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court-0f-dreamers · 6 years

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ACOTAR: Restrung Chapter 2

Fic Summary: What if it was never up to Tamlin to break the curse? What if, instead, in a true test of love, Amarantha sent out Prythian’s most abhorred and cruel Highlord, to watch his land fall into ruin while trying to change the heart of a hateful human? A Court of Bitterness and Jasmine…A Court of Rhysand. Set in the same universe as our favourite Sarah J Maas characters, but with a twist.

If Rhysand were to take Tamlin’s place how different would our story be? Or would it stay the same?

Chapter 1 Chapter 3

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CHAPTER 2 4 days later

I need this. A few moments just for me. No one cares anyway, Feyre thought, as she leaned her head back against the coarse wooden grain.

She had had a surprising few days. After her night in the forest, she had had three days of kills. Three days of food. She was able to sell the pelts in the marketplace, where a mercenary gave her twice the normal amount for them. Yet, she couldn’t stop thinking about that creature. At the most unexpected moments she would see those keen eyes, or remember that sense of home.

The rhythmic thumping sound brought her back to the present. From the sound, it was pretty obvious what was going on between Feyre and Isaac in the Hales’ old barn.

He held her, her legs wrapped around his waist, and lifted a single iron cuffed hand to push his hair off his sweaty brow.

She gripped his slight but toned shoulders harder.

He released her legs, spinning her around. She now faced a shoulder-height shelf piled high with rusty, old milk pails. She grabbed the edge and arched back urging him deeper.

His hands came around her front, squeezing her breasts, his fingertips grazing her erect nipples.

She looked down at his hands. Lean knuckled fingers, that often helped his father on the farm. She tried not to think back to last week when those hands were deworming a pig.

“More”, Feyre urgently whispered back. He increased his pace, and she arched even closer to him as the sounds of their meeting filled the barn.

She also heard a slight rustling to her side. It was a goat poking its nose in the hay strewn across the floor. It lifted its head, slowly chewing a mouthful of straw. Its beady eyes held her stare with idle tenacity.

“More!” she said, and slid her hand down. She groaned as her fingers rapidly moved between her legs.

She tried to ignore it when the goat sat down and watched.

Isaac stepped closer and thrust harder against her inner depths. For a few moments nothing else in the world existed but their bodies. Nearly there…

The door flew open.

SHIT! Feyre thought.

Nesta was standing there, hands on her hips, looking far too much like their mother. Shit shit shit.

“What the hells Nesta?! Why are you here?” Feyre shrieked, as she grabbed for her clothes. She clamped down the anger and embarrassment welling inside her. No, I will not be embarrassed. She knew what we did here. “Get dressed and get outside.” Nesta said sharply, staring them down like disgruntled queen.

She buttoned my tunic and pants, not bothering to say goodbye to Isaac as she pushed her way through the doors. “Really, Nesta...!” Feyre started.

“I don’t care about your sad little tryst. There is someone waiting to see you at home, and you better start explaining yourself now.”

*** *** ***

Aalop Archeron dropped the bowl of thin soup. With even shakier hands he tried to pick it up, nearly falling over in the process.

Rhysand cringed inwardly. He should be used to this.

The older man’s cane slipped dangerously on the now wet floor.

“Father, let me”, Elain said rushing forward. “Please Sir, forgive us, please,” she whispered, bowing her head to him, unable to make eye contact.

Rhys’ expression remained impassive. He had worn this face many times over the last five hundred years. The cold, dark, soulless Highlord. For the last fifty years, this had become his face to the world. The mask he couldn’t remove.

Unless you do your job and free them, he reminded himself.

“Enough.” he said, the low tenor of his voice an unfailing command. “I don’t care. Where is Feyre, your youngest daughter?”

“She is c-coming, Sir,” Elain said, still unable to so much as lift her head up as tears silently streamed down her face.

