Part II
Chapter One
Yonville-l'Abbaye (so called from an old
Capuchin abbey of which not even the ruins remain) is a market-town
twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville and Beauvais roads, at
the foot of a valley watered by the Rieule, a little river that runs into
the Andelle after turning three water-mills near its mouth, where there are
a few trout that the lads amuse themselves by fishing for on Sundays.
We leave the highroad at La Boissiere and
keep straight on to the top of the Leux hill, whence the valley is seen. The
river that runs through it makes of it, as it were, two regions with
distinct physiognomies—all on the left is pasture land, all of the right
arable. The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back
with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the
plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its
blond cornfields. The water, flowing by the grass, divides with a white line
the colour of the roads and of the plains, and the country is like a great
unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.
Before us, on the verge of the horizon, lie
the oaks of the forest of Argueil, with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills
scarred from top to bottom with red irregular lines; they are rain tracks,
and these brick-tones standing out in narrow streaks against the grey colour
of the mountain are due to the quantity of iron springs that flow beyond in
the neighboring country.
Here we are on the confines of Normandy,
Picardy, and the Ile-de-France, a bastard land whose language is without
accent and its landscape is without character. It is there that they make
the worst Neufchatel cheeses of all the arrondissement; and, on the other
hand, farming is costly because so much manure is needed to enrich this
friable soil full of sand and flints.
Up to 1835 there was no practicable road
for getting to Yonville, but about this time a cross-road was made which
joins that of Abbeville to that of Amiens, and is occasionally used by the
Rouen wagoners on their way to Flanders. Yonville-l'Abbaye has remained
stationary in spite of its "new outlet." Instead of improving the soil, they
persist in keeping up the pasture lands, however depreciated they may be in
value, and the lazy borough, growing away from the plain, has naturally
spread riverwards. It is seem from afar sprawling along the banks like a
cowherd taking a siesta by the water-side.
At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge
begins a roadway, planted with young aspens, that leads in a straight line
to the first houses in the place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the
middle of courtyards full of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds
and distilleries scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or
scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn
over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse
convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against
the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree
sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate
to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider
on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer
together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window
from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith's forge and then a
wheelwright's, with two or three new carts outside that partly block the
way. Then across an open space appears a white house beyond a grass mound
ornamented by a Cupid, his finger on his lips; two brass vases are at each
end of a flight of steps; scutcheons* blaze upon the door. It is the
notary's house, and the finest in the place.
*The panonceaux that have to be hung over the doors of
notaries.
The Church is on the other side of the
street, twenty paces farther down, at the entrance of the square. The little
cemetery that surrounds it, closed in by a wall breast high, is so full of
graves that the old stones, level with the ground, form a continuous
pavement, on which the grass of itself has marked out regular green squares.
The church was rebuilt during the last years of the reign of Charles X. The
wooden roof is beginning to rot from the top, and here and there has black
hollows in its blue colour. Over the door, where the organ should be, is a
loft for the men, with a spiral staircase that reverberates under their
wooden shoes.
The daylight coming through the plain glass
windows falls obliquely upon the pews ranged along the walls, which are
adorned here and there with a straw mat bearing beneath it the words in
large letters, "Mr. So-and-so's pew." Farther on, at a spot where the
building narrows, the confessional forms a pendant to a statuette of the
Virgin, clothed in a satin robe, coifed with a tulle veil sprinkled with
silver stars, and with red cheeks, like an idol of the Sandwich Islands;
and, finally, a copy of the "Holy Family, presented by the Minister of the
Interior," overlooking the high altar, between four candlesticks, closes in
the perspective. The choir stalls, of deal wood, have been left unpainted.
The market, that is to say, a tiled roof
supported by some twenty posts, occupies of itself about half the public
square of Yonville. The town hall, constructed "from the designs of a Paris
architect," is a sort of Greek temple that forms the corner next to the
chemist's shop. On the ground-floor are three Ionic columns and on the first
floor a semicircular gallery, while the dome that crowns it is occupied by a
Gallic cock, resting one foot upon the "Charte" and holding in the other the
scales of Justice.
But that which most attracts the eye is
opposite the Lion d'Or inn, the chemist's shop of Monsieur Homais. In the
evening especially its argand lamp is lit up and the red and green jars that
embellish his shop-front throw far across the street their two streams of
colour; then across them as if in Bengal lights is seen the shadow of the
chemist leaning over his desk. His house from top to bottom is placarded
with inscriptions written in large hand, round hand, printed hand: "Vichy,
Seltzer, Barege waters, blood purifiers, Raspail patent medicine, Arabian
racahout, Darcet lozenges, Regnault paste, trusses, baths, hygienic
chocolate," etc. And the signboard, which takes up all the breadth of the
shop, bears in gold letters, "Homais, Chemist." Then at the back of the
shop, behind the great scales fixed to the counter, the word "Laboratory"
appears on a scroll above a glass door, which about half-way up once more
repeats "Homais" in gold letters on a black ground.
Beyond this there is nothing to see at
Yonville. The street (the only one) a gunshot in length and flanked by a few
shops on either side stops short at the turn of the highroad. If it is left
on the right hand and the foot of the Saint-Jean hills followed the cemetery
is soon reached.
At the time of the cholera, in order to
enlarge this, a piece of wall was pulled down, and three acres of land by
its side purchased; but all the new portion is almost tenantless; the tombs,
as heretofore, continue to crowd together towards the gate. The keeper, who
is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of
the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to
plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows
smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice
at the deaths or regret the burials.
"You live on the dead, Lestiboudois!" the
curie at last said to him one day. This grim remark made him reflect; it
checked him for some time; but to this day he carries on the cultivation of
his little tubers, and even maintains stoutly that they grow naturally.
Since the events about to be narrated,
nothing in fact has changed at Yonville. The tin tricolour flag still swings
at the top of the church-steeple; the two chintz streamers still flutter in
the wind from the linen-draper's; the chemist's fetuses, like lumps of white
amadou, rot more and more in their turbid alcohol, and above the big door of
the inn the old golden lion, faded by rain, still shows passers-by its
poodle mane.
On the evening when the Bovarys were to
arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrancois, the landlady of this inn, was so very
busy that she sweated great drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was
market-day. The meat had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and
coffee made. Moreover, she had the boarders' meal to see to, and that of the
doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with
bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for
brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long
kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that
rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped.
From the poultry-yard was heard the
screaming of the fowls whom the servant was chasing in order to wring their
necks.
A man slightly marked with small-pox, in
green leather slippers, and wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was
warming his back at the chimney. His face expressed nothing but
self-satisfaction, and he appeared to take life as calmly as the goldfinch
suspended over his head in its wicker cage: this was the chemist.
"Artemise!" shouted the landlady, "chop
some wood, fill the water bottles, bring some brandy, look sharp! If only I
knew what dessert to offer the guests you are expecting! Good heavens! Those
furniture-movers are beginning their racket in the billiard-room again; and
their van has been left before the front door! The 'Hirondelle' might run
into it when it draws up. Call Polyte and tell him to put it up. Only think,
Monsieur Homais, that since morning they have had about fifteen games, and
drunk eight jars of cider! Why, they'll tear my cloth for me," she went on,
looking at them from a distance, her strainer in her hand.
"That wouldn't be much of a loss," replied
Monsieur Homais. "You would buy another."
"Another billiard-table!" exclaimed the
widow.
"Since that one is coming to pieces, Madame
Lefrancois. I tell you again you are doing yourself harm, much harm! And
besides, players now want narrow pockets and heavy cues. Hazards aren't
played now; everything is changed! One must keep pace with the times! Just
look at Tellier!"
The hostess reddened with vexation. The
chemist went on—
"You may say what you like; his table is
better than yours; and if one were to think, for example, of getting up a
patriotic pool for Poland or the sufferers from the Lyons floods—"
"It isn't beggars like him that'll frighten
us," interrupted the landlady, shrugging her fat shoulders. "Come, come,
Monsieur Homais; as long as the 'Lion d'Or' exists people will come to it.
We've feathered our nest; while one of these days you'll find the 'Cafe
Francais' closed with a big placard on the shutters. Change my
billiard-table!" she went on, speaking to herself, "the table that comes in
so handy for folding the washing, and on which, in the hunting season, I
have slept six visitors! But that dawdler, Hivert, doesn't come!"
"Are you waiting for him for your
gentlemen's dinner?"
"Wait for him! And what about Monsieur
Binet? As the clock strikes six you'll see him come in, for he hasn't his
equal under the sun for punctuality. He must always have his seat in the
small parlour. He'd rather die than dine anywhere else. And so squeamish as
he is, and so particular about the cider! Not like Monsieur Leon; he
sometimes comes at seven, or even half-past, and he doesn't so much as look
at what he eats. Such a nice young man! Never speaks a rough word!"
"Well, you see, there's a great difference
between an educated man and an old carabineer who is now a tax-collector."
Six o'clock struck. Binet came in.
He wore a blue frock-coat falling in a
straight line round his thin body, and his leather cap, with its lappets
knotted over the top of his head with string, showed under the turned-up
peak a bald forehead, flattened by the constant wearing of a helmet. He wore
a black cloth waistcoat, a hair collar, grey trousers, and, all the year
round, well-blacked boots, that had two parallel swellings due to the
sticking out of his big-toes. Not a hair stood out from the regular line of
fair whiskers, which, encircling his jaws, framed, after the fashion of a
garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and the nose
hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good hunter, and writing a fine
hand, he had at home a lathe, and amused himself by turning napkin rings,
with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an artist and the
egotism of a bourgeois.
He went to the small parlour, but the three
millers had to be got out first, and during the whole time necessary for
laying the cloth, Binet remained silent in his place near the stove. Then he
shut the door and took off his cap in his usual way.
"It isn't with saying civil things that
he'll wear out his tongue," said the chemist, as soon as he was along with
the landlady.
"He never talks more," she replied. "Last
week two travelers in the cloth line were here—such clever chaps who told
such jokes in the evening, that I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood
there like a dab fish and never said a word."
"Yes," observed the chemist; "no
imagination, no sallies, nothing that makes the society-man."
"Yet they say he has parts," objected the
landlady.
"Parts!" replied Monsieur Homais; "he,
parts! In his own line it is possible," he added in a calmer tone. And he
went on—
"Ah! That a merchant, who has large
connections, a jurisconsult, a doctor, a chemist, should be thus
absent-minded, that they should become whimsical or even peevish, I can
understand; such cases are cited in history. But at least it is because they
are thinking of something. Myself, for example, how often has it happened to
me to look on the bureau for my pen to write a label, and to find, after
all, that I had put it behind my ear!"
Madame Lefrancois just then went to the
door to see if the "Hirondelle" were not coming. She started. A man dressed
in black suddenly came into the kitchen. By the last gleam of the twilight
one could see that his face was rubicund and his form athletic.
"What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curie?"
asked the landlady, as she reached down from the chimney one of the copper
candlesticks placed with their candles in a row. "Will you take something? A
thimbleful of Cassis*? A glass of wine?"
*Black currant liqueur.
The priest declined very politely. He had
come for his umbrella, that he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont
convent, and after asking Madame Lefrancois to have it sent to him at the
presbytery in the evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus
was ringing.
When the chemist no longer heard the noise
of his boots along the square, he thought the priest's behaviour just now
very unbecoming. This refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most
odious hypocrisy; all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring
back the days of the tithe.
The landlady took up the defence of her
curie.
"Besides, he could double up four men like
you over his knee. Last year he helped our people to bring in the straw; he
carried as many as six trusses at once, he is so strong."
"Bravo!" said the chemist. "Now just send
your daughters to confess to fellows which such a temperament! I, if I were
the Government, I'd have the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame
Lefrancois, every month—a good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police
and morals."
"Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an
infidel; you've no religion."
The chemist answered: "I have a religion,
my religion, and I even have more than all these others with their mummeries
and their juggling. I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme
Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us
here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I
don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my
pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can
know Him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal
vault like the ancients. My God! Mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin,
of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the
'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of
an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand,
who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and
rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and
completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by
the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which
they would fain engulf the people with them."
He ceased, looking round for an audience,
for in his bubbling over the chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the
midst of the town council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was
listening to a distant rolling. One could distinguish the noise of a
carriage mingled with the clattering of loose horseshoes that beat against
the ground, and at last the "Hirondelle" stopped at the door.
It was a yellow box on two large wheels,
that, reaching to the tilt, prevented travelers from seeing the road and
dirtied their shoulders. The small panes of the narrow windows rattled in
their sashes when the coach was closed, and retained here and there patches
of mud amid the old layers of dust, that not even storms of rain had
altogether washed away. It was drawn by three horses, the first a leader,
and when it came down-hill its bottom jolted against the ground.
Some of the inhabitants of Yonville came
out into the square; they all spoke at once, asking for news, for
explanations, for hampers. Hivert did not know whom to answer. It was he who
did the errands of the place in town. He went to the shops and brought back
rolls of leather for the shoemaker, old iron for the farrier, a barrel of
herrings for his mistress, caps from the milliner's, locks from the
hair-dresser's and all along the road on his return journey he distributed
his parcels, which he threw, standing upright on his seat and shouting at
the top of his voice, over the enclosures of the yards.
An accident had delayed him. Madame
Bovary's greyhound had run across the field. They had whistled for him a
quarter of an hour; Hivert had even gone back a mile and a half expecting
every moment to catch sight of her; but it had been necessary to go on.
Emma had wept, grown angry; she had accused
Charles of this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a draper, who happened to be
in the coach with her, had tried to console her by a number of examples of
lost dogs recognizing their masters at the end of long years. One, he said
had been told of, who had come back to Paris from Constantinople. Another
had gone one hundred and fifty miles in a straight line, and swum four
rivers; and his own father had possessed a poodle, which, after twelve years
of absence, had all of a sudden jumped on his back in the street as he was
going to dine in town.
Chapter Two
Emma got out first, then Felicite, Monsieur
Lheureux, and a nurse, and they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where
he had slept soundly since night set in.
Homais introduced himself; he offered his
homages to madame and his respects to monsieur; said he was charmed to have
been able to render them some slight service, and added with a cordial air
that he had ventured to invite himself, his wife being away.
When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she
went up to the chimney.
With the tips of her fingers she caught her
dress at the knee, and having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out her
foot in its black boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The
flame lit up the whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of
her gowns, the fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she
blinked now and again. A great red glow passed over her with the blowing of
the wind through the half-open door.
On the other side of the chimney a young
man with fair hair watched her silently.
As he was a good deal bored at Yonville,
where he was a clerk at the notary's, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Leon
Dupuis (it was he who was the second habitue of the "Lion d'Or") frequently
put back his dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn,
with whom he could chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done
early, he had, for want of something else to do, to come punctually, and
endure from soup to cheese a tete-a-tete with Binet. It was therefore with
delight that he accepted the landlady's suggestion that he should dine in
company with the newcomers, and they passed into the large parlour where
Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the table laid
for four.
Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his
skull-cap, for fear of coryza; then, turning to his neighbour—
"Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one
gets jolted so abominably in our 'Hirondelle.'"
"That is true," replied Emma; "but moving
about always amuses me. I like change of place."
"It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to
be always riveted to the same places."
"If you were like me," said Charles,
"constantly obliged to be in the saddle"—
"But," Leon went on, addressing himself to
Madame Bovary, "nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant—when one can," he
added.
"Moreover," said the druggist, "the
practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world, for the
state of our roads allows us the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers
are prosperous, they pay pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides
the ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now
and then a few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little
of a serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of
scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our
peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur
Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your
science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse to
novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the doctor
or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad, and we
even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I have made
some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade at the outside,
which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54 degrees
Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a matter of fact, we are
sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side,
from the west winds by the St. Jean range on the other; and this heat,
moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapours given off by the river
and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know,
exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no,
nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which sucking up into itself the humus
from the ground, mixing together all those different emanations, unites them
into a stack, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through
the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical
countries, engender insalubrious miasmata—this heat, I say, finds itself
perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should
come—that is to say, the southern side—by the south-eastern winds, which,
having cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at
once like breezes from Russia."
"At any rate, you have some walks in the
neighbourhood?" continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.
"Oh, very few," he answered. "There is a
place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the
forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the
sunset."
"I think there is nothing so admirable as
sunsets," she resumed; "but especially by the side of the sea."
"Oh, I adore the sea!" said Monsieur Leon.
"And then, does it not seem to you,"
continued Madame Bovary, "that the mind travels more freely on this
limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas
of the infinite, the ideal?"
"It is the same with mountainous
landscapes," continued Leon. "A cousin of mine who travelled in Switzerland
last year told me that one could not picture to oneself the poetry of the
lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One
sees pines of incredible size across torrents, cottages suspended over
precipices, and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds
open. Such spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to
ecstasy; and I no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better
to inspire his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before
some imposing site."
"You play?" she asked.
"No, but I am very fond of music," he
replied.
"Ah! don't you listen to him, Madame
Bovary," interrupted Homais, bending over his plate. "That's sheer modesty.
Why, my dear fellow, the other day in your room you were singing 'L'Ange
Gardien' ravishingly. I heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an
actor."
Leon, in fact, lodged at the chemist's
where he had a small room on the second floor, overlooking the Place. He
blushed at the compliment of his landlord, who had already turned to the
doctor, and was enumerating to him, one after the other, all the principal
inhabitants of Yonville. He was telling anecdotes, giving information; the
fortune of the notary was not known exactly, and "there was the Tuvache
household," who made a good deal of show.
Emma continued, "And what music do you
prefer?"
"Oh, German music; that which makes you
dream."
"Have you been to the opera?"
"Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I
am living at Paris to finish reading for the bar."
"As I had the honour of putting it to your
husband," said the chemist, "with regard to this poor Yanoda who has run
away, you will find yourself, thanks to his extravagance, in the possession
of one of the most comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience
for a doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can go in and out
unseen. Moreover, it contains everything that is agreeable in a household—a
laundry, kitchen with offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He was a
gay dog, who didn't care what he spent. At the end of the garden, by the
side of the water, he had an arbour built just for the purpose of drinking
beer in summer; and if madame is fond of gardening she will be able—"
"My wife doesn't care about it," said
Charles; "although she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always
sitting in her room reading."
"Like me," replied Leon. "And indeed, what
is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while
the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?"
"What, indeed?" she said, fixing her large
black eyes wide open upon him.
"One thinks of nothing," he continued; "the
hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your
thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the
outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as
if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."
"That is true! That is true?" she said.
"Has it ever happened to you," Leon went
on, "to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image
that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your
own slightest sentiment?"
"I have experienced it," she replied.
"That is why," he said, "I especially love
the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more
easily to tears."
"Still in the long run it is tiring,"
continued Emma. "Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush
breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and
moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature."
"In fact," observed the clerk, "these
works, not touching the heart, miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It
is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in
thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness.
For myself, living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but
Yonville affords so few resources."
"Like Tostes, no doubt," replied Emma; "and
so I always subscribed to a lending library."
"If madame will do me the honour of making
use of it", said the chemist, who had just caught the last words, "I have at
her disposal a library composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Delille, Walter Scott, the 'Echo des Feuilletons'; and in addition I receive
various periodicals, among them the 'Fanal de Rouen' daily, having the
advantage to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges,
Neufchatel, Yonville, and vicinity."
For two hours and a half they had been at
table; for the servant Artemis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers
over the flags, brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and
constantly left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat
against the wall with its hooks.
Unconsciously, Leon, while talking, had
placed his foot on one of the bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was
sitting. She wore a small blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a
gauffered cambric collar, and with the movements of her head the lower part
of her face gently sunk into the linen or came out from it. Thus side by
side, while Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those
vague conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to
the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of novels,
new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where she had
lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked of
everything till to the end of dinner.
When coffee was served Felicite went away
to get ready the room in the new house, and the guests soon raised the
siege. Madame Lefrancois was asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy,
lantern in hand, was waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way
home. Bits of straw stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg.
When he had taken in his other hand the cure's umbrella, they started.
The town was asleep; the pillars of the
market threw great shadows; the earth was all grey as on a summer's night.
But as the doctor's house was only some fifty paces from the inn, they had
to say good-night almost immediately, and the company dispersed.
As soon as she entered the passage, Emma
felt the cold of the plaster fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The
walls were new and the wooden stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first
floor, a whitish light passed through the curtainless windows.
She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and
beyond, the fields, half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the
moonlight along the course of the river. In the middle of the room,
pell-mell, were scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with
mattresses on the chairs and basins on the ground—the two men who had
brought the furniture had left everything about carelessly.
This was the fourth time that she had slept
in a strange place.
The first was the day of her going to the
convent; the second, of her arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard;
and this was the fourth. And each one had marked, as it were, the
inauguration of a new phase in her life. She did not believe that things
could present themselves in the same way in different places, and since the
portion of her life lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be
lived would be better.
Chapter Three
The next day, as she was getting up, she
saw the clerk on the Place. She had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and
bowed. She nodded quickly and reclosed the window.
Leon waited all day for six o'clock in the
evening to come, but on going to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur
Binet, already at table. The dinner of the evening before had been a
considerable event for him; he had never till then talked for two hours
consecutively to a "lady." How then had he been able to explain, and in such
language, the number of things that he could not have said so well before?
He was usually shy, and maintained that reserve which partakes at once of
modesty and dissimulation.
At Yonville he was considered "well-bred."
He listened to the arguments of the older people, and did not seem hot about
politics—a remarkable thing for a young man. Then he had some
accomplishments; he painted in water-colours, could read the key of G, and
readily talked literature after dinner when he did not play cards. Monsieur
Homais respected him for his education; Madame Homais liked him for his
good-nature, for he often took the little Homais into the garden—little
brats who were always dirty, very much spoilt, and somewhat lymphatic, like
their mother. Besides the servant to look after them, they had Justin, the
chemist's apprentice, a second cousin of Monsieur Homais, who had been taken
into the house from charity, and who was useful at the same time as a
servant.
The druggist proved the best of neighbours.
He gave Madame Bovary information as to the trades-people, sent expressly
for his own cider merchant, tasted the drink himself, and saw that the casks
were properly placed in the cellar; he explained how to set about getting in
a supply of butter cheap, and made an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the
sacristan, who, besides his sacerdotal and funeral functions, looked after
the principal gardens at Yonville by the hour or the year, according to the
taste of the customers.
The need of looking after others was not
the only thing that urged the chemist to such obsequious cordiality; there
was a plan underneath it all.
He had infringed the law of the 19th
Ventose, year xi., article I, which forbade all persons not having a diploma
to practise medicine; so that, after certain anonymous denunciations, Homais
had been summoned to Rouen to see the procurer of the king in his own
private room; the magistrate receiving him standing up, ermine on shoulder
and cap on head. It was in the morning, before the court opened. In the
corridors one heard the heavy boots of the gendarmes walking past, and like
a far-off noise great locks that were shut. The druggist's ears tingled as
if he were about to have an apoplectic stroke; he saw the depths of
dungeons, his family in tears, his shop sold, all the jars dispersed; and he
was obliged to enter a cafe and take a glass of rum and seltzer to recover
his spirits.
Little by little the memory of this
reprimand grew fainter, and he continued, as heretofore, to give anodyne
consultations in his back-parlour. But the mayor resented it, his colleagues
were jealous, everything was to be feared; gaining over Monsieur Bovary by
his attentions was to earn his gratitude, and prevent his speaking out later
on, should he notice anything. So every morning Homais brought him "the
paper," and often in the afternoon left his shop for a few moments to have a
chat with the Doctor.
Charles was dull: patients did not come. He
remained seated for hours without speaking, went into his consulting room to
sleep, or watched his wife sewing. Then for diversion he employed himself at
home as a workman; he even tried to do up the attic with some paint which
had been left behind by the painters. But money matters worried him. He had
spent so much for repairs at Tostes, for madame's toilette, and for the
moving, that the whole dowry, over three thousand crowns, had slipped away
in two years.
Then how many things had been spoilt or
lost during their carriage from Tostes to Yonville, without counting the
plaster cure, who falling out of the coach at an over-severe jolt, had been
dashed into a thousand fragments on the pavements of Quincampoix! A
pleasanter trouble came to distract him, namely, the pregnancy of his wife.
As the time of her confinement approached he cherished her the more. It was
another bond of the flesh establishing itself, and, as it were, a continued
sentiment of a more complex union. When from afar he saw her languid walk,
and her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when opposite one
another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses in her
armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds; he got up, embraced her, passed
his hands over her face, called her little mamma, wanted to make her dance,
and half-laughing, half-crying, uttered all kinds of caressing pleasantries
that came into his head. The idea of having begotten a child delighted him.
Now he wanted nothing. He knew human life from end to end, and he sat down
to it with serenity.
Emma at first felt a great astonishment;
then was anxious to be delivered that she might know what it was to be a
mother. But not being able to spend as much as she would have liked, to have
a swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, and embroidered caps, in a fit
of bitterness she gave up looking after the trousseau, and ordered the whole
of it from a village needlewoman, without choosing or discussing anything.
Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that stimulate the
tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was from the very outset,
perhaps, to some extent attenuated.
As Charles, however, spoke of the boy at
every meal, she soon began to think of him more consecutively.
She hoped for a son; he would be strong and
dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was
like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least,
is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles,
taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At
once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and
legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string,
flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some
conventionality that restrains.
She was confined on a Sunday at about six
o'clock, as the sun was rising.
"It is a girl!" said Charles.
She turned her head away and fainted.
Madame Homais, as well as Madame Lefrancois
of the Lion d'Or, almost immediately came running in to embrace her. The
chemist, as man of discretion, only offered a few provincial felicitations
through the half-opened door. He wished to see the child and thought it well
made.
Whilst she was getting well she occupied
herself much in seeking a name for her daughter. First she went over all
those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she
liked Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better.
Charles wanted the child to be called after
her mother; Emma opposed this. They ran over the calendar from end to end,
and then consulted outsiders.
"Monsieur Leon," said the chemist, "with
whom I was talking about it the other day, wonders you do not chose
Madeleine. It is very much in fashion just now."
But Madame Bovary, senior, cried out loudly
against this name of a sinner. As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference
for all those that recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a
generous idea, and it was on this system that he had baptized his four
children. Thus Napoleon represented glory and Franklin liberty; Irma was
perhaps a concession to romanticism, but Athalie was a homage to the
greatest masterpiece of the French stage. For his philosophical convictions
did not interfere with his artistic tastes; in him the thinker did not
stifle the man of sentiment; he could make distinctions, make allowances for
imagination and fanaticism. In this tragedy, for example, he found fault
with the ideas, but admired the style; he detested the conception, but
applauded all the details, and loathed the characters while he grew
enthusiastic over their dialogue. When he read the fine passages he was
transported, but when he thought that mummers would get something out of
them for their show, he was disconsolate; and in this confusion of
sentiments in which he was involved he would have liked at once to crown
Racine with both his hands and discuss with him for a good quarter of an
hour.
