What Emma Bovary has in common with Al Capone

There must be a grad student who's done a dissertation dissecting and explaining the financial dealings of Lheureux in Flaubert's Madame Bovary - god help him or her. Because I think the many notes that he provides to Emma and then rolls over and sells to others, his attachments and claims, all that, I think is meant to be tragi-comical - we're not supposed to understand it or "follow the money" - if there's a trail at all, it's completely, intentionally obscured; in certain sections of the novel, as described in yesterday's post for example, we are "outside" of the characters, we observe, but there are things we can never know about them. In this section of the novel, Emma's financial catastrophe, we are "inside," that is, we understand Lheureux just as she does, which is to say not at all. I call this section tragicomical because, first, Emma, with her aspirations to be a great romantic figure, to risk all for her ideal of high romance, is brought down not by love and passion but by the grubbiness of her desire of acquisition - of crap - drapes and pieces of furniture and mid-range jewelry - and by the financial machinations of a petit-bourgeoise small town grifter. Second, compare this with other tragedies - we're not watching a tragic fall caused by hubris, by over-reaching, by the lust for power or prestige - but by the insinuations of small notes of debt, of the seizure of furniture. Flaubert, as earlier noted, lives and writes at a turning point in society and in the novel - the rise of the professional class and the demise of the feudal class structure and sense of "order." Madame Bovary shows a tragedy that's not about class or rank or status, there's not a tragic hero or a protagonist with a tragic flaw - we see the undoing of a grand, passionate, cruel character whose great undoing is that she ... spent to much money! She lived "beyond her means" - that is, she lived as if she were in another age, or in another novel, and the money is what undoes her - not her affairs, her cruelty to her husband, her indifference to her child, her flouting of social convention. It's like Al Capone getting nabbed on tax evasion. It's like the first great capitalist tragedy.