“Please. Please.” their father begged. “Take me. I will do anything. Please. I will pay--”

Rhysand forced a cruel laugh, “You think you can pay me? How much is a life worth to you, Aalop Archeron?”.

The fact that he knew their names scared them as much as his words.

He casually picked up a small wooden carving from the table, examining the fragile object in his large hands - a winged woman with shining halo. He stared at it, the work was so delicate, and her face triggered a wisp of memory-

Behind him he heard a gasp.

He turned towards the door where Nesta held a shorter, thinner version of herself tightly in front her.

Such big eyes, was his first thought, big stormy eyes.

Feyre looked around the room, taking in the scene. Then she looked at him, and he wished she didn’t.

“Who are you? What do you want?” she spat. She seemed to look straight passed the mask, she seemed to look straight into his soul. And then across her face swept a hard look of hatred.

He would have hesitated if he hadn’t had fifty years to get used to that look.

“Now now now, Feyre”, his mocking voice drawled out her name. “Is that any way to speak to your new Highlord?”

She looked shocked. He saw her take in his immaculate black on black suit, his unnatural poise, perfect face, and his clearly non-human pointed ears. “Alright, pack your things; say goodbye. You killed a Fae in the forest, someone who was a vital part of the running of my court. As the treaty demands, you must now come with me to repay the debt.”

“What! This is absurd. I didn’t know. There is no law--”

“ENOUGH.” Rhysand raised his voice and very slightly released the damper on his power. Night filled the room. Wisps of darkness reached out and caressed Nesta’s cheek, trailed across Elain’s shaking shoulders, and clouded Aalop’s vision.

The fear in their eyes was real. He could hear it in the erratic beating of their hearts.

Good, he thought. He wanted this over as quickly as possible.

“Feyre,” her father pleaded.

Rhysand’s night receded.

Aalop reached out for his young daughter. “He has promised me that you won’t be harmed. That you just need to live in his court. You will be treated well, and then he will release you when you sentence is served. I-I am s-sorry my love”. His eyes beseeched her to understand. Understand how he couldn’t help his child. “You have always been too good for us…”

Elain finally looked at her, “Feyre, he will kill us all. He will raze this town. Feyre, help us.” she said between sobs.

Nesta said nothing, but released Feyre’s shoulder and stepped aside.

Rhysand watched shock, betrayal and then fearful acceptance cross her face. He couldn’t stand this stifling house anymore. With the single word “Hurry”, he stepped outside and waited at the road.

He was so angry. And the emotion burned through his guilt.

The fools! They had so much. They had their free lives, they had a roof over their heads, and most of all, they had each other. Yet they gave her away so easily. Even as their selfishness suited his cause, his anger grew.

He couldn’t hide his deep frown.

The Archerons mistook it for impatience.

“Go Feyre. Go.” Nesta pushed her out sold chattel.

Feyre turned away from the door and walked alongside him, looking back at her family with hungry eyes until she lost sight of them.

He looked at her small face and her stiff shoulders as she kept pace with his long strides. She was trying to be brave in front of the beast that took her away.

He was about to reach his hand out but stopped. She doesn’t want to touch you, he thought.

“We are going North”, was all he said before he grabbed her by the bag and winnowed them away.

*** *** ***

This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening to her. It took Feyre at least an hour, or longer, who knew, to get used to the idea that she was flying. No, not flying. Appearing and reappearing. Like her whole body was being shattered into a middle pieces and then reassembled in the blink of an eye. Each time in a different place across the land.

The first time she saw a sweet-smelling dark garden, the second was a stifling sandy beach, then so much orange and yellow she couldn’t tell the roof from the floor. Then, snowy blizzard. Warm light. Hot brighter light. Cold night. And then it was over.

The male next to her had barely touched her but she felt his magic release her from his side.

She tried not to look at him. He had the most stunningly beautiful face she had ever seen. That only made the terrible dark power rolling off him more terrifying.

He turned away, panting.

