Félicité, Passion, Ivresse

Returning to that final sentence of Chapter 5 of Part 1 of Madame Bovary

"Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres."

In Geoffrey Wall's translation for Penguin Classics it is: "And Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words fidelity, passion, and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of books." "Fidelity" here seems like a mistake.

Lydia Davis' recent translation offers: "And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "intoxication," which had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

Frank McConnell explains the range of meanings of these three words in his essay 'Félicité, Passion, Ivresse: The Lexicography of Madame Bovary': "To understand fully the range and importance of the verbal motto félicité, passion, ivresse, it is necessary to examine their potential grammar. All three may be understood as both intransitive and relational terms, depending upon the sense in which we decide to take them. Fklicitk-"bliss, "luck," "joy," or a kind of benign capacity for grace, is either a serenely full good humor or a dynamic equilibrium of circumstance and spirit. Passion is both le grand passion, the English "passion," and also a "passive" suffering, a state of being painfully objective to another person or to the world. And Ivresse is both "ecstasy" and, simply, "drunkenness" or "intoxication": taken most generally, the use of an object-or the objectification of a subject-for the artificial transcendence of one's subjective consciousness." (Novel, Winter 1970, p.158)

In a footnote he also quotes a remark by Wittgenstein: "That is to say, whether a word of the language of our tribe is rightly translated into a word of the English language depends upon the role this word plays in the whole life of the tribe; the occasions on which it is used, the expressions of emotion by which it is generally accompanied, the ideas which it generally awakens or which prompt its saying, etc., etc.," Wittgenstein, The Brown Book (New York, lssue), p. 103.