Madame Bovary

When I first read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary I had just turned 18, and I was extremely tickled by this particular passage:

"...one of the novels that she always had in her apron pocket, and from which the good old maid herself would devour long chapters in the intervals of her task. They were always and only about love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubled hearts, oaths, sobs, tears, and kisses, skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever is, always well dressed, and weeping like tombstone urns."

I had never heard anything funnier in my life than the idea of novels in which horses are ridden to death on every page. I was so taken with the idea that two of my friends and I began to write a comic novel in which a horse is, literally, ridden to death on every single page. We called it A Horse For All Seasons.

I've been thinking about our comic novel lately because of my reading of Mrs. Craddock and also because of the Madame Bovary read-along, and made so bold as to comment about it over at Pages Turned, at which opportunity Susan urged me to share some of it.

Okay. Here is the never-before-seen-in-public Chapter VIII, In Which the Volcano Utters Many Impotent Portents, and in Which the Situation Deteriorates into Pathetic Convulsions of Fate:

"Tell us more!" said the townspeople, by now emerging from the river with their household utensils still in hand.

"Woe is you and you is woe" said the volcano. "Don't say I didn't tell you so." At that moment, the sky became dark and bolts of lightning grounded out the townspeople by the dozens and sent all the rest scampering back to the river, waving Veg-o-matics at the volcano. "Hmmph," said the volcano, and fumed for a while, and was dormant.

Whilst these unhappy things transpired, the newly-blinded Cosmo found himself lost somewhere in France. Eight days passed, and nights too, but still he wandered. At last, by happy circumstance, he wandered close enough to an old farm horse to collide with it, catching its foreleg in his waistcoat. "Aha!" he cried. "A horse!" He leapt on the beast with the sure movement of an accomplished equestrian, drew out his riding crop, and slapped the animal on. Sadly, he'd mounted the creature backwards and whipped it in the face, startling it so that it crashed off through the forest, until it died.

Cosmo wandered around the dank, deep forests of central France for a while, and taking a notion to turn left, stumbled into the west wing. "Blind luck," cackled the butler, pecking at the ground. Martha moaned and stuttered at the butler's lack of decency and more so at Cosmo's return. "Quick, hide!" she said to the thoroughly intoxicated bee-catcher, plunging him into the pearl-handled washbasin. Just before the image was shattered by the potted bee-catcher, Martha noted that in the garden the mysterious masked man in black was grinning savagely as he savagely whipped his frantically struggling mount, savagely riding him up to the lip of the pouting volcano. "Aiee!" cried the rapidly vanishing horse as the horseman waved bye-bye with savage glee.

"I just don't see," muttered Cosmo darkly and swarthily. The butler's face was a mask of chagrin as he hadn't thought of it first. Martha sighed, as if on cue.

We wrote 23 chapters of this kind of stuff before we came to our senses, and as you can see, in later chapters we sometimes finished off more than one horse per page, making it a more exciting book than even Madame Bovary could ever imagine.