An ethno-critique of Madame Bovary tends to prove that the novel’s cultural realism shows itself in the tangle of its measures of time. This paper first rapidly draws up the sociological map of its time measurement tools (clocks, watches, grandfather clocks), and then an ethnographical description of the material practices based, explicitly or not, on time measurement (almanacs, seasons). The writing of fiction testifies to the tinkering up within language of heterogeneous cosmologies. The paper’s third part is grounded in the close analysis of three examples of texts where temporalities and bodies individualise themselves (analogical time and mechanical time), miscegenate, or become undone (the cyclical time of folklore and country-life, the linear time of liberal accountability). It concludes with a semantic and stylistic study of Emma’s daydreams, grounded in myth and poetry – in search of a rhythm whose measure would be that of her fatal desires.