They were outside a massive black wrought iron gate. Beyond it were red mountains to one side, partially obscuring the edges of a river bordered by more sharp dark mountains. On the other side were black buildings with heavy smoke churning out of the chimneys atop them.

But Feyre’s eyes were focused on the gate and its surrounding fence, and she couldn’t help but notice the intricate work, the curling whorls interspersed with ugly dangerous-looking spikes. Spikes facing inwards. This wasn’t a gate to keep people out, but one to keep people in.

She forgot all the assurances of her safety he had granted her before they left.

She was looking at the Gates of Hell.

He reached towards the double-doored gate, and at his touch it opened.

“Welcome home”, his voice, calm and soft, didn’t hide the malice at the last word.

6 hours later.

It was midnight and nothing was keeping me inside this house.

They told Feyre it was a “house” but in reality, it was a palace. A dark, festering palace atop a red mountain that looked like the maw of a giant beast. She supposed it was a fitting home for the male who ruled over it.

The city was called “Velaris” and from the little Feyre saw of it, it was a place of nightmares. It was mostly a ghost town, the buildings daubed with moist black streaks of mould. On her way in, she saw a family of faeries with long blue limbs being threatened by large, angry insectile creatures with batons. The night court police perhaps, Feyre assumed, and gave them a wide berth. Upon seeing their Highlord in the streets they immediately stopped and returned to their posts. Feyre tried not to think about how terrifying the male next to her was if these creatures feared him. The citizens hurried away without glancing in their Highlord’s direction.

After that he rushed her into this palace,and she didn’t see another being while they wandered through hallway after hallway. It might have been grand once. The red uncut stone of the walls might have been warm, the high ceilings open and inviting, but like the rest of the city it felt abandoned. Feyre tried to track the turns and distances they travelled, but she quickly lost count. She had never been in a place like this. They turned abruptly and headed down a dark staircase.

He’s taking me to the dungeons, Feyre panicked.

It must have shown because he immediately stopped, and said, “These are my private chambers. Only those closest to me can enter here. You will not be harmed.”

They went down more twisted hallways and then travelled up a long spiral staircase, which finally opened over a wide white-marble antechamber lined with high windows. Feyre realised the whole palace had been carved out of the mountain itself, and they were now at the summit.

The Highlord stopped at the first door on the left. A single glossy black door.

Throughout this journey, her emotions were a riot, swirling between blind panic and brave resignation. All those thoughts stood still when he pulled out a heavy golden key and placed in it her hand, careful not to touch her, “Your room. Once you are inside no one except your handmaiden can enter without your permission.” he said. He paused for a moment, hesitating, and then started to step away, his head low.

Who are you?, Feyre thought forcefully.

His head snapped up like she had shouted it. He looked at her for the first time since entering Velaris, really looked at her. Feyre didn’t dare look away from those fierce violet eyes.

He stepped closer, tilting his head to the side.

“What do I do now?” she blurted, “Highlord”, she quickly added.

That broke the strange silence over them.

His expression changed, and he gave her that frustratingly cool smile. “Tonight? Whatever you want. I don’t care. Eat, sleep, read, stare at the wall. I’ll come get you in the morning. Until then, feel at home.” He said mockingly, knowing she could never feel that way.

He spun on his heels and walked away, hands in his pockets, with an aura of complete satisfaction.

A beautiful Fae was waiting in her room. Cerriwden, she said her name was. She spoke softly and moved through the rooms with silent grace, her straight, waist-length hair swaying behind her. Rooms, Feyre had rooms now. There was a sitting room with a desk, shelves of books, and a large fireplace framed by a comfortable couch. The bedroom was dominated by a decadent high-canopied bed, and was connected to an equally large bathing room holding a sunken grey tub. Each room was at least three times the size of her whole house.

