them, suave as the perfume of the syringas, and flung athwart their memories shadows vaster and more dolorous than the shade of the willows that lay motionless along the sward."
Rodolphe: "his pleasures, like schoolboys in a playground, had trodden down his heart so hard that nothing ever grew there, and whatsoever passed through it, more heedless than children, did not, like them, so much as leave a name scored upon the wall."
Emma: "She emptied the basket, tore away the leaves, saw the letter, opened it, and then, as if a fire were raging at her heels, made, in an agony of terror, for her room."
"that horrible piece of paper that rattled like a piece of sheet-iron in her hand"
"Her heart knocked against her breast like great blows from a sledge-hammer."
"the floor seemed to be slanting downwards like a vessel heeling over to the wind"
Lheureux's hope: "his poor little bit of money, after being fattened up at the doctor's like a patient in a convalescent home, would one day come back to him a great deal plumper than it had gone forth and fat enough to burst the sack"
Emma recovering: "Hippolyte's lantern as he got down the boxes from the boot was like a star shining in the darkness"
"Emma felt as if something endowed with great strength were passing over her, taking away all her sorrows, all perception, all feeling. Her flesh was no longer weighed down with the burden of anxiety, a new life was beginning for her. It seemed to her that her being, mounting upwards towards God, was about to be swallowed up in the divine love, like burning incense that melts away into vapour."
religious tracts for Emma: "The bookseller, with as much indifference as if he had been sending a consignment of hardware to a parcel of niggers"
Emma on Rodolphe: "she had relegated his memory to the nethermost chamber of her heart; and there he lay, more solemn and more still than a King's mummy in a subterranean tomb"
provincial inns: "they present an inalienably bucolic appearance, like farm hands in their Sunday best"
at the opera: "the faces of elderly gentlemen, placid and expressionless, looking like discs of oxidized silver"
opera: "the music of flute, which sounded like a murmuring fountain or the gentle warbling of birds"
tenor: "His complexion exhibited the magnificent pallor that lends the majesty of marble statuary to the ardent races of the South."
"these melodious lamentations that lingered long upon the air to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the shipwrecked heard amid the tumult of the tempest"
Emma's wedding-day: "never realizing the precipice over which she was flinging herself"
spilled-upon opera-goer: "When she felt the cold liquid running down her back she yelled like a peacock"
part three
Leon on Emma: "there floated before him a vague, uncertain hope which swung to and fro in the distance, like a golden fruit hung from some fantastic arabesque of branches"
"speech is a mill-roller that flattens out people's sentiments" (la parole est un laminoir qui allonge [elongates] toujours les sentiments)
Emma's face when Leon declares love: "It was like the sky when a wind chases away the clouds."
Leon leaving: "She made answer with a nod, and vanished like a bird into the adjoining room."
Emma praying before adultery: "lost in her devotions like some Andalusian marquise"
beadle's church-tour: "prouder than a country landowner showing off his wall fruit"
Leon: "his love, which, for two hours had been immobilized in the church like the stones of which it was built, was now in danger of going up like smoke through this sort of truncated pipe, oblong cage, or fretted chimney that sticks up like a comic nose on the Cathedral as though an ingenious tinker had been indulging in some extravagant fancy"
cabride: "a vehicle with drawn blinds, which kept continually coming into view, sealed up like a tomb and rocking like a ship at sea"
Emma's letter to Leon: "a little white hand peeped out beneath the blinds of yellow canvas and flung away a lot of scraps of paper, which floated in the wind and settled farther on, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover in full bloom"
Homais's rage: "he was in one of those crises in which the soul is laid bare to its very depths, just as the ocean, when a storm is raging, not only strews the shore with jetsam, but churns up the sand from its lowest depths"
Emma w/CB: "Something stupefying, like the fumes of opium, seemed to be deadening her senses."
Rouen Seine: "great oily patches undulating in the crimson of the setting sun like medallions of Florentine bronze"
Emma and Leon: "like two shipwrecked travellers, they would have liked to dwell for ever in that little spot"
Emma's song: "the trills, that Leon heard fleeting past him like the fluttering of little wings"
Rouen from the coach: "the oval-shaped islands looked like great dark fish floating motionless on the surface of the water"
"Occasionally a gust of wind would come and sweep the clouds towards the heights of Sainte Catherine, like airy billows breaking soundlessly against a cliff."