At last Emma remembered that at the chateau
of Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from
that moment this name was chosen; and as old Rouault could not come,
Monsieur Homais was requested to stand godfather. His gifts were all
products from his establishment, to wit: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar
of racahout, three cakes of marshmallow paste, and six sticks of sugar-candy
into the bargain that he had come across in a cupboard. On the evening of
the ceremony there was a grand dinner; the cure was present; there was much
excitement. Monsieur Homais towards liqueur-time began singing "Le Dieu des
bonnes gens." Monsieur Leon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior,
who was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary,
senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing it
with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head. This mockery of the
first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien angry; old Bovary replied
by a quotation from "La Guerre des Dieux"; the cure wanted to leave; the
ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they succeeded in making the priest
sit down again, and he quietly went on with the half-finished coffee in his
saucer.
Monsieur Bovary, senior, stayed at Yonville
a month, dazzling the natives by a superb policeman's cap with silver
tassels that he wore in the morning when he smoked his pipe in the square.
Being also in the habit of drinking a good deal of brandy, he often sent the
servant to the Lion d'Or to buy him a bottle, which was put down to his
son's account, and to perfume his handkerchiefs he used up his
daughter-in-law's whole supply of eau-de-cologne.
The latter did not at all dislike his
company. He had knocked about the world, he talked about Berlin, Vienna, and
Strasbourg, of his soldier times, of the mistresses he had had, the grand
luncheons of which he had partaken; then he was amiable, and sometimes even,
either on the stairs, or in the garden, would seize hold of her waist,
crying, "Charles, look out for yourself."
Then Madame Bovary, senior, became alarmed
for her son's happiness, and fearing that her husband might in the long-run
have an immoral influence upon the ideas of the young woman, took care to
hurry their departure. Perhaps she had more serious reasons for uneasiness.
Monsieur Bovary was not the man to respect anything.
One day Emma was suddenly seized with the
desire to see her little girl, who had been put to nurse with the
carpenter's wife, and, without looking at the calendar to see whether the
six weeks of the Virgin were yet passed, she set out for the Rollets' house,
situated at the extreme end of the village, between the highroad and the
fields.
It was mid-day, the shutters of the houses
were closed and the slate roofs that glittered beneath the fierce light of
the blue sky seemed to strike sparks from the crest of the gables. A heavy
wind was blowing; Emma felt weak as she walked; the stones of the pavement
hurt her; she was doubtful whether she would not go home again, or go in
somewhere to rest.
At this moment Monsieur Leon came out from
a neighbouring door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came to greet
her, and stood in the shade in front of the Lheureux's shop under the
projecting grey awning.
Madame Bovary said she was going to see her
baby, but that she was beginning to grow tired.
"If—" said Leon, not daring to go on.
"Have you any business to attend to?" she
asked.
And on the clerk's answer, she begged him
to accompany her. That same evening this was known in Yonville, and Madame
Tuvache, the mayor's wife, declared in the presence of her servant that
"Madame Bovary was compromising herself."
To get to the nurse's it was necessary to
turn to the left on leaving the street, as if making for the cemetery, and
to follow between little houses and yards a small path bordered with privet
hedges. They were in bloom, and so were the speedwells, eglantines,
thistles, and the sweetbriar that sprang up from the thickets. Through
openings in the hedges one could see into the huts, some pigs on a
dung-heap, or tethered cows rubbing their horns against the trunk of trees.
The two, side by side walked slowly, she leaning upon him, and he
restraining his pace, which he regulated by hers; in front of them a swarm
of midges fluttered, buzzing in the warm air.
They recognized the house by an old
walnut-tree which shaded it.
Low and covered with brown tiles, there
hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of
onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuce, a
few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water
was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several
indefinite rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet
of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse
appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she
was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula,
the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their
business, left in the country.
"Go in," she said; "your little one is
there asleep."
The room on the ground-floor, the only one
in the dwelling, had at its farther end, against the wall, a large bed
without curtains, while a kneading-trough took up the side by the window,
one pane of which was mended with a piece of blue paper. In the corner
behind the door, shining hob-nailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of
the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth; a
Matthieu Laensberg lay on the dusty mantelpiece amid gunflints, candle-ends,
and bits of amadou.
Finally, the last luxury in the apartment
was a "Fame" blowing her trumpets, a picture cut out, no doubt, from some
perfumer's prospectus and nailed to the wall with six wooden shoe-pegs.
Emma's child was asleep in a wicker-cradle.
She took it up in the wrapping that enveloped it and began singing softly as
she rocked herself to and fro.
Leon walked up and down the room; it seemed
strange to him to see this beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in the midst
of all this poverty. Madam Bovary reddened; he turned away, thinking perhaps
there had been an impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the little
girl, who had just been sick over her collar.
The nurse at once came to dry her,
protesting that it wouldn't show.
"She gives me other doses," she said: "I am
always a-washing of her. If you would have the goodness to order Camus, the
grocer, to let me have a little soap, it would really be more convenient for
you, as I needn't trouble you then."
"Very well! very well!" said Emma. "Good
morning, Madame Rollet," and she went out, wiping her shoes at the door.
The good woman accompanied her to the end
of the garden, talking all the time of the trouble she had getting up of
nights.
"I'm that worn out sometimes as I drop
asleep on my chair. I'm sure you might at least give me just a pound of
ground coffee; that'd last me a month, and I'd take it of a morning with
some milk."
After having submitted to her thanks, Madam
Bovary left. She had gone a little way down the path when, at the sound of
wooden shoes, she turned round. It was the nurse.
"What is it?"
Then the peasant woman, taking her aside
behind an elm tree, began talking to her of her husband, who with his trade
and six francs a year that the captain—
"Oh, be quick!" said Emma.
"Well," the nurse went on, heaving sighs
between each word, "I'm afraid he'll be put out seeing me have coffee alone,
you know men—"
"But you are to have some," Emma repeated;
"I will give you some. You bother me!"
"Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see in
consequence of his wounds he has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says
that cider weakens him."
"Do make haste, Mere Rollet!"
"Well," the latter continued, making a
curtsey, "if it weren't asking too much," and she curtsied once more, "if
you would"—and her eyes begged—"a jar of brandy," she said at last, "and I'd
rub your little one's feet with it; they're as tender as one's tongue."
Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took
Monsieur Leon's arm. She walked fast for some time, then more slowly, and
looking straight in front of her, her eyes rested on the shoulder of the
young man, whose frock-coat had a black-velvety collar. His brown hair fell
over it, straight and carefully arranged. She noticed his nails which were
longer than one wore them at Yonville. It was one of the clerk's chief
occupations to trim them, and for this purpose he kept a special knife in
his writing desk.
They returned to Yonville by the
water-side. In the warm season the bank, wider than at other times, showed
to their foot the garden walls whence a few steps led to the river. It
flowed noiselessly, swift, and cold to the eye; long, thin grasses huddled
together in it as the current drove them, and spread themselves upon the
limpid water like streaming hair; sometimes at the tip of the reeds or on
the leaf of a water-lily an insect with fine legs crawled or rested. The sun
pierced with a ray the small blue bubbles of the waves that, breaking,
followed each other; branchless old willows mirrored their grey backs in the
water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was the dinner-hour
at the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard nothing as they
walked but the fall of their steps on the earth of the path, the words they
spoke, and the sound of Emma's dress rustling round her.
The walls of the gardens with pieces of
bottle on their coping were hot as the glass windows of a conservatory.
Wallflowers had sprung up between the bricks, and with the tip of her open
sunshade Madame Bovary, as she passed, made some of their faded flowers
crumble into a yellow dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and
clematis caught in its fringe and dangled for a moment over the silk.
They were talking of a troupe of Spanish
dancers who were expected shortly at the Rouen theatre.
"Are you going?" she asked.
"If I can," he answered.
Had they nothing else to say to one
another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they
forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor
stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous,
dominating that of their voices. Surprised with wonder at this strange
sweetness, they did not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its
cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before
them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this
intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.
In one place the ground had been trodden
down by the cattle; they had to step on large green stones put here and
there in the mud.
She often stopped a moment to look where to
place her foot, and tottering on a stone that shook, her arms outspread, her
form bent forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of
falling into the puddles of water.
When they arrived in front of her garden,
Madame Bovary opened the little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared.
Leon returned to his office. His chief was
away; he just glanced at the briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last
took up his hat and went out.
He went to La Pature at the top of the
Argueil hills at the beginning of the forest; he threw himself upon the
ground under the pines and watched the sky through his fingers.
"How bored I am!" he said to himself, "how
bored I am!"
He thought he was to be pitied for living
in this village, with Homais for a friend and Monsieru Guillaumin for
master. The latter, entirely absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed
spectacles and red whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of
mental refinements, although he affected a stiff English manner, which in
the beginning had impressed the clerk.
As to the chemist's spouse, she was the
best wife in Normandy, gentle as a sheep, loving her children, her father,
her mother, her cousins, weeping for other's woes, letting everything go in
her household, and detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore
to listen to, so common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation,
that although she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms
next each other and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might
be a woman for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex than
the gown.
And what else was there? Binet, a few
shopkeepers, two or three publicans, the cure, and finally, Monsieur
Tuvache, the mayor, with his two sons, rich, crabbed, obtuse persons, who
farmed their own lands and had feasts among themselves, bigoted to boot, and
quite unbearable companions.
But from the general background of all
these human faces Emma's stood out isolated and yet farthest off; for
between her and him he seemed to see a vague abyss.
In the beginning he had called on her
several times along with the druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly
anxious to see him again, and Leon did not know what to do between his fear
of being indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost
impossible.
Chapter Four
When the first cold days set in Emma left
her bedroom for the sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in
which there was on the mantelpiece a large bunch of coral spread out against
the looking-glass. Seated in her arm chair near the window, she could see
the villagers pass along the pavement.
Twice a day Leon went from his office to
the Lion d'Or. Emma could hear him coming from afar; she leant forward
listening, and the young man glided past the curtain, always dressed in the
same way, and without turning his head. But in the twilight, when, her chin
resting on her left hand, she let the embroidery she had begun fall on her
knees, she often shuddered at the apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding
past. She would get up and order the table to be laid.
Monsieur Homais called at dinner-time.
Skull-cap in hand, he came in on tiptoe, in order to disturb no one, always
repeating the same phrase, "Good evening, everybody." Then, when he had
taken his seat at the table between the pair, he asked the doctor about his
patients, and the latter consulted his as to the probability of their
payment. Next they talked of "what was in the paper."
Homais by this hour knew it almost by
heart, and he repeated it from end to end, with the reflections of the
penny-a-liners, and all the stories of individual catastrophes that had
occurred in France or abroad. But the subject becoming exhausted, he was not
slow in throwing out some remarks on the dishes before him.
Sometimes even, half-rising, he delicately
pointed out to madame the tenderest morsel, or turning to the servant, gave
her some advice on the manipulation of stews and the hygiene of seasoning.
He talked aroma, osmazome, juices, and
gelatine in a bewildering manner. Moreover, Homais, with his head fuller of
recipes than his shop of jars, excelled in making all kinds of preserves,
vinegars, and sweet liqueurs; he knew also all the latest inventions in
economic stoves, together with the art of preserving cheese and of curing
sick wines.
At eight o'clock Justin came to fetch him
to shut up the shop.
Then Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look,
especially if Felicite was there, for he half noticed that his apprentice
was fond of the doctor's house.
"The young dog," he said, "is beginning to
have ideas, and the devil take me if I don't believe he's in love with your
servant!"
But a more serious fault with which he
reproached Justin was his constantly listening to conversation. On Sunday,
for example, one could not get him out of the drawing-room, whither Madame
Homais had called him to fetch the children, who were falling asleep in the
arm-chairs, and dragging down with their backs calico chair-covers that were
too large.
Not many people came to these soirees at
the chemist's, his scandal-mongering and political opinions having
successfully alienated various respectable persons from him. The clerk never
failed to be there. As soon as he heard the bell he ran to meet Madame
Bovary, took her shawl, and put away under the shop-counter the thick list
shoes that she wore over her boots when there was snow.
First they played some hands at
trente-et-un; next Monsieur Homais played ecarte with Emma; Leon behind her
gave her advice.
Standing up with his hands on the back of
her chair he saw the teeth of her comb that bit into her chignon. With every
movement that she made to throw her cards the right side of her dress was
drawn up. From her turned-up hair a dark colour fell over her back, and
growing gradually paler, lost itself little by little in the shade. Then her
dress fell on both sides of her chair, puffing out full of folds, and
reached the ground. When Leon occasionally felt the sole of his boot resting
on it, he drew back as if he had trodden upon some one.
When the game of cards was over, the
druggist and the Doctor played dominoes, and Emma, changing her place, leant
her elbow on the table, turning over the leaves of "L'Illustration". She had
brought her ladies' journal with her. Leon sat down near her; they looked at
the engravings together, and waited for one another at the bottom of the
pages. She often begged him to read her the verses; Leon declaimed them in a
languid voice, to which he carefully gave a dying fall in the love passages.
But the noise of the dominoes annoyed him. Monsieur Homais was strong at the
game; he could beat Charles and give him a double-six. Then the three
hundred finished, they both stretched themselves out in front of the fire,
and were soon asleep. The fire was dying out in the cinders; the teapot was
empty, Leon was still reading.
Emma listened to him, mechanically turning
around the lampshade, on the gauze of which were painted clowns in
carriages, and tight-rope dances with their balancing-poles. Leon stopped,
pointing with a gesture to his sleeping audience; then they talked in low
tones, and their conversation seemed the more sweet to them because it was
unheard.
Thus a kind of bond was established between
them, a constant commerce of books and of romances. Monsieur Bovary, little
given to jealousy, did not trouble himself about it.
On his birthday he received a beautiful
phrenological head, all marked with figures to the thorax and painted blue.
This was an attention of the clerk's. He showed him many others, even to
doing errands for him at Rouen; and the book of a novelist having made the
mania for cactuses fashionable, Leon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing
them back on his knees in the "Hirondelle," pricking his fingers on their
hard hairs.
She had a board with a balustrade fixed
against her window to hold the pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging
garden; they saw each other tending their flowers at their windows.
Of the windows of the village there was one
yet more often occupied; for on Sundays from morning to night, and every
morning when the weather was bright, one could see at the dormer-window of
the garret the profile of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose
monotonous humming could be heard at the Lion d'Or.
One evening on coming home Leon found in
his room a rug in velvet and wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called
Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of
it to his chief; every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the doctor's wife
give the clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his
lover.
He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly
did he talk of her charms and of her wit; so much so, that Binet once
roughly answered him—
"What does it matter to me since I'm not in
her set?"
He tortured himself to find out how he
could make his declaration to her, and always halting between the fear of
displeasing her and the shame of being such a coward, he wept with
discouragement and desire. Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters
that he tore up, put it off to times that he again deferred.
Often he set out with the determination to
dare all; but this resolution soon deserted him in Emma's presence, and when
Charles, dropping in, invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to
see some patient in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame,
and went out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her? As to
Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must
come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies,
which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and
sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on the terrace
of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she would thus have
remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a rent in the wall of
it.
Chapter Five
It was a Sunday in February, an afternoon
when the snow was falling.
They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary,
Homais, and Monsieur Leon, gone to see a yarn-mill that was being built in
the valley a mile and a half from Yonville. The druggist had taken Napoleon
and Athalie to give them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them,
carrying the umbrellas on his shoulder.
Nothing, however, could be less curious
than this curiosity. A great piece of waste ground, on which pell-mell, amid
a mass of sand and stones, were a few break-wheels, already rusty,
surrounded by a quadrangular building pierced by a number of little windows.
The building was unfinished; the sky could be seen through the joists of the
roofing. Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of straw mixed with
corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured ribbons in the wind.
Homais was talking. He explained to the
company the future importance of this establishment, computed the strength
of the floorings, the thickness of the walls, and regretted extremely not
having a yard-stick such as Monsieur Binet possessed for his own special
use.
Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly
against his shoulder, and she looked at the sun's disc shedding afar through
the mist his pale splendour. She turned. Charles was there. His cap was
drawn down over his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which
added a look of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was
irritating to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of
the bearer.
While she was considering him thus, tasting
in her irritation a sort of depraved pleasure, Leon made a step forward. The
cold that made him pale seemed to add a more gentle languor to his face;
between his cravat and his neck the somewhat loose collar of his shirt
showed the skin; the lobe of his ear looked out from beneath a lock of hair,
and his large blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid
and more beautiful than those mountain-lakes where the heavens are mirrored.
"Wretched boy!" suddenly cried the chemist.
And he ran to his son, who had just
precipitated himself into a heap of lime in order to whiten his boots. At
the reproaches with which he was being overwhelmed Napoleon began to roar,
while Justin dried his shoes with a wisp of straw. But a knife was wanted;
Charles offered his.
"Ah!" she said to herself, "he carried a
knife in his pocket like a peasant."
The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned
back to Yonville.
In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to
her neighbour's, and when Charles had left and she felt herself alone, the
comparison re-began with the clearness of a sensation almost actual, and
with that lengthening of perspective which memory gives to things. Looking
from her bed at the clean fire that was burning, she still saw, as she had
down there, Leon standing up with one hand behind his cane, and with the
other holding Athalie, who was quietly sucking a piece of ice. She thought
him charming; she could not tear herself away from him; she recalled his
other attitudes on other days, the words he had spoken, the sound of his
voice, his whole person; and she repeated, pouting out her lips as if for a
kiss—
"Yes, charming! charming! Is he not in
love?" she asked herself; "but with whom? With me?"
All the proofs arose before her at once;
her heart leapt. The flame of the fire threw a joyous light upon the
ceiling; she turned on her back, stretching out her arms.
Then began the eternal lamentation: "Oh, if
Heaven had out willed it! And why not? What prevented it?"
When Charles came home at midnight, she
seemed to have just awakened, and as he made a noise undressing, she
complained of a headache, then asked carelessly what had happened that
evening.
"Monsieur Leon," he said, "went to his room
early."
She could not help smiling, and she fell
asleep, her soul filled with a new delight.
The next day, at dusk, she received a visit
from Monsieur Lherueux, the draper. He was a man of ability, was this
shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern
volubility the cunning of the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face
seemed dyed by a decoction of liquorice, and his white hair made even more
vivid the keen brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had
been formerly; a pedlar said some, a banker at Routot according to others.
What was certain was that he made complex calculations in his head that
would have frightened Binet himself. Polite to obsequiousness, he always
held himself with his back bent in the position of one who bows or who
invites.
After leaving at the door his hat
surrounded with crape, he put down a green bandbox on the table, and began
by complaining to madame, with many civilities, that he should have remained
till that day without gaining her confidence. A poor shop like his was not
made to attract a "fashionable lady"; he emphasized the words; yet she had
only to command, and he would undertake to provide her with anything she
might wish, either in haberdashery or linen, millinery or fancy goods, for
he went to town regularly four times a month. He was connected with the best
houses. You could speak of him at the "Trois Freres," at the "Barbe d'Or,"
or at the "Grand Sauvage"; all these gentlemen knew him as well as the
insides of their pockets. To-day, then he had come to show madame, in
passing, various articles he happened to have, thanks to the most rare
opportunity. And he pulled out half-a-dozen embroidered collars from the
box.
Madame Bovary examined them. "I do not
require anything," she said.
Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited
three Algerian scarves, several packets of English needles, a pair of straw
slippers, and finally, four eggcups in cocoanut wood, carved in open work by
convicts. Then, with both hands on the table, his neck stretched out, his
figure bent forward, open-mouthed, he watched Emma's look, who was walking
up and down undecided amid these goods. From time to time, as if to remove
some dust, he filliped with his nail the silk of the scarves spread out at
full length, and they rustled with a little noise, making in the green
twilight the gold spangles of their tissue scintillate like little stars.
"How much are they?"
"A mere nothing," he replied, "a mere
nothing. But there's no hurry; whenever it's convenient. We are not Jews."
She reflected for a few moments, and ended
by again declining Monsieur Lheureux's offer. He replied quite
unconcernedly—
"Very well. We shall understand one another
by and by. I have always got on with ladies—if I didn't with my own!"
Emma smiled.
"I wanted to tell you," he went on
good-naturedly, after his joke, "that it isn't the money I should trouble
about. Why, I could give you some, if need be."
She made a gesture of surprise.
"Ah!" said he quickly and in a low voice,
"I shouldn't have to go far to find you some, rely on that."
And he began asking after Pere Tellier, the
proprietor of the "Cafe Francais," whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending.
"What's the matter with Pere Tellier? He
coughs so that he shakes his whole house, and I'm afraid he'll soon want a
deal covering rather than a flannel vest. He was such a rake as a young man!
Those sort of people, madame, have not the least regularity; he's burnt up
with brandy. Still it's sad, all the same, to see an acquaintance go off."
And while he fastened up his box he
discoursed about the doctor's patients.
"It's the weather, no doubt," he said,
looking frowningly at the floor, "that causes these illnesses. I, too, don't
feel the thing. One of these days I shall even have to consult the doctor
for a pain I have in my back. Well, good-bye, Madame Bovary. At your
service; your very humble servant." And he closed the door gently.
Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom
on a tray by the fireside; she was a long time over it; everything was well
with her.
"How good I was!" she said to herself,
thinking of the scarves.
She heard some steps on the stairs. It was
Leon. She got up and took from the chest of drawers the first pile of
dusters to be hemmed. When he came in she seemed very busy.
The conversation languished; Madame Bovary
gave it up every few minutes, whilst he himself seemed quite embarrassed.
Seated on a low chair near the fire, he turned round in his fingers the
ivory thimble-case. She stitched on, or from time to time turned down the
hem of the cloth with her nail. She did not speak; he was silent, captivated
by her silence, as he would have been by her speech.
"Poor fellow!" she thought.
"How have I displeased her?" he asked
himself.
At last, however, Leon said that he should
have, one of these days, to go to Rouen on some office business.
"Your music subscription is out; am I to
renew it?"
"No," she replied.
"Why?"
"Because—"
And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long
stitch of grey thread.
This work irritated Leon. It seemed to
roughen the ends of her fingers. A gallant phrase came into his head, but he
did not risk it.
"Then you are giving it up?" he went on.
"What?" she asked hurriedly. "Music? Ah!
yes! Have I not my house to look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand
things, in fact, many duties that must be considered first?"
She looked at the clock. Charles was late.
Then, she affected anxiety. Two or three times she even repeated, "He is so
good!"
The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But
this tenderness on his behalf astonished him unpleasantly; nevertheless he
took up on his praises, which he said everyone was singing, especially the
chemist.
"Ah! he is a good fellow," continued Emma.
"Certainly," replied the clerk.
And he began talking of Madame Homais,
whose very untidy appearance generally made them laugh.
"What does it matter?" interrupted Emma. "A
good housewife does not trouble about her appearance."
Then she relapsed into silence.
It was the same on the following days; her
talks, her manners, everything changed. She took interest in the housework,
went to church regularly, and looked after her servant with more severity.
She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors
called, Felicite brought her in, and Madame Bovary undressed her to show off
her limbs. She declared she adored children; this was her consolation, her
joy, her passion, and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outburst
which would have reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette in
"Notre Dame de Paris."
When Charles came home he found his
slippers put to warm near the fire. His waistcoat now never wanted lining,
nor his shirt buttons, and it was quite a pleasure to see in the cupboard
the night-caps arranged in piles of the same height. She no longer grumbled
as formerly at taking a turn in the garden; what he proposed was always
done, although she did not understand the wishes to which she submitted
without a murmur; and when Leon saw him by his fireside after dinner, his
two hands on his stomach, his two feet on the fender, his two cheeks red
with feeding, his eyes moist with happiness, the child crawling along the
carpet, and this woman with the slender waist who came behind his arm-chair
to kiss his forehead: "What madness!" he said to himself. "And how to reach
her!"
And thus she seemed so virtuous and
inaccessible to him that he lost all hope, even the faintest. But by this
renunciation he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle. To him she stood
outside those fleshly attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in
his heart she rose ever, and became farther removed from him after the
magnificent manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of those
pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because
they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their passion
rejoices.
Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her
face longer. With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her
birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to be passing through
life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some
divine destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so
reserved, that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we
shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of
the marble. The others even did not escape from this seduction. The chemist
said—
"She is a woman of great parts, who
wouldn't be misplaced in a sub-prefecture."
The housewives admired her economy, the
patients her politeness, the poor her charity.
But she was eaten up with desires, with
rage, with hate. That dress with the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of
whose torment those chaste lips said nothing. She was in love with Leon, and
sought solitude that she might with the more ease delight in his image. The
sight of his form troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation. Emma
thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion
subsided, and afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment
that ended in sorrow.
Leon did not know that when he left her in
despair she rose after he had gone to see him in the street. She concerned
herself about his comings and goings; she watched his face; she invented
quite a history to find an excuse for going to his room. The chemist's wife
seemed happy to her to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts
constantly centered upon this house, like the "Lion d'Or" pigeons, who came
there to dip their red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more
Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be
evident, that she might make it less. She would have liked Leon to guess it,
and she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this.
What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness
and fear, and a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too
much, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then, pride, and joy of
being able to say to herself, "I am virtuous," and to look at herself in the
glass taking resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she
believed she was making.
Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing
for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one
suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the
more, urging herself to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it. She
was irritated by an ill-served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the
velvets she had not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams,
her narrow home.
What exasperated her was that Charles did
not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy
seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point
ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the
obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the
sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.
On him alone, then, she concentrated all
the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to
diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other
reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between
them. Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic
mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous
desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a
better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised
sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she
had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was
happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.
Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She
was seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a new
life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul.
"Besides, he no longer loves me," she
thought. "What is to become of me? What help is to be hoped for, what
consolation, what solace?"
She was left broken, breathless, inert,
sobbing in a low voice, with flowing tears.
"Why don't you tell master?" the servant
asked her when she came in during these crises.
"It is the nerves," said Emma. "Do not
speak to him of it; it would worry him."
"Ah! yes," Felicite went on, "you are just
like La Guerine, Pere Guerin's daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I
used to know at Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, to see
her standing upright on the threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a
winding-sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears, was a
kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could not do anything,
nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone
to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found
her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage,
it went off, they say."
"But with me," replied Emma, "it was after
marriage that it began."
