"a country boy, about fifteen years old... His hair was cut straight across his forehead...he looked sensible and shy."

"His mother was always dragging him around with her; she would cut out paper dolls for him, tell him stories; and involve herself in endless monologues full of melancholy humor and baby talk."

"In the loneliness of her life she lavished all her thwarted ambitions on this childish head. She dreamed of important positions, could already see him grown up, handsome, witty, a successful civil engineer or magistrate."

"So many of his repressed feeling expanded; he learned songs by heart and sang them to entertain the women present, developed a taste for Beranger (a french song writer), learned how to make punch, and finally how to make love."

"He needed a wife. She[Madame Bovary] found him one: the widow of a Dieppe bailiff, who was forty-five years old and had an income of twelve hundred pounds. Although she was ugly, thin as a rail, and had as many pimples as the springtime has buds, Madame Dubuc was not lacking in suitors."

"He assumed he would be freer to choose his own actions and spend his money as planned. But his wife was the ruler; he had to watch what he said and didn't say in public, eat fish on Friday, dress as she prescribed... She would open his letters, spy on his whereabouts, and listen behind the partition when there were women in the consulting room..."