Part III

Chapter One

Monsieur Léon, while studying law, had gone pretty often to the

dancing-rooms, where he was even a great success amongst the grisettes,

who thought he had a distinguished air. He was the best-mannered of the

students; he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, didn’t spend

all his quarter’s money on the first day of the month, and kept on good

terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always abstained from

them, as much from cowardice as from refinement.

Often when he stayed in his room to read, or else when sitting of an

evening under the lime-trees of the Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to

the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But gradually this

feeling grew weaker, and other desires gathered over it, although it

still persisted through them all. For Léon did not lose all hope; there

was for him, as it were, a vague promise floating in the future, like a

golden fruit suspended from some fantastic tree.

Then, seeing her again after three years of absence his passion

reawakened. He must, he thought, at last make up his mind to possess

her. Moreover, his timidity had worn off by contact with his gay

companions, and he returned to the provinces despising everyone who had

not with varnished shoes trodden the asphalt of the boulevards. By

the side of a Parisienne in her laces, in the drawing-room of some

illustrious physician, a person driving his carriage and wearing many

orders, the poor clerk would no doubt have trembled like a child; but

here, at Rouen, on the harbour, with the wife of this small doctor

he felt at his ease, sure beforehand he would shine. Self-possession

depends on its environment. We don’t speak on the first floor as on the

fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to have, about her, to guard her

virtue, all her banknotes, like a cuirass in the lining of her corset.

On leaving the Bovarys the night before, Léon had followed them

through the streets at a distance; then having seen them stop at the

“Croix-Rouge,” he turned on his heel, and spent the night meditating a

plan.

So the next day about five o’clock he walked into the kitchen of the

inn, with a choking sensation in his throat, pale cheeks, and that

resolution of cowards that stops at nothing.

“The gentleman isn’t in,” answered a servant.

This seemed to him a good omen. He went upstairs.

She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she apologised

for having neglected to tell him where they were staying.

“Oh, I divined it!” said Léon.

He pretended he had been guided towards her by chance, by, instinct. She

began to smile; and at once, to repair his folly, Léon told her that he

had spent his morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town

one after the other.

“So you have made up your mind to stay?” he added.

“Yes,” she said, “and I am wrong. One ought not to accustom oneself to

impossible pleasures when there are a thousand demands upon one.”

“Oh, I can imagine!”

“Ah! no; for you, you are a man!”

But men too had had their trials, and the conversation went off into

certain philosophical reflections. Emma expatiated much on the misery of

earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains

entombed.

To show off, or from a naive imitation of this melancholy which called

forth his, the young man declared that he had been awfully bored during

the whole course of his studies. The law irritated him, other vocations

attracted him, and his mother never ceased worrying him in every one

of her letters. As they talked they explained more and more fully the

motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive

confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition

of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express

it all the same. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not

say that he had forgotten her.

Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked

balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she

ran across the fields in the morning to her lover’s house. The noises

of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if

on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity

dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old arm-chair; the

yellow wall-paper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her,

and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in

the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her

hair.

“But pardon me!” she said. “It is wrong of me. I weary you with my

eternal complaints.”

“No, never, never!”

“If you knew,” she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes,

in which a tear was trembling, “all that I had dreamed!”

“And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went away. I

dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction amid the din of the

crowd without being able to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me.

In an engraver’s shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print of one

of the Muses. She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the

moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair. Something drove me there

continually; I stayed there hours together.” Then in a trembling voice,

“She resembled you a little.”

Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the

irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.

“Often,” he went on, “I wrote you letters that I tore up.”

She did not answer. He continued--

“I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you. I thought I

recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages

through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours.”

She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption.

Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes

on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin

of them with her toes.

At last she sighed.

“But the most wretched thing, is it not--is to drag out, as I do, a

useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we

should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.”

He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immolation, having

himself an incredible longing for self-sacrifice that he could not

satisfy.

“I should much like,” she said, “to be a nurse at a hospital.”

“Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any

calling--unless perhaps that of a doctor.”

With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of

her illness, which had almost killed her. What a pity! She should not be

suffering now! Léon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening

he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug

with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they

would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now

adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always

thins out the sentiment.

But at this invention of the rug she asked, “But why?”

“Why?” He hesitated. “Because I loved you so!” And congratulating

himself at having surmounted the difficulty, Léon watched her face out

of the corner of his eyes.

It was like the sky when a gust of wind drives the clouds across. The

mass of sad thoughts that darkened them seemed to be lifted from her

blue eyes; her whole face shone. He waited. At last she replied--

“I always suspected it.”

Then they went over all the trifling events of that far-off existence,

whose joys and sorrows they had just summed up in one word. They

recalled the arbour with clematis, the dresses she had worn, the

furniture of her room, the whole of her house.

“And our poor cactuses, where are they?”

“The cold killed them this winter.”

“Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? I often saw them again as

of yore, when on the summer mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds,

and I saw your two bare arms passing out amongst the flowers.”

“Poor friend!” she said, holding out her hand to him.

Léon swiftly pressed his lips to it. Then, when he had taken a deep

breath--

“At that time you were to me I know not what incomprehensible force that

took captive my life. Once, for instance, I went to see you; but you, no

doubt, do not remember it.”

