Madame Bovary: Ry and Rouen

Charles Bovary sets out to build a practice in "the village of Tostes", and he and his new wife Emma arrive there at about six o'clock one evening. The neighbours come to their windows to see the doctor's new wife. This is the couple's first home, before the move to Yonville. The village that inspired Flaubert is the commune of Tôtes, in the department of Seine-Maritime in Normandy.

Location precision: The novel gives no address; the pin marks the village of Tôtes, the commune said to have inspired Flaubert.

Seeking a change for Emma, Charles moves his practice to the larger market town of Yonville-l'Abbaye, "a market-town twenty-four miles from Rouen". Here Emma gives birth to her daughter Berthe and becomes infatuated with Léon Dupuis. Yonville is traditionally held to be based on Ry, a farming village on the little river Crevon. Its twelfth-century church of St. Sulpice has a sixteenth-century wooden porch, and an automaton museum, the Galerie Bovary, ran in the village from 1977 until 2018.

Location precision: Yonville is fictional; the pin marks Ry, the village it is traditionally held to be based on.

Visitor guidance: The church of St. Sulpice stands in the village; the Bovary automaton museum closed in 2018.

At Charles's insistence the couple go to Rouen to hear the tenor Lagardy. Posters repeat in quaint letters "Lucie de Lammermoor-Lagardy-Opera-etc.", and nearby runs the Rue des Charrettes, "full of large black warehouses". The opera reawakens Emma's passions, and there she meets Léon again. Rouen's old theatre stood near today's Grand-Pont and Charrettes streets until fire gutted it on 25 April 1876; today's opera house is at the bottom of the Rue Jeanne d'Arc.

Location precision: The novel says only "the theatre"; the pin marks the Rue des Charrettes, near where the old Théâtre des Arts stood.

Emma and Léon arrange to meet in the cathedral. Léon waits inside, watched by the beadle, who resents a stranger who "took the liberty of admiring the cathedral by himself". Then comes "a rustle of silk on the flags", and Emma arrives. The building Flaubert knew had lost its Renaissance spire to a lightning fire in 1822, and when an iron spire was proposed, Flaubert himself denounced it.

Visitor guidance: Rouen Cathedral stands in the old town; avoid sightseeing during services.

Emma and Léon climb into a cab, which then wanders "without any fixed plan or direction" across Rouen, seen before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou and Saint-Nicaise, in front of the Customs. The coachman "could not understand what furious desire for locomotion" drove his passengers on. Saint-Maclou was raised to the status of a parish by King Louis IX in 1253.

Location precision: The cab goes everywhere and nowhere; the pin marks Saint-Maclou, one of the churches named in the passage.

Visitor guidance: The church of Saint-Maclou is in Rouen's old town.