Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings, --a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss." ¿ Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Madame Bovary (1856) by Gustave Flaubert recounts the story of Emma, who marries a pitiful doctor named Charles Bovary. But dissatisfied with the ordinary and average life that she leads, she begins seeing other men and has numerous affairs in the hope of finding the wholesome romance she reads about in books. This futile search subsequently places her and her husband under a huge debt. This remarkable story of a woman's aspirations, needs, and desires ends with her agonizing death.