“I do,” she said; “go on.”

“You were downstairs in the ante-room, ready to go out, standing on

the last stair; you were wearing a bonnet with small blue flowers; and

without any invitation from you, in spite of myself, I went with you.

Every moment, however, I grew more and more conscious of my folly, and

I went on walking by you, not daring to follow you completely, and

unwilling to leave you. When you went into a shop, I waited in the

street, and I watched you through the window taking off your gloves and

counting the change on the counter. Then you rang at Madame Tuvache’s;

you were let in, and I stood like an idiot in front of the great heavy

door that had closed after you.”

Madame Bovary, as she listened to him, wondered that she was so old. All

these things reappearing before her seemed to widen out her life; it was

like some sentimental immensity to which she returned; and from time to

time she said in a low voice, her eyes half closed--

“Yes, it is true--true--true!”

They heard eight strike on the different clocks of the Beauvoisine

quarter, which is full of schools, churches, and large empty hotels.

They no longer spoke, but they felt as they looked upon each other a

buzzing in their heads, as if something sonorous had escaped from the

fixed eyes of each of them. They were hand in hand now, and the past,

the future, reminiscences and dreams, all were confounded in the

sweetness of this ecstasy. Night was darkening over the walls, on which

still shone, half hidden in the shade, the coarse colours of four bills

representing four scenes from the “Tour de Nesle,” with a motto in

Spanish and French at the bottom. Through the sash-window a patch of

dark sky was seen between the pointed roofs.

She rose to light two wax-candles on the drawers, then she sat down

again.

“Well!” said Léon.

“Well!” she replied.

He was thinking how to resume the interrupted conversation, when she

said to him--

“How is it that no one until now has ever expressed such sentiments to

me?”

The clerk said that ideal natures were difficult to understand. He from

the first moment had loved her, and he despaired when he thought of the

happiness that would have been theirs, if thanks to fortune, meeting her

earlier, they had been indissolubly bound to one another.

“I have sometimes thought of it,” she went on.

“What a dream!” murmured Léon. And fingering gently the blue binding of

her long white sash, he added, “And who prevents us from beginning now?”

“No, my friend,” she replied; “I am too old; you are too young. Forget

me! Others will love you; you will love them.”

“Not as you!” he cried.

“What a child you are! Come, let us be sensible. I wish it.”

She showed him the impossibility of their love, and that they must

remain, as formerly, on the simple terms of a fraternal friendship.

Was she speaking thus seriously? No doubt Emma did not herself know,

quite absorbed as she was by the charm of the seduction, and the

necessity of defending herself from it; and contemplating the young

man with a moved look, she gently repulsed the timid caresses that his

trembling hands attempted.

“Ah! forgive me!” he cried, drawing back.

Emma was seized with a vague fear at this shyness, more dangerous to her

than the boldness of Rodolphe when he advanced to her open-armed. No man

had ever seemed to her so beautiful. An exquisite candour emanated from

his being. He lowered his long fine eyelashes, that curled upwards.

His cheek, with the soft skin reddened, she thought, with desire of her

person, and Emma felt an invincible longing to press her lips to it.

Then, leaning towards the clock as if to see the time--

“Ah! how late it is!” she said; “how we do chatter!”

He understood the hint and took up his hat.

“It has even made me forget the theatre. And poor Bovary has left me

here especially for that. Monsieur Lormeaux, of the Rue Grand-Pont, was

to take me and his wife.”

And the opportunity was lost, as she was to leave the next day.

“Really!” said Léon.

“Yes.”

“But I must see you again,” he went on. “I wanted to tell you--”

“What?”

“Something--important--serious. Oh, no! Besides, you will not go; it is

impossible. If you should--listen to me. Then you have not understood

me; you have not guessed--”

“Yet you speak plainly,” said Emma.

“Ah! you can jest. Enough! enough! Oh, for pity’s sake, let me see you

once--only once!”

“Well--” She stopped; then, as if thinking better of it, “Oh, not here!”

“Where you will.”

“Will you--” She seemed to reflect; then abruptly, “To-morrow at eleven

o’clock in the cathedral.”

“I shall be there,” he cried, seizing her hands, which she disengaged.

And as they were both standing up, he behind her, and Emma with her head

bent, he stooped over her and pressed long kisses on her neck.

“You are mad! Ah! you are mad!” she said, with sounding little laughs,

while the kisses multiplied.

Then bending his head over her shoulder, he seemed to beg the consent of

her eyes. They fell upon him full of an icy dignity.

Léon stepped back to go out. He stopped on the threshold; then he

whispered with a trembling voice, “Tomorrow!”

She answered with a nod, and disappeared like a bird into the next room.

In the evening Emma wrote the clerk an interminable letter, in which she

cancelled the rendezvous; all was over; they must not, for the sake of

their happiness, meet again. But when the letter was finished, as she

did not know Léon’s address, she was puzzled.

“I’ll give it to him myself,” she said; “he will come.”

The next morning, at the open window, and humming on his balcony, Léon

himself varnished his pumps with several coatings. He put on white

trousers, fine socks, a green coat, emptied all the scent he had into

his handkerchief, then having had his hair curled, he uncurled it again,

in order to give it a more natural elegance.

