These two chapters present Emma's entry into another love affair and her forthcoming destruction. These two chapters evoke many comparisons and contrasts. In the beginning of the affair, she again saw herself as the "woman in love of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas, the shadowy 'she' of all the poetry-books." This was the same as in the beginning of her romance with Rodolphe. But along with this similarity, we see Emma going to meet her lover by "going through alleyways and emerging" in disreputable parts of towns. Strong hints of ugliness pervade these meetings.
But as the affair progresses, we suddenly realize that the role Emma played with Rodolphe is suddenly reversed. Now Leon is in the place of Emma and Emma is playing the role that Rodolphe earlier acted. Now Emma is the experienced partner introducing the young and inexperienced Leon into lovemaking and as Rodolphe used to come to her, now she goes to Leon. At the end of the day, it is Emma who must dress and make the journey home. Finally, even Leon realizes that he has "become her mistress rather than she his."
During the first part of their relationship, Emma thought that she had found what she had been searching for during her whole life. But as the relationship progressed, she gradually began to realize that she couldn't look at Leon realistically. "Idols must not be touched; the gilt comes off on our hands." And she also realizes that she had made him seem to be more than he is. Then she wonders what causes "this inadequacy in her life." At home she would try to read romantic fiction hoping that the idealized heroes would reawaken a love for Leon. But she had to finally admit that she was tired of him. She "had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage." This discovery then seems to leave Emma more empty than ever.
During her affair with Leon, she has continued to neglect her business and is steadily becoming more entangled in financial affairs. Flaubert seems to be correlating Emma's deteriorating moral sense with her financial deterioration. She becomes the pathological liar both about her affair with Leon and about the financial debts. And as the love affair begins to fail, her debts begin to confront her as though they were analogous to her entangled love life.
Even in the early parts of Emma's affair with Leon, an ominous note appears. It is in the form of the old beggar, whom Emma often meets immediately after leaving Leon. The ugliness and vulgar appearance, the degradation of this old blind beggar contrast well with the artificial bliss with which Emma has enfolded herself, and also serve to foreshadow the depths of degradation to which Emma is falling. He can even be said to be symbolic of the ugly death that Emma is soon to face. Emma then sinks to her lowest shortly after this when she goes to a masquerade party and ends up with low-class clerks in an inferior eating house.