Rouen: "the old Norman city lay outspread beneath her gaze like some mighty metropolis, some vast Babylon"
Leon with Emma: "Often as he gazed at her, it seemed to him as if his soul, taking flight towards her, was diffused like a wave over the contour of her head and descended willy-nilly into the whiteness of her bosom."
beggar's plea: "It went sheer down into the depths of her soul like a whirlwind in a chasm, and bore her away among the spaces of an illimitable melancholy."
Emma w/Lheureux: "there was a sound in her ears as if a host of golden coins, bursting their bags, were jingling round her on the floor"
Emma angry at Leon: "We should never touch our idols. Some of the gilt always comes off on our fingers."
Emma undressing: "snatching away her thin corset-lace so that it hissed around her hips like a gliding grass-snake" (arrachant le lacet mince de son corset, qui sifflait autour de ses hanches comme une couleuvre qui glisse)
Leon's doubts: "at the sound of her step, he would feel himself wilting, like a drunkard at the sight of the bottle"
Emma's ideal: "a man with the heart of a poet and the form of an angel, a lyre with brazen strings, sounding his bridal songs of triumph and of pain beneath the echoing vault of heaven"
Emma's emotions outside her old convent: "a universe of passion may be crammed into a moment, even as a crowd may be hemmed into a little space"
"She would have liked, if she had been a bird, to fly away and renew herself in far-off, stainless, skyey spaces."
bailiff's inventory: "her whole mode of life, with all its intimacies and secrets, was laid bare, like a corpse undergoing a post-mortem examination"
Binet's hobby: "the pale sawdust was flying from his lathe like a plume of sparks beneath the iron-shod hoofs of a horse at the gallop"
Emma's hair: "in the glowing twilight a lingering ray of the sun sparkled in it like a golden arrow"
"of all the blasts that ever fall on the plant of love, a pecuniary request is the most freezing and most devastating"
Emma's panic: "The walls were quaking, and the ceiling seemed as if it would fall on her and crush her... the throbbing of her arteries, which seemed to besiege her ears like a deafening music and to fill the region round about. The ground beneath her feet was softer than a wave, and the furrows looked to her like vast brown billows, rolling on and on into the distance. All the stored-up contents of her brain, all her memories, all her ideas burst forth in a single flash, like the myriad stars in a blaze of fireworks."
"It was her love that pierced her heart, and she felt as if her soul were ebbing from her through the memory of it, even as the wounded in their death agony feel their life's blood ebbing from them through their unstanched wounds."
"Of a sudden it seemed to her as if the sky were hung with globes of fire that burst like angry bullets and flattened themselves and fell slowly earthward, turning and turning, amid the branches of the trees, to bury themselves in the snow."
"There were drops of sweat on her livid face, that seemed as though it were petrified in the exhalation of some metallic vapour."
"Emma heard only the intermittent lamentation of that poor heart of hers, a lamentation soft and indistinct, like the last echo of a symphony dying away in the distance"
"her pulse flickered away beneath the fingers like a taut wire, or like a harp-string, stretched to breaking point"
"her poor hands twitching at the sheets, in the ghastly, submissive way that dying people have, as though they were trying, prematurely, to draw the winding-sheet about them"
CB: "Pale as a statue, with eyes like burning coals"
"she looked all round about her, slowly, like one waking from a dream"
"Her wandering eyes began to grow pale, like a pair of lamp globes in which the light was waning"
priest's prayers: "the low murmur of the Latin syllables, which sounded like the tinkling of a passing bell"
Emma's corpse: "the eyes themselves seemed to be disappearing in a viscous pallor like a thin gauze, as if spiders had spun a web over them... it seemed to Charles as though infinite masses, an enormous weight, were pressing her down"
CB: "it somehow seemed to him as if she were rising up and floating far and wide, merging confusedly in everything round about- in the silence, in the night, in the winds that went wandering by, in the moist odours that were rising from the earth"
Emma's coffin: "on and on it went, with little jerky movements like a boat in a choppy sea pitching at every wave"
CB's love of Berthe: "that delight had its alloy of bitterness, like an ill-made wine that smells of resin"
Homais: "this husband of hers, who stood before her swathed like a Scythian and resplendent as an Eastern Mage"
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