Madame Bovary 1949
{15160}{15257}What are dreams made of?|Where do they come from?
{15374}{15480}Absurd dreams of fashion and luxury|in a farmhouse bedroom.
{15500}{15547}Who was the messenger?
{15566}{15668}Ridiculous dreams of high romance|and impossible love.
{15688}{15850}The cavalier, the serenade,|the long ago and the faraway.
{15879}{15943}Images of beauty that never existed.
{15966}{16013}These things she loved.
{16116}{16172}Emma Roualt, motherless,
{16174}{16272}had attended a convent|in the provincial city of Rouen.
{16274}{16335}Emma at first detested the convent.
{16356}{16481}The scales, the eternal scales, when|she might have been learning love songs.
{16483}{16552}The discipline, the dreadful conformity.
{16568}{16679}The eternal uniform,|when a girl's young body is budding.
{16696}{16783}Perhaps it was the discipline itself|and Emma's discontent
{16784}{16908}that drove her to dreams, and taught|a lonely girl to live within herself.
{16936}{17023}For these became the happy years,|these convent years,
{17024}{17100}when a young girl's mind could wander.
{17346}{17433}And then, as if to feed her dreams,
{17435}{17586}there was the old Swiss seamstress who|sang the love songs of the last century
{17588}{17699}and told stories about|love in a Swiss chalet
{17700}{17772}and love in a villa in Italy,
{17774}{17845}and to make|the geography lesson complete,
{17847}{17938}slipped them on the sly|novels forbidden by the sisters,
{17940}{18040}so they could read about|love in a cottage in Scotland
{18043}{18118}and love in a castle in Spain.
{18149}{18233}Novels, novels.
{18270}{18391}She lived in a world of love,|lovers, sweethearts,
{18393}{18463}persecuted ladies fainting|in lonely pavilions,
{18484}{18560}horses ridden to death on every page,
{18562}{18647}gentlemen, brave as lions,|gentle as lambs,
{18648}{18723}always well-dressed|and weeping like fountains.
{18756}{18874}Oh, love in Italy! Oh, love in Spain!
{18895}{19004}It seemed to Emma that certain places|on Earth must bring happiness,
{19006}{19104}as a plant peculiar to the soil|that cannot thrive elsewhere.
{19120}{19173}She would find it someday.
{19183}{19215}Happiness.
{19253}{19288}Fashion.
{19297}{19335}High romance.
{19368}{19451}One kind of dream and another kind of life.
{19473}{19566}The convent years ended|and Emma returned to the farm.
{19583}{19681}Had she been a normal girl,|her dreams might likewise have ended,
{19693}{19764}but in Emma|there was a terrifying capacity
{19765}{19817}for pursuing the impossible.
{19830}{19883}The dream did not end.
{19915}{20024}She had learned to be a woman for whom|experience would always be a prison,
{20030}{20124}and freedom would lie always|beyond the horizon.
{20176}{20279}Here, in these books, in these pictures,|we had taught her
{20281}{20376}that the strange was beautiful|and the familiar contemptible.
{20395}{20503}We had taught her to find glamour,|excitement, in the faraway
{20505}{20575}and only boredom in the here and now.
{20594}{20659}We had taught her what?
{20672}{20736}To believe in Cinderella,
{20738}{20846}and now, here, this morning,|Charles Bovary.
{20883}{21017}Emma Roualt, you cannot know.|He is not Prince Charming.
{21019}{21067}He is only a man.
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Madame Bovaryby videoculturalclub2,608 views
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