Champfleury, Flaubert and the Novel of Adultery

Les Bourgeois de Molinchart (1855), the minor realist novel by Champfleury, is, like Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), a novel of adultery. The main figures in that triangle of adultery are, however, very different. In particular, the heroine, Louise Creton du Coche, is an angelicized figure who seems passive and inert, when compared to Emma Bovary. Whilst Flaubert makes Emma's development grow out of her dissatisfaction with marriage, Champfleury makes Louise a helpless victim of the machinations of those around her. Champfleury's failure to explore the problematics of marriage and adultery allows us to appreciate how successful Flaubert's novel was in this respect. (TW)