Chapter Six
One evening when the window was open, and
she, sitting by it, had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the
box, she suddenly heard the Angelus ringing.
It was the beginning of April, when the
primroses are in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly
turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to be getting ready for the summer
fetes. Through the bars of the arbour and away beyond, the river seen in the
fields, meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening
vapours rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a
violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart
their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor
their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air,
kept up its peaceful lamentation.
With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of
the young woman lost themselves in old memories of her youth and
school-days. She remembered the great candlesticks that rose above the vases
full of flowers on the altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She
would have liked to be once more lost in the long line of white veils,
marked off here and there by the stuff black hoods of the good sisters
bending over their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she
saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense.
Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down
of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went
towards the church, included to no matter what devotions, so that her soul
was absorbed and all existence lost in it.
On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his
way back, for, in order not to shorten his day's labour, he preferred
interrupting his work, then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus
to suit his own convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier
warned the lads of catechism hour.
Already a few who had arrived were playing
marbles on the stones of the cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their
legs, kicking with their clogs the large nettles growing between the little
enclosure and the newest graves. This was the only green spot. All the rest
was but stones, always covered with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom.
The children in list shoes ran about there
as if it were an enclosure made for them. The shouts of their voices could
be heard through the humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the
swinging of the great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged
its end on the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries,
cut the air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their
yellow nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp
was burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a
distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of the
sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and the
corners.
"Where is the cure?" asked Madame Bovary of
one of the lads, who was amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too
large for it.
"He is just coming," he answered.
And in fact the door of the presbytery
grated; Abbe Bournisien appeared; the children, pell-mell, fled into the
church.
"These young scamps!" murmured the priest,
"always the same!"
Then, picking up a catechism all in rags
that he had struck with is foot, "They respect nothing!" But as soon as he
caught sight of Madame Bovary, "Excuse me," he said; "I did not recognise
you."
He thrust the catechism into his pocket,
and stopped short, balancing the heavy vestry key between his two fingers.
The light of the setting sun that fell full
upon his face paled the lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows,
unravelled at the hem. Grease and tobacco stains followed along his broad
chest the lines of the buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were
from his neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this
was dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of
his greyish beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily.
"How are you?" he added.
"Not well," replied Emma; "I am ill."
"Well, and so am I," answered the priest.
"These first warm days weaken one most remarkably, don't they? But, after
all, we are born to suffer, as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary
think of it?"
"He!" she said with a gesture of contempt.
"What!" replied the good fellow, quite
astonished, "doesn't he prescribe something for you?"
"Ah!" said Emma, "it is no earthly remedy I
need."
But the cure from time to time looked into
the church, where the kneeling boys were shouldering one another, and
tumbling over like packs of cards.
"I should like to know—" she went on.
"You look out, Riboudet," cried the priest
in an angry voice; "I'll warm your ears, you imp!" Then turning to Emma,
"He's Boudet the carpenter's son; his parents are well off, and let him do
just as he pleases. Yet he could learn quickly if he would, for he is very
sharp. And so sometimes for a joke I call him Riboudet (like the road one
takes to go to Maromme) and I even say 'Mon Riboudet.' Ha! Ha! 'Mont
Riboudet.' The other day I repeated that just to Monsignor, and he laughed
at it; he condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?"
She seemed not to hear him. And he went on—
"Always very busy, no doubt; for he and I
are certainly the busiest people in the parish. But he is doctor of the
body," he added with a thick laugh, "and I of the soul."
She fixed her pleading eyes upon the
priest. "Yes," she said, "you solace all sorrows."
"Ah! don't talk to me of it, Madame Bovary.
This morning I had to go to Bas-Diauville for a cow that was ill; they
thought it was under a spell. All their cows, I don't know how it is—But
pardon me! Longuemarre and Boudet! Bless me! Will you leave off?"
And with a bound he ran into the church.
The boys were just then clustering round
the large desk, climbing over the precentor's footstool, opening the missal;
and others on tiptoe were just about to venture into the confessional. But
the priest suddenly distributed a shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them
by the collars of their coats, he lifted them from the ground, and deposited
them on their knees on the stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant
planting them there.
"Yes," said he, when he returned to Emma,
unfolding his large cotton handkerchief, one corner of which he put between
his teeth, "farmers are much to be pitied."
"Others, too," she replied.
"Assuredly. Town-labourers, for example."
"It is not they—"
"Pardon! I've there known poor mothers of
families, virtuous women, I assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread."
"But those," replied Emma, and the corners
of her mouth twitched as she spoke, "those, Monsieur le Cure, who have bread
and have no—"
"Fire in the winter," said the priest.
"Oh, what does that matter?"
"What! What does it matter? It seems to me
that when one has firing and food—for, after all—"
"My God! my God!" she sighed.
"It is indigestion, no doubt? You must get
home, Madame Bovary; drink a little tea, that will strengthen you, or else a
glass of fresh water with a little moist sugar."
"Why?" And she looked like one awaking from
a dream.
"Well, you see, you were putting your hand
to your forehead. I thought you felt faint." Then, bethinking himself, "But
you were asking me something? What was it? I really don't remember."
"I? Nothing! nothing!" repeated Emma.
And the glance she cast round her slowly
fell upon the old man in the cassock. They looked at one another face to
face without speaking.
"Then, Madame Bovary," he said at last,
"excuse me, but duty first, you know; I must look after my
good-for-nothings. The first communion will soon be upon us, and I fear we
shall be behind after all. So after Ascension Day I keep them recta* an
extra hour every Wednesday. Poor children! One cannot lead them too soon
into the path of the Lord, as, moreover, he has himself recommended us to do
by the mouth of his Divine Son. Good health to you, madame; my respects to
your husband."
*On the straight and narrow path.
And he went into the church making a
genuflexion as soon as he reached the door.
Emma saw him disappear between the double
row of forms, walking with a heavy tread, his head a little bent over his
shoulder, and with his two hands half-open behind him.
Then she turned on her heel all of one
piece, like a statue on a pivot, and went homewards. But the loud voice of
the priest, the clear voices of the boys still reached her ears, and went on
behind her.
"Are you a Christian?"
"Yes, I am a Christian."
"What is a Christian?"
"He who, being baptized-baptized-baptized—"
She went up the steps of the staircase
holding on to the banisters, and when she was in her room threw herself into
an arm-chair.
The whitish light of the window-panes fell
with soft undulations.
The furniture in its place seemed to have
become more immobile, and to lose itself in the shadow as in an ocean of
darkness. The fire was out, the clock went on ticking, and Emma vaguely
marvelled at this calm of all things while within herself was such tumult.
But little Berthe was there, between the window and the work-table,
tottering on her knitted shoes, and trying to come to her mother to catch
hold of the ends of her apron-strings.
"Leave me alone," said the latter, putting
her from her with her hand.
The little girl soon came up closer against
her knees, and leaning on them with her arms, she looked up with her large
blue eyes, while a small thread of pure saliva dribbled from her lips on to
the silk apron.
"Leave me alone," repeated the young woman
quite irritably.
Her face frightened the child, who began to
scream.
"Will you leave me alone?" she said,
pushing her with her elbow.
Berthe fell at the foot of the drawers
against the brass handle, cutting her cheek, which began to bleed, against
it. Madame Bovary sprang to lift her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the
servant with all her might, and she was just going to curse herself when
Charles appeared. It was the dinner-hour; he had come home.
"Look, dear!" said Emma, in a calm voice,
"the little one fell down while she was playing, and has hurt herself."
Charles reassured her; the case was not a
serious one, and he went for some sticking plaster.
Madame Bovary did not go downstairs to the
dining-room; she wished to remain alone to look after the child. Then
watching her sleep, the little anxiety she felt gradually wore off, and she
seemed very stupid to herself, and very good to have been so worried just
now at so little. Berthe, in fact, no longer sobbed.
Her breathing now imperceptibly raised the
cotton covering. Big tears lay in the corner of the half-closed eyelids,
through whose lashes one could see two pale sunken pupils; the plaster stuck
on her cheek drew the skin obliquely.
"It is very strange," thought Emma, "how
ugly this child is!"
When at eleven o'clock Charles came back
from the chemist's shop, whither he had gone after dinner to return the
remainder of the sticking-plaster, he found his wife standing by the cradle.
"I assure you it's nothing." he said,
kissing her on the forehead. "Don't worry, my poor darling; you will make
yourself ill."
He had stayed a long time at the chemist's.
Although he had not seemed much moved, Homais, nevertheless, had exerted
himself to buoy him up, to "keep up his spirits." Then they had talked of
the various dangers that threaten childhood, of the carelessness of
servants. Madame Homais knew something of it, having still upon her chest
the marks left by a basin full of soup that a cook had formerly dropped on
her pinafore, and her good parents took no end of trouble for her. The
knives were not sharpened, nor the floors waxed; there were iron gratings to
the windows and strong bars across the fireplace; the little Homais, in
spite of their spirit, could not stir without someone watching them; at the
slightest cold their father stuffed them with pectorals; and until they were
turned four they all, without pity, had to wear wadded head-protectors.
This, it is true, was a fancy of Madame Homais'; her husband was inwardly
afflicted at it. Fearing the possible consequences of such compression to
the intellectual organs. He even went so far as to say to her, "Do you want
to make Caribs or Botocudos of them?"
Charles, however, had several times tried
to interrupt the conversation. "I should like to speak to you," he had
whispered in the clerk's ear, who went upstairs in front of him.
"Can he suspect anything?" Leon asked
himself. His heart beat, and he racked his brain with surmises.
At last, Charles, having shut the door,
asked him to see himself what would be the price at Rouen of a fine
daguerreotypes. It was a sentimental surprise he intended for his wife, a
delicate attention—his portrait in a frock-coat. But he wanted first to know
"how much it would be." The inquiries would not put Monsieur Leon out, since
he went to town almost every week.
Why? Monsieur Homais suspected some "young
man's affair" at the bottom of it, an intrigue. But he was mistaken. Leon
was after no love-making. He was sadder than ever, as Madame Lefrancois saw
from the amount of food he left on his plate. To find out more about it she
questioned the tax-collector. Binet answered roughly that he "wasn't paid by
the police."
All the same, his companion seemed very
strange to him, for Leon often threw himself back in his chair, and
stretching out his arms. Complained vaguely of life.
"It's because you don't take enough
recreation," said the collector.
"What recreation?"
"If I were you I'd have a lathe."
"But I don't know how to turn," answered
the clerk.
"Ah! that's true," said the other, rubbing
his chin with an air of mingled contempt and satisfaction.
Leon was weary of loving without any
result; moreover he was beginning to feel that depression caused by the
repetition of the same kind of life, when no interest inspires and no hope
sustains it. He was so bored with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the
sight of certain persons, of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance;
and the chemist, good fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely
unbearable to him. Yet the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as
much as it seduced him.
This apprehension soon changed into
impatience, and then Paris from afar sounded its fanfare of masked balls
with the laugh of grisettes. As he was to finish reading there, why not set
out at once? What prevented him? And he began making home-preparations; he
arranged his occupations beforehand. He furnished in his head an apartment.
He would lead an artist's life there! He would take lessons on the guitar!
He would have a dressing-gown, a Basque cap, blue velvet slippers! He even
already was admiring two crossed foils over his chimney-piece, with a
death's head on the guitar above them.
The difficulty was the consent of his
mother; nothing, however, seemed more reasonable. Even his employer advised
him to go to some other chambers where he could advance more rapidly. Taking
a middle course, then, Leon looked for some place as second clerk at Rouen;
found none, and at last wrote his mother a long letter full of details, in
which he set forth the reasons for going to live at Paris immediately. She
consented.
He did not hurry. Every day for a month
Hivert carried boxes, valises, parcels for him from Yonville to Rouen and
from Rouen to Yonville; and when Leon had packed up his wardrobe, had his
three arm-chairs restuffed, bought a stock of neckties, in a word, had made
more preparations than for a voyage around the world, he put it off from
week to week, until he received a second letter from his mother urging him
to leave, since he wanted to pass his examination before the vacation.
When the moment for the farewells had come,
Madame Homais wept, Justin sobbed; Homais, as a man of nerve, concealed his
emotion; he wished to carry his friend's overcoat himself as far as the gate
of the notary, who was taking Leon to Rouen in his carriage.
The latter had just time to bid farewell to
Monsieur Bovary.
When he reached the head of the stairs, he
stopped, he was so out of breath. As he came in, Madame Bovary arose
hurriedly.
"It is I again!" said Leon.
"I was sure of it!"
She bit her lips, and a rush of blood
flowing under her skin made her red from the roots of her hair to the top of
her collar. She remained standing, leaning with her shoulder against the
wainscot.
"The doctor is not here?" he went on.
"He is out." She repeated, "He is out."
Then there was silence. They looked at one
another and their thoughts, confounded in the same agony, clung close
together like two throbbing breasts.
"I should like to kiss Berthe," said Leon.
Emma went down a few steps and called
Felicite.
He threw one long look around him that took
in the walls, the decorations, the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything,
carry away everything. But she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who
was swinging a windmill roof downwards at the end of a string. Leon kissed
her several times on the neck.
"Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear
little one! good-bye!" And he gave her back to her mother.
"Take her away," she said.
They remained alone—Madame Bovary, her back
turned, her face pressed against a window-pane; Leon held his cap in his
hand, knocking it softly against his thigh.
"It is going to rain," said Emma.
"I have a cloak," he answered.
"Ah!"
She turned around, her chin lowered, her
forehead bent forward.
The light fell on it as on a piece of
marble, to the curve of the eyebrows, without one's being able to guess what
Emma was seeing on the horizon or what she was thinking within herself.
"Well, good-bye," he sighed.
She raised her head with a quick movement.
"Yes, good-bye—go!"
They advanced towards each other; he held
out his hand; she hesitated.
"In the English fashion, then," she said,
giving her own hand wholly to him, and forcing a laugh.
Leon felt it between his fingers, and the
very essence of all his being seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then
he opened his hand; their eyes met again, and he disappeared.
When he reached the market-place, he
stopped and hid behind a pillar to look for the last time at this white
house with the four green blinds. He thought he saw a shadow behind the
window in the room; but the curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one
were touching it, slowly opened its long oblique folds that spread out with
a single movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall.
Leon set off running.
From afar he saw his employer's gig in the
road, and by it a man in a coarse apron holding the horse. Homais and
Monsieur Guillaumin were talking. They were waiting for him.
"Embrace me," said the druggist with tears
in his eyes. "Here is your coat, my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of
yourself; look after yourself."
"Come, Leon, jump in," said the notary.
Homais bend over the splash-board, and in a
voice broken by sobs uttered these three sad words—
"A pleasant journey!"
"Good-night," said Monsieur Guillaumin.
"Give him his head." They set out, and Homais went back.
Madame Bovary had opened her window
overlooking the garden and watched the clouds. They gathered around the
sunset on the side of Rouen and then swiftly rolled back their black
columns, behind which the great rays of the sun looked out like the golden
arrows of a suspended trophy, while the rest of the empty heavens was white
as porcelain. But a gust of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain
fell; it pattered against the green leaves.
Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked,
sparrows shook their wings in the damp thickets, and the pools of water on
the gravel as they flowed away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia.
"Ah! how far off he must be already!" she
thought.
Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at
half-past six during dinner.
"Well," said he, "so we've sent off our
young friend!"
"So it seems," replied the doctor. Then
turning on his chair; "Any news at home?"
"Nothing much. Only my wife was a little
moved this afternoon. You know women—a nothing upsets them, especially my
wife. And we should be wrong to object to that, since their nervous
organization is much more malleable than ours."
"Poor Leon!" said Charles. "How will he
live at Paris? Will he get used to it?"
Madame Bovary sighed.
"Get along!" said the chemist, smacking his
lips. "The outings at restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne—all
that'll be jolly enough, I assure you."
"I don't think he'll go wrong," objected
Bovary.
"Nor do I," said Monsieur Homais quickly;
"although he'll have to do like the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit.
And you don't know what a life those dogs lead in the Latin quarter with
actresses. Besides, students are thought a great deal of in Paris. Provided
they have a few accomplishments, they are received in the best society;
there are even ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with
them, which subsequently furnishes them opportunities for making very good
matches."
"But," said the doctor, "I fear for him
that down there—"
"You are right," interrupted the chemist;
"that is the reverse of the medal. And one is constantly obliged to keep
one's hand in one's pocket there. Thus, we will suppose you are in a public
garden. An individual presents himself, well dressed, even wearing an order,
and whom one would take for a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates
himself; offers you a pinch of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become
more intimate; he takes you to a cafe, invites you to his country-house,
introduces you, between two drinks, to all sorts of people; and
three-fourths of the time it's only to plunder your watch or lead you into
some pernicious step.
"That is true," said Charles; "but I was
thinking especially of illnesses—of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks
students from the provinces."
Emma shuddered.
"Because of the change of regimen,"
continued the chemist, "and of the perturbation that results therefrom in
the whole system. And then the water at Paris, don't you know! The dishes at
restaurants, all the spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not
worth, whatever people may say of them, a good soup. For my own part, I have
always preferred plain living; it is more healthy. So when I was studying
pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a boarding house; I dined with the
professors."
And thus he went on, expounding his
opinions generally and his personal likings, until Justin came to fetch him
for a mulled egg that was wanted.
"Not a moment's peace!" he cried; "always
at it! I can't go out for a minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be
moiling and toiling. What drudgery!" Then, when he was at the door, "By the
way, do you know the news?"
"What news?"
"That it is very likely," Homais went on,
raising his eyebrows and assuming one of his most serious expression, "that
the agricultural meeting of the Seine-Inferieure will be held this year at
Yonville-l'Abbaye. The rumour, at all events, is going the round. This
morning the paper alluded to it. It would be of the utmost importance for
our district. But we'll talk it over later on. I can see, thank you; Justin
has the lantern."
Chapter Seven
The next day was a dreary one for Emma.
Everything seemed to her enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly
over the exterior of things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with
soft shrieks such as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that
reverie which we give to things that will not return, the lassitude that
seizes you after everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the
interruption of every wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged
vibration, brings on.
As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the
quadrilles were running in her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of
a numb despair. Leon reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more
vague. Though separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the
walls of the house seemed to hold his shadow.
She could not detach her eyes from the
carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had sat. The
river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the slippery
banks.
They had often walked there to the murmur
of the waves over the moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been!
What happy afternoons they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the
garden! He read aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the
fresh wind of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the
nasturtiums of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life, the
only possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it
came to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees,
when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not having
loved Leon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession of her to
run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms and say to him, "It is
I; I am yours." But Emma recoiled beforehand at the difficulties of the
enterprise, and her desires, increased by regret, became only the more
acute.
Henceforth the memory of Leon was the
centre of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travellers
have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she
pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all
around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant
reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as
well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her
projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her
sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete—she gathered it all
up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
The flames, however, subsided, either
because the supply had exhausted itself, or because it had been piled up too
much. Love, little by little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath
habit; and this incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was
overspread and faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she
even took her repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her
lover, the burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest
still raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no
help came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in
the terrible cold that pierced her.
Then the evil days of Tostes began again.
She thought herself now far more unhappy; for she had the experience of
grief, with the certainty that it would not end.
A woman who had laid on herself such
sacrifices could well allow herself certain whims. She bought a Gothic
prie-dieu, and in a month spent fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her
nails; she wrote to Rouen for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of
Lheureux's finest scarves, and wore it knotted around her waist over her
dressing-gown; and, with closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay
stretched out on a couch in this garb.
She often changed her coiffure; she did her
hair a la Chinoise, in flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted in on one
side and rolled it under like a man's.
She wanted to learn Italian; she bought
dictionaries, a grammar, and a supply of white paper. She tried serious
reading, history, and philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles woke up
with a start, thinking he was being called to a patient. "I'm coming," he
stammered; and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the
lamp. But her reading fared like her piece of embroidery, all of which, only
just begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other
books.
She had attacks in which she could easily
have been driven to commit any folly. She maintained one day, in opposition
to her husband, that she could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as
Charles was stupid enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the
last drop.
In spite of her vapourish airs (as the
housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay,
and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction
that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has
failed. She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was
drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering
three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age.
She often fainted. One day she even spat
blood, and, as Charles fussed around her showing his anxiety—
"Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?"
Charles fled to his study and wept there,
both his elbows on the table, sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under
the phrenological head.
Then he wrote to his mother begging her to
come, and they had many long consultations together on the subject of Emma.
What should they decide? What was to be
done since she rejected all medical treatment? "Do you know what your wife
wants?" replied Madame Bovary senior.
"She wants to be forced to occupy herself
with some manual work. If she were obliged, like so many others, to earn her
living, she wouldn't have these vapours, that come to her from a lot of
ideas she stuffs into her head, and from the idleness in which she lives."
"Yet she is always busy," said Charles.
"Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels,
bad books, works against religion, and in which they mock at priests in
speeches taken from Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor
child. Anyone who has no religion always ends by turning out badly."
So it was decided to stop Emma reading
novels. The enterprise did not seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She
was, when she passed through Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and
represent that Emma had discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a
right to apply to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his
poisonous trade? The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold.
During the three weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged
half-a-dozen words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at
table and in the evening before going to bed.
Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the
market-day at Yonville.
The Place since morning had been blocked by
a row of carts, which, on end and their shafts in the air, spread all along
the line of houses from the church to the inn. On the other side there were
canvas booths, where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were
sold, together with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose
ends fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground
between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky straw
stuck out.
Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed
their necks through the bars of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same
place and unwilling to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the shop
front of the chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and the people
pushed in less to buy drugs than for consultations. So great was Homais'
reputation in the neighbouring villages. His robust aplomb had fascinated
the rustics. They considered him a greater doctor than all the doctors.
Emma was leaning out at the window; she was
often there. The window in the provinces replaces the theatre and the
promenade, she was amusing herself with watching the crowd of boors when she
saw a gentleman in a green velvet coat. He had on yellow gloves, although he
wore heavy gaiters; he was coming towards the doctor's house, followed by a
peasant walking with a bent head and quite a thoughtful air.
"Can I see the doctor?" he asked Justin,
who was talking on the doorsteps with Felicite, and, taking him for a
servant of the house—"Tell him that Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La
Huchette is here."
It was not from territorial vanity that the
new arrival added "of La Huchette" to his name, but to make himself the
better known.
La Huchette, in fact, was an estate near
Yonville, where he had just bought the chateau and two farms that he
cultivated himself, without, however, troubling very much about them. He
lived as a bachelor, and was supposed to have "at least fifteen thousand
francs a year."
Charles came into the room. Monsieur
Boulanger introduced his man, who wanted to be bled because he felt "a
tingling all over."
"That'll purge me," he urged as an
objection to all reasoning.
So Bovary ordered a bandage and a basin,
and asked Justin to hold it. Then addressing the peasant, who was already
pale—
"Don't be afraid, my lad."
"No, no, sir," said the other; "get on."
And with an air of bravado he held out his
great arm. At the prick of the lancet the blood spurted out, splashing
against the looking-glass.
"Hold the basin nearer," exclaimed Charles.
"Lor!" said the peasant, "one would swear
it was a little fountain flowing. How red my blood is! That's a good sign,
isn't it?"
"Sometimes," answered the doctor, "one
feels nothing at first, and then syncope sets in, and more especially with
people of strong constitution like this man."
At these words the rustic let go the
lancet-case he was twisting between his fingers. A shudder of his shoulders
made the chair-back creak. His hat fell off.
"I thought as much," said Bovary, pressing
his finger on the vein.
The basin was beginning to tremble in
Justin's hands; his knees shook, he turned pale.
"Emma! Emma!" called Charles.
With one bound she came down the staircase.
"Some vinegar," he cried. "O dear! two at
once!"
And in his emotion he could hardly put on
the compress.
"It is nothing," said Monsieur Boulanger
quietly, taking Justin in his arms. He seated him on the table with his back
resting against the wall.
Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat.
The strings of his shirt had got into a knot, and she was for some minutes
moving her light fingers about the young fellow's neck. Then she poured some
vinegar on her cambric handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little
dabs, and then blew upon them softly. The ploughman revived, but Justin's
syncope still lasted, and his eyeballs disappeared in the pale sclerotics
like blue flowers in milk.
"We must hide this from him," said Charles.
Madame Bovary took the basin to put it
under the table. With the movement she made in bending down, her dress (it
was a summer dress with four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in
the skirt) spread out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma
stooping, staggered a little as she stretched out her arms.
The stuff here and there gave with the
inflections of her bust.
Then she went to fetch a bottle of water,
and she was melting some pieces of sugar when the chemist arrived. The
servant had been to fetch him in the tumult. Seeing his pupil's eyes staring
he drew a long breath; then going around him he looked at him from head to
foot.
"Fool!" he said, "really a little fool! A
fool in four letters! A phlebotomy's a big affair, isn't it! And a fellow
who isn't afraid of anything; a kind of squirrel, just as he is who climbs
to vertiginous heights to shake down nuts. Oh, yes! you just talk to me,
boast about yourself! Here's a fine fitness for practising pharmacy later
on; for under serious circumstances you may be called before the tribunals
in order to enlighten the minds of the magistrates, and you would have to
keep your head then, to reason, show yourself a man, or else pass for an
imbecile."
Justin did not answer. The chemist went on—
"Who asked you to come? You are always
pestering the doctor and madame. On Wednesday, moreover, your presence is
indispensable to me. There are now twenty people in the shop. I left
everything because of the interest I take in you. Come, get along! Sharp!
Wait for me, and keep an eye on the jars."
When Justin, who was rearranging his dress,
had gone, they talked for a little while about fainting-fits. Madame Bovary
had never fainted.
"That is extraordinary for a lady," said
Monsieur Boulanger; "but some people are very susceptible. Thus in a duel, I
have seen a second lose consciousness at the mere sound of the loading of
pistols."
"For my part," said the chemist, "the sight
of other people's blood doesn't affect me at all, but the mere thought of my
own flowing would make me faint if I reflected upon it too much."
Monsieur Boulanger, however, dismissed his
servant, advising him to calm himself, since his fancy was over.
"It procured me the advantage of making
your acquaintance," he added, and he looked at Emma as he said this. Then he
put three francs on the corner of the table, bowed negligently, and went
out.
He was soon on the other side of the river
(this was his way back to La Huchette), and Emma saw him in the meadow,
walking under the poplars, slackening his pace now and then as one who
reflects.
"She is very pretty," he said to himself;
"she is very pretty, this doctor's wife. Fine teeth, black eyes, a dainty
foot, a figure like a Parisienne's. Where the devil does she come from?