Cerriwden ran a bath for her and helped her into clean, soft night clothes. Her warm, sure hands on Feyre were the only reminder that this was real, and not a twisted dream. And though Cerriwden spoke little, her gaze was keen, taking in everything Feyre did.

Well, she doesn’t work for me, Feyre thought.

Occasionally, Feyre noticed a twinge of pity, of sadness when the handmaiden’s clear black eyes met hers. In those moments, Feyre felt shame, and guilt, and hurt. She wasn’t going to be kept here, a prisoner in a lavish cell.

Which brought her here, at midnight, with her legs thrown over the ledge of her window, high above the sleeping city. Feyre tried to judge how quickly she would die if her accidentally slipped right now. She had used the trimmings of the rich curtains to fashion a rope, and she planned to attach it to the multiple balconies and balustrades that dotted her path down the mountain face. Just like the trees in the forest at home, she told herself as took in deep breath and jumped.

She made leap after leap, careful not to look down the at the dizzying fall should she miss. But her forest and her home were far from here. She didn’t know if she was thankful or angry at that fact. Thankful that despite the little they had, her family were not in this place. But angry that they were left to die. Without her, how would they feed themselves? And deep down, she hoped they would realise how much she gave them, and then they would come to regret how they barely fought to keep her.

A few more leaps and she was at the bottom. She was careful to tuck her homemade rope into her bag. She then grabbed the bow and two fighting knives she took from home and secured them within easy reach.

Preparation first. Know your what you are dealing with, Feyre, she thought. Then figure a way out.

She was not prepared for the sight of Velaris at night.

Feyre’s senses were assaulted as she took in the scene before her. Everywhere the sights, sounds, and smells of the crowd was overwhelming. The streets were teeming with High Fae, pushing each other around, yelling, leering, grinding against each other. Thumping music blared from doorways, different beats and rhythms, all merging on the street into a chaotic cacophony. The main street was lined with bars and restaurants, all filled with fae and faeries. Feyre sensed the threat of violence slinking underneath the revelry, a manic intoxication was could be uncorked at any time.

Her subconscious had picked it up before she acknowledged it. This was not the celebration of a happy, satiated people. These were the revels of a cruel and angry court. Her eyes narrowed to the faeries interspersed between the High fae. The faeries were waiting on them, servicing them, desperately trying to keep their establishments from being torn apart by them - the faeries were being abused by them. She tasted something bitter in her mouth. Fear.

She was an outsider here. She was a weak human. She quickly walked away from the broadway. She avoided the storefronts closing for the nights, patrons throwing down their rubbish as they left, smashing bottles and swearing. She was careful to dodge a drunk vomiting man only to nearly walk into someone pissing off the broadwalk. Thankfully, no one paid much attention to her.

She decided to make for the docks. Docks meant ships, and ships meant a way out.

But there were no ships.

By the waterfront inside the abandoned boatshed, there were only more faeries. It was quieter here, but somehow even more dismal. There were faeries from every part of Prythian, it seemed. Some looked like humans, some seemed like an extension of nature itself. A faerie with verdigris skin and hair like the richest leaves sat next to a pale white faerie with skin like translucent tissue paper. Groups of threes and fours clustered around barrels filled with fire, clutching packets of food in paper. Others were sitting up on thin bed mats and cardboard mattresses laid on the floor. There was muted conversation amongst the heads held low. Feyre had seen enough of hunger and poverty to recognise it on all these faeries instantly. She didn’t dare speak to anyone, it was clear that no one here wanted to be noticed either.

She crossed a bridge to the other side of the river and entered another cluster of buildings.

Here were hundreds of houses built almost on top of each other. They had sprouted up in a disorganised mass, a colony that had grown too quickly and irregularly, crawling from the waterfront to cling to the steep mountain face. But there was a beauty in it, for it was the only speck of colour in this city of stark black, tarnished red and drab grey. All the shanty homes were painted every colour of the rainbow. Though fading, with nothing of the bright technicolour of Elain’s garden in spring, it had a coherence and unity that was lost everywhere else in the city.