“It is still too early,” he thought, looking at the hairdresser’s

cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of nine. He read an old fashion

journal, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three streets, thought it

was time, and went slowly towards the porch of Notre Dame.

It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate sparkled in the

jeweller’s windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral

made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds

fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square,

resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its

pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly

spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds;

the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst

melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting

paper round bunches of violets.

The young man took one. It was the first time that he had bought flowers

for a woman, and his breast, as he smelt them, swelled with pride, as if

this homage that he meant for another had recoiled upon himself.

But he was afraid of being seen; he resolutely entered the church. The

beadle, who was just then standing on the threshold in the middle of the

left doorway, under the “Dancing Marianne,” with feather cap, and rapier

dangling against his calves, came in, more majestic than a cardinal, and

as shining as a saint on a holy pyx.

He came towards Léon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity

assumed by ecclesiastics when they question children--

“The gentleman, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? The gentleman

would like to see the curiosities of the church?”

“No!” said the other.

And he first went round the lower aisles. Then he went out to look at

the Place. Emma was not coming yet. He went up again to the choir.

The nave was reflected in the full fonts with the beginning of the

arches and some portions of the glass windows. But the reflections of

the paintings, broken by the marble rim, were continued farther on upon

the flag-stones, like a many-coloured carpet. The broad daylight from

without streamed into the church in three enormous rays from the three

opened portals. From time to time at the upper end a sacristan passed,

making the oblique genuflexion of devout persons in a hurry. The crystal

lustres hung motionless. In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and

from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose

sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating, its echo

reverberating under the lofty vault.

Léon with solemn steps walked along by the walls. Life had never seemed

so good to him. She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking

back at the glances that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her

gold eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that he

had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue.

The church like a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down

to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone

resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she

might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odours.

But she did not come. He sat down on a chair, and his eyes fell upon a

blue stained window representing boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at

it long, attentively, and he counted the scales of the fishes and the

button-holes of the doublets, while his thoughts wandered off towards

Emma.

The beadle, standing aloof, was inwardly angry at this individual who

took the liberty of admiring the cathedral by himself. He seemed to him

to be conducting himself in a monstrous fashion, to be robbing him in a

sort, and almost committing sacrilege.

But a rustle of silk on the flags, the tip of a bonnet, a lined

cloak--it was she! Léon rose and ran to meet her.

Emma was pale. She walked fast.

“Read!” she said, holding out a paper to him. “Oh, no!”

And she abruptly withdrew her hand to enter the chapel of the Virgin,

where, kneeling on a chair, she began to pray.

The young man was irritated at this bigot fancy; then he nevertheless

experienced a certain charm in seeing her, in the middle of a

rendezvous, thus lost in her devotions, like an Andalusian marchioness;

then he grew bored, for she seemed never coming to an end.

Emma prayed, or rather strove to pray, hoping that some sudden

resolution might descend to her from heaven; and to draw down divine

aid she filled full her eyes with the splendours of the tabernacle. She

breathed in the perfumes of the full-blown flowers in the large vases,

and listened to the stillness of the church, that only heightened the

tumult of her heart.

She rose, and they were about to leave, when the beadle came forward,

hurriedly saying--

“Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? Madame would like to

see the curiosities of the church?”

“Oh, no!” cried the clerk.

“Why not?” said she. For she clung with her expiring virtue to the

Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs--anything.

Then, in order to proceed “by rule,” the beadle conducted them right to

the entrance near the square, where, pointing out with his cane a large

circle of block-stones without inscription or carving--

“This,” he said majestically, “is the circumference of the beautiful

bell of Ambroise. It weighed forty thousand pounds. There was not its

equal in all Europe. The workman who cast it died of the joy--”

“Let us go on,” said Léon.

The old fellow started off again; then, having got back to the chapel of

the Virgin, he stretched forth his arm with an all-embracing gesture

of demonstration, and, prouder than a country squire showing you his

espaliers, went on--

“This simple stone covers Pierre de Breze, lord of Varenne and of

Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou, and governor of Normandy, who died at

the battle of Montlhery on the 16th of July, 1465.”

Léon bit his lips, fuming.

“And on the right, this gentleman all encased in iron, on the

prancing horse, is his grandson, Louis de Breze, lord of Breval and of

Montchauvet, Count de Maulevrier, Baron de Mauny, chamberlain to the

king, Knight of the Order, and also governor of Normandy; died on the

23rd of July, 1531--a Sunday, as the inscription specifies; and below,

this figure, about to descend into the tomb, portrays the same person.

It is not possible, is it, to see a more perfect representation of

annihilation?”

Madame Bovary put up her eyeglasses. Léon, motionless, looked at her,

no longer even attempting to speak a single word, to make a gesture,

so discouraged was he at this two-fold obstinacy of gossip and

indifference.

The everlasting guide went on--

“Near him, this kneeling woman who weeps is his spouse, Diane de

Poitiers, Countess de Breze, Duchess de Valentinois, born in 1499, died

in 1566, and to the left, the one with the child is the Holy Virgin. Now

turn to this side; here are the tombs of the Ambroise. They were both

cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one was minister under Louis

XII. He did a great deal for the cathedral. In his will he left thirty

thousand gold crowns for the poor.”

