Her passages with
Rodolphe and with Leon are pictures that pass; they solve nothing,
they lead to no climax. Rodolphe's final rejection of her, for
example, is no scene of drama, deciding a question that has been held
in suspense; it is one of Emma's various mischances, with its own
marked effect upon _her_, but it does not stand out in the book as a
turning-point in the action. She goes her way and acts out her
history; but of whatever suspense, whatever dramatic value, there
might be in it Flaubert makes nothing, he evidently considers it of no
account. Who, in recalling the book, thinks of the chain of incident
that runs through it, compared with the long and living impression of
a few of the people in it and of the place in which they are set? None
of the events really matter for their own sake; they might have
happened differently, not one of them is indispensable as it is. Emma
must certainly have made what she could of her opportunities of
romance, but they need not necessarily have appeared in the shape of
Leon or Rodolphe; she would have found others if these had not been at
hand. The _events_, therefore, Emma's excursions to Rouen, her
forest-rides, her one or two memorable adventures in the world, all
these are only Flaubert's way of telling his subject, of making it
count to the eye. They are not in themselves what he has to say, they
simply illustrate it.
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