Delphine Couturier : From the news item to the literary work

"There’s nothing true in Madame Bovary, it's a totally made-up story." This is how Gustave Flaubert expressed himself in a letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer of Chantepie.

And yet ...

Readers can see it as a key novel.

Thus Georges Dubosc, a writer and journalist, asserts, in an article in the Journal de Rouen of November 22, 1890 (Page 3), that Madame Bovary is Delphine Couturier, born in La Rue Saint Pierre on February 17, 1822, and Yonville l’Abbaye is Ry.

Later, Professor Raoul Brunon, founder of the Flaubert and History of Medicine Museum, recounts in an article of La Normandie Médicale of December 1 1907, the assertions of his mother: she was with Delphine Couturier in the boarding house for "young ladies" of Mademoiselle Pauline Bisson in Cailly. With catering leaving something to be desired, Delphine's father, a wealthy farmer, removed her and put her in the convent.

Both are not lacking in arguments because the parallel between Delphine Couturier and Emma Bovary is striking.

At the age of 17, on 7 August 1839, Delphine Couturier married, in Blainville, the health officer Eugène Delamare, a disciple of Achille Flaubert, Gustave’s father, widower of a first marriage, and living in Ry. In 1842, she gave birth to a baby girl Alice Delphine Delamare.

After several supposed disappointed romantic adventures, she committed suicide, at the age of 26 on May 6, 1848, her daughter was then 6 years old. She was buried in Ry on the 8th.

Eugene, her husband, died in Ry 18 months later on 7 December 1849.

Other supposed models of Ms. Bovary can also be mentioned.

Thus, as Daniel Fauvel reports in his book "Did the Ferdinand Delamare affair inspire Flaubert?" published by Wooz Editions, the relationship of Amélie Mandar and her lover Ferdinand Delamare, health officer and pharmacist on Rue Eau de Robec in Rouen, also a former student of Achille Flaubert, may have been known to the author of Madame Bovary. Arsenic, suicide, the secret drawer to keep the letters are there.

Gustave Flaubert's novel was published in 1857.