And without stopping, still talking, he pushed them into a chapel

full of balustrades, some put away, and disclosed a kind of block that

certainly might once have been an ill-made statue.

“Truly,” he said with a groan, “it adorned the tomb of Richard Coeur de

Lion, King of England and Duke of Normandy. It was the Calvinists, sir,

who reduced it to this condition. They had buried it for spite in the

earth, under the episcopal seat of Monsignor. See! this is the door by

which Monsignor passes to his house. Let us pass on quickly to see the

gargoyle windows.”

But Léon hastily took some silver from his pocket and seized Emma’s

arm. The beadle stood dumfounded, not able to understand this untimely

munificence when there were still so many things for the stranger to

see. So calling him back, he cried--

“Sir! sir! The steeple! the steeple!”

“No, thank you!” said Léon.

“You are wrong, sir! It is four hundred and forty feet high, nine less

than the great pyramid of Egypt. It is all cast; it--”

Léon was fleeing, for it seemed to him that his love, that for nearly

two hours now had become petrified in the church like the stones, would

vanish like a vapour through that sort of truncated funnel, of oblong

cage, of open chimney that rises so grotesquely from the cathedral like

the extravagant attempt of some fantastic brazier.

“But where are we going?” she said.

Making no answer, he walked on with a rapid step; and Madame Bovary

was already, dipping her finger in the holy water when behind them they

heard a panting breath interrupted by the regular sound of a cane. Léon

turned back.

“Sir!”

“What is it?”

And he recognised the beadle, holding under his arms and balancing

against his stomach some twenty large sewn volumes. They were works

“which treated of the cathedral.”

“Idiot!” growled Léon, rushing out of the church.

A lad was playing about the close.

“Go and get me a cab!”

The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quatre-Vents; then they

were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed.

“Ah! Léon! Really--I don’t know--if I ought,” she whispered. Then with a

more serious air, “Do you know, it is very improper--”

“How so?” replied the clerk. “It is done at Paris.”

And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her.

Still the cab did not come. Léon was afraid she might go back into the

church. At last the cab appeared.

“At all events, go out by the north porch,” cried the beadle, who was

left alone on the threshold, “so as to see the Resurrection, the Last

Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames.”

“Where to, sir?” asked the coachman.

“Where you like,” said Léon, forcing Emma into the cab.

And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont,

crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and

stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille.

“Go on,” cried a voice that came from within.

The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour

Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop.

“No, straight on!” cried the same voice.

The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours, trotted

quietly beneath the elm-trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put his

leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the side

alley by the meadow to the margin of the waters.

It went along by the river, along the towing-path paved with sharp

pebbles, and for a long while in the direction of Oyssel, beyond the

isles.

But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatremares, Sotteville, La

Grande-Chaussee, the Rue d’Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of

the Jardin des Plantes.

“Get on, will you?” cried the voice more furiously.

And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the

Quai’des Curandiers, the Quai aux Meules, once more over the bridge, by

the Place du Champ de Mars, and behind the hospital gardens, where old

men in black coats were walking in the sun along the terrace all green

with ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard

Cauchoise, then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills.

It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered

about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont

Gargan, at La Rougue-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue

Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien,

Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise--in front of the Customs, at the “Vieille

Tour,” the “Trois Pipes,” and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to time

the coachman, on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses.

He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these

individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to now and then, and at

once exclamations of anger burst forth behind him. Then he lashed his

perspiring jades afresh, but indifferent to their jolting, running up

against things here and there, not caring if he did, demoralised, and

almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression.

And on the harbour, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the

streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken

eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds

drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb,

and tossing about like a vessel.

Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun

beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed

beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps

of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white

butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom.

At about six o’clock the carriage stopped in a back street of the

Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down,

and without turning her head.

Chapter Two

On reaching the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the

diligence. Hivert, who had waited for her fifty-three minutes, had at

last started.

Yet nothing forced her to go; but she had given her word that she would

return that same evening. Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her

heart she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at

once the chastisement and atonement of adultery.

She packed her box quickly, paid her bill, took a cab in the yard,

hurrying on the driver, urging him on, every moment inquiring about

the time and the miles traversed. He succeeded in catching up the

“Hirondelle” as it neared the first houses of Quincampoix.

Hardly was she seated in her corner than she closed her eyes, and opened

them at the foot of the hill, when from afar she recognised Félicité,

who was on the lookout in front of the farrier’s shop. Hivert pulled

in his horses and, the servant, climbing up to the window, said

mysteriously--

“Madame, you must go at once to Monsieur Homais. It’s for something

important.”

The village was silent as usual. At the corner of the streets were small

pink heaps that smoked in the air, for this was the time for jam-making,

and everyone at Yonville prepared his supply on the same day. But in

front of the chemist’s shop one might admire a far larger heap, and that

surpassed the others with the superiority that a laboratory must have

over ordinary stores, a general need over individual fancy.

