These days the quiet little country village of Ry is only a fifteen-minute drive away from the busy centre of Rouen. Ten minutes in my Irish friend's beat-up black BMW. There, in the rich damp Normandy earth, only a few feet from the door of the church, the best position in the graveyard, lies the body of the young woman who was the original Madame Bovary. Here she is. If an imaginary woman can have a real grave, this must be it. Her name is Delphine Delamare. She died in 1848, at the age of twenty-seven, her name wrapped in a little poison-cloud of local scandal. People said that Delphine Delamare killed herself. But Delphine's head-stone looks nearly new. It can't possibly be nearly 150 years old. The helpful official leaflet tells me that in 1990 she got a new tombstone, paid for by the local literary society and the chamber of commerce. The neat black lettering on the yellow slab leaves no room for doubt. Delphine Delamare nee Couturier. Then, carved below the real name, there are just the words "Madame Bovary". It's a clever move. The village that once gossiped Delphine Delamare into an early grave now earns a good living from cultivating her memory. There's the Museum of Automata, housed in a big old barn. For ten francs you can see Emma's Wedding: fifty life-sized moving figures in authentic nineteenth-century costume. There's a thriving florist's shop called Emma's Garden. How she would have loved such a sweetly lucrative confusion of art and life.
Like Emma, Delphine Delamare was the unhappy wife of a none-too-successful village doctor. Like Emma, she had expensive tastes, a gullible adoring husband, a procession of lovers, and a secret festering pile of debts. Like Emma she met an early and ignominious death, probably at her own hand. Unlike Emma, Delphine Delamare was nothing special. Plump and pale, and rather plain, with dull blonde hair and a blotchy complexion. But she oozed sex. According to one witness Delphine had a sliding, sinuous walk, a caressing voice and wonderful beseeching eyes that seemed to change colour with the light. Were they grey, green or blue? Emma's eyes change colour too. But it's difficult to sort out the real Delphine. Everyone has embellished her story to make it fit the novel. Delphine Delamare now lies buried deep under a great mound of fantasy.
Louise Pradier, the other woman who went into the making of Madame Bovary, came from a world very different. Louise had everything that Delphine Delamare could only imagine: great beauty, great wealth, a talented successful husband and a house in the heart of Paris where the famous of the day were delighted to gather. But Louise Pradier's life makes a sad story.
At the age of eighteen, to escape from her father, she married James Pradier, the most successful sculptor of the day, a man old enough to be her father. From their luxurious house on the Quai Voltaire she presided over a salon that brought together poets, painters and musicians, as well as the merely fashionable. "Beauty is de rigueur" Louise wrote on her party invitations. The entertainment she supplied to her guests was always memorably lavish. There were musicians dressed in antique costume. There were fancy-dress processions of gods and goddesses. The high point of the evening was the appearance of Venus, embodied in the divinely voluptuous person of Louise Pradier herself, making her entrance in a diaphanous classical tunic held together by a large diamond. With her tight amber-red curls, her dazzling blue eyes, her powerful shoulders and the curious golden down on her breasts, Louise Pradier was a woman who could plausibly play the goddess.
Unlike Emma Bovary, Louise Pradier was allowed to stage her dreams and live out her passions. But luxury did her no good. It left her bleakly unsatisfied. Like Emma, Louise was eventually destroyed by a combination of debt and her own scandalous legendary promiscuity. Her husband lost patience with her and cast her off. Flaubert began to take an interest in her at this point. He was fascinated, artistically and erotically, by the superlative drama of the fallen woman. Louise was, in his words, "a whole orchestra of female sentiments. " He became one of her many lovers and later, when writing Madame Bovary, he borrowed many details from an unpublished manuscript history of Louise Pradier's hectic and unhappy life.
Flaubert turned the real lives of Delphine Delamare and Louise Pradier into the imagined life of Emma Bovary. But why did he go such lengths to hide the double face of his most celebrated character? There is a third woman who is also part of Emma's story: Flaubert's adored younger sister, Caroline. She was great companion of his childhood, his loyal ally in family every family dispute. A fragile, sickly, sensitive, affectionate woman, she married a loathsome local mediocrity and then died in childbirth, after many months of slow agony, at the age of twenty-two. For Flaubert the loss of Caroline was unspeakable. He seemed to feel only a kind of blank desolation. On the morning of his sister's funeral he took a plaster cast of her face and from this death-mask a life-size white marble bust was carved. The effigy of this dead sister was there in the room, like a ghostly memory of love, all through the years that Madame Bovary was being written.
In a letter to his Parisian mistress Flaubert wrote, "You talk about the unhappiness of women. That's the world I'm in at the moment. You'll see how deep I shall go down into the well of feeling. If my book works, it will gently tickle many a feminine wound. Many will smile as they recognise themselves. O I will have known your sufferings, you poor obscure souls, damp from your stifled sorrows, like your provincial backgardens where the moss is growing all down the walls." The potent sorrow of Caroline Flaubert's death seeped into the story of Emma
Bovary, flowing through between the lines. It was the memory of her that inspired Flaubert's marvellously lucid tenderness towards the sufferings, the dreams and the thwarted desires of women.~ Geoffrey Wall of Penguin Classic