Wherever did that fat fellow pick her up?"
Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was
thirty-four; he was of brutal temperament and intelligent perspicacity,
having, moreover, had much to do with women, and knowing them well. This one
had seemed pretty to him; so he was thinking about her and her husband.
"I think he is very stupid. She is tired of
him, no doubt. He has dirty nails, and hasn't shaved for three days. While
he is trotting after his patients, she sits there botching socks. And she
gets bored! She would like to live in town and dance polkas every evening.
Poor little woman! She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a
kitchen-table. With three words of gallantry she'd adore one, I'm sure of
it. She'd be tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?"
Then the difficulties of love-making seen
in the distance made him by contrast think of his mistress. She was an
actress at Rouen, whom he kept; and when he had pondered over this image,
with which, even in remembrance, he was satiated—
"Ah! Madame Bovary," he thought, "is much
prettier, especially fresher. Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat.
She is so finiky about her pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for
prawns."
The fields were empty, and around him
Rodolphe only heard the regular beating of the grass striking against his
boots, with a cry of the grasshopper hidden at a distance among the oats. He
again saw Emma in her room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed
her.
"Oh, I will have her," he cried, striking a
blow with his stick at a clod in front of him. And he at once began to
consider the political part of the enterprise. He asked himself—
"Where shall we meet? By what means? We
shall always be having the brat on our hands, and the servant, the
neighbours, and husband, all sorts of worries. Pshaw! one would lose too
much time over it."
Then he resumed, "She really has eyes that
pierce one's heart like a gimlet. And that pale complexion! I adore pale
women!"
When he reached the top of the Arguiel
hills he had made up his mind. "It's only finding the opportunities. Well, I
will call in now and then. I'll send them venison, poultry; I'll have myself
bled, if need be. We shall become friends; I'll invite them to my place. By
Jove!" added he, "there's the agricultural show coming on. She'll be there.
I shall see her. We'll begin boldly, for that's the surest way."
Chapter Eight
At last it came, the famous agricultural
show. On the morning of the solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors
were chatting over the preparations. The pediment of the town hall had been
hung with garlands of ivy; a tent had been erected in a meadow for the
banquet; and in the middle of the Place, in front of the church, a kind of
bombarde was to announce the arrival of the prefect and the names of the
successful farmers who had obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy
(there was none at Yonville) had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom
Binet was captain. On that day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and,
tightly buttoned in his tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless that
the whole vital portion of his person seemed to have descended into his
legs, which rose in a cadence of set steps with a single movement. As there
was some rivalry between the tax-collector and the colonel, both, to show
off their talents, drilled their men separately. One saw the red epaulettes
and the black breastplates pass and re-pass alternately; there was no end to
it, and it constantly began again. There had never been such a display of
pomp. Several citizens had scoured their houses the evening before;
tri-coloured flags hung from half-open windows; all the public-houses were
full; and in the lovely weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and
the coloured neckerchiefs seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and
relieved with the motley colours the sombre monotony of the frock-coats and
blue smocks. The neighbouring farmers' wives, when they got off their
horses, pulled out the long pins that fastened around them their dresses,
turned up for fear of mud; and the husbands, for their part, in order to
save their hats, kept their handkerchiefs around them, holding one corner
between their teeth.
The crowd came into the main street from
both ends of the village. People poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the
houses; and from time to time one heard knockers banging against doors
closing behind women with their gloves, who were going out to see the fete.
What was most admired were two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that
flanked a platform on which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there
were against the four columns of the town hall four kinds of poles, each
bearing a small standard of greenish cloth, embellished with inscriptions in
gold letters.
On one was written, "To Commerce"; on the
other, "To Agriculture"; on the third, "To Industry"; and on the fourth, "To
the Fine Arts."
But the jubilation that brightened all
faces seemed to darken that of Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper. Standing on
her kitchen-steps she muttered to herself, "What rubbish! what rubbish! With
their canvas booth! Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down
there under a tent like a gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to
the place! Then it wasn't worth while sending to Neufchatel for the keeper
of a cookshop! And for whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!"
The druggist was passing. He had on a
frock-coat, nankeen trousers, beaver shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a
low crown.
"Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry."
And as the fat widow asked where he was going—
"It seems odd to you, doesn't it, I who am
always more cooped up in my laboratory than the man's rat in his cheese."
"What cheese?" asked the landlady.
"Oh, nothing! nothing!" Homais continued.
"I merely wished to convey to you, Madame Lefrancois, that I usually live at
home like a recluse. To-day, however, considering the circumstances, it is
necessary—"
"Oh, you're going down there!" she said
contemptuously.
"Yes, I am going," replied the druggist,
astonished. "Am I not a member of the consulting commission?"
Mere Lefrancois looked at him for a few
moments, and ended by saying with a smile—
"That's another pair of shoes! But what
does agriculture matter to you? Do you understand anything about it?"
"Certainly I understand it, since I am a
druggist—that is to say, a chemist. And the object of chemistry, Madame
Lefrancois, being the knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of
all natural bodies, it follows that agriculture is comprised within its
domain. And, in fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of
liquids, the analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask
you, is all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure and simple?"
The landlady did not answer. Homais went
on—
"Do you think that to be an agriculturist
it is necessary to have tilled the earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is
necessary rather to know the composition of the substances in question—the
geological strata, the atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the
minerals, the waters, the density of the different bodies, their
capillarity, and what not. And one must be master of all the principles of
hygiene in order to direct, criticize the construction of buildings, the
feeding of animals, the diet of domestics. And, moreover, Madame Lefrancois,
one must know botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand,
which are the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are
unproductive and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and
re-sow them there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must
keep pace with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be always on
the alert to find out improvements."
The landlady never took her eyes off the
"Cafe Francois" and the chemist went on—
"Would to God our agriculturists were
chemists, or that at least they would pay more attention to the counsels of
science. Thus lately I myself wrote a considerable tract, a memoir of over
seventy-two pages, entitled, 'Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects,
together with some New Reflections on the Subject,' that I sent to the
Agricultural Society of Rouen, and which even procured me the honour of
being received among its members—Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological.
Well, if my work had been given to the public—" But the druggist stopped,
Madame Lefrancois seemed so preoccupied.
"Just look at them!" she said. "It's past
comprehension! Such a cookshop as that!" And with a shrug of the shoulders
that stretched out over her breast the stitches of her knitted bodice, she
pointed with both hands at her rival's inn, whence songs were heard issuing.
"Well, it won't last long," she added. "It'll be over before a week."
Homais drew back with stupefaction. She
came down three steps and whispered in his ear—
"What! you didn't know it? There is to be
an execution in next week. It's Lheureux who is selling him out; he has
killed him with bills."
"What a terrible catastrophe!" cried the
druggist, who always found expressions in harmony with all imaginable
circumstances.
Then the landlady began telling him the
story that she had heard from Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, and
although she detested Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was "a wheedler, a
sneak."
"There!" she said. "Look at him! he is in
the market; he is bowing to Madame Bovary, who's got on a green bonnet. Why,
she's taking Monsieur Boulanger's arm."
"Madame Bovary!" exclaimed Homais. "I must
go at once and pay her my respects. Perhaps she'll be very glad to have a
seat in the enclosure under the peristyle." And, without heeding Madame
Lefrancois, who was calling him back to tell him more about it, the druggist
walked off rapidly with a smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing
copiously to right and left, and taking up much room with the large tails of
his frock-coat that fluttered behind him in the wind.
Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from
afar, hurried on, but Madame Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more
slowly, and, smiling at her, said in a rough tone—
"It's only to get away from that fat
fellow, you know, the druggist." She pressed his elbow.
"What's the meaning of that?" he asked
himself. And he looked at her out of the corner of his eyes.
Her profile was so calm that one could
guess nothing from it. It stood out in the light from the oval of her
bonnet, with pale ribbons on it like the leaves of weeds. Her eyes with
their long curved lashes looked straight before her, and though wide open,
they seemed slightly puckered by the cheek-bones, because of the blood
pulsing gently under the delicate skin. A pink line ran along the partition
between her nostrils. Her head was bent upon her shoulder, and the pearl
tips of her white teeth were seen between her lips.
"Is she making fun of me?" thought
Rodolphe.
Emma's gesture, however, had only been
meant for a warning; for Monsieur Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke
now and again as if to enter into the conversation.
"What a superb day! Everybody is out! The
wind is east!"
And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe
answered him, whilst at the slightest movement made by them he drew near,
saying, "I beg your pardon!" and raised his hat.
When they reached the farrier's house,
instead of following the road up to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down
a path, drawing with him Madame Bovary. He called out—
"Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you
again presently."
"How you got rid of him!" she said,
laughing.
"Why," he went on, "allow oneself to be
intruded upon by others? And as to-day I have the happiness of being with
you—"
Emma blushed. He did not finish his
sentence. Then he talked of the fine weather and of the pleasure of walking
on the grass. A few daisies had sprung up again.
"Here are some pretty Easter daisies," he
said, "and enough of them to furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the
place."
He added, "Shall I pick some? What do you
think?"
"Are you in love?" she asked, coughing a
little.
"H'm, h'm! who knows?" answered Rodolphe.
The meadow began to fill, and the
housewives hustled you with their great umbrellas, their baskets, and their
babies. One had often to get out of the way of a long file of country folk,
servant-maids with blue stockings, flat shoes, silver rings, and who smelt
of milk, when one passed close to them. They walked along holding one
another by the hand, and thus they spread over the whole field from the row
of open trees to the banquet tent.
But this was the examination time, and the
farmers one after the other entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long
cord supported on sticks.
The beasts were there, their noses towards
the cord, and making a confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs
were burrowing in the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs
baaing; the cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the
grass, slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats
that buzzed round them. Plough-men with bare arms were holding by the halter
prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils looking towards the
mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and flowing manes,
while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then came and sucked
them. And above the long undulation of these crowded animals one saw some
white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some sharp horns sticking out,
and the heads of men running about. Apart, outside the enclosure, a hundred
paces off, was a large black bull, muzzled, with an iron ring in its
nostrils, and who moved no more than if he had been in bronze. A child in
rags was holding him by a rope.
Between the two lines the committee-men
were walking with heavy steps, examining each animal, then consulting one
another in a low voice. One who seemed of more importance now and then took
notes in a book as he walked along. This was the president of the jury,
Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville. As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he
came forward quickly, and smiling amiably, said—
"What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are
deserting us?"
Rodolphe protested that he was just coming.
But when the president had disappeared—
"Ma foi!*" said he, "I shall not go. Your
company is better than his."
*Upon my word!
And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe,
to move about more easily, showed the gendarme his blue card, and even
stopped now and then in front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did
not at all admire. He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies
and their dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had
that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think
they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of
sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social
conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric shirt with
plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his waistcoat of
grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at the ankle nankeen
boots with patent leather gaiters.
These were so polished that they reflected
the grass. He trampled on horses's dung with them, one hand in the pocket of
his jacket and his straw hat on one side.
"Besides," added he, "when one lives in the
country—"
"It's waste of time," said Emma.
"That is true," replied Rodolphe. "To think
that not one of these people is capable of understanding even the cut of a
coat!"
Then they talked about provincial
mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the illusions lost there.
"And I too," said Rodolphe, "am drifting
into depression."
"You!" she said in astonishment; "I thought
you very light-hearted."
"Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst
of the world I know how to wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet,
how many a time at the sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked
myself whether it were not better to join those sleeping there!"
"Oh! and your friends?" she said. "You do
not think of them."
"My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who
cares for me?" And he accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of
the lips.
But they were obliged to separate from each
other because of a great pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them.
He was so overladen with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden
shoes and the ends of his two outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the
gravedigger, who was carrying the church chairs about amongst the people.
Alive to all that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of
turning the show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer
knew which way to turn. In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for
these seats, whose straw smelt of incense, and they leant against the thick
backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration.
Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe's arm; he
went on as if speaking to himself—
"Yes, I have missed so many things. Always
alone! Ah! if I had some aim in life, if I had met some love, if I had found
someone! Oh, how I would have spent all the energy of which I am capable,
surmounted everything, overcome everything!"
"Yet it seems to me," said Emma, "that you
are not to be pitied."
"Ah! you think so?" said Rodolphe.
"For, after all," she went on, "you are
free—" she hesitated, "rich—"
"Do not mock me," he replied.
And she protested that she was not mocking
him, when the report of a cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling
one another pell-mell towards the village.
It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed
not to be coming, and the members of the jury felt much embarrassed, not
knowing if they ought to begin the meeting or still wait.
At last at the end of the Place a large
hired landau appeared, drawn by two thin horses, which a coachman in a white
hat was whipping lustily. Binet had only just time to shout, "Present arms!"
and the colonel to imitate him. All ran towards the enclosure; everyone
pushed forward. A few even forgot their collars; but the equipage of the
prefect seemed to anticipate the crowd, and the two yoked jades, trapesing
in their harness, came up at a little trot in front of the peristyle of the
town hall at the very moment when the National Guard and firemen deployed,
beating drums and marking time.
"Present!" shouted Binet.
"Halt!" shouted the colonel. "Left about,
march."
And after presenting arms, during which the
clang of the band, letting loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling
downstairs, all the guns were lowered. Then was seen stepping down from the
carriage a gentleman in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow,
and wearing a tuft of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion
and the most benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy
lids, were half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he
raised his sharp nose, and forced a smile upon his sunken mouth. He
recognised the mayor by his scarf, and explained to him that the prefect was
not able to come. He himself was a councillor at the prefecture; then he
added a few apologies. Monsieur Tuvache answered them with compliments; the
other confessed himself nervous; and they remained thus, face to face, their
foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all round, the
municipal council, the notable personages, the National Guard and the crowd.
The councillor pressing his little cocked hat to his breast repeated his
bows, while Tuvache, bent like a bow, also smiled, stammered, tried to say
something, protested his devotion to the monarchy and the honour that was
being done to Yonville.
Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the
head of the horses from the coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot,
led them to the door of the "Lion d'Or", where a number of peasants
collected to look at the carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered,
and the gentlemen one by one mounted the platform, where they sat down in
red utrecht velvet arm-chairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache.
All these people looked alike. Their fair
flabby faces, somewhat tanned by the sun, were the colour of sweet cider,
and their puffy whiskers emerged from stiff collars, kept up by white
cravats with broad bows. All the waist-coats were of velvet,
double-breasted; all the watches had, at the end of a long ribbon, an oval
cornelian seal; everyone rested his two hands on his thighs, carefully
stretching the stride of their trousers, whose unsponged glossy cloth shone
more brilliantly than the leather of their heavy boots.
The ladies of the company stood at the back
under the vestibule between the pillars while the common herd was opposite,
standing up or sitting on chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had
brought thither all those that he had moved from the field, and he even kept
running back every minute to fetch others from the church. He caused such
confusion with this piece of business that one had great difficulty in
getting to the small steps of the platform.
"I think," said Monsieur Lheureux to the
chemist, who was passing to his place, "that they ought to have put up two
Venetian masts with something rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would
have been a very pretty effect."
"To be sure," replied Homais; "but what can
you expect? The mayor took everything on his own shoulders. He hasn't much
taste. Poor Tuvache! and he is even completely destitute of what is called
the genius of art."
Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary,
had gone up to the first floor of the town hall, to the "council-room," and,
as it was empty, he declared that they could enjoy the sight there more
comfortably. He fetched three stools from the round table under the bust of
the monarch, and having carried them to one of the windows, they sat down by
each other.
There was commotion on the platform, long
whisperings, much parleying. At last the councillor got up. They knew now
that his name was Lieuvain, and in the crowd the name was passed from one to
the other. After he had collated a few pages, and bent over them to see
better, he began—
"Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all
(before addressing you on the object of our meeting to-day, and this
sentiment will, I am sure, be shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say,
to pay a tribute to the higher administration, to the government to the
monarch, gentle men, our sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch
of public or private prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs
with a hand at once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the
incessant perils of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace
respected as well as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine
arts?"
"I ought," said Rodolphe, "to get back a
little further."
"Why?" said Emma.
But at this moment the voice of the
councillor rose to an extraordinary pitch. He declaimed—
"This is no longer the time, gentlemen,
when civil discord ensanguined our public places, when the landlord, the
business-man, the working-man himself, falling asleep at night, lying down
to peaceful sleep, trembled lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise
of incendiary tocsins, when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped
foundations."
"Well, someone down there might see me,"
Rodolphe resumed, "then I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and
with my bad reputation—"
"Oh, you are slandering yourself," said
Emma.
"No! It is dreadful, I assure you."
"But, gentlemen," continued the councillor,
"if, banishing from my memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry
my eyes back to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see
there? Everywhere commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new
means of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state,
establish within it new relations. Our great industrial centres have
recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in all
hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France breathes
once more!"
"Besides," added Rodolphe, "perhaps from
the world's point of view they are right."
"How so?" she asked.
"What!" said he. "Do you not know that
there are souls constantly tormented? They need by turns to dream and to
act, the purest passions and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling
themselves into all sorts of fantasies, of follies."
Then she looked at him as one looks at a
traveller who has voyaged over strange lands, and went on—
"We have not even this distraction, we poor
women!"
"A sad distraction, for happiness isn't
found in it."
"But is it ever found?" she asked.
"Yes; one day it comes," he answered.
"And this is what you have understood,"
said the councillor.
"You, farmers, agricultural labourers! you
pacific pioneers of a work that belongs wholly to civilization! you, men of
progress and morality, you have understood, I say, that political storms are
even more redoubtable than atmospheric disturbances!"
"It comes one day," repeated Rodolphe, "one
day suddenly, and when one is despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it
is as if a voice cried, 'It is here!' You feel the need of confiding the
whole of your life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this
being. There is no need for explanations; they understand one another. They
have seen each other in dreams!"
(And he looked at her.) "In fine, here it
is, this treasure so sought after, here before you. It glitters, it flashes;
yet one still doubts, one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if
one went out iron darkness into light."
And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action
to the word. He passed his hand over his face, like a man seized with
giddiness. Then he let it fall on Emma's. She took hers away.
"And who would be surprised at it,
gentlemen? He only who is so blind, so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so
plunged in the prejudices of another age as still to misunderstand the
spirit of agricultural populations. Where, indeed, is to be found more
patriotism than in the country, greater devotion to the public welfare, more
intelligence, in a word? And, gentlemen, I do not mean that superficial
intelligence, vain ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and
balanced intelligence that applies itself above all else to useful objects,
thus contributing to the good of all, to the common amelioration and to the
support of the state, born of respect for law and the practice of duty—"
"Ah! again!" said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.'
I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and
of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our
ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish
the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the
ignominy that it imposes upon us."
"Yet—yet—" objected Madame Bovary.
"No, no! Why cry out against the passions?
Are they not the one beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of
enthusiasm, of poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?"
"But one must," said Emma, "to some extent
bow to the opinion of the world and accept its moral code."
"Ah! but there are two," he replied. "The
small, the conventional, that of men, that which constantly changes, that
brays out so loudly, that makes such a commotion here below, of the earth
earthly, like the mass of imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the
eternal, that is about us and above, like the landscape that surrounds us,
and the blue heavens that give us light."
Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth
with a pocket-handkerchief. He continued—
"And what should I do here gentlemen,
pointing out to you the uses of agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who
provides our means of subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The
agriculturist, gentlemen, who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile
furrows of the country, brings forth the corn, which, being ground, is made
into a powder by means of ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the
name of flour, and from there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered
at the baker's, who makes it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it
not the agriculturist who fattens, for our clothes, his abundant flocks in
the pastures? For how should we clothe ourselves, how nourish ourselves,
without the agriculturist? And, gentlemen, is it even necessary to go so far
for examples? Who has not frequently reflected on all the momentous things
that we get out of that modest animal, the ornament of poultry-yards, that
provides us at once with a soft pillow for our bed, with succulent flesh for
our tables, and eggs? But I should never end if I were to enumerate one
after the other all the different products which the earth, well cultivated,
like a generous mother, lavishes upon her children. Here it is the vine,
elsewhere the apple tree for cider, there colza, farther on cheeses and
flax. Gentlemen, let us not forget flax, which has made such great strides
of late years, and to which I will more particularly call your attention."
He had no need to call it, for all the
mouths of the multitude were wide open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache
by his side listened to him with staring eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time
to time softly closed his eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son
Napoleon between his knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose
a syllable. The chins of the other members of the jury went slowly up and
down in their waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the
platform rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with
out-turned elbows, the point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could hear,
but certainly he could see nothing, because of the visor of his helmet, that
fell down on his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of Monsieur Tuvache,
had a bigger one, for his was enormous, and shook on his head, and from it
an end of his cotton scarf peeped out. He smiled beneath it with a perfectly
infantine sweetness, and his pale little face, whence drops were running,
wore an expression of enjoyment and sleepiness.
The square as far as the houses was crowded
with people. One saw folk leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others
standing at doors, and Justin, in front of the chemist's shop, seemed quite
transfixed by the sight of what he was looking at. In spite of the silence
Monsieur Lieuvain's voice was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments
of phrases, and interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the
crowd; then you suddenly heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the
bleating of the lambs, who answered one another at street corners. In fact,
the cowherds and shepherds had driven their beasts thus far, and these lowed
from time to time, while with their tongues they tore down some scrap of
foliage that hung above their mouths.
Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said
to her in a low voice, speaking rapidly—
"Does not this conspiracy of the world
revolt you? Is there a single sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest
instincts, the purest sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length
two poor souls do meet, all is so organised that they cannot blend together.
Yet they will make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will
call upon each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten
years, they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they
are born one for the other."
His arms were folded across his knees, and
thus lifting his face towards Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her.
She noticed in his eyes small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she
even smelt the perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy.
Then a faintness came over her; she
recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard
exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she
half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But in making this
movement, as she leant back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on
the line of the horizon, the old diligence, the "Hirondelle," that was
slowly descending the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust.
It was in this yellow carriage that Leon had so often come back to her, and
by this route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him
opposite at his windows; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it seemed
to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of the
lustres on the arm of the Viscount, and that Leon was not far away, that he
was coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent of
Rodolphe's head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced through her
old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust of wind, eddied to
and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which suffused her soul. She
opened wide her nostrils several times to drink in the freshness of the ivy
round the capitals. She took off her gloves, she wiped her hands, then
fanned her face with her handkerchief, while athwart the throbbing of her
temples she heard the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the councillor
intoning his phrases. He said—"Continue, persevere; listen neither to the
suggestions of routine, nor to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism.
"Apply yourselves, above all, to the
amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the development of the equine,
bovine, ovine, and porcine races. Let these shows be to you pacific arenas,
where the victor in leaving it will hold forth a hand to the vanquished, and
will fraternise with him in the hope of better success. And you, aged
servants, humble domestics, whose hard labour no Government up to this day
has taken into consideration, come hither to receive the reward of your
silent virtues, and be assured that the state henceforward has its eye upon
you; that it encourages you, protects you; that it will accede to your just
demands, and alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful
sacrifices."
Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur
Derozerays got up, beginning another speech. His was not perhaps so florid
as that of the councillor, but it recommended itself by a more direct style,
that is to say, by more special knowledge and more elevated considerations.
Thus the praise of the Government took up less space in it; religion and
agriculture more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they
had always contributed to civilisation. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was
talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of
society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns in
the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had put on
cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and in this
discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur Derozerays set
himself this problem. From magnetism little by little Rodolphe had come to
affinities, and while the president was citing Cincinnatus and his plough,
Diocletian, planting his cabbages, and the Emperors of China inaugurating
the year by the sowing of seed, the young man was explaining to the young
woman that these irresistible attractions find their cause in some previous
state of existence.
"Thus we," he said, "why did we come to
know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite,
like two streams that flow but to unite; our special bents of mind had
driven us towards each other."
And he seized her hand; she did not
withdraw it.
"For good farming generally!" cried the
president.
"Just now, for example, when I went to your
house."
"To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix."
"Did I know I should accompany you?"
"Seventy francs."
"A hundred times I wished to go; and I
followed you—I remained."
"Manures!"
"And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow,
all other days, all my life!"
"To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold
medal!"
"For I have never in the society of any
other person found so complete a charm."
"To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin."
"And I shall carry away with me the
remembrance of you."
"For a merino ram!"
"But you will forget me; I shall pass away
like a shadow."
"To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame."
"Oh, no! I shall be something in your
thought, in your life, shall I not?"
"Porcine race; prizes—equal, to Messrs.
Leherisse and Cullembourg, sixty francs!"
Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt
it all warm and quivering like a captive dove that wants to fly away; but,
whether she was trying to take it away or whether she was answering his
pressure; she made a movement with her fingers. He exclaimed—
"Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me!
You are good! You understand that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me
contemplate you!"
A gust of wind that blew in at the window
ruffled the cloth on the table, and in the square below all the great caps
of the peasant women were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies
fluttering.
"Use of oil-cakes," continued the
president. He was hurrying on: "Flemish manure-flax-growing-drainage-long
leases-domestic service."
Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They
looked at one another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and
wearily, without an effort, their fingers intertwined.
"Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of
Sassetot-la-Guerriere, for fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a
silver medal—value, twenty-five francs!"
"Where is Catherine Leroux?" repeated the
councillor.
She did not present herself, and one could
hear voices whispering—
"Go up!"
"Don't be afraid!"
"Oh, how stupid she is!"
"Well, is she there?" cried Tuvache.
"Yes; here she is."
"Then let her come up!"
Then there came forward on the platform a
little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor
clothes. On her feet she wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a
large blue apron. Her pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled
than a withered russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked
out two large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of
washing the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that
they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and by dint
of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble witness for
themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of monastic rigidity
dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale
look. In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and
their calm. It was the first time that she found herself in the midst of so
large a company, and inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the gentlemen
in frock-coats, and the order of the councillor, she stood motionless, not
knowing whether to advance or run away, nor why the crowd was pushing her
and the jury were smiling at her.
Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois
this half-century of servitude.
"Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise
Elizabeth Leroux!" said the councillor, who had taken the list of
prize-winners from the president; and, looking at the piece of paper and the
old woman by turns, he repeated in a fatherly tone—"Approach! approach!"
"Are you deaf?" said Tuvache, fidgeting in
his armchair; and he began shouting in her ear, "Fifty-four years of
service. A silver medal! Twenty-five francs! For you!"
Then, when she had her medal, she looked at
it, and a smile of beatitude spread over her face; and as she walked away
they could hear her muttering "I'll give it to our cure up home, to say some
masses for me!"
"What fanaticism!" exclaimed the chemist,
leaning across to the notary.