She went in. The large arm-chair was upset, and even the “Fanal de

Rouen” lay on the ground, outspread between two pestles. She pushed open

the lobby door, and in the middle of the kitchen, amid brown jars full

of picked currants, of powdered sugar and lump sugar, of the scales on

the table, and of the pans on the fire, she saw all the Homais, small

and large, with aprons reaching to their chins, and with forks in their

hands. Justin was standing up with bowed head, and the chemist was

screaming--

“Who told you to go and fetch it in the Capharnaum.”

“What is it? What is the matter?”

“What is it?” replied the druggist. “We are making preserves; they are

simmering; but they were about to boil over, because there is too

much juice, and I ordered another pan. Then he, from indolence, from

laziness, went and took, hanging on its nail in my laboratory, the key

of the Capharnaum.”

It was thus the druggist called a small room under the leads, full of

the utensils and the goods of his trade. He often spent long hours there

alone, labelling, decanting, and doing up again; and he looked upon

it not as a simple store, but as a veritable sanctuary, whence there

afterwards issued, elaborated by his hands, all sorts of pills, boluses,

infusions, lotions, and potions, that would bear far and wide his

celebrity. No one in the world set foot there, and he respected it so,

that he swept it himself. Finally, if the pharmacy, open to all comers,

was the spot where he displayed his pride, the Capharnaum was the refuge

where, egoistically concentrating himself, Homais delighted in the

exercise of his predilections, so that Justin’s thoughtlessness seemed

to him a monstrous piece of irreverence, and, redder than the currants,

he repeated--

“Yes, from the Capharnaum! The key that locks up the acids and caustic

alkalies! To go and get a spare pan! a pan with a lid! and that I

shall perhaps never use! Everything is of importance in the delicate

operations of our art! But, devil take it! one must make distinctions,

and not employ for almost domestic purposes that which is meant for

pharmaceutical! It is as if one were to carve a fowl with a scalpel; as

if a magistrate--”

“Now be calm,” said Madame Homais.

And Athalie, pulling at his coat, cried “Papa! papa!”

“No, let me alone,” went on the druggist “let me alone, hang it! My

word! One might as well set up for a grocer. That’s it! go it! respect

nothing! break, smash, let loose the leeches, burn the mallow-paste,

pickle the gherkins in the window jars, tear up the bandages!”

“I thought you had--” said Emma.

“Presently! Do you know to what you exposed yourself? Didn’t you see

anything in the corner, on the left, on the third shelf? Speak, answer,

articulate something.”

“I--don’t--know,” stammered the young fellow.

“Ah! you don’t know! Well, then, I do know! You saw a bottle of blue

glass, sealed with yellow wax, that contains a white powder, on which I

have even written ‘Dangerous!’ And do you know what is in it? Arsenic!

And you go and touch it! You take a pan that was next to it!”

“Next to it!” cried Madame Homais, clasping her hands. “Arsenic! You

might have poisoned us all.”

And the children began howling as if they already had frightful pains in

their entrails.

“Or poison a patient!” continued the druggist. “Do you want to see me

in the prisoner’s dock with criminals, in a court of justice? To see

me dragged to the scaffold? Don’t you know what care I take in managing

things, although I am so thoroughly used to it? Often I am horrified

myself when I think of my responsibility; for the Government persecutes

us, and the absurd legislation that rules us is a veritable Damocles’

sword over our heads.”

Emma no longer dreamed of asking what they wanted her for, and the

druggist went on in breathless phrases--

“That is your return for all the kindness we have shown you! That is

how you recompense me for the really paternal care that I lavish on

you! For without me where would you be? What would you be doing? Who

provides you with food, education, clothes, and all the means of

figuring one day with honour in the ranks of society? But you must pull

hard at the oar if you’re to do that, and get, as, people say,

callosities upon your hands. _Fabricando fit faber, age quod

agis_.”[18]

[18] The worker lives by working, do what he will.

He was so exasperated he quoted Latin. He would have quoted Chinese

or Greenlandish had he known those two languages, for he was in one

of those crises in which the whole soul shows indistinctly what it

contains, like the ocean, which, in the storm, opens itself from the

seaweeds on its shores down to the sands of its abysses.

And he went on--

“I am beginning to repent terribly of having taken you up! I should

certainly have done better to have left you to rot in your poverty and

the dirt in which you were born. Oh, you’ll never be fit for anything

but to herd animals with horns! You have no aptitude for science! You

hardly know how to stick on a label! And there you are, dwelling with me

snug as a parson, living in clover, taking your ease!”

But Emma, turning to Madame Homais, “I was told to come here--”

“Oh, dear me!” interrupted the good woman, with a sad air, “how am I to

tell you? It is a misfortune!”

She could not finish, the druggist was thundering--“Empty it! Clean it!

Take it back! Be quick!”

And seizing Justin by the collar of his blouse, he shook a book out of

his pocket. The lad stooped, but Homais was the quicker, and, having

picked up the volume, contemplated it with staring eyes and open mouth.

“CONJUGAL--LOVE!” he said, slowly separating the two words. “Ah! very

good! very good! very pretty! And illustrations! Oh, this is too much!”

Madame Homais came forward.

“No, do not touch it!”

The children wanted to look at the pictures.

