Joubert, a French village baker and former Parisian publisher, reads the diaries of his dead English neighbour Gemma Bovery and reconstructs her affairs, boredom and death, becoming convinced her life is tracking the plot of Flaubert's novel. His obsession leads him to intervene in her story, yet she dies accidentally choking on bread, not by the poisoning the literary parallel led him to dread.
Once an observer maps a living person onto a famous literary plot, he reads her actions as predetermined beats rather than independent choices, filtering out evidence that contradicts the template. The pattern he sees is largely imposed by his reading, so his predictions about her fate prove wrong even as the surface coincidences mount.
Gemma flees urban English life for an idealized rural France expecting authenticity and renewal, but her restlessness and discontent travel with her and reattach to the new setting. The move changes scenery without changing the internal dissatisfaction that drove it.
Telling a story through a spectator who pieces together another's life from fragments (diaries, overheard talk, glimpses) exposes how much of any biography is the narrator's invention. The reader sees not the woman but the baker's version of her, so the account reveals his desires as much as her facts.