As she walked through the uneven alleys, she saw the walls of the homes were crumbling, roofs replaced with corrugated iron, and doors and windows sealed shut with makeshift wood planks. There were signs of the fae that inhabited those homes, with occasional clotheslines, rain waterpots on doorsteps, and the telltale flicker of a candle beneath a door frame. But for so many homes, the silence was eerie.

Until she heard something.

The scratching of claws against a wall. A girlish scream cut short. The sounds of scuffed boots on the ground.

She cautiously turned the corner.

Four creatures with bat-like faces, leathery wings and insectile bodies were crowded around a Fae girl.

“Hmmm, out after curfew. Your Highlord’s rules don’t protect you now”, one of them hissed. They leaned in close. Their leering glances made it clear what she needed protecting from.

The girl looked around for any path to run into, for anything that might help her.

They creatures started clicking, rubbing their claws together, purposefully taunting her.

Before Feyre could consider the consequences she picked up a large rock and aimed it. The creature closest to her grunted loudly as it hit him on the back of the head.

They turned towards Feyre in unsettling unison.

“RUN!”, Feyre yelled to the girl, who needed no encouragement as she bolted towards Feyre. They both ran through the pot-holed alleys that bordered the homes, turning often in the hope they could lose the creatures.

“Attors!”, the girl exclaimed pointing to the right, “We need to go this way. Attors hate water”, she pointed back towards the docks.

They veered sharply right, ducking under a low clothesline.

Straight into the path of a waiting Attor.

“Aren’t I lucky? I get two of you all to myself”, his voice dripping with vicious pleasure.

Feyre palmed the knives she had hidden in her boots as they backed away.

They barely got three feet away when the Attor flapped its leathery wings and appeared behind them, obstructing their path out.

“Rhysand has been careless”, he hissed gleefully. “Let’s get rid of those”, he reached over and with one swipe knocked both the knives out of Feyre’s hands, cutting her skin with his razor claws.

Defenceless now, Feyre tried to reach for her bow.

My bow!, she realised belatedly it wasn’t on her back. She had made the thin linen string herself. It must have snapped while she was running.

Panic seeped into the souls of her feet. This is it. It’s over.

The Attor moved in closer, reaching towards Feyre. “I think I’ll start with you”, he rasped, breathless at the thought.

Suddenly his head jerked up, and before either of them could make another movement, a bone-shuddering tremor snapped through the ground. Immediately followed by another.

Feyre held her breath as everything stopped. A hundred feet behind the Attor, still crouching from the impact of their landing, were two leather-clad Fae.

They stood together and started walking towards them, their magnificent wings flared out wide, spanning the length of the alley. The way they moved their tall, muscular bodies with restrained ease, the weapons strapped to every inch of them, and the fierceness of their expressions made it clear who they were - Warriors. These were the Fae of dreams and nightmares. And they were beautiful, in all their gloriously and deathly fury.

Feyre made herself small and started to inch back the alley. For whatever reason they were here, the distraction could save her life. They surely didn’t even sense her insignificant human self.

“Who in the hells are you?” the Attor hissed at them.

“I’m glad you asked,” said the broader one with shoulder length hair and rough-cut features, coming up to them, “now you will know who sent you back to that pit you crawled from.”

In a flash of silver, he unsheathed two short swords and scissored them across the Attor’s thick neck. Feyre stopped still, barely noticing the black blood spraying the walls as its lifeless head rolled towards her feet.

“Oh I lied. I didn’t let you live long enough to find out”, he said with an angry half-smile.

The taller one, a dark Adonis, rolled his eyes. Shadows swirled around his ears as his gaze turned to her. She was trying to still her hammering heart, when he nodded and said, “Hello, Miss Feyre. I’m Azriel, and this is Cassian. Welcome to Velaris”.