“Leave the room,” he said imperiously; and they went out.

First he walked up and down with the open volume in his hand, rolling

his eyes, choking, tumid, apoplectic. Then he came straight to his

pupil, and, planting himself in front of him with crossed arms--

“Have you every vice, then, little wretch? Take care! you are on a

downward path. Did not you reflect that this infamous book might fall

in the hands of my children, kindle a spark in their minds, tarnish the

purity of Athalie, corrupt Napoleon. He is already formed like a man.

Are you quite sure, anyhow, that they have not read it? Can you certify

to me--”

“But really, sir,” said Emma, “you wished to tell me--”

“Ah, yes! madame. Your father-in-law is dead.”

In fact, Monsieur Bovary senior had expired the evening before suddenly

from an attack of apoplexy as he got up from table, and by way of

greater precaution, on account of Emma’s sensibility, Charles had begged

Homais to break the horrible news to her gradually. Homais had thought

over his speech; he had rounded, polished it, made it rhythmical; it was

a masterpiece of prudence and transitions, of subtle turns and delicacy;

but anger had got the better of rhetoric.

Emma, giving up all chance of hearing any details, left the pharmacy;

for Monsieur Homais had taken up the thread of his vituperations.

However, he was growing calmer, and was now grumbling in a paternal tone

whilst he fanned himself with his skull-cap.

“It is not that I entirely disapprove of the work. Its author was a

doctor! There are certain scientific points in it that it is not ill a

man should know, and I would even venture to say that a man must know.

But later--later! At any rate, not till you are man yourself and your

temperament is formed.”

When Emma knocked at the door. Charles, who was waiting for her, came

forward with open arms and said to her with tears in his voice--

“Ah! my dear!”

And he bent over her gently to kiss her. But at the contact of his lips

the memory of the other seized her, and she passed her hand over her

face shuddering.

But she made answer, “Yes, I know, I know!”

He showed her the letter in which his mother told the event without any

sentimental hypocrisy. She only regretted her husband had not received

the consolations of religion, as he had died at Daudeville, in the

street, at the door of a cafe after a patriotic dinner with some

ex-officers.

Emma gave him back the letter; then at dinner, for appearance’s sake,

she affected a certain repugnance. But as he urged her to try, she

resolutely began eating, while Charles opposite her sat motionless in a

dejected attitude.

Now and then he raised his head and gave her a long look full of

distress. Once he sighed, “I should have liked to see him again!”

She was silent. At last, understanding that she must say something, “How

old was your father?” she asked.

“Fifty-eight.”

“Ah!”

And that was all.

A quarter of an hour after he added, “My poor mother! what will become

of her now?”

She made a gesture that signified she did not know. Seeing her so

taciturn, Charles imagined her much affected, and forced himself to say

nothing, not to reawaken this sorrow which moved him. And, shaking off

his own--

“Did you enjoy yourself yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes.”

When the cloth was removed, Bovary did not rise, nor did Emma; and as

she looked at him, the monotony of the spectacle drove little by little

all pity from her heart. He seemed to her paltry, weak, a cipher--in

a word, a poor thing in every way. How to get rid of him? What an

interminable evening! Something stupefying like the fumes of opium

seized her.

They heard in the passage the sharp noise of a wooden leg on the boards.

It was Hippolyte bringing back Emma’s luggage. In order to put it down

he described painfully a quarter of a circle with his stump.

“He doesn’t even remember any more about it,” she thought, looking at

the poor devil, whose coarse red hair was wet with perspiration.

Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and

without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him

in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified

reproach to his incurable incapacity.

“Hallo! you’ve a pretty bouquet,” he said, noticing Léon’s violets on

the chimney.

“Yes,” she replied indifferently; “it’s a bouquet I bought just now from

a beggar.”

Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears,

against them, smelt them delicately.

She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water.

The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept much.

Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared. The following day

they had a talk over the mourning. They went and sat down with their

workboxes by the waterside under the arbour.

Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much

affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little

about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst

days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the

instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst

she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a

moment. Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since

they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and

not having eyes enough to gaze upon each other. She tried to recall the

slightest details of that past day. But the presence of her husband and

mother-in-law worried her. She would have liked to hear nothing, to see

nothing, so as not to disturb the meditation on her love, that, do what

she would, became lost in external sensations.

She was unpicking the lining of a dress, and the strips were scattered

around her. Madame Bovary senior was plying her scissor without looking

up, and Charles, in his list slippers and his old brown surtout that he

used as a dressing-gown, sat with both hands in his pockets, and did not

speak either; near them Berthe, in a little white pinafore, was raking

sand in the walks with her spade. Suddenly she saw Monsieur Lheureux,

the linendraper, come in through the gate.

He came to offer his services “under the sad circumstances.” Emma

answered that she thought she could do without. The shopkeeper was not

to be beaten.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I should like to have a private talk

with you.” Then in a low voice, “It’s about that affair--you know.”

Charles crimsoned to his ears. “Oh, yes! certainly.” And in his

confusion, turning to his wife, “Couldn’t you, my darling?”

She seemed to understand him, for she rose; and Charles said to his

mother, “It is nothing particular. No doubt, some household trifle.” He

did not want her to know the story of the bill, fearing her reproaches.

