After Madame Bovary and Monsieur Bovary get settled into the life at Yonville they meet the majority of the townspeople, especially ones of similar economic class as them. Such as Rodolphe, Monsieur Lheurex, Madame Lefrancois, Homais, and many others. The pivotal moment of this story was when Madame Bovary met Leon. She meets Leon shortly after giving birth to her daughter Berthe. She meets him while she's walking to her nurses' home to see her daughter when, "At this moment Monsieur Leon came out from a neighboring door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came to greet her, and stood in the shade in front of Lheureux's shop under the projecting grey awning," (Flaubert 89). After the two of them meeting, they become extremely close, almost a little too close. "Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices...and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know...In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him again, and Leon did not know what to do between his fear of being indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that almost seemed impossible," (Flaubert 92-93).
For Madame Bovary, I really don't think she was even all that attracted to Charles when she married him, she saw him as the escape goat out of her boring, country lifestyle. And even after having his child, she still couldn't find a way to be in love with him. Leon I think she was actually attracted to and found ways to connect with him that she didn't have with Charles. I think as well she was raised to be a good wife and mother, but on the inside she had a very free spirit, and Leon was someone that was different and excited her. "But the more Emma recognized her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might make it less. She would have liked Leon to guess it, and she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this. What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of shame also...Then the lusts of flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it," (Flaubert 104). When she met Leon her life changed. Leon was someone she desperately wanted but couldn't have, which drove her insane and made her all the more upset. And when we discover her lust for another, and Charles' oblivion to her feelings for other men, it sets us up for Emma's future actions.
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