"...nothing in
fact has changed at Yonville" (Flaubert 51)
My great hometown
of Yonville-l’ Abbaye was the subject of Flaubert’s
book Madame Bovary. I didn’t appreciate the negative way Flaubert
portrayed my town, I feel that “the society satirized has not been
defeated or left behind, but is the dominant world which you (we) must accept”
(Cortland 23). I believe like in every town there are good things and
bad, but each of them make the town what they are, and those little eccentricities
make Yonville a great place to live and raise a family. Yonville is
a quaint town that is about 25 miles from Rouen. The town resides at the
base of the valley, where the river Rieule waters the land. As a boy
I used to wait till the summers so my friends and I could play in the water
and go fishing. I being the master of pretty much everything I do,
was a great fisherman; in fact I caught the biggest fish in the history of
the Rieule it was fourteen inches long. The town is “between
Abbeville and Beauvais” and is named after “an old Capuchin abbey”
which doesn’t even exist anymore. Visitors can take the La Boissiere
highway and climb to the top of Leux Hill, and look down the entire town;
the view of Yonville is breathtaking.
Yonville is divided
into
two parts, “the left is pasture, everything on the right is farmland”
(Flaubert 85). Many times the children of the town can be seen playing
in the “gold-colored grainfields” which stretch “as far
as the eye can see” (Flaubert 85). Our town of Yonville is blessed
to have such a variety of landscapes with Arqueil forest s and the slopes
of Saint Jean Hill, this makes our wonderful town one of great envy.
Especially the people from “Normandy, Picardy, and Ile-de-France, a
bastard section where the language is without accent as the scenery is without
character” (Flaubert 85).
In about 1835 the we
finally got a road, but people usually don’t come to visit Yonville,they
usually just ride on through to Rouen, which is a shame because they don’t
get to see the beauty of out small town. The town hasn’t expanded
much, which is kind of a good thing because everyone in town knows everyone
else, so our town is safe. The farmers say they are trying to be environmentalists
by conserving the land and they only recultivate the previous land.
But I believe they are being lazy and if there is less produce because the
land isn’t as fertile they can jack up the prices.
All the houses in Yonville
look pretty much the same except the fact they get smaller as you go through
the city, except for my house which was “‘built to the plan of
a Paris architect’“ (Flaubert 87). “The church was
rebuilt in the last years of the reign of Charles X” and has a small
cemetery around it (Flaubert 87). The church to me is a bunch of poppycock;
the people running the church have no idea what they are preaching about.
In my opinion “misunderstood science is as equivalent to religion”
because there is at least it is based on some fact (Cortland 53). The
church on the other hand is so hypocritical as they have a “statuette
of the Virgin, dressed in satin, with a tulle veil sown with silver stars
in her head, and her cheeks a deep purple like some Sandwich Island Idol”
(Flaubert 87). Mary is supposed to represent purity and simplicity;
she shouldn’t look like some two bit Rouen hussy. The church
insults history and distorts the truth. My pharmacy is probably the
most beautiful thing in town, as at night the apothecary jars glow in the
dark in a variety of colors.
The town hasn’t
really changed since Flaubert’s book was published, so it is still
a small, quiet and wonderful town that everyone should come and visit.
Yonville
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