Justin
“ ‘My young friend...is beginning to have ideas, and devil take
me if he isn’t in love with your maid!’” (Flaubert 109)
Under my philanthropic care is Justin, a distant relative—a cousin—of
mine. I took him in, in my own home, as my apprentice. I gave
him the opportunity to grow up into a respectable citizen of France, like
me, the Legion of Honor recipient. I need to stress that I have given
him every opportunity—but he spoiled them all. He faints when
he sees blood, he takes a pan situated near some arsenic from my Carpharnum
to make jam with—he’s not a reliable servant. Plus, he
fell in love with Felicité, the Bovary’s maid. What a
rascal! Moreover, he brought scandalous filth into my househol, a pornographic
book entitled Conjugal Love. What filth! He could have polluted
the minds of my darling children—apart from defiling his own.
Adding insult to injury, he left, ran away from Yonville without even one
word of thanks. Like Brutus to Caesar, he betrayed me and wronged me,
as he ran off to Rouen to become a grocer’s assistant! What an
insensitive, degenerate ruffian!
Upon reading Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, my eyes were thrown
wide open, seeing the full extent of the vices of this boy. An adolescent
watching a grown woman—married, mind you—dress and undress.
How scandalous! Furthermore, had I known at the time that this stupid,
stupid boy had supplied Emma Bovary with the means of her suicide, the arsenic,
he would have wished he had never been born. Justin would have been
thrown out of my house in an instant, sans the comfort, the love, the opportunity
I had previously given him.
Yet, I must disprove Flaubert in one point. He states that “[Emma]
never dreamed that the love that had disappeared from her life was throbbing
so close to her, under that homespun shirt, in that adolescent heart so receptive
to the emanations of her beauty” (209). It was not love—it
was hormones, adolescent lust. Just like when I found him with that
filth Conjugal Love, he was too young to understand love. Had he known
what love was, he would have changed the object of his affection, from a
promiscuous adulterer to a nice, educated farmgirl, avoiding Madame Bovary
like the plague (Tanner 279)!
People of Yonville
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