As soon as they were alone, Monsieur Lheureux in sufficiently clear

terms began to congratulate Emma on the inheritance, then to talk of

indifferent matters, of the espaliers, of the harvest, and of his own

health, which was always so-so, always having ups and downs. In fact, he

had to work devilish hard, although he didn’t make enough, in spite of

all people said, to find butter for his bread.

Emma let him talk on. She had bored herself so prodigiously the last two

days.

“And so you’re quite well again?” he went on. “Ma foi! I saw your

husband in a sad state. He’s a good fellow, though we did have a little

misunderstanding.”

She asked what misunderstanding, for Charles had said nothing of the

dispute about the goods supplied to her.

“Why, you know well enough,” cried Lheureux. “It was about your little

fancies--the travelling trunks.”

He had drawn his hat over his eyes, and, with his hands behind his

back, smiling and whistling, he looked straight at her in an unbearable

manner. Did he suspect anything?

She was lost in all kinds of apprehensions. At last, however, he went

on--

“We made it up, all the same, and I’ve come again to propose another

arrangement.”

This was to renew the bill Bovary had signed. The doctor, of course,

would do as he pleased; he was not to trouble himself, especially just

now, when he would have a lot of worry. “And he would do better to give

it over to someone else--to you, for example. With a power of attorney

it could be easily managed, and then we (you and I) would have our

little business transactions together.”

She did not understand. He was silent. Then, passing to his trade,

Lheureux declared that madame must require something. He would send her

a black barege, twelve yards, just enough to make a gown.

“The one you’ve on is good enough for the house, but you want another

for calls. I saw that the very moment that I came in. I’ve the eye of an

American!”

He did not send the stuff; he brought it. Then he came again to measure

it; he came again on other pretexts, always trying to make himself

agreeable, useful, “enfeoffing himself,” as Homais would have said, and

always dropping some hint to Emma about the power of attorney. He never

mentioned the bill; she did not think of it. Charles, at the beginning

of her convalescence, had certainly said something about it to her,

but so many emotions had passed through her head that she no longer

remembered it. Besides, she took care not to talk of any money

questions. Madame Bovary seemed surprised at this, and attributed the

change in her ways to the religious sentiments she had contracted during

her illness.

But as soon as she was gone, Emma greatly astounded Bovary by her

practical good sense. It would be necessary to make inquiries, to look

into mortgages, and see if there were any occasion for a sale by auction

or a liquidation. She quoted technical terms casually, pronounced the

grand words of order, the future, foresight, and constantly exaggerated

the difficulties of settling his father’s affairs so much, that at last

one day she showed him the rough draft of a power of attorney to manage

and administer his business, arrange all loans, sign and endorse all

bills, pay all sums, etc. She had profited by Lheureux’s lessons.

Charles naively asked her where this paper came from.

“Monsieur Guillaumin”; and with the utmost coolness she added, “I don’t

trust him overmuch. Notaries have such a bad reputation. Perhaps we

ought to consult--we only know--no one.”

“Unless Léon--” replied Charles, who was reflecting. But it was

difficult to explain matters by letter. Then she offered to make the

journey, but he thanked her. She insisted. It was quite a contest of

mutual consideration. At last she cried with affected waywardness--

“No, I will go!”

“How good you are!” he said, kissing her forehead.

The next morning she set out in the “Hirondelle” to go to Rouen to

consult Monsieur Léon, and she stayed there three days.

Chapter Three

They were three full, exquisite days--a true honeymoon. They were at

the Hotel-de-Boulogne, on the harbour; and they lived there, with drawn

blinds and closed doors, with flowers on the floor, and iced syrups were

brought them early in the morning.

Towards evening they took a covered boat and went to dine on one of the

islands. It was the time when one hears by the side of the dockyard the

caulking-mallets sounding against the hull of vessels. The smoke of

the tar rose up between the trees; there were large fatty drops on the

water, undulating in the purple colour of the sun, like floating plaques

of Florentine bronze.

They rowed down in the midst of moored boats, whose long oblique cables

grazed lightly against the bottom of the boat. The din of the town

gradually grew distant; the rolling of carriages, the tumult of voices,

the yelping of dogs on the decks of vessels. She took off her bonnet,

and they landed on their island.

They sat down in the low-ceilinged room of a tavern, at whose door hung

black nets. They ate fried smelts, cream and cherries. They lay down

upon the grass; they kissed behind the poplars; and they would fain,

like two Robinsons, have lived for ever in this little place, which

seemed to them in their beatitude the most magnificent on earth. It was

not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that

they had heard the water flowing and the wind blowing in the leaves;

but, no doubt, they had never admired all this, as if Nature had

not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the

gratification of their desires.

At night they returned. The boat glided along the shores of the islands.

They sat at the bottom, both hidden by the shade, in silence. The square

oars rang in the iron thwarts, and, in the stillness, seemed to mark

time, like the beating of a metronome, while at the stern the rudder

that trailed behind never ceased its gentle splash against the water.

Once the moon rose; they did not fail to make fine phrases, finding the

orb melancholy and full of poetry. She even began to sing--

“One night, do you remember, we were sailing,” etc.