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hellofastestnewsfan · 5 years

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Literary portrayals of Thanksgiving Day—with all its good, bad, and stressful emotional stuffing—have varied over the years. They span from Louisa May Alcott’s sentimental 1882 New England story, “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving,” all the way to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s aggrieved childhood memories of it as a day of compulsory fasting and reflection in his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. Scattered between, there’s Philip Roth’s boisterous hosanna to the holiday’s secular roots in American Pastoral, the queasy scenes in Jonathan Franzen’s fictions, Saul Bellow’s hashish-stuffed turkey, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s fragrant cumin-and-garlic-smeared one. And while I’ve enjoyed all of the above, the book I associate most closely with this echt American festival is not an American one at all, but Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece, Madame Bovary.

On its face, this may seem like a morbid choice. What does a 19th-century French tragedy, in which a provincial housewife kills herself as a result of her debts and affairs, have to do with an American holiday that celebrates homecoming and overeating? The answer, quite simply, is turkey (along with plum preserve). Madame Bovary not only prominently features the fowl, but also positions it as a token of thanksgiving, albeit in a personal rather than national context. And the reason this novel comes to mind on this gourmand Thursday has to do with one little passage that, more than any other in this bleak story, catches me on the raw.

Every spring, it is customary for Emma Bovary’s father, old Rouault, to send his daughter’s family a turkey. It is meant as a present to his son-in-law, Charles Bovary, in grateful remembrance of how well he had once set Rouault’s broken leg. (It was on account of this fracture that the bumbling country doctor and the farmer’s beautiful daughter had first met.) Old Rouault always sends an affectionate letter with his gift. Written on coarse paper and full of spelling errors, his notes are like a gust of fresh air in a novel scented with the pomade of Emma’s lovers.

One such letter contains the moving passage to which I’m referring. Old Rouault starts out by describing the turkey with all the sensuous pleasure of a farmer proud of his produce, and proceeds to ramble about the trials of farm life. Then, in the middle of the letter, the reader is told, “There was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped his pen to dream a little while.” The unexpected poignance of this image sets us up for what follows, for at the end of the letter, Rouault’s thoughts turn to his sole grandchild:

It grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little grand-daughter, Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for her in the garden under your room, and I won’t have it touched unless it is to have jam made for her by and bye, that I will keep in the cupboard for her when she comes.

Why does this letter tug at the heartstrings in a novel squalid with gangrene and arsenic? It’s hard to say, really, but perhaps it’s because Rouault’s tone is so endearingly artless and so utterly innocent of the dreadful fate that awaits his family. The novel will end with Emma and Charles bankrupt and dead, old Rouault paralyzed, and Berthe in a cotton factory. The girl will have neither the expensive education her mother enjoyed nor the easeful future her adoring father had dreamed of for her, one in which she would “wear large straw hats in the summer-time.” Almost certainly, there will be no turkey and plum preserve—a classic pairing that Flaubert likely had in mind when he wrote that passage, culinary concord being as crucial to his great novel as style and rhythm. It is Berthe who will pay an obscene price for her parents’ follies, and her grotesque future casts the longest shadow over the novel.

Born at sunrise on a Sunday, Berthe Bovary makes a curiously auspicious Christian entrance, only for things to go rapidly downhill. Her mother, who has been dreaming of a “strong and dark” baby boy, faints when told it’s a girl. Her paternal grandfather, Bovary Père, an apostate, baptizes Berthe with a mocking glass of champagne. Her mother can’t wait to outsource her to an impoverished wet nurse. More casual cruelty follows, notably the incident where Emma, in an irritable fit, elbows the toddler away, causing her to cut herself on the cheek and bleed. Flaubert reserves his sharpest stiletto for the aftermath of the accident, when, sitting semi-remorsefully by the sleeping Berthe, Emma thinks to herself, “It is very strange how ugly this child is!”

