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With desperate resolve, the new boy opened a mouth that seemed enormous, and as though calling someone he cried at the top of his lungs the word "Charbovari!"
This touched off a roar that rose crescendo, punctuated with shrill screams. There was a shrieking, a banging of desks as everyone yelled, "Charbovari! Charbovari!" Then the din broke up into isolated cries that slowly diminished, occasionally starting up again along a line of desks where a stifled laugh would burst out here and there like a half-spent firecracker.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller, New York, Random House, 1957
TIME: 1827.
PLACE: Rouen, France.
CIRCUMSTANCE: an amused class of French male adolescents react vociferously to the unusual announcement by Charles Bovary of his name.
Kenneled watchdogs were barking, pulling at their chains... The farmyard sloped upward, planted with symmetrically spaced trees, and from near the pond came the merry sound of a flock of geese.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller, New York, Random House, 1957, p.16.
TIME: 1835
PLACE: Les Bertaux, a farm on the outskirts of Tostes (now Totes), near Rouen.
CIRCUMSTANCE: sounds heard upon arrival at Les Bertaux.
If they listened, they [wedding guests] could hear the steady scraping of the fiddle in the fields .... The sound of the instrument frightened away all the birds for a long distance ahead.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller, New York, Random House, 1957, p.32.
TIME: 1837
PLACE: Rouen, France.
CIRCUMSTANCE: a fiddler accompanies the wedding party on foot.
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