The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed,
and now that the speeches had been read, each one fell back into his place
again, and everything into the old grooves; the masters bullied the
servants, and these struck the animals, indolent victors, going back to the
stalls, a green-crown on their horns.
The National Guards, however, had gone up
to the first floor of the town hall with buns spitted on their bayonets, and
the drummer of the battalion carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary
took Rodolphe's arm; he saw her home; they separated at her door; then he
walked about alone in the meadow while he waited for the time of the
banquet.
The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the
guests were so crowded that they could hardly move their elbows; and the
narrow planks used for forms almost broke down under their weight. They ate
hugely. Each one stuffed himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every
brow, and a whitish steam, like the vapour of a stream on an autumn morning,
floated above the table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against
the calico of the tent was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard
nothing. Behind him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty
plates, his neighbours were talking; he did not answer them; they filled his
glass, and there was silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing noise.
He was dreaming of what she had said, of the line of her lips; her face, as
in a magic mirror, shone on the plates of the shakos, the folds of her gown
fell along the walls, and days of love unrolled to all infinity before him
in the vistas of the future.
He saw her again in the evening during the
fireworks, but she was with her husband, Madame Homais, and the druggist,
who was worrying about the danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left
the company to go and give some advice to Binet.
The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur
Tuvache had, through an excess of caution, been shut up in his cellar, and
so the damp powder would not light, and the principal set piece, that was to
represent a dragon biting his tail, failed completely. Now and then a meagre
Roman-candle went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled
with the cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness.
Emma silently nestled against Charles's shoulder; then, raising her chin,
she watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe
gazed at her in the light of the burning lanterns.
They went out one by one. The stars shone
out. A few crops of rain began to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare
head.
At this moment the councillor's carriage
came out from the inn.
His coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed
off, and one could see from the distance, above the hood, between the two
lanterns, the mass of his body, that swayed from right to left with the
giving of the traces.
"Truly," said the druggist, "one ought to
proceed most rigorously against drunkenness! I should like to see written up
weekly at the door of the town hall on a board ad hoc* the names of all
those who during the week got intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard
to statistics, one would thus have, as it were, public records that one
could refer to in case of need. But excuse me!"
*Specifically for that.
And he once more ran off to the captain.
The latter was going back to see his lathe again.
"Perhaps you would not do ill," Homais said
to him, "to send one of your men, or to go yourself—"
"Leave me alone!" answered the
tax-collector. "It's all right!"
"Do not be uneasy," said the druggist, when
he returned to his friends. "Monsieur Binet has assured me that all
precautions have been taken. No sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let
us go to rest."
"Ma foi! I want it," said Madame Homais,
yawning at large. "But never mind; we've had a beautiful day for our fete."
Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with
a tender look, "Oh, yes! very beautiful!"
And having bowed to one another, they
separated.
Two days later, in the "Final de Rouen,"
there was a long article on the show. Homais had composed it with verve the
very next morning.
"Why these festoons, these flowers, these
garlands? Whither hurries this crowd like the waves of a furious sea under
the torrents of a tropical sun pouring its heat upon our heads?"
Then he spoke of the condition of the
peasants. Certainly the Government was doing much, but not enough.
"Courage!" he cried to it; "a thousand reforms are indispensable; let us
accomplish them!" Then touching on the entry of the councillor, he did not
forget "the martial air of our militia;" nor "our most merry village
maidens;" nor the "bald-headed old men like patriarchs who were there, and
of whom some, the remnants of our phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at
the manly sound of the drums." He cited himself among the first of the
members of the jury, and he even called attention in a note to the fact that
Monsieur Homais, chemist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural
society.
When he came to the distribution of the
prizes, he painted the joy of the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes.
"The father embraced the son, the brother the brother, the husband his
consort. More than one showed his humble medal with pride; and no doubt when
he got home to his good housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls
of his cot.
"About six o'clock a banquet prepared in
the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard brought together the principal personages of
the fete. The greatest cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed:
Monsieur Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur
Derozerays, Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those
twin sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant
fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a
veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our little
locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of a dream of
the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Let us state that no untoward event disturbed
this family meeting." And he added "Only the absence of the clergy was
remarked. No doubt the priests understand progress in another fashion. Just
as you please, messieurs the followers of Loyola!"
Chapter Nine
Six weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come
again. At last one evening he appeared.
The day after the show he had said to
himself—"We mustn't go back too soon; that would be a mistake."
And at the end of a week he had gone off
hunting. After the hunting he had thought it was too late, and then he
reasoned thus—
"If from the first day she loved me, she
must from impatience to see me again love me more. Let's go on with it!"
And he knew that his calculation had been
right when, on entering the room, he saw Emma turn pale.
She was alone. The day was drawing in. The
small muslin curtain along the windows deepened the twilight, and the
gilding of the barometer, on which the rays of the sun fell, shone in the
looking-glass between the meshes of the coral.
Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly
answered his first conventional phrases.
"I," he said, "have been busy. I have been
ill."
"Seriously?" she cried.
"Well," said Rodolphe, sitting down at her
side on a footstool, "no; it was because I did not want to come back."
"Why?"
"Can you not guess?"
He looked at her again, but so hard that
she lowered her head, blushing. He went on—
"Emma!"
"Sir," she said, drawing back a little.
"Ah! you see," replied he in a melancholy
voice, "that I was right not to come back; for this name, this name that
fills my whole soul, and that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame
Bovary! why all the world calls you thus! Besides, it is not your name; it
is the name of another!"
He repeated, "of another!" And he hid his
face in his hands.
"Yes, I think of you constantly. The memory
of you drives me to despair. Ah! forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell! I
will go far away, so far that you will never hear of me again; and
yet—to-day—I know not what force impelled me towards you. For one does not
struggle against Heaven; one cannot resist the smile of angels; one is
carried away by that which is beautiful, charming, adorable."
It was the first time that Emma had heard
such words spoken to herself, and her pride, like one who reposes bathed in
warmth, expanded softly and fully at this glowing language.
"But if I did not come," he continued, "if
I could not see you, at least I have gazed long on all that surrounds you.
At night-every night-I arose; I came hither; I watched your house, its
glimmering in the moon, the trees in the garden swaying before your window,
and the little lamp, a gleam shining through the window-panes in the
darkness. Ah! you never knew that there, so near you, so far from you, was a
poor wretch!"
She turned towards him with a sob.
"Oh, you are good!" she said.
"No, I love you, that is all! You do not
doubt that! Tell me—one word—only one word!"
And Rodolphe imperceptibly glided from the
footstool to the ground; but a sound of wooden shoes was heard in the
kitchen, and he noticed the door of the room was not closed.
"How kind it would be of you," he went on,
rising, "if you would humour a whim of mine." It was to go over her house;
he wanted to know it; and Madame Bovary seeing no objection to this, they
both rose, when Charles came in.
"Good morning, doctor," Rodolphe said to
him.
The doctor, flattered at this unexpected
title, launched out into obsequious phrases. Of this the other took
advantage to pull himself together a little.
"Madame was speaking to me," he then said,
"about her health."
Charles interrupted him; he had indeed a
thousand anxieties; his wife's palpitations of the heart were beginning
again. Then Rodolphe asked if riding would not be good.
"Certainly! excellent! just the thing!
There's an idea! You ought to follow it up."
And as she objected that she had no horse,
Monsieur Rodolphe offered one. She refused his offer; he did not insist.
Then to explain his visit he said that his ploughman, the man of the
blood-letting, still suffered from giddiness.
"I'll call around," said Bovary.
"No, no! I'll send him to you; we'll come;
that will be more convenient for you."
"Ah! very good! I thank you."
And as soon as they were alone, "Why don't
you accept Monsieur Boulanger's kind offer?"
She assumed a sulky air, invented a
thousand excuses, and finally declared that perhaps it would look odd.
"Well, what the deuce do I care for that?"
said Charles, making a pirouette. "Health before everything! You are wrong."
"And how do you think I can ride when I
haven't got a habit?"
"You must order one," he answered.
The riding-habit decided her.
When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to
Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his command, and that they counted
on his good-nature.
The next day at noon Rodolphe appeared at
Charles's door with two saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and
a deerskin side-saddle.
Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying
to himself that no doubt she had never seen anything like them. In fact,
Emma was charmed with his appearance as he stood on the landing in his great
velvet coat and white corduroy breeches. She was ready; she was waiting for
him.
Justin escaped from the chemist's to see
her start, and the chemist also came out. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger a
little good advice.
"An accident happens so easily. Be careful!
Your horses perhaps are mettlesome."
She heard a noise above her; it was
Felicite drumming on the windowpanes to amuse little Berthe. The child blew
her a kiss; her mother answered with a wave of her whip.
"A pleasant ride!" cried Monsieur Homais.
"Prudence! above all, prudence!" And he flourished his newspaper as he saw
them disappear.
As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse
set off at a gallop.
Rodolphe galloped by her side. Now and then
they exchanged a word. Her figure slightly bent, her hand well up, and her
right arm stretched out, she gave herself up to the cadence of the movement
that rocked her in her saddle. At the bottom of the hill Rodolphe gave his
horse its head; they started together at a bound, then at the top suddenly
the horses stopped, and her large blue veil fell about her.
It was early in October. There was fog over
the land. Hazy clouds hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the
hills; others, rent asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a
rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots
of Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls and
the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and
never had this poor village where she lived appeared so small. From the
height on which they were the whole valley seemed an immense pale lake
sending off its vapour into the air. Clumps of trees here and there stood
out like black rocks, and the tall lines of the poplars that rose above the
mist were like a beach stirred by the wind.
By the side, on the turf between the pines,
a brown light shimmered in the warm atmosphere. The earth, ruddy like the
powder of tobacco, deadened the noise of their steps, and with the edge of
their shoes the horses as they walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front
of them.
Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt
of the wood. She turned away from time to time to avoid his look, and then
she saw only the pine trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her
a little giddy. The horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked.
Just as they were entering the forest the
sun shone out.
"God protects us!" said Rodolphe.
"Do you think so?" she said.
"Forward! forward!" he continued.
He "tchk'd" with his tongue. The two beasts
set off at a trot.
Long ferns by the roadside caught in Emma's
stirrup.
Rodolphe leant forward and removed them as
they rode along. At other times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close
to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now
blue, the leaves no longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in
flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches of the
trees that were grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of
their leaves. Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or
else the hoarse, soft cry of the ravens flying off amidst the oaks.
They dismounted. Rodolphe fastened up the
horses. She walked on in front on the moss between the paths. But her long
habit got in her way, although she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe,
walking behind her, saw between the black cloth and the black shoe the
fineness of her white stocking, that seemed to him as if it were a part of
her nakedness.
She stopped. "I am tired," she said.
"Come, try again," he went on. "Courage!"
Then some hundred paces farther on she
again stopped, and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat
over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were
floating under azure waves.
"But where are we going?"
He did not answer. She was breathing
irregularly. Rodolphe looked round him biting his moustache. They came to a
larger space where the coppice had been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a
fallen tree, and Rodolphe began speaking to her of his love. He did not
begin by frightening her with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.
Emma listened to him with bowed head, and
stirred the bits of wood on the ground with the tip of her foot. But at the
words, "Are not our destinies now one?"
"Oh, no!" she replied. "You know that well.
It is impossible!" She rose to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped.
Then, having gazed at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look,
she said hurriedly—
"Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are
the horses? Let us go back."
He made a gesture of anger and annoyance.
She repeated:
"Where are the horses? Where are the
horses?"
Then smiling a strange smile, his pupil
fixed, his teeth set, he advanced with outstretched arms. She recoiled
trembling. She stammered:
"Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let me
go!"
"If it must be," he went on, his face
changing; and he again became respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her
arm. They went back. He said—
"What was the matter with you? Why? I do
not understand. You were mistaken, no doubt. In my soul you are as a Madonna
on a pedestal, in a place lofty, secure, immaculate. But I need you to live!
I must have your eyes, your voice, your thought! Be my friend, my sister, my
angel!"
And he put out his arm round her waist. She
feebly tried to disengage herself. He supported her thus as they walked
along.
But they heard the two horses browsing on
the leaves.
"Oh! one moment!" said Rodolphe. "Do not
let us go! Stay!"
He drew her farther on to a small pool
where duckweeds made a greenness on the water. Faded water lilies lay
motionless between the reeds. At the noise of their steps in the grass,
frogs jumped away to hide themselves.
"I am wrong! I am wrong!" she said. "I am
mad to listen to you!"
"Why? Emma! Emma!"
"Oh, Rodolphe!" said the young woman
slowly, leaning on his shoulder.
The cloth of her habit caught against the
velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and
faltering, in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave
herself up to him—
The shades of night were falling; the
horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there
around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as it
hummingbirds flying about had scattered their feathers. Silence was
everywhere; something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt
her heart, whose beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her
flesh like a stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other
hills, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in
silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her
throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his
penknife one of the two broken bridles.
They returned to Yonville by the same road.
On the mud they saw again the traces of their horses side by side, the same
thickets, the same stones to the grass; nothing around them seemed changed;
and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains
had moved in their places. Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her
hand to kiss it.
She was charming on horseback—upright, with
her slender waist, her knee bent on the mane of her horse, her face somewhat
flushed by the fresh air in the red of the evening.
On entering Yonville she made her horse
prance in the road. People looked at her from the windows.
At dinner her husband thought she looked
well, but she pretended not to hear him when he inquired about her ride, and
she remained sitting there with her elbow at the side of her plate between
the two lighted candles.
"Emma!" he said.
"What?"
"Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur
Alexandre's. He has an old cob, still very fine, only a little broken-kneed,
and that could be bought; I am sure, for a hundred crowns." He added, "And
thinking it might please you, I have bespoken it—bought it. Have I done
right? Do tell me?"
She nodded her head in assent; then a
quarter of an hour later—
"Are you going out to-night?" she asked.
"Yes. Why?"
"Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!"
And as soon as she had got rid of Charles
she went and shut herself up in her room.
At first she felt stunned; she saw the
trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she again felt the pressure of
his arm, while the leaves rustled and the reeds whistled.
But when she saw herself in the glass she
wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so
profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She
repeated, "I have a lover! a lover!" delighting at the idea as if a second
puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that
fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels
where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed
her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary
existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the
interspaces of these heights.
Then she recalled the heroines of the books
that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to
sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became
herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the
love-dream of her youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women
whom she had so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had
she not suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up
burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse, without
anxiety, without trouble.
The day following passed with a new
sweetness. They made vows to one another She told him of her sorrows.
Rodolphe interrupted her with kisses; and she looking at him through
half-closed eyes, asked him to call her again by her name—to say that he
loved her They were in the forest, as yesterday, in the shed of some
woodenshoe maker. The walls were of straw, and the roof so low they had to
stoop. They were seated side by side on a bed of dry leaves.
From that day forth they wrote to one
another regularly every evening. Emma placed her letter at the end of the
garden, by the river, in a fissure of the wall. Rodolphe came to fetch it,
and put another there, that she always found fault with as too short.
One morning, when Charles had gone out
before day break, she was seized with the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. She
would go quickly to La Huchette, stay there an hour, and be back again at
Yonville while everyone was still asleep. This idea made her pant with
desire, and she soon found herself in the middle of the field, walking with
rapid steps, without looking behind her.
Day was just breaking. Emma from afar
recognised her lover's house. Its two dove-tailed weathercocks stood out
black against the pale dawn.
Beyond the farmyard there was a detached
building that she thought must be the chateau She entered—it was if the
doors at her approach had opened wide of their own accord. A large straight
staircase led up to the corridor. Emma raised the latch of a door, and
suddenly at the end of the room she saw a man sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She
uttered a cry.
"You here? You here?" he repeated. "How did
you manage to come? Ah! your dress is damp."
"I love you," she answered, throwing her
arms about his neck.
This first piece of daring successful, now
every time Charles went out early Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe
down the steps that led to the waterside.
But when the plank for the cows was taken
up, she had to go by the walls alongside of the river; the bank was
slippery; in order not to fall she caught hold of the tufts of faded
wallflowers. Then she went across ploughed fields, in which she sank,
stumbling; and clogging her thin shoes. Her scarf, knotted round her head,
fluttered to the wind in the meadows. She was afraid of the oxen; she began
to run; she arrived out of breath, with rosy cheeks, and breathing out from
her whole person a fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. At
this hour Rodolphe still slept. It was like a spring morning coming into his
room.
The yellow curtains along the windows let a
heavy, whitish light enter softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her
eyes, while the drops of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a
topaz aureole around her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him, and
pressed her to his breast.
Then she examined the apartment, opened the
drawers of the tables, combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself
in his shaving-glass. Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that
lay on the table by the bed, amongst lemons and pieces of sugar near a
bottle of water.
It took them a good quarter of an hour to
say goodbye. Then Emma cried. She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe.
Something stronger than herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day,
seeing her come unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out.
"What is the matter with you?" she said.
"Are you ill? Tell me!"
At last he declared with a serious air that
her visits were becoming imprudent—that she was compromising herself.
Chapter Ten
Gradually Rodolphe's fears took possession
of her. At first, love had intoxicated her; and she had thought of nothing
beyond. But now that he was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose
anything of this, or even that it should be disturbed. When she came back
from his house she looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that
passed in the horizon, and every village window from which she could be
seen. She listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she
stopped short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying
overhead.
One morning as she was thus returning, she
suddenly thought she saw the long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be
aimed at her. It stuck out sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried
in the grass on the edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror,
nevertheless walked on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a
Jack-in-the-box. He had gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down
over his eyes, trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in
ambush for wild ducks.
"You ought to have called out long ago!" he
exclaimed; "When one sees a gun, one should always give warning."
The tax-collector was thus trying to hide
the fright he had had, for a prefectorial order having prohibited
duckhunting except in boats, Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the
laws, was infringing them, and so he every moment expected to see the rural
guard turn up. But this anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his
tub, he congratulated himself on his luck and on his cuteness. At sight of
Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once entered upon a
conversation.
"It isn't warm; it's nipping."
Emma answered nothing. He went on—
"And you're out so early?"
"Yes," she said stammering; "I am just
coming from the nurse where my child is."
"Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am
here, just as you see me, since break of day; but the weather is so muggy,
that unless one had the bird at the mouth of the gun—"
"Good evening, Monsieur Binet," she
interrupted him, turning on her heel.
"Your servant, madame," he replied drily;
and he went back into his tub.
Emma regretted having left the
tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he would form unfavourable conjectures.
The story about the nurse was the worst possible excuse, everyone at
Yonville knowing that the little Bovary had been at home with her parents
for a year. Besides, no one was living in this direction; this path led only
to La Huchette. Binet, then, would guess whence she came, and he would not
keep silence; he would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening
racking her brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly
before her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag.
Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy,
proposed, by way of distraction, to take her to the chemist's, and the first
person she caught sight of in the shop was the taxcollector again. He was
standing in front of the counter, lit up by the gleams of the red bottle,
and was saying—
"Please give me half an ounce of vitriol."
"Justin," cried the druggist, "bring us the
sulphuric acid." Then to Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais' room, "No,
stay here; it isn't worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm
yourself at the stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor," (for
the chemist much enjoyed pronouncing the word "doctor," as if addressing
another by it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in
it). "Now, take care not to upset the mortars! You'd better fetch some
chairs from the little room; you know very well that the arm-chairs are not
to be taken out of the drawing-room."
And to put his arm-chair back in its place
he was darting away from the counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce
of sugar acid.
"Sugar acid!" said the chemist
contemptuously, "don't know it; I'm ignorant of it! But perhaps you want
oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid, isn't it?"
Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive
to make himself some copperwater with which to remove rust from his hunting
things.
Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying—
"Indeed the weather is not propitious on
account of the damp."
"Nevertheless," replied the tax-collector,
with a sly look, "there are people who like it."
She was stifling.
"And give me—"
"Will he never go?" thought she.
"Half an ounce of resin and turpentine,
four ounces of yellow wax, and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you
please, to clean the varnished leather of my togs."
The druggist was beginning to cut the wax
when Madame Homais appeared, Irma in her arms, Napoleon by her side, and
Athalie following. She sat down on the velvet seat by the window, and the
lad squatted down on a footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the
jujube box near her papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials,
sticking on labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from
time to time, were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low
words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.
"And how's the little woman?" suddenly
asked Madame Homais.
"Silence!" exclaimed her husband, who was
writing down some figures in his waste-book.
"Why didn't you bring her?" she went on in
a low voice.
"Hush! hush!" said Emma, pointing with her
finger to the druggist.
But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over
his bill, had probably heard nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma,
relieved, uttered a deep sigh.
"How hard you are breathing!" said Madame
Homais.
"Well, you see, it's rather warm," she
replied.
So the next day they talked over how to
arrange their rendezvous. Emma wanted to bribe her servant with a present,
but it would be better to find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe
promised to look for one.
All through the winter, three or four times
a week, in the dead of night he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose
taken away the key of the gate, which Charles thought lost.
To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of
sand at the shutters. She jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to
wait, for Charles had a mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not
stop. She was wild with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she
would have hurled him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress,
then take up a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused
her. But Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.
"Come, now, Emma," he said, "it is time."
"Yes, I am coming," she answered.
Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned
to the wall and fell asleep. She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed.
Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round
her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden.
It was in the arbour, on the same seat of
old sticks where formerly Leon had looked at her so amorously on the summer
evenings. She never thought of him now.
The stars shone through the leafless
jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and
again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and
there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one
movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward
to engulf them. The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of
their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see,
larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on
their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied
vibrations.
When the night was rainy, they took refuge
in the consulting-room between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one
of the kitchen candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe
settled down there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau,
of the whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not
refrain from making jokes about Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma. She
would have liked to see him more serious, and even on occasions more
dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of approaching
steps in the alley.
"Someone is coming!" she said.
He blew out the light.
"Have you your pistols?"
"Why?"
"Why, to defend yourself," replied Emma.
"From your husband? Oh, poor devil!" And
Rodolphe finished his sentence with a gesture that said, "I could crush him
with a flip of my finger."
She was wonder-stricken at his bravery,
although she felt in it a sort of indecency and a naive coarseness that
scandalised her.
Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the
affair of the pistols. If she had spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous,
he thought, even odious; for he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not
being what is called devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had
taken a great vow that he did not think in the best of taste.
Besides, she was growing very sentimental.
She had insisted on exchanging miniatures; they had cut off handfuls of
hair, and now she was asking for a ring—a real wedding-ring, in sign of an
eternal union. She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices
of nature. Then she talked to him of her mother—hers! and of his mother—his!
Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled him with
caressing words as one would have done a lost child, and she sometimes even
said to him, gazing at the moon—
"I am sure that above there together they
approve of our love."
But she was so pretty. He had possessed so
few women of such ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new
experience for him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at
once his pride and his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois
good sense disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since
it was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up
appearances, and insensibly his ways changed.
He had no longer, as formerly, words so
gentle that they made her cry, nor passionate caresses that made her mad, so
that their great love, which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath
her like the water of a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see
the bed of it. She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and
Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less.
She did not know if she regretted having
yielded to him, or whether she did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him
the more. The humiliation of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour,
tempered by their voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a
continual seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him.
Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than
ever, Rodolphe having succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own
fancy; and at the end of six months, when the spring-time came, they were to
one another like a married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame.
It was the time of year when old Rouault
sent his turkey in remembrance of the setting of his leg. The present always
arrived with a letter. Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and
read the following lines:—
"My Dear Children—I hope this will find you
well, and that this one will be as good as the others. For it seems to me a
little more tender, if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But next time,
for a change, I'll give you a turkeycock, unless you have a preference for
some dabs; and send me back the hamper, if you please, with the two old
ones. I have had an accident with my cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one
windy night among the trees. The harvest has not been overgood either.
Finally, I don't know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult now
to leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma."
Here there was a break in the lines, as if
the old fellow had dropped his pen to dream a little while.
"For myself, I am very well, except for a
cold I caught the other day at the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire
a shepherd, having turned away mine because he was too dainty. How we are to
be pitied with such a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I heard
from a pedlar, who, travelling through your part of the country this winter,
had a tooth drawn, that Bovary was as usual working hard. That doesn't
surprise me; and he showed me his tooth; we had some coffee together. I
asked him if he had seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two
horses in the stables, from which I conclude that business is looking up. So
much the better, my dear children, and may God send you every imaginable
happiness! It grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little grand-daughter,
Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for her in the garden
under your room, and I won't have it touched unless it is to have jam made
for her by and bye, that I will keep in the cupboard for her when she comes.
"Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my
girl, you too, my son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with
best compliments, your loving father.
"Theodore Rouault."
She held the coarse paper in her fingers
for some minutes. The spelling mistakes were interwoven one with the other,
and Emma followed the kindly thought that cackled right through it like a
hen half hidden in the hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with
ashes from the hearth, for a little grey powder slipped from the letter on
to her dress, and she almost thought she saw her father bending over the
hearth to take up the tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting
on the footstool in the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of a
bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the summer
evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when anyone passed by, and
galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes the
bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like rebounding
balls of gold. What happiness there had been at that time, what freedom,
what hope! What an abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of them now. She
had got rid of them all in her soul's life, in all her successive conditions
of life, maidenhood, her marriage, and her love—thus constantly losing them
all her life through, like a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at
every inn along his road.
But what then, made her so unhappy? What
was the extraordinary catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised
her head, looking round as if to seek the cause of that which made her
suffer.
An April ray was dancing on the china of
the whatnot; the fire burned; beneath her slippers she felt the softness of
the carpet; the day was bright, the air warm, and she heard her child
shouting with laughter.
In fact, the little girl was just then
rolling on the lawn in the midst of the grass that was being turned. She was
lying flat on her stomach at the top of a rick. The servant was holding her
by her skirt. Lestiboudois was raking by her side, and every time he came
near she lent forward, beating the air with both her arms.
"Bring her to me," said her mother, rushing
to embrace her. "How I love you, my poor child! How I love you!"
Then noticing that the tips of her ears
were rather dirty, she rang at once for warm water, and washed her, changed
her linen, her stockings, her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her
health, as if on the return from a long journey, and finally, kissing her
again and crying a little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood quite
thunderstricken at this excess of tenderness.
That evening Rodolphe found her more
serious than usual.
"That will pass over," he concluded; "it's
a whim:"
And he missed three rendezvous running.
When he did come, she showed herself cold and almost contemptuous.
"Ah! you're losing your time, my lady!"
And he pretended not to notice her
melancholy sighs, nor the handkerchief she took out.
