Flaubert's naturalism - what we see and what we can't.

I remember the famous carriage ride through Rouen scene from the first time I read Flaubert's Madame Bovary ( I think it had just come out on pb!) - I remember once being asked why I like the novel, I think I'd boldly said it was my favorite, and all I could come up w/ to explain why was to describe the carriage scene. I was a pretty young and naive reader then, there was so much I didn't - and still don't! - understand about the art of the novel, but I did sense the magnificence and the daring of Flaubert, to take the great seduction scene of the novel (the 2nd seduction - the first he described far more directly, the ravishing by Rodolphe after they gallop through meadows on horseback - a typically Flaubertian cinematic scene) - this one the seduction by Leon, who has come back from Paris, obvious no longer virginal and naive, in fact he thinks he's a big shot in the small city of Rouen, it's not clear whether he'd more or less gotten over his crush on Emma and then it's revived when he sees her at the opera (another romantic tragedy, btw), or whether he cynically pretends to never have forgotten her in order to effect his conquest. In any case, he agrees to meet her in a church - where the annoying verger tried to give them a guided tour of the relics - the symbolism a little heavy-handed here, the church beckoning them and they rush off to their sinful tryst - in any case, when they bolt from the church, then enter a "carriage" and from that point we see their romance from the outside - like the people in Rouen we see the carriage coursing up and down the streets, all day, the poor horse totally exhausted (not that Emma or Leon care about anyone else, even a poor beast of burden), and toward the end of the day we see a shredded paper tossed from the window of the carriage ($50 fine?), the letter Emma had meant to give to Leon telling him to leave her alone, it's over. This is the second important scene that Flaubert plays out behind closed doors, or windows - the first being Emma's father Rouault persuading her to marry Bovary - and it's a signature part of Flaubert's naturalism: we know and understand character primarily through observation of detail and of action; he generally tries to avoid the "he thought/she thought" authorial access to consciousness, but rather lets us know by what we see - and sometimes lets us know by what we can't see: information conveyed by "assays of bias." Our view of the characters is "natural," in that is not an author's view but the viewpoint of the characters' contemporaries: mirror held up alongside the highway. We, in a sense, are characters in the novel.