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 Neufchâtel

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 seen 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[9] blaze upon the door. It is the notary’s house, and

the finest in the place.

[9] 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 curé 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.

“Artémise!” 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 Léon; 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 Curé?” 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?_[10] A glass of wine?”

[10] 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 curé.

“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 with 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 Félicité, 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 Léon 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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,” Léon 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 Pâture, 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 Léon.

“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 Léon. “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.”

Léon, 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 Léon. “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,” Léon 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, Neufchâtel,

Yonville, and vicinity.”

For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant

Artémis, 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, Léon, 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 Félicité 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.

Léon 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 Léon,” 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 château 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 Léon 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 Léon 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 Léon, 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.

Léon 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 Léon’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.

Léon 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 Pâture 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 Monsieur 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 Léon 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 Léon 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 Félicité 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; Léon 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 Léon 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. Léon 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; Léon 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, Léon 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. Léon 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, Léon 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 Léon 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 Léon,

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, Léon 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, Léon 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 not 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 Léon,” 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 Lheureux, 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 Léon. 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, Léon 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 Léon. 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, Félicité 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

Léon 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 Léon, 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.

Léon 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 Léon 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 Léon 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,” Félicité 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 his

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_[11] 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.”

[11] 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?” Léon 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 Léon 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. Léon 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 Léon 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.

Léon 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, Léon 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 Léon 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 Léon 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 Léon.

“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 Léon.

Emma went down a few steps and called Félicité.

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. Léon 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; Léon 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.

Léon 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. Léon

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, Léon, jump in,” said the notary.

Homais bent 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 Léon!” 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.

Léon 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 Léon. 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 Léon 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 _tête-à-tête_--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 Félicité, 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 château 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 Neufchâtel 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!_”[12] said he, “I shall not go. Your company is better than

his.”

[12] 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 from

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 Léon 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 Léon 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_[13] 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!”

[13] 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 Félicité 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 if 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 château. 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 Léon

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, Artémise,

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 Neufchâtel, 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 she was eating her 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 Artémise 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 Neufchâtel, 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 Félicité

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?” Félicité 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 Félicité 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;_[14] 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.

[14] 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 façon_.[15] 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.

[15] 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 Félicité.

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 Félicité.

“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. Félicité 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 Félicité.

“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 Félicité, 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

Neufchâtel 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.

Félicité 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 Neufchâtel; 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 Félicité 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 Félicité, 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_,[16] 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.”

[16] 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 Léon!”

“Léon?”

“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 _tête-à-tête_ 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 Léon said--

“The heat is--”

“Unbearable! Yes!”

“Do you feel unwell?” asked Bovary.

“Yes, I am stifling; let us go.”

Monsieur Léon 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 Léon; 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!_”[17] Then Léon, 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.

[17] 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

Léon, 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.