Then Emma repented. She even asked herself
why she detested Charles; if it had not been better to have been able to
love him? But he gave her no opportunities for such a revival of sentiment,
so that she was much embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the
druggist came just in time to provide her with an opportunity.
Chapter Eleven
He had recently read a eulogy on a new
method for curing club-foot, and as he was a partisan of progress, he
conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, in order to keep to the fore,
ought to have some operations for strephopody or club-foot.
"For," said he to Emma, "what risk is
there? See—" (and he enumerated on his fingers the advantages of the
attempt), "success, almost certain relief and beautifying of the patient,
celebrity acquired by the operator. Why, for example, should not your
husband relieve poor Hippolyte of the 'Lion d'Or'? Note that he would not
fail to tell about his cure to all the travellers, and then" (Homais lowered
his voice and looked round him) "who is to prevent me from sending a short
paragraph on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets
about; it is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who
knows?"
In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing
proved to Emma that he was not clever; and what a satisfaction for her to
have urged him to a step by which his reputation and fortune would be
increased! She only wished to lean on something more solid than love.
Charles, urged by the druggist and by her,
allowed himself to be persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval's volume,
and every evening, holding his head between both hands, plunged into the
reading of it.
While he was studying equinus, varus, and
valgus, that is to say, katastrephopody, endostrephopody, and exostrephopody
(or better, the various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and
outwards, with the hypostrephopody and anastrephopody), otherwise torsion
downwards and upwards, Monsier Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was
exhorting the lad at the inn to submit to the operation.
"You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight
pain; it is a simple prick, like a little blood-letting, less than the
extraction of certain corns."
Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid
eyes.
"However," continued the chemist, "it
doesn't concern me. It's for your sake, for pure humanity! I should like to
see you, my friend, rid of your hideous caudication, together with that
waddling of the lumbar regions which, whatever you say, must considerably
interfere with you in the exercise of your calling."
Then Homais represented to him how much
jollier and brisker he would feel afterwards, and even gave him to
understand that he would be more likely to please the women; and the
stable-boy began to smile heavily. Then he attacked him through his vanity:
"Aren't you a man? Hang it! what would you
have done if you had had to go into the army, to go and fight beneath the
standard? Ah! Hippolyte!"
And Homais retired, declaring that he could
not understand this obstinacy, this blindness in refusing the benefactions
of science.
The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a
conspiracy. Binet, who never interfered with other people's business, Madame
Lefrancois, Artemise, the neighbours, even the mayor, Monsieur
Tuvache—everyone persuaded him, lectured him, shamed him; but what finally
decided him was that it would cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to
provide the machine for the operation. This generosity was an idea of
Emma's, and Charles consented to it, thinking in his heart of hearts that
his wife was an angel.
So by the advice of the chemist, and after
three fresh starts, he had a kind of box made by the carpenter, with the aid
of the locksmith, that weighed about eight pounds, and in which iron, wood,
sheer-iron, leather, screws, and nuts had not been spared.
But to know which of Hippolyte's tendons to
cut, it was necessary first of all to find out what kind of club-foot he
had.
He had a foot forming almost a straight
line with the leg, which, however, did not prevent it from being turned in,
so that it was an equinus together with something of a varus, or else a
slight varus with a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide
in foot like a horse's hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes,
on which the black nails looked as if made of iron, the clubfoot ran about
like a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place,
jumping round the carts, thrusting his limping foot forwards. He seemed even
stronger on that leg than the other. By dint of hard service it had
acquired, as it were, moral qualities of patience and energy; and when he
was given some heavy work, he stood on it in preference to its fellow.
Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary
to cut the tendon of Achilles, and, if need were, the anterior tibial muscle
could be seen to afterwards for getting rid of the varus; for the doctor did
not dare to risk both operations at once; he was even trembling already for
fear of injuring some important region that he did not know.
Neither Ambrose Pare, applying for the
first time since Celsus, after an interval of fifteen centuries, a ligature
to an artery, nor Dupuytren, about to open an abscess in the brain, nor
Gensoul when he first took away the superior maxilla, had hearts that
trembled, hands that shook, minds so strained as Monsieur Bovary when he
approached Hippolyte, his tenotome between his fingers. And as at hospitals,
near by on a table lay a heap of lint, with waxed thread, many bandages—a
pyramid of bandages—every bandage to be found at the druggist's. It was
Monsieur Homais who since morning had been organising all these
preparations, as much to dazzle the multitude as to keep up his illusions.
Charles pierced the skin; a dry crackling was heard. The tendon was cut, the
operation over. Hippolyte could not get over his surprise, but bent over
Bovary's hands to cover them with kisses.
"Come, be calm," said the druggist; "later
on you will show your gratitude to your benefactor."
And he went down to tell the result to five
or six inquirers who were waiting in the yard, and who fancied that
Hippolyte would reappear walking properly. Then Charles, having buckled his
patient into the machine, went home, where Emma, all anxiety, awaited him at
the door. She threw herself on his neck; they sat down to table; he ate
much, and at dessert he even wanted to take a cup of coffee, a luxury he
only permitted himself on Sundays when there was company.
The evening was charming, full of prattle,
of dreams together. They talked about their future fortune, of the
improvements to be made in their house; he saw people's estimation of him
growing, his comforts increasing, his wife always loving him; and she was
happy to refresh herself with a new sentiment, healthier, better, to feel at
last some tenderness for this poor fellow who adored her. The thought of
Rodolphe for one moment passed through her mind, but her eyes turned again
to Charles; she even noticed with surprise that he had not bad teeth.
They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, in
spite of the servant, suddenly entered the room, holding in his hand a sheet
of paper just written. It was the paragraph he intended for the "Fanal de
Rouen." He brought it for them to read.
"Read it yourself," said Bovary.
He read—
"'Despite the prejudices that still invest
a part of the face of Europe like a net, the light nevertheless begins to
penetrate our country places. Thus on Tuesday our little town of Yonville
found itself the scene of a surgical operation which is at the same time an
act of loftiest philanthropy. Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished
practitioners—'"
"Oh, that is too much! too much!" said
Charles, choking with emotion.
"No, no! not at all! What next!"
"'—Performed an operation on a club-footed
man.' I have not used the scientific term, because you know in a newspaper
everyone would not perhaps understand. The masses must—'"
"No doubt," said Bovary; "go on!"
"I proceed," said the chemist. "'Monsieur
Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners, performed an operation
on a club-footed man called Hippolyte Tautain, stableman for the last
twenty-five years at the hotel of the "Lion d'Or," kept by Widow Lefrancois,
at the Place d'Armes. The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident
to the subject, had attracted such a concourse of persons that there was a
veritable obstruction on the threshold of the establishment. The operation,
moreover, was performed as if by magic, and barely a few drops of blood
appeared on the skin, as though to say that the rebellious tendon had at
last given way beneath the efforts of art. The patient, strangely enough—we
affirm it as an eye-witness—complained of no pain. His condition up to the
present time leaves nothing to be desired. Everything tends to show that his
convelescence will be brief; and who knows even if at our next village
festivity we shall not see our good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance
in the midst of a chorus of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all
eyes by his verve and his capers his complete cure? Honour, then, to the
generous savants! Honour to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their
vigils to the amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honour,
thrice honour! Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf
hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its
elect, science now accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers
informed as to the successive phases of this remarkable cure.'"
This did not prevent Mere Lefrancois, from
coming five days after, scared, and crying out—
"Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!"
Charles rushed to the "Lion d'Or," and the
chemist, who caught sight of him passing along the Place hatless, abandoned
his shop. He appeared himself breathless, red, anxious, and asking everyone
who was going up the stairs—
"Why, what's the matter with our
interesting strephopode?"
The strephopode was writhing in hideous
convulsions, so that the machine in which his leg was enclosed was knocked
against the wall enough to break it.
With many precautions, in order not to
disturb the position of the limb, the box was removed, and an awful sight
presented itself. The outlines of the foot disappeared in such a swelling
that the entire skin seemed about to burst, and it was covered with
ecchymosis, caused by the famous machine. Hippolyte had already complained
of suffering from it. No attention had been paid to him; they had to
acknowledge that he had not been altogether wrong, and he was freed for a
few hours. But, hardly had the oedema gone down to some extent, than the two
savants thought fit to put back the limb in the apparatus, strapping it
tighter to hasten matters. At last, three days after, Hippolyte being unable
to endure it any longer, they once more removed the machine, and were much
surprised at the result they saw. The livid tumefaction spread over the leg,
with blisters here and there, whence there oozed a black liquid. Matters
were taking a serious turn. Hippolyte began to worry himself, and Mere
Lefrancois, had him installed in the little room near the kitchen, so that
he might at least have some distraction.
But the tax-collector, who dined there
every day, complained bitterly of such companionship. Then Hippolyte was
removed to the billiard-room. He lay there moaning under his heavy
coverings, pale with long beard, sunken eyes, and from time to time turning
his perspiring head on the dirty pillow, where the flies alighted. Madame
Bovary went to see him. She brought him linen for his poultices; she
comforted, and encouraged him. Besides, he did not want for company,
especially on market-days, when the peasants were knocking about the
billiard-balls round him, fenced with the cues, smoked, drank, sang, and
brawled.
"How are you?" they said, clapping him on
the shoulder. "Ah! you're not up to much, it seems, but it's your own fault.
You should do this! do that!" And then they told him stories of people who
had all been cured by other remedies than his. Then by way of consolation
they added—
"You give way too much! Get up! You coddle
yourself like a king! All the same, old chap, you don't smell nice!"
Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and
more. Bovary himself turned sick at it. He came every hour, every moment.
Hippolyte looked at him with eyes full of terror, sobbing—
"When shall I get well? Oh, save me! How
unfortunate I am! How unfortunate I am!"
And the doctor left, always recommending
him to diet himself.
"Don't listen to him, my lad," said Mere
Lefrancois, "Haven't they tortured you enough already? You'll grow still
weaker. Here! swallow this."
And she gave him some good beef-tea, a
slice of mutton, a piece of bacon, and sometimes small glasses of brandy,
that he had not the strength to put to his lips.
Abbe Bournisien, hearing that he was
growing worse, asked to see him. He began by pitying his sufferings,
declaring at the same time that he ought to rejoice at them since it was the
will of the Lord, and take advantage of the occasion to reconcile himself to
Heaven.
"For," said the ecclesiastic in a paternal
tone, "you rather neglected your duties; you were rarely seen at divine
worship. How many years is it since you approached the holy table? I
understand that your work, that the whirl of the world may have kept you
from care for your salvation. But now is the time to reflect. Yet don't
despair. I have known great sinners, who, about to appear before God (you
are not yet at this point I know), had implored His mercy, and who certainly
died in the best frame of mind. Let us hope that, like them, you will set us
a good example. Thus, as a precaution, what is to prevent you from saying
morning and evening a 'Hail Mary, full of grace,' and 'Our Father which art
in heaven'? Yes, do that, for my sake, to oblige me. That won't cost you
anything. Will you promise me?"
The poor devil promised. The cure came back
day after day. He chatted with the landlady; and even told anecdotes
interspersed with jokes and puns that Hippolyte did not understand. Then, as
soon as he could, he fell back upon matters of religion, putting on an
appropriate expression of face.
His zeal seemed successful, for the
club-foot soon manifested a desire to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if
he were cured; to which Monsieur Bournisien replied that he saw no
objection; two precautions were better than one; it was no risk anyhow.
The druggist was indignant at what he
called the manoeuvres of the priest; they were prejudicial, he said, to
Hippolyte's convalescence, and he kept repeating to Madame Lefrancois,
"Leave him alone! leave him alone! You perturb his morals with your
mysticism." But the good woman would no longer listen to him; he was the
cause of it all. From a spirit of contradiction she hung up near the bedside
of the patient a basin filled with holy-water and a branch of box.
Religion, however, seemed no more able to
succour him than surgery, and the invincible gangrene still spread from the
extremities towards the stomach. It was all very well to vary the potions
and change the poultices; the muscles each day rotted more and more; and at
last Charles replied by an affirmative nod of the head when Mere Lefrancois,
asked him if she could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet of
Neufchatel, who was a celebrity.
A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age,
enjoying a good position and self-possessed, Charles's colleague did not
refrain from laughing disdainfully when he had uncovered the leg, mortified
to the knee. Then having flatly declared that it must be amputated, he went
off to the chemist's to rail at the asses who could have reduced a poor man
to such a state. Shaking Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he
shouted out in the shop—
"These are the inventions of Paris! These
are the ideas of those gentry of the capital! It is like strabismus,
chloroform, lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the Government ought to
prohibit. But they want to do the clever, and they cram you with remedies
without, troubling about the consequences. We are not so clever, not we! We
are not savants, coxcombs, fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and
we should not dream of operating on anyone who is in perfect health.
Straighten club-feet! As if one could straighten club-feet! It is as if one
wished, for example, to make a hunchback straight!"
Homais suffered as he listened to this
discourse, and he concealed his discomfort beneath a courtier's smile; for
he needed to humour Monsier Canivet, whose prescriptions sometimes came as
far as Yonville. So he did not take up the defence of Bovary; he did not
even make a single remark, and, renouncing his principles, he sacrificed his
dignity to the more serious interests of his business.
This amputation of the thigh by Doctor
Canivet was a great event in the village. On that day all the inhabitants
got up earlier, and the Grande Rue, although full of people, had something
lugubrious about it, as if an execution had been expected. At the grocer's
they discussed Hippolyte's illness; the shops did no business, and Madame
Tuvache, the mayor's wife, did not stir from her window, such was her
impatience to see the operator arrive.
He came in his gig, which he drove himself.
But the springs of the right side having at length given way beneath the
weight of his corpulence, it happened that the carriage as it rolled along
leaned over a little, and on the other cushion near him could be seen a
large box covered in red sheep-leather, whose three brass clasps shone
grandly.
After he had entered like a whirlwind the
porch of the "Lion d'Or," the doctor, shouting very loud, ordered them to
unharness his horse. Then he went into the stable to see that he was eating
his oats all right; for on arriving at a patient's he first of all looked
after his mare and his gig. People even said about this—
"Ah! Monsieur Canivet's a character!"
And he was the more esteemed for this
imperturbable coolness. The universe to the last man might have died, and he
would not have missed the smallest of his habits.
Homais presented himself.
"I count on you," said the doctor. "Are we
ready? Come along!"
But the druggist, turning red, confessed
that he was too sensitive to assist at such an operation.
"When one is a simple spectator," he said,
"the imagination, you know, is impressed. And then I have such a nervous
system!"
"Pshaw!" interrupted Canivet; "on the
contrary, you seem to me inclined to apoplexy. Besides, that doesn't
astonish me, for you chemist fellows are always poking about your kitchens,
which must end by spoiling your constitutions. Now just look at me. I get up
every day at four o'clock; I shave with cold water (and am never cold). I
don't wear flannels, and I never catch cold; my carcass is good enough! I
live now in one way, now in another, like a philosopher, taking pot-luck;
that is why I am not squeamish like you, and it is as indifferent to me to
carve a Christian as the first fowl that turns up. Then, perhaps, you will
say, habit! habit!"
Then, without any consideration for
Hippolyte, who was sweating with agony between his sheets, these gentlemen
entered into a conversation, in which the druggist compared the coolness of
a surgeon to that of a general; and this comparison was pleasing to Canivet,
who launched out on the exigencies of his art. He looked upon, it as a
sacred office, although the ordinary practitioners dishonoured it. At last,
coming back to the patient, he examined the bandages brought by Homais, the
same that had appeared for the club-foot, and asked for someone to hold the
limb for him. Lestiboudois was sent for, and Monsieur Canivet having turned
up his sleeves, passed into the billiard-room, while the druggist stayed
with Artemise and the landlady, both whiter than their aprons, and with ears
strained towards the door.
Bovary during this time did not dare to
stir from his house.
He kept downstairs in the sitting-room by
the side of the fireless chimney, his chin on his breast, his hands clasped,
his eyes staring. "What a mishap!" he thought, "what a mishap!" Perhaps,
after all, he had made some slip. He thought it over, but could hit upon
nothing. But the most famous surgeons also made mistakes; and that is what
no one would ever believe! People, on the contrary, would laugh, jeer! It
would spread as far as Forges, as Neufchatel, as Rouen, everywhere! Who
could say if his colleagues would not write against him. Polemics would
ensue; he would have to answer in the papers. Hippolyte might even prosecute
him. He saw himself dishonoured, ruined, lost; and his imagination, assailed
by a world of hypotheses, tossed amongst them like an empty cask borne by
the sea and floating upon the waves.
Emma, opposite, watched him; she did not
share his humiliation; she felt another—that of having supposed such a man
was worth anything. As if twenty times already she had not sufficiently
perceived his mediocrity.
Charles was walking up and down the room;
his boots creaked on the floor.
"Sit down," she said; "you fidget me."
He sat down again.
How was it that she—she, who was so
intelligent—could have allowed herself to be deceived again? and through
what deplorable madness had she thus ruined her life by continual
sacrifices? She recalled all her instincts of luxury, all the privations of
her soul, the sordidness of marriage, of the household, her dream sinking
into the mire like wounded swallows; all that she had longed for, all that
she had denied herself, all that she might have had! And for what? for what?
In the midst of the silence that hung over
the village a heart-rending cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to
fainting. She knit her brows with a nervous gesture, then went on. And it
was for him, for this creature, for this man, who understood nothing, who
felt nothing! For he was there quite quiet, not even suspecting that the
ridicule of his name would henceforth sully hers as well as his. She had
made efforts to love him, and she had repented with tears for having yielded
to another!
"But it was perhaps a valgus!" suddenly
exclaimed Bovary, who was meditating.
At the unexpected shock of this phrase
falling on her thought like a leaden bullet on a silver plate, Emma,
shuddering, raised her head in order to find out what he meant to say; and
they looked at the other in silence, almost amazed to see each other, so far
sundered were they by their inner thoughts. Charles gazed at her with the
dull look of a drunken man, while he listened motionless to the last cries
of the sufferer, that followed each other in long-drawn modulations, broken
by sharp spasms like the far-off howling of some beast being slaughtered.
Emma bit her wan lips, and rolling between her fingers a piece of coral that
she had broken, fixed on Charles the burning glance of her eyes like two
arrows of fire about to dart forth. Everything in him irritated her now; his
face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his existence, in
fine. She repented of her past virtue as of a crime, and what still remained
of it rumbled away beneath the furious blows of her pride. She revelled in
all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover came
back to her with dazzling attractions; she threw her whole soul into it,
borne away towards this image with a fresh enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to
her as much removed from her life, as absent forever, as impossible and
annihilated, as if he had been about to die and were passing under her eyes.
There was a sound of steps on the pavement.
Charles looked up, and through the lowered blinds he saw at the corner of
the market in the broad sunshine Dr. Canivet, who was wiping his brow with
his handkerchief. Homais, behind him, was carrying a large red box in his
hand, and both were going towards the chemist's.
Then with a feeling of sudden tenderness
and discouragement Charles turned to his wife saying to her—
"Oh, kiss me, my own!"
"Leave me!" she said, red with anger.
"What is the matter?" he asked, stupefied.
"Be calm; compose yourself. You know well enough that I love you. Come!"
"Enough!" she cried with a terrible look.
And escaping from the room, Emma closed the
door so violently that the barometer fell from the wall and smashed on the
floor.
Charles sank back into his arm-chair
overwhelmed, trying to discover what could be wrong with her, fancying some
nervous illness, weeping, and vaguely feeling something fatal and
incomprehensible whirling round him.
When Rodolphe came to the garden that
evening, he found his mistress waiting for him at the foot of the steps on
the lowest stair. They threw their arms round one another, and all their
rancour melted like snow beneath the warmth of that kiss.
Chapter Twelve
They began to love one another again.
Often, even in the middle of the day, Emma suddenly wrote to him, then from
the window made a sign to Justin, who, taking his apron off, quickly ran to
La Huchette. Rodolphe would come; she had sent for him to tell him that she
was bored, that her husband was odious, her life frightful.
"But what can I do?" he cried one day
impatiently.
"Ah! if you would—"
She was sitting on the floor between his
knees, her hair loose, her look lost.
"Why, what?" said Rodolphe.
She sighed.
"We would go and live elsewhere—somewhere!"
"You are really mad!" he said laughing.
"How could that be possible?"
She returned to the subject; he pretended
not to understand, and turned the conversation.
What he did not understand was all this
worry about so simple an affair as love. She had a motive, a reason, and, as
it were, a pendant to her affection.
Her tenderness, in fact, grew each day with
her repulsion to her husband. The more she gave up herself to the one, the
more she loathed the other. Never had Charles seemed to her so disagreeable,
to have such stodgy fingers, such vulgar ways, to be so dull as when they
found themselves together after her meeting with Rodolphe. Then, while
playing the spouse and virtue, she was burning at the thought of that head
whose black hair fell in a curl over the sunburnt brow, of that form at once
so strong and elegant, of that man, in a word, who had such experience in
his reasoning, such passion in his desires. It was for him that she filed
her nails with the care of a chaser, and that there was never enough
cold-cream for her skin, nor of patchouli for her handkerchiefs. She loaded
herself with bracelets, rings, and necklaces. When he was coming she filled
the two large blue glass vases with roses, and prepared her room and her
person like a courtesan expecting a prince. The servant had to be constantly
washing linen, and all day Felicite did not stir from the kitchen, where
little Justin, who often kept her company, watched her at work.
With his elbows on the long board on which
she was ironing, he greedily watched all these women's clothes spread about
him, the dimity petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with
running strings, wide at the hips and growing narrower below.
"What is that for?" asked the young fellow,
passing his hand over the crinoline or the hooks and eyes.
"Why, haven't you ever seen anything?"
Felicite answered laughing. "As if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear
the same."
"Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!" And he
added with a meditative air, "As if she were a lady like madame!"
But Felicite grew impatient of seeing him
hanging round her. She was six years older than he, and Theodore, Monsieur
Guillaumin's servant, was beginning to pay court to her.
"Let me alone," she said, moving her pot of
starch. "You'd better be off and pound almonds; you are always dangling
about women. Before you meddle with such things, bad boy, wait till you've
got a beard to your chin."
"Oh, don't be cross! I'll go and clean her
boots."
And he at once took down from the shelf
Emma's boots, all coated with mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled
into powder beneath his fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a
ray of sunlight.
"How afraid you are of spoiling them!" said
the servant, who wasn't so particular when she cleaned them herself, because
as soon as the stuff of the boots was no longer fresh madame handed them
over to her.
Emma had a number in her cupboard that she
squandered one after the other, without Charles allowing himself the
slightest observation. So also he disbursed three hundred francs for a
wooden leg that she thought proper to make a present of to Hippolyte. Its
top was covered with cork, and it had spring joints, a complicated
mechanism, covered over by black trousers ending in a patent-leather boot.
But Hippolyte, not daring to use such a handsome leg every day, begged
Madame Bovary to get him another more convenient one. The doctor, of course,
had again to defray the expense of this purchase.
So little by little the stable-man took up
his work again. One saw him running about the village as before, and when
Charles heard from afar the sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once went
in another direction.
It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper,
who had undertaken the order; this provided him with an excuse for visiting
Emma. He chatted with her about the new goods from Paris, about a thousand
feminine trifles, made himself very obliging, and never asked for his money.
Emma yielded to this lazy mode of satisfying all her caprices. Thus she
wanted to have a very handsome ridding-whip that was at an umbrella-maker's
at Rouen to give to Rodolphe. The week after Monsieur Lheureux placed it on
her table.
But the next day he called on her with a
bill for two hundred and seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was
much embarrassed; all the drawers of the writing-table were empty; they owed
over a fortnight's wages to Lestiboudois, two quarters to the servant, for
any quantity of other things, and Bovary was impatiently expecting Monsieur
Derozeray's account, which he was in the habit of paying every year about
Midsummer.
She succeeded at first in putting off
Lheureux. At last he lost patience; he was being sued; his capital was out,
and unless he got some in he should be forced to take back all the goods she
had received.
"Oh, very well, take them!" said Emma.
"I was only joking," he replied; "the only
thing I regret is the whip. My word! I'll ask monsieur to return it to me."
"No, no!" she said.
"Ah! I've got you!" thought Lheureux.
And, certain of his discovery, he went out
repeating to himself in an undertone, and with his usual low whistle—
"Good! we shall see! we shall see!"
She was thinking how to get out of this
when the servant coming in put on the mantelpiece a small roll of blue paper
"from Monsieur Derozeray's." Emma pounced upon and opened it. It contained
fifteen napoleons; it was the account. She heard Charles on the stairs;
threw the gold to the back of her drawer, and took out the key.
Three days after Lheureux reappeared.
"I have an arrangement to suggest to you,"
he said. "If, instead of the sum agreed on, you would take—"
"Here it is," she said placing fourteen
napoleons in his hand.
The tradesman was dumfounded. Then, to
conceal his disappointment, he was profuse in apologies and proffers of
service, all of which Emma declined; then she remained a few moments
fingering in the pocket of her apron the two five-franc pieces that he had
given her in change. She promised herself she would economise in order to
pay back later on. "Pshaw!" she thought, "he won't think about it again."
Besides the riding-whip with its
silver-gilt handle, Rodolphe had received a seal with the motto Amor nel
cor* furthermore, a scarf for a muffler, and, finally, a cigar-case exactly
like the Viscount's, that Charles had formerly picked up in the road, and
that Emma had kept. These presents, however, humiliated him; he refused
several; she insisted, and he ended by obeying, thinking her tyrannical and
overexacting.
*A loving heart.
Then she had strange ideas.
"When midnight strikes," she said, "you
must think of me."
And if he confessed that he had not thought
of her, there were floods of reproaches that always ended with the eternal
question—
"Do you love me?"
"Why, of course I love you," he answered.
"A great deal?"
"Certainly!"
"You haven't loved any others?"
"Did you think you'd got a virgin?" he
exclaimed laughing.
Emma cried, and he tried to console her,
adorning his protestations with puns.
"Oh," she went on, "I love you! I love you
so that I could not live without you, do you see? There are times when I
long to see you again, when I am torn by all the anger of love. I ask
myself, Where is he? Perhaps he is talking to other women. They smile upon
him; he approaches. Oh no; no one else pleases you. There are some more
beautiful, but I love you best. I know how to love best. I am your servant,
your concubine! You are my king, my idol! You are good, you are beautiful,
you are clever, you are strong!"
He had so often heard these things said
that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses;
and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare
the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same
language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the
difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips
libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little
in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must
be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in
the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his
needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is
like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance
when we long to move the stars.
But with that superior critical judgment
that belongs to him who, in no matter what circumstance, holds back,
Rodolphe saw other delights to be got out of this love. He thought all
modesty in the way. He treated her quite sans facon.* He made of her
something supple and corrupt. Hers was an idiotic sort of attachment, full
of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that benumbed
her; her soul sank into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like
Clarence in his butt of Malmsey.
