Character guide

Emma Bovary

major

Also known as Mademoiselle Emma, Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers, Madame Bovary junior

Emma enters marriage expecting the transports of the books she devoured as a girl, and finds instead a quiet house, a plodding husband, and neighbors who talk about cider and weather. Her beauty draws attention she half-wants and half-despises, and her restlessness curdles into boredom, spending, and a hunger for feeling that nothing in Yonville can satisfy. Flaubert lets us watch her from inside, so that her dissatisfaction becomes the engine of the whole story.

Charles Bovary

major

Also known as Monsieur Charles Denis Bartolome Bovary, Monsieur Bovary, Madame Charles

Charles is the man who marries Emma after his first wife dies, a mediocre practitioner with a warm heart and no imagination for the longings that move her. He notices violets on the mantel and smells them tenderly, unaware they came from another man; he presses opera tickets against his stomach and weeps at the music. His sincere, clumsy love is the baseline against which Emma's romantic fantasies and eventual betrayals are measured.

Rodolphe Boulanger

major

Also known as Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette, Monsieur Boulanger

Rodolphe arrives at the agricultural fair already bored with easy conquests, and Emma's restless beauty strikes him as a more interesting diversion than the local women. He speaks to her in the language of novels she has read, plucks daisies for love-oracles, and steers her away from the druggist with practiced ease. His calculated seduction gives Emma her first taste of the passion she has craved, and sets the pattern of illusion and disappointment that will define her.

Léon Dupuis

major

Also known as Monsieur Léon, Monsieur Léon Dupuis

Léon meets Emma at the inn and discovers a kindred spirit who reads the same books and sighs at the same sunsets; they talk of poetry and music while Charles dozes. He leaves for Paris to study law, and three years later returns with varnished shoes and a bolder manner, still carrying the memory of her. His timidity and her hunger make their reunion a slow, charged dance that promises the affair Emma has been rehearsing in her imagination.

Monsieur Homais

supporting

Also known as Homais

Homais is the neighbor who drops in daily, writes florid paragraphs for the local paper, and treats every event as an occasion for his opinions on progress and virtue. He bustles through the market bowing to Madame Bovary, and later whispers with the landlady about Lheureux's bills and the ruin they are bringing. Pompous and meddlesome, he embodies the smug provincial modernity against which Emma's romanticism chafes.

Monsieur Lheureux

supporting

Also known as Lheureux

Lheureux appears at Emma's elbow with a bow and a compliment, offering fabrics and novelties she cannot afford and terms she does not read carefully. He walks beside her and Rodolphe at the fair, pretending not to intrude, while the town already knows he has ruined others with bills. His patient, smiling arithmetic turns Emma's romantic spending into a trap that will close around her long before she understands it.

Justin

minor

Also known as little Justin

The Homais' young, infatuated assistant who works in the pharmacy.

Père Rouault

supporting

Also known as Old Rouault, Monsieur Rouault, Theodore Rouault

Rouault is a prosperous, plainspoken Norman farmer who pays Charles Bovary seventy-five francs and a turkey for setting his leg, then quietly steers the widowed doctor back toward his household. His grief over his dead wife, told in the fields with a stick striking the earth, reveals a man who endures rather than dramatizes—a temperament Emma will inherit nothing of. He matters because he launches the marriage plot: without his farm, his convalescence, and his daughter's convent education, there is no Madame Bovary.

Monsieur Binet

minor

Also known as Binet

The tax collector in Yonville, known for his lathe work.

Madame Homais

minor

The pharmacist's wife and mother of their children.

Hippolyte Tautain

minor

Also known as Hippolyte

The clubfooted stable boy at the inn on whom Charles operates.

Berthe Bovary

minor

Also known as little Berthe

The young daughter of Charles and Emma.

Félicité

minor

The Bovarys' maid in Yonville.

Hivert

minor

The coachman who drives the Hirondelle between Rouen and Yonville.

Madame Lefrançois

minor

Also known as Widow Lefrançois, Mère Lefrançois

The innkeeper of the Lion d'Or in Yonville.

Monsieur Bournisien

minor

Also known as Bournisien

The parish priest of Yonville, often at odds with Homais.

Doctor Larivière

minor

A renowned, skilled doctor from Rouen consulted in critical cases.

Mère Rollet

minor

A wet-nurse who cares for Berthe Bovary.

Mademoiselle Lempereur

minor

Also known as Mademoiselle Lempereur

A music teacher in Rouen whom Emma falsely claims as her piano instructor.

Madame Dubuc

minor

Also known as Dubuc

Charles Bovary's first wife, who dies early in the story.

Lagardy

minor

Also known as Edgar - Lagardy

A famous opera singer Emma admires during a performance in Rouen.

Madame Tuvache

minor

The wife of the mayor of Yonville.

Monsieur Canivet

minor

Also known as Canivet, Dr. Canivet

A surgeon from Neufchâtel called in for consultations.

Lestiboudois

minor

The sexton and grave-digger in Yonville who also tends the garden.

Monsieur Tuvache

minor

Also known as Tuvache

The mayor of Yonville.

Catherine Leroux

minor

Also known as Catherine Niçaise Elizabeth Leroux

An elderly servant honored for fifty years of service at an agricultural show.

Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville

minor

Also known as Monsieur Derozerays

A prominent farmer who speaks at the agricultural show.

Monsieur Guillaumin

minor

A notary in Yonville whom Emma approaches for financial help.

Athalie

minor

One of the Homais children.

Maître Hareng

minor

Also known as Hareng

A bailiff who serves legal notices.

Vinçart

minor

Also known as Monsieur Vinçart, Quiet Vinçart

A banker in Rouen associated with Lheureux's financial schemes.

Artémise

minor

The Homais' maid.