"Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same shape and the same language. He was unable to see, this man so full of experience, the variety of feelings hidden within the same expressions. Since libertine or venal lips had murmured similar phrases, he only faintly believed in the candor of Emma's; he thought one should beware of exaggerated declarations which only serve to cloak a tepid love; as though the abundance of one's soul did not sometimes overflow with empty metaphors, since no one ever has been able to give the exact measure of his needs, his concepts, or his sorrows."

Madame Bovary (Flaubert 138)

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In Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the central character Emma Bovary borrows heavily from Flaubert's real life mistress Louise Colet. Flaubert makes no effort to conceal his source: the parallels between the two begin with mere physical resembelance but progress to include similarities in values and temperment. Flaubert also uses incidents from his romance with Colet as material for the romances of Emma and her lovers.

In physical appearance, the two are very similar: Like her real life counterpart, Emma is a blonde beauty of humble origins, who feeds her vanity on the attention she is given in her small town. Both are fair skinned and elegant in manner. They also share some similarities in style: the "blue merino dress with three flounces" that Emma wears in her first meeting with Charles, her future husband, is nearlly identical in description to the blue dress that Colet wore on her first meeting with Flaubert. The two are also in similar family situations, both going from their lower class roots to an unsatisfactory marriage, each with one child- in both cases, a daughter.

The similarities are not merely skin deep: the two are also very similar in manner and attitude. The passion and firey nature of Colet, that had alternately inflamed and infuriated Flaubert, is present unchanged in Emma. Both are also dreamers, using their lovers and husbands as means to achieve their dreams. These dreams are focused almost entirely on escape, escape from the mundane everyday existence of lower class life, escape to far off lands and romantic paradises.

Yet even as they use the men in their lives, both are also fiercely independent minded and feminist. Emma's disillusionment with men, like Colet's, begins with her first husband:

Emma's husband "could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in the novel. A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing."

Madame Bovary (Flaubert 29)

From that point on, Emma becomes more convinced of her equality with the men in her life and so becomes a voice for feminism in the novel, just as Colet was a voice for feminism in her time.

The events that shape Emma and her relationships are also drawn from Colet's own life, namely her relationship with Flaubert. Tokens exchanged between Emma and her lovers mimic those exchanged between Colet and Flaubert. One such token was the silver and agate cigarette case, engraved with the phrase "Amor nel cor," which Colet gave to Flaubert. The token is mimicked by Emma in the form of a silver medallion, engraved with the phrase "Amor nel cor."

Colet's reaction to these obvious resembalences was resentment. She immediately published a poem, sardonically entitled "Amor nel cor," in which she criticized the work:

"It was for him, for him whom she loved like a god,
For him, callous to all human sorrow, uncouth to women.
Alas, she was poor and had little to give
But all gifts are sacred that incarnate a soul.

Well! In a novel of traveling-salesman style,
As nauseating as a toxic wind,
He mocked the gift in a flat-footed phrase,
Yet kept the fine agate seal."

Louise Colet, "Amor nel cor", Le Monde Illustre, January 1859