*Off-handedly.
By the mere effect of her love Madame
Bovary's manners changed. Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she
even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a
cigarette in her mouth, "as if to defy the people." At last, those who still
doubted doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out of the
"Hirondelle," her waist squeezed into a waistcoat like a man; and Madame
Bovary senior, who, after a fearful scene with her husband, had taken refuge
at her son's, was not the least scandalised of the women-folk. Many other
things displeased her. First, Charles had not attended to her advice about
the forbidding of novels; then the "ways of the house" annoyed her; she
allowed herself to make some remarks, and there were quarrels, especially
one on account of Felicite.
Madame Bovary senior, the evening before,
passing along the passage, had surprised her in company of a man—a man with
a brown collar, about forty years old, who, at the sound of her step, had
quickly escaped through the kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh, but the good
lady grew angry, declaring that unless morals were to be laughed at one
ought to look after those of one's servants.
"Where were you brought up?" asked the
daughter-in-law, with so impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if
she were not perhaps defending her own case.
"Leave the room!" said the young woman,
springing up with a bound.
"Emma! Mamma!" cried Charles, trying to
reconcile them.
But both had fled in their exasperation.
Emma was stamping her feet as she repeated—
"Oh! what manners! What a peasant!"
He ran to his mother; she was beside
herself. She stammered
"She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or
perhaps worse!"
And she was for leaving at once if the
other did not apologise. So Charles went back again to his wife and implored
her to give way; he knelt to her; she ended by saying—
"Very well! I'll go to her."
And in fact she held out her hand to her
mother-in-law with the dignity of a marchioness as she said—
"Excuse me, madame."
Then, having gone up again to her room, she
threw herself flat on her bed and cried there like a child, her face buried
in the pillow.
She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the
event of anything extraordinary occurring, she should fasten a small piece
of white paper to the blind, so that if by chance he happened to be in
Yonville, he could hurry to the lane behind the house. Emma made the signal;
she had been waiting three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly caught
sight of Rodolphe at the corner of the market. She felt tempted to open the
window and call him, but he had already disappeared. She fell back in
despair.
Soon, however, it seemed to her that
someone was walking on the pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went
downstairs, crossed the yard. He was there outside. She threw herself into
his arms.
"Do take care!" he said.
"Ah! if you knew!" she replied.
And she began telling him everything,
hurriedly, disjointedly, exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so
prodigal of parentheses that he understood nothing of it.
"Come, my poor angel, courage! Be
comforted! be patient!"
"But I have been patient; I have suffered
for four years. A love like ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven.
They torture me! I can bear it no longer! Save me!"
She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of
tears, flashed like flames beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never
loved her so much, so that he lost his head and said "What is, it? What do
you wish?"
"Take me away," she cried, "carry me off!
Oh, I pray you!"
And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if
to seize there the unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss.
"But—" Rodolphe resumed.
"What?"
"Your little girl!"
She reflected a few moments, then replied—
"We will take her! It can't be helped!"
"What a woman!" he said to himself,
watching her as she went. For she had run into the garden. Someone was
calling her.
On the following days Madame Bovary senior
was much surprised at the change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was
showing herself more docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask
for a recipe for pickling gherkins.
Was it the better to deceive them both? Or
did she wish by a sort of voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly
the bitterness of the things she was about to leave?
But she paid no heed to them; on the
contrary, she lived as lost in the anticipated delight of her coming
happiness.
It was an eternal subject for conversation
with Rodolphe. She leant on his shoulder murmuring—
"Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you
think about it? Can it be? It seems to me that the moment I feel the
carriage start, it will be as if we were rising in a balloon, as if we were
setting out for the clouds. Do you know that I count the hours? And you?"
Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful
as at this period; she had that indefinable beauty that results from joy,
from enthusiasm, from success, and that is only the harmony of temperament
with circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure,
and her ever-young illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the
sun make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed
forth in all the plenitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled
expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a
strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy
corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down. One would
have thought that an artist apt in conception had arranged the curls of hair
upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the changing
chances of their adultery, that unbound them every day. Her voice now took
more mellow infections, her figure also; something subtle and penetrating
escaped even from the folds of her gown and from the line of her foot.
Charles, as when they were first married, thought her delicious and quite
irresistible.
When he came home in the middle of the
night, he did not dare to wake her. The porcelain night-light threw a round
trembling gleam upon the ceiling, and the drawn curtains of the little cot
formed as it were a white hut standing out in the shade, and by the bedside
Charles looked at them. He seemed to hear the light breathing of his child.
She would grow big now; every season would bring rapid progress. He already
saw her coming from school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on
her jacket, and carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to be
sent to the boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to be done?
Then he reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the neighbourhood,
that he would superintend every morning on his way to his patients. He would
save up what he brought in; he would put it in the savings-bank. Then he
would buy shares somewhere, no matter where; besides, his practice would
increase; he counted upon that, for he wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to
be accomplished, to learn to play the piano. Ah! how pretty she would be
later on when she was fifteen, when, resembling her mother, she would, like
her, wear large straw hats in the summer-time; from a distance they would be
taken for two sisters. He pictured her to himself working in the evening by
their side beneath the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers;
she would look after the house; she would fill all the home with her charm
and her gaiety. At last, they would think of her marriage; they would find
her some good young fellow with a steady business; he would make her happy;
this would last for ever.
Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be;
and while he dozed off by her side she awakened to other dreams.
To the gallop of four horses she was
carried away for a week towards a new land, whence they would return no
more. They went on and on, their arms entwined, without a word. Often from
the top of a mountain there suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes,
and bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white
marble, on whose pointed steeples were storks' nests. They went at a
walking-pace because of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were
bouquets of flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard
the chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of
guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps of
fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled
beneath playing waters. And then, one night they came to a fishing village,
where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and in front of
the huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live in a low,
flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a gulf, by the
sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and their existence
would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and star-spangled as the
nights they would contemplate. However, in the immensity of this future that
she conjured up, nothing special stood forth; the days, all magnificent,
resembled each other like waves; and it swayed in the horizon, infinite,
harmonised, azure, and bathed in sunshine. But the child began to cough in
her cot or Bovary snored more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep till
morning, when the dawn whitened the windows, and when little Justin was
already in the square taking down the shutters of the chemist's shop.
She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had
said to him—
"I want a cloak—a large lined cloak with a
deep collar."
"You are going on a journey?" he asked.
"No; but—never mind. I may count on you,
may I not, and quickly?"
He bowed.
"Besides, I shall want," she went on, "a
trunk—not too heavy—handy."
"Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet
by a foot and a half, as they are being made just now."
"And a travelling bag."
"Decidedly," thought Lheureux, "there's a
row on here."
"And," said Madame Bovary, taking her watch
from her belt, "take this; you can pay yourself out of it."
But the tradesman cried out that she was
wrong; they knew one another; did he doubt her? What childishness!
She insisted, however, on his taking at
least the chain, and Lheureux had already put it in his pocket and was
going, when she called him back.
"You will leave everything at your place.
As to the cloak"—she seemed to be reflecting—"do not bring it either; you
can give me the maker's address, and tell him to have it ready for me."
It was the next month that they were to run
away. She was to leave Yonville as if she was going on some business to
Rouen. Rodolphe would have booked the seats, procured the passports, and
even have written to Paris in order to have the whole mail-coach reserved
for them as far as Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and go on
thence without stopping to Genoa. She would take care to send her luggage to
Lheureux whence it would be taken direct to the "Hirondelle," so that no one
would have any suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion to
the child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer thought
about it.
He wished to have two more weeks before him
to arrange some affairs; then at the end of a week he wanted two more; then
he said he was ill; next he went on a journey. The month of August passed,
and, after all these delays, they decided that it was to be irrevocably
fixed for the 4th September—a Monday.
At length the Saturday before arrived.
Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than
usual.
"Everything is ready?" she asked him.
"Yes."
Then they walked round a garden-bed, and
went to sit down near the terrace on the kerb-stone of the wall.
"You are sad," said Emma.
"No; why?"
And yet he looked at her strangely in a
tender fashion.
"It is because you are going away?" she
went on; "because you are leaving what is dear to you—your life? Ah! I
understand. I have nothing in the world! you are all to me; so shall I be to
you. I will be your people, your country; I will tend, I will love you!"
"How sweet you are!" he said, seizing her
in his arms.
"Really!" she said with a voluptuous laugh.
"Do you love me? Swear it then!"
"Do I love you—love you? I adore you, my
love."
The moon, full and purple-coloured, was
rising right out of the earth at the end of the meadow. She rose quickly
between the branches of the poplars, that hid her here and there like a
black curtain pierced with holes. Then she appeared dazzling with whiteness
in the empty heavens that she lit up, and now sailing more slowly along, let
fall upon the river a great stain that broke up into an infinity of stars;
and the silver sheen seemed to writhe through the very depths like a
heedless serpent covered with luminous scales; it also resembled some
monster candelabra all along which sparkled drops of diamonds running
together. The soft night was about them; masses of shadow filled the
branches. Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in with deep sighs the fresh
wind that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in the rush of
their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came back to their hearts,
full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the perfume of
the syringas, and threw across their memories shadows more immense and more
sombre than those of the still willows that lengthened out over the grass.
Often some night-animal, hedgehog or weasel, setting out on the hunt,
disturbed the lovers, or sometimes they heard a ripe peach falling all alone
from the espalier.
"Ah! what a lovely night!" said Rodolphe.
"We shall have others," replied Emma; and,
as if speaking to herself: "Yet, it will be good to travel. And yet, why
should my heart be so heavy? Is it dread of the unknown? The effect of
habits left? Or rather—? No; it is the excess of happiness. How weak I am,
am I not? Forgive me!"
"There is still time!" he cried. "Reflect!
perhaps you may repent!"
"Never!" she cried impetuously. And coming
closer to him: "What ill could come to me? There is no desert, no precipice,
no ocean I would not traverse with you. The longer we live together the more
it will be like an embrace, every day closer, more heart to heart. There
will be nothing to trouble us, no cares, no obstacle. We shall be alone, all
to ourselves eternally. Oh, speak! Answer me!"
At regular intervals he answered,
"Yes—Yes—" She had passed her hands through his hair, and she repeated in a
childlike voice, despite the big tears which were falling, "Rodolphe!
Rodolphe! Ah! Rodolphe! dear little Rodolphe!"
Midnight struck.
"Midnight!" said she. "Come, it is
to-morrow. One day more!"
He rose to go; and as if the movement he
made had been the signal for their flight, Emma said, suddenly assuming a
gay air—
"You have the passports?"
"Yes."
"You are forgetting nothing?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Certainly."
"It is at the Hotel de Provence, is it not,
that you will wait for me at midday?"
He nodded.
"Till to-morrow then!" said Emma in a last
caress; and she watched him go.
He did not turn round. She ran after him,
and, leaning over the water's edge between the bulrushes—
"To-morrow!" she cried.
He was already on the other side of the
river and walking fast across the meadow.
After a few moments Rodolphe stopped; and
when he saw her with her white gown gradually fade away in the shade like a
ghost, he was seized with such a beating of the heart that he leant against
a tree lest he should fall.
"What an imbecile I am!" he said with a
fearful oath. "No matter! She was a pretty mistress!"
And immediately Emma's beauty, with all the
pleasures of their love, came back to him. For a moment he softened; then he
rebelled against her.
"For, after all," he exclaimed,
gesticulating, "I can't exile myself—have a child on my hands."
He was saying these things to give himself
firmness.
"And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah!
no, no, no, no! a thousand times no! That would be too stupid."
Chapter Thirteen
No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat
down quickly at his bureau under the stag's head that hung as a trophy on
the wall. But when he had the pen between his fingers, he could think of
nothing, so that, resting on his elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to
him to have receded into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken
had suddenly placed a distance between them.
To get back something of her, he fetched
from the cupboard at the bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he
usually kept his letters from women, and from it came an odour of dry dust
and withered roses. First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It
was a handkerchief of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled;
he had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature
given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him pretentious, and her
languishing look in the worst possible taste. Then, from looking at this
image and recalling the memory of its original, Emma's features little by
little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living and the painted
face, rubbing one against the other, had effaced each other. Finally, he
read some of her letters; they were full of explanations relating to their
journey, short, technical, and urgent, like business notes. He wanted to see
the long ones again, those of old times. In order to find them at the bottom
of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the others, and mechanically began
rummaging amidst this mass of papers and things, finding pell-mell bouquets,
garters, a black mask, pins, and hair—hair! dark and fair, some even,
catching in the hinges of the box, broke when it was opened.
Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he
examined the writing and the style of the letters, as varied as their
orthography. They were tender or jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were
some that asked for love, others that asked for money. A word recalled faces
to him, certain gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, however, he
remembered nothing at all.
In fact, these women, rushing at once into
his thoughts, cramped each other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform level
of love that equalised them all. So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters,
he amused himself for some moments with letting them fall in cascades from
his right into his left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back
the box to the cupboard, saying to himself, "What a lot of rubbish!" Which
summed up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard,
had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that
which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like
them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
"Come," said he, "let's begin."
He wrote—
"Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring
misery into your life."
"After all, that's true," thought Rodolphe.
"I am acting in her interest; I am honest."
"Have you carefully weighed your
resolution? Do you know to what an abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No,
you do not, do you? You were coming confident and fearless, believing in
happiness in the future. Ah! unhappy that we are—insensate!"
Rodolphe stopped here to think of some good
excuse.
"If I told her all my fortune is lost? No!
Besides, that would stop nothing. It would all have to be begun over again
later on. As if one could make women like that listen to reason!" He
reflected, then went on—
"I shall not forget you, oh believe it; and
I shall ever have a profound devotion for you; but some day, sooner or
later, this ardour (such is the fate of human things) would have grown less,
no doubt. Lassitude would have come to us, and who knows if I should not
even have had the atrocious pain of witnessing your remorse, of sharing it
myself, since I should have been its cause? The mere idea of the grief that
would come to you tortures me, Emma. Forget me! Why did I ever know you? Why
were you so beautiful? Is it my fault? O my God! No, no! Accuse only fate."
"That's a word that always tells," he said
to himself.
"Ah, if you had been one of those frivolous
women that one sees, certainly I might, through egotism, have tried an
experiment, in that case without danger for you. But that delicious
exaltation, at once your charm and your torment, has prevented you from
understanding, adorable woman that you are, the falseness of our future
position. Nor had I reflected upon this at first, and I rested in the shade
of that ideal happiness as beneath that of the manchineel tree, without
foreseeing the consequences."
"Perhaps she'll think I'm giving it up from
avarice. Ah, well! so much the worse; it must be stopped!"
"The world is cruel, Emma. Wherever we
might have gone, it would have persecuted us. You would have had to put up
with indiscreet questions, calumny, contempt, insult perhaps. Insult to you!
Oh! And I, who would place you on a throne! I who bear with me your memory
as a talisman! For I am going to punish myself by exile for all the ill I
have done you. I am going away. Whither I know not. I am mad. Adieu! Be good
always. Preserve the memory of the unfortunate who has lost you. Teach my
name to your child; let her repeat it in her prayers."
The wicks of the candles flickered.
Rodolphe got up to, shut the window, and when he had sat down again—
"I think it's all right. Ah! and this for
fear she should come and hunt me up."
"I shall be far away when you read these
sad lines, for I have wished to flee as quickly as possible to shun the
temptation of seeing you again. No weakness! I shall return, and perhaps
later on we shall talk together very coldly of our old love. Adieu!"
And there was a last "adieu" divided into
two words! "A Dieu!" which he thought in very excellent taste.
"Now how am I to sign?" he said to himself.
"'Yours devotedly?' No! 'Your friend?' Yes, that's it."
"Your friend."
He re-read his letter. He considered it
very good.
"Poor little woman!" he thought with
emotion. "She'll think me harder than a rock. There ought to have been some
tears on this; but I can't cry; it isn't my fault." Then, having emptied
some water into a glass, Rodolphe dipped his finger into it, and let a big
drop fall on the paper, that made a pale stain on the ink. Then looking for
a seal, he came upon the one "Amor nel cor."
"That doesn't at all fit in with the
circumstances. Pshaw! never mind!"
After which he smoked three pipes and went
to bed.
The next day when he was up (at about two
o'clock—he had slept late), Rodolphe had a basket of apricots picked. He put
his letter at the bottom under some vine leaves, and at once ordered Girard,
his ploughman, to take it with care to Madame Bovary. He made use of this
means for corresponding with her, sending according to the season fruits or
game.
"If she asks after me," he said, "you will
tell her that I have gone on a journey. You must give the basket to her
herself, into her own hands. Get along and take care!"
Girard put on his new blouse, knotted his
handkerchief round the apricots, and walking with great heavy steps in his
thick iron-bound galoshes, made his way to Yonville.
Madame Bovary, when he got to her house,
was arranging a bundle of linen on the kitchen-table with Felicite.
"Here," said the ploughboy, "is something
for you—from the master."
She was seized with apprehension, and as
she sought in her pocket for some coppers, she looked at the peasant with
haggard eyes, while he himself looked at her with amazement, not
understanding how such a present could so move anyone. At last he went out.
Felicite remained. She could bear it no longer; she ran into the sitting
room as if to take the apricots there, overturned the basket, tore away the
leaves, found the letter, opened it, and, as if some fearful fire were
behind her, Emma flew to her room terrified.
Charles was there; she saw him; he spoke to
her; she heard nothing, and she went on quickly up the stairs, breathless,
distraught, dumb, and ever holding this horrible piece of paper, that
crackled between her fingers like a plate of sheet-iron. On the second floor
she stopped before the attic door, which was closed.
Then she tried to calm herself; she
recalled the letter; she must finish it; she did not dare to. And where?
How? She would be seen! "Ah, no! here," she thought, "I shall be all right."
Emma pushed open the door and went in.
The slates threw straight down a heavy heat
that gripped her temples, stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed
garret-window. She drew back the bolt, and the dazzling light burst in with
a leap.
Opposite, beyond the roofs, stretched the
open country till it was lost to sight. Down below, underneath her, the
village square was empty; the stones of the pavement glittered, the
weathercocks on the houses were motionless. At the corner of the street,
from a lower storey, rose a kind of humming with strident modulations. It
was Binet turning.
She leant against the embrasure of the
window, and reread the letter with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her
attention upon it, the more confused were her ideas. She saw him again,
heard him, encircled him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat
against her breast like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster,
with uneven intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth
might crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was
free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself, "Come!
come!"
The luminous ray that came straight up from
below drew the weight of her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that
the ground of the oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor
dipped on end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost
hanging, surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the
air was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself be
taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry voice
calling her.
"Emma! Emma!" cried Charles.
She stopped.
"Wherever are you? Come!"
The thought that she had just escaped from
death almost made her faint with terror. She closed her eyes; then she
shivered at the touch of a hand on her sleeve; it was Felicite.
"Master is waiting for you, madame; the
soup is on the table."
And she had to go down to sit at table.
She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then
she unfolded her napkin as if to examine the darns, and she really thought
of applying herself to this work, counting the threads in the linen.
Suddenly the remembrance of the letter returned to her. How had she lost it?
Where could she find it? But she felt such weariness of spirit that she
could not even invent a pretext for leaving the table. Then she became a
coward; she was afraid of Charles; he knew all, that was certain! Indeed he
pronounced these words in a strange manner:
"We are not likely to see Monsieur Rodolphe
soon again, it seems."
"Who told you?" she said, shuddering.
"Who told me!" he replied, rather
astonished at her abrupt tone. "Why, Girard, whom I met just now at the door
of the Cafe Francais. He has gone on a journey, or is to go."
She gave a sob.
"What surprises you in that? He absents
himself like that from time to time for a change, and, ma foi, I think he's
right, when one has a fortune and is a bachelor. Besides, he has jolly
times, has our friend. He's a bit of a rake. Monsieur Langlois told me—"
He stopped for propriety's sake because the
servant came in. She put back into the basket the apricots scattered on the
sideboard. Charles, without noticing his wife's colour, had them brought to
him, took one, and bit into it.
"Ah! perfect!" said he; "just taste!"
And he handed her the basket, which she put
away from her gently.
"Do just smell! What an odour!" he
remarked, passing it under her nose several times.
"I am choking," she cried, leaping up. But
by an effort of will the spasm passed; then—
"It is nothing," she said, "it is nothing!
It is nervousness. Sit down and go on eating." For she dreaded lest he
should begin questioning her, attending to her, that she should not be left
alone.
Charles, to obey her, sat down again, and
he spat the stones of the apricots into his hands, afterwards putting them
on his plate.
Suddenly a blue tilbury passed across the
square at a rapid trot. Emma uttered a cry and fell back rigid to the
ground.
In fact, Rodolphe, after many reflections,
had decided to set out for Rouen. Now, as from La Huchette to Buchy there is
no other way than by Yonville, he had to go through the village, and Emma
had recognised him by the rays of the lanterns, which like lightning flashed
through the twilight.
The chemist, at the tumult which broke out
in the house ran thither. The table with all the plates was upset; sauce,
meat, knives, the salt, and cruet-stand were strewn over the room; Charles
was calling for help; Berthe, scared, was crying; and Felicite, whose hands
trembled, was unlacing her mistress, whose whole body shivered convulsively.
"I'll run to my laboratory for some
aromatic vinegar," said the druggist.
Then as she opened her eyes on smelling the
bottle—
"I was sure of it," he remarked; "that
would wake any dead person for you!"
"Speak to us," said Charles; "collect
yourself; it is your Charles, who loves you. Do you know me? See! here is
your little girl! Oh, kiss her!"
The child stretched out her arms to her
mother to cling to her neck. But turning away her head, Emma said in a
broken voice "No, no! no one!"
She fainted again. They carried her to her
bed. She lay there stretched at full length, her lips apart, her eyelids
closed, her hands open, motionless, and white as a waxen image. Two streams
of tears flowed from her eyes and fell slowly upon the pillow.
Charles, standing up, was at the back of
the alcove, and the chemist, near him, maintained that meditative silence
that is becoming on the serious occasions of life.
"Do not be uneasy," he said, touching his
elbow; "I think the paroxysm is past."
"Yes, she is resting a little now,"
answered Charles, watching her sleep. "Poor girl! poor girl! She had gone
off now!"
Then Homais asked how the accident had come
about. Charles answered that she had been taken ill suddenly while she was
eating some apricots.
"Extraordinary!" continued the chemist.
"But it might be that the apricots had brought on the syncope. Some natures
are so sensitive to certain smells; and it would even be a very fine
question to study both in its pathological and physiological relation. The
priests know the importance of it, they who have introduced aromatics into
all their ceremonies. It is to stupefy the senses and to bring on
ecstasies—a thing, moreover, very easy in persons of the weaker sex, who are
more delicate than the other. Some are cited who faint at the smell of burnt
hartshorn, of new bread—"
"Take care; you'll wake her!" said Bovary
in a low voice.
"And not only," the druggist went on, "are
human beings subject to such anomalies, but animals also. Thus you are not
ignorant of the singularly aphrodisiac effect produced by the Nepeta
cataria, vulgarly called catmint, on the feline race; and, on the other
hand, to quote an example whose authenticity I can answer for. Bridaux (one
of my old comrades, at present established in the Rue Malpalu) possesses a
dog that falls into convulsions as soon as you hold out a snuff-box to him.
He often even makes the experiment before his friends at his summer-house at
Guillaume Wood. Would anyone believe that a simple sternutation could
produce such ravages on a quadrupedal organism? It is extremely curious, is
it not?"
"Yes," said Charles, who was not listening
to him.
"This shows us," went on the other, smiling
with benign self-sufficiency, "the innumerable irregularities of the nervous
system. With regard to madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very
susceptible. And so I should by no means recommend to you, my dear friend,
any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretence of attacking the
symptoms, attack the constitution. No; no useless physicking! Diet, that is
all; sedatives, emollients, dulcification. Then, don't you think that
perhaps her imagination should be worked upon?"
"In what way? How?" said Bovary.
"Ah! that is it. Such is indeed the
question. 'That is the question,' as I lately read in a newspaper."
But Emma, awaking, cried out—
"The letter! the letter!"
They thought she was delirious; and she was
by midnight. Brain-fever had set in.
For forty-three days Charles did not leave
her. He gave up all his patients; he no longer went to bed; he was
constantly feeling her pulse, putting on sinapisms and cold-water
compresses. He sent Justin as far as Neufchatel for ice; the ice melted on
the way; he sent him back again. He called Monsieur Canivet into
consultation; he sent for Dr. Lariviere, his old master, from Rouen; he was
in despair. What alarmed him most was Emma's prostration, for she did not
speak, did not listen, did not even seem to suffer, as if her body and soul
were both resting together after all their troubles.
About the middle of October she could sit
up in bed supported by pillows. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first
bread-and-jelly. Her strength returned to her; she got up for a few hours of
an afternoon, and one day, when she felt better, he tried to take her,
leaning on his arm, for a walk round the garden. The sand of the paths was
disappearing beneath the dead leaves; she walked slowly, dragging along her
slippers, and leaning against Charles's shoulder. She smiled all the time.
They went thus to the bottom of the garden
near the terrace. She drew herself up slowly, shading her eyes with her hand
to look. She looked far off, as far as she could, but on the horizon were
only great bonfires of grass smoking on the hills.
"You will tire yourself, my darling!" said
Bovary. And, pushing her gently to make her go into the arbour, "Sit down on
this seat; you'll be comfortable."
"Oh! no; not there!" she said in a
faltering voice.
She was seized with giddiness, and from
that evening her illness recommenced, with a more uncertain character, it is
true, and more complex symptoms. Now she suffered in her heart, then in the
chest, the head, the limbs; she had vomitings, in which Charles thought he
saw the first signs of cancer.
And besides this, the poor fellow was
worried about money matters.
