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Indeed, this patent lack of originality may well be the most important feature of this ambiguous creation. If the beggar is, on the one hand, a composite, 34 madame bovary ’s blind beggar the grotesque fusion of characters and images met not only by Emma within the novelistic space but by the reader in prior texts, then he becomes a perfect figure for the déjà-vu/déjà-lu experience that so distressed his creator. Furthermore, his scabrous exhibitionism and his salacious song solidify his identification with sexuality and with the most banal aspects of this widespread preoccupation.

Like the beauty of Victorine Taillefer (Balzac tells us in Le Père Goriot that she is “pretty by contrast”), Canivet’s competence depends upon who’s in the neighborhood, so to speak. A full appreciation of the subtlety of Flaubert’s portrait would require a juxtaposition of the two passages in which he appears, that of the amputation, which insists on his bombastic self-sufficiency and condescension vis-à-vis Bovary and Homais, and that of the unsuccessful purge, in which the groveling provincial doctor is scolded into submission by Larivière.

1 Rothfield illustrates the use to which such madame bovary ’s blind beggar 23 understanding can be put by studying the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales and other early-nineteenth-century medical essays, most notably those authored by Xavier Bichat. Madame Bovary itself suggests a study of these sources, since the novel alludes both to the medical dictionary and to the celebrated pathological anatomist, the former a symbol of Charles Bovary’s relative ignorance, since its pages are uncut, the latter associated with the single competent representative of the medical profession mentioned in the novel, Dr.