Without Lifting A Finger

I ran across this word in Madame Bovary . The literal translation seems to be something like "railway worker, railwayman." In Bovary it is a pastry or bread of some sort: Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy turban-shaped loaves, that are eaten in Lent with salt butter; a last vestige of Gothic food that goes back, perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which the robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they saw on the table, in the light of the yellow torches, between tankards of hippocras and huge boars' heads, the heads of Saracens to be devoured. *** The very little I found on "cheminot" (alternate spelling "chemineau") on line seems to confirm Flaubert's description: a special cake or roll eaten at certain festivals (Western France). http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/chemineau//1

First a good quote (what Leon saw in Emma): She was the mistress of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas, the vague "she" of all the volumes of verse. * Following the above quote, Leon goes on to compare Emma to two paintings (at least seemingly from my Kindle version): "Odalisque Bathing" and "Pale Woman of Barcelona." However, a quick Google suggests that Flaubert intentionally made Leon's allusions incorrect or vague.  The first may be an allusion to Ingres' La Grande Odalisque:  The second allusion is apparently to a poem not a painting: Alfred de Musset's L'Andalouse (The Andalusian), which begins thus: Have you seen in Barcelona An Andalusian in brown? Pale as a beautiful autumn evening! It is my mistress, my lion!