Since her childhood, Emma Rouault has been lulled into romantic dreams and romance novels. Her marriage to Charles Bovary, a dull and humble doctor, confronts her with a prosaic and banal reality from which she seeks to escape by any means necessary. Motherhood, the ambition she nourishes for her husband, and the taste for fine things that drives her to excessive spending, cannot satisfy this young woman who suffocates in the narrow, mediocre society of a small Normandy town. Passionate love may be her ultimate hope, but her thirst for ideals, beauty and grandeur brings her to a point of no return, foreshadowing her tragic destiny. Based on a true story that caught the attention of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) and earned him a sensational trial in 1857, the story of Emma Bovary is set in a meticulously depicted ordinary world. Considered the greatest stylist of the French language of the 19th century, Flaubert's masterful writing and style unfold in this psychological drama, where uncertainty and ambiguity are the hallmarks of the greatness and beauty of this masterpiece of French literature. Between cruel irony and infinite tenderness for this heroine who wants to escape from banality, Flaubert depicts a woman who is both ridiculous and sublime, and with whom the author readily identified.

Beyond being one of the great classics of French literature, and beyond the scandal that followed its publication, Madame Bovary is without doubt the very novel of the 19th century. It has profoundly marked Western literature with its modernity, depicting a woman in the grip of her own fantasies and in perpetual struggle with the mediocrity of her contemporaries. Behind the story of this wounded, passionate and sublime woman lies one of the greatest reflections on the human condition, so cruel and yet so universal.