What happens in Part Three, Chapter 7 of Madame Bovary?
Driven to financial ruin and emotional despair after Léon and Rodolphe both refuse to help her with her debts, Emma heads to Homais's pharmacy. She tricks Justin into unlocking the storeroom and swallows a handful of arsenic. Back at home, the poison takes effect quickly: a bitter taste in her mouth, waves of nausea, and convulsions. Charles, called back from his rounds, feels powerless to help. Homais and Dr. Canivet arrive and try treatments that prove ineffective. Just as she is dying, the blind beggar whose song has haunted Emma throughout Part Three passes by her window, prompting her to laugh—an eerie final sound—before she breathes her last. The village priest administers last rites to a woman who, in life, blurred the lines between religious ecstasy and erotic desire. Charles crumples at her bedside, utterly devastated.
Analysis
Flaubert stages Emma's death as the novel's most brutal irony. Every figure who shaped her romantic ideals—the lover, the moneylender, the priest, the doctor—gathers at her deathbed and disappoints her in ways that align with their characters: Homais worries about his reputation, Canivet asserts medical authority without any real skill, and Bournisien offers rituals that Emma once romanticized but now cannot appreciate. The arsenic is a brilliant touch: kept in Homais's pharmacy, a symbol of provincial Enlightenment rationalism, it kills through the body's most unglamorous processes—vomiting, blackened lips, cold sweat. Flaubert denies Emma the beautiful death of sentimental fiction that she would have envisioned for herself.
The blind beggar serves as the chapter's most talked-about motif. His return—singing a crude song about a girl and her dreams—acts as a grotesque counterpoint: the song Emma once found unbearable now coincides with her final moments, and her laugh in response becomes the novel's most ambiguous sound, a mix of hysteria, clarity, and despair. Flaubert's free indirect discourse fades here; for the first time, we are outside Emma's consciousness, observing her body instead of experiencing her thoughts. This shift from inner experience to clinical observation is the chapter's key move, illustrating the very annihilation of self that Emma's romanticism could never accept.
Key quotes from Part Three, Chapter 7
“She went to the window, looked at the roofs of the village, at the plain, at the river, at the hills, and she felt a tenderness for all this, as if she were seeing it for the last time.”
Emma pauses before entering the pharmacy, the landscape briefly registering as loss rather than escape—one of Flaubert's rare moments of unguarded pathos for her.
“She began to vomit blood. Her lips pressed tighter. Her limbs were convulsed, her body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped through the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp string about to snap.”
Flaubert's clinical, almost musical simile renders the body's dissolution with the same aesthetic attention Emma once lavished on her fantasies.
“The blind man! she cried. And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch loom out of the eternal darkness like a menace.”
The beggar's song drifts through the window at the moment of Emma's death, and her laugh—the novel's last sound from her—collapses irony, horror, and recognition into a single gesture.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part Three, Chapter 7
- arsenic
- A toxic chemical element used in 19th-century France as rat poison; Emma steals and swallows it from Homais's pharmacy to kill herself.
- extreme unction
- The Roman Catholic sacrament administered to a person who is dying, involving anointing with holy oil; its performance over Emma is a solemn and ironic moment given her faithless life.
- sexton
- A church official responsible for the maintenance of the building and churchyard, and for digging graves; he appears at the time of Emma's death and burial.