For the nineteenth-century writer, and especially for the realist novelist Gustave Flaubert, so preoccupied with his writing and the fate of his characters, emotion drives the course of the action. Flaubert, well known for his special way of conceiving his novels, for his impersonality and impassibility as techniques that make his writing unique, was also tempted by the analysis of how Emma masters her emotions (in the novel Madame Bovary which created a stir at the time). Our study is, first of all, an analysis of the theory of emotions in general and, secondly, an analysis of Emma Bovary’s emotions, the main character of the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, namely, illusion, pleasure and desire.