Arnoux rushes into the garden to gather flowers. He ties them with thread, but the stems fall unevenly. He searches his pocket, which is full of papers, takes a piece at random, wraps the bouquet, completes his handiwork with a strong pin, and offers it to his wife with a certain amount of tenderness. “Look here, my darling! Excuse me for having forgotten you!”
The pin, having been awkwardly fixed, cuts her. She utters a little scream and goes upstairs. They wait nearly a quarter of an hour.
When she returns, she refuses the bouquet. Frederick runs to fetch it; she calls out: “I don’t want it!” He brings it anyway. She thrusts the flowers behind the leather apron of the carriage, close to the seat. In the carriage she is trembling frightfully. She corrects Arnoux’s wrong turn with irritation. Everything annoys her.
Then, with Marthe asleep on her lap, Madame Arnoux draws forth the bouquet, flings it out through the carriage door, catches Frederick’s arm, and signals with her other hand to say nothing about it.
After this, she presses her handkerchief against her lips and sits quite motionless.
What happened upstairs in those fifteen minutes? The pin cut her hand, but a pin does not produce a quarter hour of absence, trembling, and tears. Arnoux took a piece of paper “at random” from a pocket full of papers. The paper wrapped the flowers. She went upstairs with the bouquet. She came back without wanting it.
Flaubert gives us the evidence and withholds the verdict. He does not say she read something on that paper. He shows the pocket full of papers, the random selection, the scream, the fifteen minutes, and the changed woman who comes back down. The reader is left to assemble what the text will not state. The narrator describes Arnoux’s gesture with no more weight than he describes the weather.
For five chapters Madame Arnoux has existed as Frederick sees her: a silhouette on the deck of a steamboat, a presence at dinner, a figure walking through Paris whose every accessory he translates into longing. He does not know her. He knows the shape of his desire projected onto her outline. The text cooperates with his gaze. We see what Frederick sees, which is a surface.
In the carriage, the surface is removed. They are in the Bois de Boulogne. The branches graze the hood. Frederick can see nothing of her save her two eyes in the shade. Darkness has eaten the silhouette, the dressing-gown, the parasol, the skin on which he has lavished so much narrative attention. And in this darkness, she acts. Not for Frederick. Not for anyone who is watching. She throws the flowers out of the carriage because of something she knows and he does not, and she tells him to be silent about it.
This is the first moment in the novel where she is a person rather than a surface. She has private knowledge, private pain, and a private decision. The gesture is not for Frederick’s benefit; he is merely the witness she cannot avoid. She enlists him not as a lover but as a co-conspirator in a domestic act of refusal whose cause he will never learn.
In The Engraving, the object is forgotten because the desire that created it has been satisfied. The engraving is Frederick’s, and it reveals Frederick. The bouquet is Arnoux’s, and it reveals Madame Arnoux. Both objects are abandoned after a single use. But the engraving is abandoned because it was never real. The bouquet is thrown away because what it carried was too real.
Much later in the novel, Frederick will ask: “Do you remember a certain bouquet of roses one evening, in a carriage?” She will blush and say: “Ah, I was very young then!” He remembers the bouquet as a moment of intimacy. She remembers it as something else entirely. The same event, two different wounds. He keeps returning to that evening because he sat beside her in the dark and she touched his arm. She remembers it because of whatever was on that piece of paper. They share a memory that is not the same memory.