- A girl I was at university with once told me that I reminded her of Madame Bovary.
- She just…said it, and I sort of smiled at her, and it is all too possible that I even said, thanks.
- It took me a number of years to realise that I had been dealt a mortal blow.
- The reasons for this belated awakening are various, and one of the least important is that I had not yet read Madame Bovary when she said that to me.
- You don’t have to have actually read Madame Bovary from cover to cover to understand that when someone tells you that you remind them of Emma, they are making a brutal assessment of your character.
- They are going straight for the jugular.
- Ripping a big chunk of flesh out your calf.
- I refused to see this though, in a feat of willed obliviousness that calls to mind Emma herself.
- I thought she was saying I was chic or something!
- I thought she was saying I had some attractive anxious habits, or that I had the aura of a woman who would own an elegant dog.
- I thought she was saying I had a kind of romantic, nervous panache!
- Not so, obviously, but it certainly took me a while to arrive at this conclusion.
- An insult of that scale and viciousness can lie dormant within a person for many years, like rabies.
- You have been bitten, and you know that it hurt, but it is only when the insult embeds itself in your central nervous system that you realise how bad it actually is.
- What bothers me is that I have certainly been on the receiving end of other attacks and swipes of this nature, but I am too much of a simpleton to work it out just yet.
- I will probably spend the rest of my life periodically moaning in shame and anguish as I realise many years after the fact that I have been viciously insulted once again.
- You don’t seem like the kind of person who would have a problem like this.
- You seem like the kind of person who would know in a heartbeat, in real time, whether or not you had been insulted, and to what precise degree.
- You seem like you would have had a special diary for that.
- We know from your travel diary, at least, that your first meal of the day consisted of “eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate.”
- We know also that “after dinner, which generally lasted from seven to nine, dusk often found them there, looking out at moonlight flecking the water and fisherman casting their hoop nets for eel.”
- “For eel.”
- A reasonable supposition is one which appeals to common sense, and common sense says that a man who recorded his and his companions’ hunt for eels will have also jotted down his own personal gripes and grievances.
- I for one would have loved to see that diary.
- Happy Birthday.
Happy Birthday Flaubert
You seem like the kind of person who would know in a heartbeat, in real time, whether or not you had been insulted, and to what precise degree.
Popula is 100% ad-free, reader-supported journalism accountable only to you. Every dollar of your subscription goes straight to our work. Thank you for supporting Popula.
Each comment or response costs a tiny ETH fee of 0.00013 (about 5¢ in Ethereum cryptocurrency), payable from your Metamask.io wallet (the wallet is free, and takes just a moment to add to your browser). This system helps protect Popula conversations from trolls, fakers, Cambridges Analytica and other malign influences.
If you haven’t got any ETH yet and you’re a Popula subscriber, please write to hey@popula.com with your subscriber email address and MetaMask wallet address, and we’ll send you a little bit to get started! It’s pretty easy and a lot of fun to use, Yay.
If you’d like to learn more about cryptocurrency, Ethereum, and how Popula is using these new technologies to help protect speech rights and the free press, please visit our FAQ page.
We’re having trouble checking your subscriber status. Try refreshing the page.
Welcome! To leave a comment, you’ll need to log in, and also have your MetaMask wallet ready with some ETH cryptocurrency available.
It’s easy! Just visit metamask.io to install an in-browser MetaMask wallet. If you’re a new subscriber, write to hey@popula.com for $2 in free ETH crypto!
Thank you for being a Popula subscriber! As a subscriber, you may leave comments, but you have to be logged in as commenter here first. This is an additional login—the login for your commenting privileges—and you’ll stay logged in after you log in the first time.
We’ve sent an email to your registered address at … with your commenting details. Please follow the directions in the email to open your commenting privileges and then come back here to leave your first comment!
Thanks for registering! Please log in and you can get started commenting.
You need to connect to the Main Ethereum Network before you can leave a comment. Click on your MetaMask icon so the window pops up, then select ‘Main Ethereum Network’ from the network-chooser dropdown at the top.
You’re logged in and ready to leave comments! All you need is a MetaMask wallet and a little ETH cryptocurrency, just like with our microtipping system.
If you know what MetaMask is and have it installed, activate MetaMask and refresh:
Each comment costs 5¢ in Ethereum cryptocurrency to post! Just write your comment and click the green button. Thank you, Popula subscriber, for joining us in the new world of cryptoeconomics! Please don’t forget to set your wallet address in order to receive tips on your comments.
Alas! commenting is not yet available on your mobile device. Each comment costs a little ETH cryptocurrency to post, and for now that requires a regular computer.
So please go to your laptop, install the MetaMask browser plugin, and hold forth!