Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, Durkheim and le suicide, Paris, 1984, p 82-88
“One of the suicide literature, the most famous is that of Emma Bovary; it is also one of the most improbable. Woman, young, married, mother of one child, rural and catholic, she had the traits of which Durkheim has shown that they were the factors the most effective of the preservation of the suicide. And yet she kills herself in the novel as in life: Flaubert invented nothing, he was inspired down to the smallest detail of a fact various real […].
According to Durkheim, Emma Bovary had less than 74 chances out of 100,000 committing suicide, so that Rodolphe had him most of 985. Flaubert extends over the first and not breath a word of the second, o how much more common. However, the ambition sociological novelist, no doubt, attests clearly the sub-title chosen by Flaubert (Manners of Province)”