So insignificant a matter as this ordinary leave-taking becomes interesting through the loving care bestowed on the description, and the separation obtains individual life from the prominence given to a single day, when, after all, nothing of moment transpires. The accuracy with which this commonplace situation is portrayed, transforms it into a painting of high rank, one that reproduces simultaneously the visible and the audible, the tableau and the mobile life.
Or recall the passage where Emma, after her marriage, falls in love for the first time:—
"Emma grew thin, her cheeks became pale, her face lengthened. With her smoothly brushed black hair, neatly tied with a ribbon, her large eyes, her straight nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent as she was, she almost seemed to glide through existence without touching it, and to bear on her brow the indistinct impress of some sublime destiny. She was so sorrowful and so calm, and at the same time so gentle and so reserved, that in her presence people felt as though seized by some icy spell, just as a shudder is apt to run through the frame in church where the perfume of flowers is mingled with the chill of the marble."
The comparison is new, is striking and brief. We here detect the poet in the narrative.
We detect him still more clearly when he continues thus:—
"The ladies of the city admired her housewifely taste, the patients her courtesy, the poor her benevolence. But she herself was full of desire, full of rage and hatred. Her dress, with its rigid folds, concealed a troubled heart, whose pangs these chaste lips of hers did not reveal. She was in love with Léon.... She investigated his every footstep; she searched his countenance; she invented a whole history in order to have a pretext for a visit to his room. She esteemed the apothecary's wife happy because she slept under the same roof with him; and her thoughts were continually alighting on the house, precisely as the doves of the 'Golden Lion' that were always flying there to moisten their rosy feet and their white wings in the muddy water of the eaves."
This is not a striking general comparison; it is a comparison borrowed from a positive occurrence in the village where Emma lives. So vividly does this village present itself to the mind's eye of the author.
Sometimes he condenses an entire description into one powerful poetic phrase. So it is in the passage where he introduces the old maid-servant who has been summoned to a meeting of the agricultural union in order to receive for her faithful service of fifty-four years on one farm a silver medal valued at twenty-five francs.
Katharina Niçaise Elizabeth Leroux, a little old woman who looks all shrivelled up in her poor garments, appears upon the estrade. We see her thin face with its deep wrinkles beneath her cap, and her long hands with their knotted joints, which had been coated by the dust of the barn, the grease of wool-picking, and the potash of the wash-tub, with so hard a crust that, although they had been washed in pure spring water, they still seemed dirty, and which could no longer be wholly closed, but always remained open, as though in testimony of too much toil. We see the nun-like rigidity of her expression, the animal stupidity of her wan visage, her motionless bewilderment at the unusual spectacle of banners, flourish of trumpets, and smiling gentlemen in black coats, decorated with the cross of the Legion of Honor. Then Flaubert condenses the picture into this one sentence:—
"Thus stood in the presence of these well-to-do old fogies this half-century of slavery."