A country doctor's wife in Normandy reads romances, takes lovers, runs up debts with a draper who is patient for exactly as long as it suits him, and reaches for the arsenic. Flaubert was prosecuted for offending public morals in 1857 and acquitted; he wrote at a page a week and read every sentence aloud. Nothing is explained and nothing is forgiven. Forty-four plates by Renoir, Pissarro and their circle catch the yellow fields, farm children and windows of the France Emma Bovary longed to escape.
