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THE object of mystery plays was religious. Gustave Flaubert, it is often thought, was rather removed from any interest in religion and was, if anything, somewhat cynical about it. Studies have nevertheless demonstrated the rich resource that religion offered him for the composition of many of his works.1 In his correspondence he noted how dogma served to express human feeling. For instance, concerning the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, he stated that the Catholic Church was right to affirm it since such a dogma "sums up the emotional life of the nineteenth century" (Wall 264).
Mystery plays were not foreign to Flaubert, for he had tried his hand at one with the composition of Smarh: An Old Mystery written in 1838-39. With Bibliomania, published in 1837, he tells the story of a former monk who has become a bookseller and who commits criminal acts to acquire the Mystery of St. Michael. Then, with The Temptation of Saint Anthony, written between 1848 and 1849, Flaubert approaches the genre again as he has saints, demons and others exchange words with the anchorite. After reading the Temptation to his friends Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp, they suggested that he abandon the project because they sensed that he would not find a publisher. He did not, however, follow their advice because he eventually went on to write two more versions, the third of which he published in 1874. Madame Bovary was published in 1856, followed by other novels and his Three Tales (1877), stories about saints Julien l'Hospitalier, John the Baptist, and a pious woman who develops a close bond with her parrot with whom she associates the Holy Spirit.
I propose that, even before the composition of his tales, Madame Bovary did not completely break with the phantasmagoric world of heretics and apparitions found in the Temptation. That world exists in the shape of a mystery play within the story of his adulterous woman. In one of the conversations that the pharmacist Homais has with the pastor of Yonville, he reminds the priest that actors participated in the liturgy: "... Yes, they used to act right in the middle of the choir - put on farcical plays called mysteries. These often violated the laws...