Chapter Fourteen
To begin with, he did not know how he could
pay Monsieur Homais for all the physic supplied by him, and though, as a
medical man, he was not obliged to pay for it, he nevertheless blushed a
little at such an obligation. Then the expenses of the household, now that
the servant was mistress, became terrible. Bills rained in upon the house;
the tradesmen grumbled; Monsieur Lheureux especially harassed him. In fact,
at the height of Emma's illness, the latter, taking advantage of the
circumstances to make his bill larger, had hurriedly brought the cloak, the
travelling-bag, two trunks instead of one, and a number of other things. It
was very well for Charles to say he did not want them. The tradesman
answered arrogantly that these articles had been ordered, and that he would
not take them back; besides, it would vex madame in her convalescence; the
doctor had better think it over; in short, he was resolved to sue him rather
than give up his rights and take back his goods. Charles subsequently
ordered them to be sent back to the shop. Felicite forgot; he had other
things to attend to; then thought no more about them. Monsieur Lheureux
returned to the charge, and, by turns threatening and whining, so managed
that Bovary ended by signing a bill at six months. But hardly had he signed
this bill than a bold idea occurred to him: it was to borrow a thousand
francs from Lheureux. So, with an embarrassed air, he asked if it were
possible to get them, adding that it would be for a year, at any interest he
wished. Lheureux ran off to his shop, brought back the money, and dictated
another bill, by which Bovary undertook to pay to his order on the 1st of
September next the sum of one thousand and seventy francs, which, with the
hundred and eighty already agreed to, made just twelve hundred and fifty,
thus lending at six per cent in addition to one-fourth for commission: and
the things bringing him in a good third at the least, this ought in twelve
months to give him a profit of a hundred and thirty francs. He hoped that
the business would not stop there; that the bills would not be paid; that
they would be renewed; and that his poor little money, having thriven at the
doctor's as at a hospital, would come back to him one day considerably more
plump, and fat enough to burst his bag.
Everything, moreover, succeeded with him.
He was adjudicator for a supply of cider to the hospital at Neufchatel;
Monsieur Guillaumin promised him some shares in the turf-pits of Gaumesnil,
and he dreamt of establishing a new diligence service between Arcueil and
Rouen, which no doubt would not be long in ruining the ramshackle van of the
"Lion d'Or," and that, travelling faster, at a cheaper rate, and carrying
more luggage, would thus put into his hands the whole commerce of Yonville.
Charles several times asked himself by what
means he should next year be able to pay back so much money. He reflected,
imagined expedients, such as applying to his father or selling something.
But his father would be deaf, and he—he had nothing to sell. Then he foresaw
such worries that he quickly dismissed so disagreeable a subject of
meditation from his mind. He reproached himself with forgetting Emma, as if,
all his thoughts belonging to this woman, it was robbing her of something
not to be constantly thinking of her.
The winter was severe, Madame Bovary's
convalescence slow. When it was fine they wheeled her arm-chair to the
window that overlooked the square, for she now had an antipathy to the
garden, and the blinds on that side were always down. She wished the horse
to be sold; what she formerly liked now displeased her. All her ideas seemed
to be limited to the care of herself. She stayed in bed taking little meals,
rang for the servant to inquire about her gruel or to chat with her. The
snow on the market-roof threw a white, still light into the room; then the
rain began to fall; and Emma waited daily with a mind full of eagerness for
the inevitable return of some trifling events which nevertheless had no
relation to her. The most important was the arrival of the "Hirondelle" in
the evening. Then the landlady shouted out, and other voices answered, while
Hippolyte's lantern, as he fetched the boxes from the boot, was like a star
in the darkness. At mid-day Charles came in; then he went out again; next
she took some beef-tea, and towards five o'clock, as the day drew in, the
children coming back from school, dragging their wooden shoes along the
pavement, knocked the clapper of the shutters with their rulers one after
the other.
It was at this hour that Monsieur
Bournisien came to see her. He inquired after her health, gave her news,
exhorted her to religion, in a coaxing little prattle that was not without
its charm. The mere thought of his cassock comforted her.
One day, when at the height of her illness,
she had thought herself dying, and had asked for the communion; and, while
they were making the preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they
were turning the night table covered with syrups into an altar, and while
Felicite was strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power
passing over her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from
all feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was
beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would be
annihilated in that love like a burning incense that melts into vapour. The
bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water, the priest drew from the holy
pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting with a celestial joy that she put
out her lips to accept the body of the Saviour presented to her. The
curtains of the alcove floated gently round her like clouds, and the rays of
the two tapers burning on the night-table seemed to shine like dazzling
halos. Then she let her head fall back, fancying she heard in space the
music of seraphic harps, and perceived in an azure sky, on a golden throne
in the midst of saints holding green palms, God the Father, resplendent with
majesty, who with a sign sent to earth angels with wings of fire to carry
her away in their arms.
This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as
the most beautiful thing that it was possible to dream, so that now she
strove to recall her sensation. That still lasted, however, but in a less
exclusive fashion and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by pride,
at length found rest in Christian humility, and, tasting the joy of
weakness, she saw within herself the destruction of her will, that must have
left a wide entrance for the inroads of heavenly grace. There existed, then,
in the place of happiness, still greater joys—another love beyond all loves,
without pause and without end, one that would grow eternally! She saw amid
the illusions of her hope a state of purity floating above the earth
mingling with heaven, to which she aspired. She wanted to become a saint.
She bought chaplets and wore amulets; she wished to have in her room, by the
side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might kiss it every
evening.
The cure marvelled at this humour, although
Emma's religion, he thought, might, from its fervour, end by touching on
heresy, extravagance. But not being much versed in these matters, as soon as
they went beyond a certain limit he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, bookseller to
Monsignor, to send him "something good for a lady who was very clever." The
bookseller, with as much indifference as if he had been sending off hardware
to niggers, packed up, pellmell, everything that was then the fashion in the
pious book trade. There were little manuals in questions and answers,
pamphlets of aggressive tone after the manner of Monsieur de Maistre, and
certain novels in rose-coloured bindings and with a honied style,
manufactured by troubadour seminarists or penitent blue-stockings. There
were the "Think of it; the Man of the World at Mary's Feet, by Monsieur de
***, decorated with many Orders"; "The Errors of Voltaire, for the Use of
the Young," etc.
Madame Bovary's mind was not yet
sufficiently clear to apply herself seriously to anything; moreover, she
began this reading in too much hurry. She grew provoked at the doctrines of
religion; the arrogance of the polemic writings displeased her by their
inveteracy in attacking people she did not know; and the secular stories,
relieved with religion, seemed to her written in such ignorance of the
world, that they insensibly estranged her from the truths for whose proof
she was looking. Nevertheless, she persevered; and when the volume slipped
from her hands, she fancied herself seized with the finest Catholic
melancholy that an ethereal soul could conceive.
As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had
thrust it back to the bottom of her heart, and it remained there more solemn
and more motionless than a king's mummy in a catacomb. An exhalation escaped
from this embalmed love, that, penetrating through everything, perfumed with
tenderness the immaculate atmosphere in which she longed to live. When she
knelt on her Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same suave
words that she had murmured formerly to her lover in the outpourings of
adultery. It was to make faith come; but no delights descended from the
heavens, and she arose with tired limbs and with a vague feeling of a
gigantic dupery.
This searching after faith, she thought,
was only one merit the more, and in the pride of her devoutness Emma
compared herself to those grand ladies of long ago whose glory she, had
dreamed of over a portrait of La Valliere, and who, trailing with so much
majesty the lace-trimmed trains of their long gowns, retired into solitudes
to shed at the feet of Christ all the tears of hearts that life had wounded.
Then she gave herself up to excessive
charity. She sewed clothes for the poor, she sent wood to women in childbed;
and Charles one day, on coming home, found three good-for-nothings in the
kitchen seated at the table eating soup. She had her little girl, whom
during her illness her husband had sent back to the nurse, brought home. She
wanted to teach her to read; even when Berthe cried, she was not vexed. She
had made up her mind to resignation, to universal indulgence. Her language
about everything was full of ideal expressions. She said to her child, "Is
your stomach-ache better, my angel?"
Madame Bovary senior found nothing to
censure except perhaps this mania of knitting jackets for orphans instead of
mending her own house-linen; but, harassed with domestic quarrels, the good
woman took pleasure in this quiet house, and she even stayed there till
after Easter, to escape the sarcasms of old Bovary, who never failed on Good
Friday to order chitterlings.
Besides the companionship of her
mother-in-law, who strengthened her a little by the rectitude of her
judgment and her grave ways, Emma almost every day had other visitors. These
were Madame Langlois, Madame Caron, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and
regularly from two to five o'clock the excellent Madame Homais, who, for her
part, had never believed any of the tittle-tattle about her neighbour. The
little Homais also came to see her; Justin accompanied them. He went up with
them to her bedroom, and remained standing near the door, motionless and
mute. Often even Madame Bovary; taking no heed of him, began her toilette.
She began by taking out her comb, shaking her head with a quick movement,
and when he for the first time saw all this mass of hair that fell to her
knees unrolling in black ringlets, it was to him, poor child! like a sudden
entrance into something new and strange, whose splendour terrified him.
Emma, no doubt, did not notice his silent
attentions or his timidity. She had no suspicion that the love vanished from
her life was there, palpitating by her side, beneath that coarse holland
shirt, in that youthful heart open to the emanations of her beauty. Besides,
she now enveloped all things with such indifference, she had words so
affectionate with looks so haughty, such contradictory ways, that one could
no longer distinguish egotism from charity, or corruption from virtue. One
evening, for example, she was angry with the servant, who had asked to go
out, and stammered as she tried to find some pretext. Then suddenly—
"So you love him?" she said.
And without waiting for any answer from
Felicite, who was blushing, she added, "There! run along; enjoy yourself!"
In the beginning of spring she had the
garden turned up from end to end, despite Bovary's remonstrances. However,
he was glad to see her at last manifest a wish of any kind. As she grew
stronger she displayed more wilfulness. First, she found occasion to expel
Mere Rollet, the nurse, who during her convalescence had contracted the
habit of coming too often to the kitchen with her two nurslings and her
boarder, better off for teeth than a cannibal. Then she got rid of the
Homais family, successively dismissed all the other visitors, and even
frequented church less assiduously, to the great approval of the druggist,
who said to her in a friendly way—
"You were going in a bit for the cassock!"
As formerly, Monsieur Bournisien dropped in
every day when he came out after catechism class. He preferred staying out
of doors to taking the air "in the grove," as he called the arbour. This was
the time when Charles came home. They were hot; some sweet cider was brought
out, and they drank together to madame's complete restoration.
Binet was there; that is to say, a little
lower down against the terrace wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary invited
him to have a drink, and he thoroughly understood the uncorking of the stone
bottles.
"You must," he said, throwing a satisfied
glance all round him, even to the very extremity of the landscape, "hold the
bottle perpendicularly on the table, and after the strings are cut, press up
the cork with little thrusts, gently, gently, as indeed they do
seltzer-water at restaurants."
But during his demonstration the cider
often spurted right into their faces, and then the ecclesiastic, with a
thick laugh, never missed this joke—
"Its goodness strikes the eye!"
He was, in fact, a good fellow and one day
he was not even scandalised at the chemist, who advised Charles to give
madame some distraction by taking her to the theatre at Rouen to hear the
illustrious tenor, Lagardy. Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to
know his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less
dangerous for morals than literature.
But the chemist took up the defence of
letters. The theatre, he contended, served for railing at prejudices, and,
beneath a mask of pleasure, taught virtue.
"'Castigat ridendo mores,'* Monsieur
Bournisien! Thus consider the greater part of Voltaire's tragedies; they are
cleverly strewn with philosophical reflections, that made them a vast school
of morals and diplomacy for the people."
*It corrects customs through laughter.
"I," said Binet, "once saw a piece called
the 'Gamin de Paris,' in which there was the character of an old general
that is really hit off to a T. He sets down a young swell who had seduced a
working girl, who at the ending—"
"Certainly," continued Homais, "there is
bad literature as there is bad pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most
important of the fine arts seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic idea, worthy of
the abominable times that imprisoned Galileo."
"I know very well," objected the cure,
"that there are good works, good authors. However, if it were only those
persons of different sexes united in a bewitching apartment, decorated
rouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this must, in the
long-run, engender a certain mental libertinage, give rise to immodest
thoughts and impure temptations. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all
the Fathers. Finally," he added, suddenly assuming a mystic tone of voice
while he rolled a pinch of snuff between his fingers, "if the Church has
condemned the theatre, she must be right; we must submit to her decrees."
"Why," asked the druggist, "should she
excommunicate actors? For formerly they openly took part in religious
ceremonies. Yes, in the middle of the chancel they acted; they performed a
kind of farce called 'Mysteries,' which often offended against the laws of
decency."
The ecclesiastic contented himself with
uttering a groan, and the chemist went on—
"It's like it is in the Bible; there there
are, you know, more than one piquant detail, matters really libidinous!"
And on a gesture of irritation from
Monsieur Bournisien—
"Ah! you'll admit that it is not a book to
place in the hands of a young girl, and I should be sorry if Athalie—"
"But it is the Protestants, and not we,"
cried the other impatiently, "who recommend the Bible."
"No matter," said Homais. "I am surprised
that in our days, in this century of enlightenment, anyone should still
persist in proscribing an intellectual relaxation that is inoffensive,
moralising, and sometimes even hygienic; is it not, doctor?"
"No doubt," replied the doctor carelessly,
either because, sharing the same ideas, he wished to offend no one, or else
because he had not any ideas.
The conversation seemed at an end when the
chemist thought fit to shoot a Parthian arrow.
"I've known priests who put on ordinary
clothes to go and see dancers kicking about."
"Come, come!" said the cure.
"Ah! I've known some!" And separating the
words of his sentence, Homais repeated, "I—have—known—some!"
"Well, they were wrong," said Bournisien,
resigned to anything.
"By Jove! they go in for more than that,"
exclaimed the druggist.
"Sir!" replied the ecclesiastic, with such
angry eyes that the druggist was intimidated by them.
"I only mean to say," he replied in less
brutal a tone, "that toleration is the surest way to draw people to
religion."
"That is true! that is true!" agreed the
good fellow, sitting down again on his chair. But he stayed only a few
moments.
Then, as soon as he had gone, Monsieur
Homais said to the doctor—
"That's what I call a cock-fight. I beat
him, did you see, in a way!—Now take my advice. Take madame to the theatre,
if it were only for once in your life, to enrage one of these ravens, hang
it! If anyone could take my place, I would accompany you myself. Be quick
about it. Lagardy is only going to give one performance; he's engaged to go
to England at a high salary. From what I hear, he's a regular dog; he's
rolling in money; he's taking three mistresses and a cook along with him.
All these great artists burn the candle at both ends; they require a
dissolute life, that suits the imagination to some extent. But they die at
the hospital, because they haven't the sense when young to lay by. Well, a
pleasant dinner! Goodbye till to-morrow."
The idea of the theatre quickly germinated
in Bovary's head, for he at once communicated it to his wife, who at first
refused, alleging the fatigue, the worry, the expense; but, for a wonder,
Charles did not give in, so sure was he that this recreation would be good
for her. He saw nothing to prevent it: his mother had sent them three
hundred francs which he had no longer expected; the current debts were not
very large, and the falling in of Lheureux's bills was still so far off that
there was no need to think about them. Besides, imagining that she was
refusing from delicacy, he insisted the more; so that by dint of worrying
her she at last made up her mind, and the next day at eight o'clock they set
out in the "Hirondelle."
The druggist, whom nothing whatever kept at
Yonville, but who thought himself bound not to budge from it, sighed as he
saw them go.
"Well, a pleasant journey!" he said to
them; "happy mortals that you are!"
Then addressing himself to Emma, who was
wearing a blue silk gown with four flounces—
"You are as lovely as a Venus. You'll cut a
figure at Rouen."
The diligence stopped at the "Croix-Rouge"
in the Place Beauvoisine. It was the inn that is in every provincial
faubourg, with large stables and small bedrooms, where one sees in the
middle of the court chickens pilfering the oats under the muddy gigs of the
commercial travellers—a good old house, with worm-eaten balconies that creak
in the wind on winter nights, always full of people, noise, and feeding,
whose black tables are sticky with coffee and brandy, the thick windows made
yellow by the flies, the damp napkins stained with cheap wine, and that
always smells of the village, like ploughboys dressed in Sundayclothes, has
a cafe on the street, and towards the countryside a kitchen-garden. Charles
at once set out. He muddled up the stage-boxes with the gallery, the pit
with the boxes; asked for explanations, did not understand them; was sent
from the box-office to the acting-manager; came back to the inn, returned to
the theatre, and thus several times traversed the whole length of the town
from the theatre to the boulevard.
Madame Bovary bought a bonnet, gloves, and
a bouquet. The doctor was much afraid of missing the beginning, and, without
having had time to swallow a plate of soup, they presented themselves at the
doors of the theatre, which were still closed.
Chapter Fifteen
The crowd was waiting against the wall,
symmetrically enclosed between the balustrades. At the corner of the
neighbouring streets huge bills repeated in quaint letters "Lucie de
Lammermoor-Lagardy-Opera-etc." The weather was fine, the people were hot,
perspiration trickled amid the curls, and handkerchiefs taken from pockets
were mopping red foreheads; and now and then a warm wind that blew from the
river gently stirred the border of the tick awnings hanging from the doors
of the public-houses. A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a
current of icy air that smelt of tallow, leather, and oil. This was an
exhalation from the Rue des Charrettes, full of large black warehouses where
they made casks.
For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma before
going in wished to have a little stroll in the harbour, and Bovary prudently
kept his tickets in his hand, in the pocket of his trousers, which he
pressed against his stomach.
Her heart began to beat as soon as she
reached the vestibule. She involuntarily smiled with vanity on seeing the
crowd rushing to the right by the other corridor while she went up the
staircase to the reserved seats. She was as pleased as a child to push with
her finger the large tapestried door. She breathed in with all her might the
dusty smell of the lobbies, and when she was seated in her box she bent
forward with the air of a duchess.
The theatre was beginning to fill;
opera-glasses were taken from their cases, and the subscribers, catching
sight of one another, were bowing. They came to seek relaxation in the fine
arts after the anxieties of business; but "business" was not forgotten; they
still talked cottons, spirits of wine, or indigo. The heads of old men were
to be seen, inexpressive and peaceful, with their hair and complexions
looking like silver medals tarnished by steam of lead. The young beaux were
strutting about in the pit, showing in the opening of their waistcoats their
pink or applegreen cravats, and Madame Bovary from above admired them
leaning on their canes with golden knobs in the open palm of their yellow
gloves.
Now the lights of the orchestra were lit,
the lustre, let down from the ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its
facets a sudden gaiety over the theatre; then the musicians came in one
after the other; and first there was the protracted hubbub of the basses
grumbling, violins squeaking, cornets trumpeting, flutes and flageolets
fifing. But three knocks were heard on the stage, a rolling of drums began,
the brass instruments played some chords, and the curtain rising, discovered
a country-scene.
It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a
fountain shaded by an oak to the left. Peasants and lords with plaids on
their shoulders were singing a hunting-song together; then a captain
suddenly came on, who evoked the spirit of evil by lifting both his arms to
heaven. Another appeared; they went away, and the hunters started afresh.
She felt herself transported to the reading of her youth, into the midst of
Walter Scott. She seemed to hear through the mist the sound of the Scotch
bagpipes re-echoing over the heather. Then her remembrance of the novel
helping her to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by
phrase, while vague thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once again
with the bursts of music. She gave herself up to the lullaby of the
melodies, and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn
over her nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the
scenery, the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and
the velvet caps, cloaks, swords—all those imaginary things that floated amid
the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young woman stepped
forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was left alone, and the
flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the warbling of birds.
Lucie attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She plained of love; she
longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life, would have liked to fly away
in an embrace. Suddenly Edgar-Lagardy appeared.
He had that splendid pallor that gives
something of the majesty of marble to the ardent races of the South. His
vigorous form was tightly clad in a brown-coloured doublet; a small
chiselled poniard hung against his left thigh, and he cast round laughing
looks showing his white teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard
him sing one night on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended boats, had
fallen in love with him. She had ruined herself for him. He had deserted her
for other women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his
artistic reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into his
advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his person and the
susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable coolness, more
temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis than of real singing,
made up the charm of this admirable charlatan nature, in which there was
something of the hairdresser and the toreador.
From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm.
He pressed Lucy in his arms, he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate;
he had outbursts of rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and
the notes escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant
forward to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was
filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn out to
the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the drowning in
the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication and the anguish
that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna seemed to her to be
but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that charmed her as some
very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had loved her with such
love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit night when they said,
"To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with cheers; they recommenced the
entire movement; the lovers spoke of the flowers on their tomb, of vows,
exile, fate, hopes; and when they uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp
cry that mingled with the vibrations of the last chords.
"But why," asked Bovary, "does that
gentleman persecute her?"
"No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!"
"Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while
the other one who came on before said, 'I love Lucie and she loves me!'
Besides, he went off with her father arm in arm. For he certainly is her
father, isn't he—the ugly little man with a cock's feather in his hat?"
Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the
recitative duet began in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations
to his master Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to
deceive Lucie, thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed,
moreover, that he did not understand the story because of the music, which
interfered very much with the words.
"What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be
quiet!"
"Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning
against her shoulder, "I like to understand things."
"Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried
impatiently.
Lucie advanced, half supported by her
women, a wreath of orange blossoms in her hair, and paler than the white
satin of her gown. Emma dreamed of her marriage day; she saw herself at home
again amid the corn in the little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why
had not she, like this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had
been joyous, without seeing the abyss into which she was throwing herself.
Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and
the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some
great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty
blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness. But that
happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She
now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So, striving to
divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this reproduction of her
sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to please the eye, and she even
smiled internally with disdainful pity when at the back of the stage under
the velvet hangings a man appeared in a black cloak.
His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he
made, and immediately the instruments and the singers began the sextet.
Edgar, flashing with fury, dominated all the others with his clearer voice;
Ashton hurled homicidal provocations at him in deep notes; Lucie uttered her
shrill plaint, Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the middle
register, and the bass of the minister pealed forth like an organ, while the
voices of the women repeating his words took them up in chorus delightfully.
They were all in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy,
terror, and stupefaction breathed forth at once from their half-opened
mouths. The outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle
rose with jerks to the movements of his chest, and he walked from right to
left with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of
his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she thought must have an
inexhaustible love to lavish it upon the crowd with such effusion. All her
small fault-findings faded before the poetry of the part that absorbed her;
and, drawn towards this man by the illusion of the character, she tried to
imagine to herself his life—that life resonant, extraordinary, splendid, and
that might have been hers if fate had willed it. They would have known one
another, loved one another. With him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she
would have travelled from capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his
pride, picking up the flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his
costumes. Then each evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden
trellis-work she would have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul
that would have sung for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he
would have looked at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at
her; it was certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his
strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry
out, "Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my
ardour and all my dreams!"
The curtain fell.
The smell of the gas mingled with that of
the breaths, the waving of the fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma
wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her
arm-chair with palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would
faint, ran to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.
He had great difficulty in getting back to
his seat, for his elbows were jerked at every step because of the glass he
held in his hands, and he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a
Rouen lady in short sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her
loins, uttered cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her
husband, who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was
with her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured
taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At
last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath—
"Ma foi! I thought I should have had to
stay there. There is such a crowd—SUCH a crowd!"
He added—
"Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur
Leon!"
"Leon?"
"Himself! He's coming along to pay his
respects." And as he finished these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered
the box.
He held out his hand with the ease of a
gentleman; and Madame Bovary extended hers, without doubt obeying the
attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening
when the rain fell upon the green leaves, and they had said good-bye
standing at the window. But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the
situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and
began stammering a few hurried words.
"Ah, good-day! What! you here?"
"Silence!" cried a voice from the pit, for
the third act was beginning.
"So you are at Rouen?"
"Yes."
"And since when?"
"Turn them out! turn them out!" People were
looking at them. They were silent.
But from that moment she listened no more;
and the chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the
grand duet in D major, all were for her as far off as if the instruments had
grown less sonorous and the characters more remote. She remembered the games
at cards at the druggist's, and the walk to the nurse's, the reading in the
arbour, the tete-a-tete by the fireside—all that poor love, so calm and so
protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten.
And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances had brought him
back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder
against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering
beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair.
"Does this amuse you?" said he, bending
over her so closely that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek. She
replied carelessly—
"Oh, dear me, no, not much."
Then he proposed that they should leave the
theatre and go and take an ice somewhere.
"Oh, not yet; let us stay," said Bovary.
"Her hair's undone; this is going to be tragic."
But the mad scene did not at all interest
Emma, and the acting of the singer seemed to her exaggerated.
"She screams too loud," said she, turning
to Charles, who was listening.
"Yes—a little," he replied, undecided
between the frankness of his pleasure and his respect for his wife's
opinion.
Then with a sigh Leon said—
"The heat is—"
"Unbearable! Yes!"
"Do you feel unwell?" asked Bovary.
"Yes, I am stifling; let us go."
Monsieur Leon put her long lace shawl
carefully about her shoulders, and all three went off to sit down in the
harbour, in the open air, outside the windows of a cafe.
First they spoke of her illness, although
Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring
Monsieur Leon; and the latter told them that he had come to spend two years
at Rouen in a large office, in order to get practice in his profession,
which was different in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe,
the Homais, Mere Lefrancois, and as they had, in the husband's presence,
nothing more to say to one another, the conversation soon came to an end.
People coming out of the theatre passed
along the pavement, humming or shouting at the top of their voices, "O bel
ange, ma Lucie!*" Then Leon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He
had seen Tambourini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them,
Lagardy, despite his grand outbursts, was nowhere.
*Oh beautiful angel, my Lucie.
"Yet," interrupted Charles, who was slowly
sipping his rum-sherbet, "they say that he is quite admirable in the last
act. I regret leaving before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me."
"Why," said the clerk, "he will soon give
another performance."
But Charles replied that they were going
back next day. "Unless," he added, turning to his wife, "you would like to
stay alone, kitten?"
And changing his tactics at this unexpected
opportunity that presented itself to his hopes, the young man sang the
praises of Lagardy in the last number. It was really superb, sublime. Then
Charles insisted—
"You would get back on Sunday. Come, make
up your mind. You are wrong if you feel that this is doing you the least
good."
The tables round them, however, were
emptying; a waiter came and stood discreetly near them. Charles, who
understood, took out his purse; the clerk held back his arm, and did not
forget to leave two more pieces of silver that he made chink on the marble.
"I am really sorry," said Bovary, "about
the money which you are—"
The other made a careless gesture full of
cordiality, and taking his hat said—
"It is settled, isn't it? To-morrow at six
o'clock?"
Charles explained once more that he could
not absent himself longer, but that nothing prevented Emma—
"But," she stammered, with a strange smile,
"I am not sure—"
"Well, you must think it over. We'll see.
Night brings counsel." Then to Leon, who was walking along with them, "Now
that you are in our part of the world, I hope you'll come and ask us for
some dinner now and then."
The clerk declared he would not fail to do
so, being obliged, moreover, to go to Yonville on some business for his
office. And they parted before the Saint-Herbland Passage just as the clock
in the cathedral struck half-past eleven.