Yet for all the neglect heaped on her, Berthe remains attached to her mother, and is a happy child; readers get a glimpse of her bouncing on a hayrick on a warm spring day, squealing with laughter. For the most part, she slips in and out of the story immersed in her own little world and possessing an admirable esprit—a bit like Dickens’s waif, the Little Marchioness. Even at the novel’s wretched finale, when Berthe is running around in a pinafore whose armholes are torn down to her hips, she remains uncomplaining. It allows the reader some small solace that this resilience will armor her against the hardships of the cotton factory. But even this solace is snatched away by one ominously tubercular detail at the end: “She coughed sometimes, and had red spots on her cheeks.”

Berthe’s sunny temperament and bleak future are thrown into piquant relief by the cosseted brood of kids next door, who are awash in the good things of childhood, notably jam. The novel’s superb jam-making scene unfolds in the children’s house and is presided over by their father, the odious chemist Monsieur Homais. Chez Homais—with its unwaxed floors, barred fireplace, and kids in padded headgear—must be one of the earliest literary lampoons of a childproofed house. Emma enters the kitchen to talk to Homais, only to find him in the middle of a screaming fit surrounded by his children dressed in aprons that reach to their chins. The tableau is rich in contrapuntal notes, with the comedy of Homais’ histrionics and his children’s absurd attire serrated with the premonition of tragedy. For it is at this moment that Emma first spies the bottle of arsenic that she will, at a later stage of despair, pour greedily into her mouth. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s devoted fan, has noted that there’s no such thing as a superfluous detail in Madame Bovary, and this scene is a wonderful example of that meticulous plotting. Though Berthe herself isn’t present, the simmering pans and the surfeit of currants and sugar recall her grandfather’s futile plans to feed her plum jam.

Which brings us back to old Rouault’s letter and the turkey. Flaubert uses the bird’s annual arrival at the Bovary residence to help mark the passage of time—a reminder to Emma that yet another year of her prime has been wasted in a suffocating marriage. Instead of the masked balls and wild raptures she had dreamed of, she’s stuck with Charles, with his thick lips and “a look of stupidity”—a malicious phrase that glints not just with Flaubert’s hatred of obtuseness but also with his deep-down sympathy for Emma. Yes, the author seems to be saying, this woman is a negligent mother, a spendthrift, and a narcissist, but can you blame her for following her dreams? It’s this fierce and continual battle between Flaubert’s realist and romantic halves that makes his often appalling antiheroine so riveting and so deeply humane.

The turkey itself starts out as a straightforward gesture of thanksgiving, but it gradually acquires layers of complex meaning. All the various images associated with this gift—the broken leg, the plum jam, the springtime arrival, and the nostalgia and regrets the accompanying letter triggers—are the marrons Flaubert uses to stuff his turkey. His approach is not so different, then, from how Bellow, Roth, and Franzen have used the bird to riff on the strange, funny, and messy stuffing of American society. But for all its different marrons, Flaubert’s turkey remains freighted with the pathos of old Rouault’s love for his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild.

At the end, when a destitute Charles has died of heartache, the novel has only one loose end left: Berthe Bovary. Her fate is tied up in a brief, astringent paragraph, in which she’s referred to for the first time as Mademoiselle Bovary. This is Flaubert the surgeon’s son at work, suturing up Madame Bovary with neat, dispassionate stitches:

When everything had been sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes remained, that served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary’s going to her grandmother. The good woman died the same year; old Rouault was paralyzed, and it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor, and sends her to a cotton-factory to earn a living.

Old Rouault never sets eyes on Berthe, much less makes her a pot of jam. He travels to the Bovary home, half demented with shock, to attend Emma’s funeral, but refuses to see his granddaughter, crying out that it will be too much for him to bear. He is a broken man, but even in his grief, he recalls the ritual of thanksgiving he has so relished for all these years. As he bids Charles farewell, his last words are, “Never fear, you shall always have your turkey.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2Bqm0Ot

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