Her musical but weak voice died away along the waves, and the winds

carried off the trills that Léon heard pass like the flapping of wings

about him.

She was opposite him, leaning against the partition of the shallop,

through one of whose raised blinds the moon streamed in. Her black

dress, whose drapery spread out like a fan, made her seem more slender,

taller. Her head was raised, her hands clasped, her eyes turned towards

heaven. At times the shadow of the willows hid her completely; then she

reappeared suddenly, like a vision in the moonlight.

Léon, on the floor by her side, found under his hand a ribbon of scarlet

silk. The boatman looked at it, and at last said--

“Perhaps it belongs to the party I took out the other day. A lot

of jolly folk, gentlemen and ladies, with cakes, champagne,

cornets--everything in style! There was one especially, a tall handsome

man with small moustaches, who was that funny! And they all kept saying,

‘Now tell us something, Adolphe--Dolpe,’ I think.”

She shivered.

“You are in pain?” asked Léon, coming closer to her.

“Oh, it’s nothing! No doubt, it is only the night air.”

“And who doesn’t want for women, either,” softly added the sailor,

thinking he was paying the stranger a compliment.

Then, spitting on his hands, he took the oars again.

Yet they had to part. The adieux were sad. He was to send his letters to

Mere Rollet, and she gave him such precise instructions about a double

envelope that he admired greatly her amorous astuteness.

“So you can assure me it is all right?” she said with her last kiss.

“Yes, certainly.”

“But why,” he thought afterwards as he came back through the streets

alone, “is she so very anxious to get this power of attorney?”

Chapter Four

Léon soon put on an air of superiority before his comrades, avoided

their company, and completely neglected his work.

He waited for her letters; he re-read them; he wrote to her. He called

her to mind with all the strength of his desires and of his memories.

Instead of lessening with absence, this longing to see her again grew,

so that at last on Saturday morning he escaped from his office.

When, from the summit of the hill, he saw in the valley below the

church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the wind, he felt that

delight mingled with triumphant vanity and egoistic tenderness that

millionaires must experience when they come back to their native

village.

He went rambling round her house. A light was burning in the kitchen. He

watched for her shadow behind the curtains, but nothing appeared.

Mere Lefrancois, when she saw him, uttered many exclamations. She

thought he “had grown and was thinner,” while Artémise, on the contrary,

thought him stouter and darker.

He dined in the little room as of yore, but alone, without the

tax-gatherer; for Binet, tired of waiting for the “Hirondelle,” had

definitely put forward his meal one hour, and now he dined punctually at

five, and yet he declared usually the rickety old concern “was late.”

Léon, however, made up his mind, and knocked at the doctor’s door.

Madame was in her room, and did not come down for a quarter of an hour.

The doctor seemed delighted to see him, but he never stirred out that

evening, nor all the next day.

He saw her alone in the evening, very late, behind the garden in the

lane; in the lane, as she had the other one! It was a stormy night, and

they talked under an umbrella by lightning flashes.

Their separation was becoming intolerable. “I would rather die!” said

Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. “Adieu! adieu! When shall I

see you again?”

They came back again to embrace once more, and it was then that

she promised him to find soon, by no matter what means, a regular

opportunity for seeing one another in freedom at least once a week. Emma

never doubted she should be able to do this. Besides, she was full of

hope. Some money was coming to her.

On the strength of it she bought a pair of yellow curtains with large

stripes for her room, whose cheapness Monsieur Lheureux had commended;

she dreamed of getting a carpet, and Lheureux, declaring that it wasn’t

“drinking the sea,” politely undertook to supply her with one. She could

no longer do without his services. Twenty times a day she sent for him,

and he at once put by his business without a murmur. People could not

understand either why Mere Rollet breakfasted with her every day, and

even paid her private visits.

It was about this time, that is to say, the beginning of winter, that

she seemed seized with great musical fervour.

One evening when Charles was listening to her, she began the same piece

four times over, each time with much vexation, while he, not noticing

any difference, cried--

“Bravo! very goodl You are wrong to stop. Go on!”

“Oh, no; it is execrable! My fingers are quite rusty.”

The next day he begged her to play him something again.

“Very well; to please you!”

And Charles confessed she had gone off a little. She played wrong notes

and blundered; then, stopping short--

“Ah! it is no use. I ought to take some lessons; but--” She bit her lips

and added, “Twenty francs a lesson, that’s too dear!”

“Yes, so it is--rather,” said Charles, giggling stupidly. “But it seems

to me that one might be able to do it for less; for there are artists of

no reputation, and who are often better than the celebrities.”

“Find them!” said Emma.

The next day when he came home he looked at her shyly, and at last could

no longer keep back the words.

“How obstinate you are sometimes! I went to Barfucheres to-day. Well,

Madame Liegard assured me that her three young ladies who are at

La Misericorde have lessons at fifty sous apiece, and that from an

excellent mistress!”

She shrugged her shoulders and did not open her piano again. But when

she passed by it (if Bovary were there), she sighed--

“Ah! my poor piano!”

And when anyone came to see her, she did not fail to inform them she

had given up music, and could not begin again now for important reasons.

Then people commiserated her--

“What a pity! she had so much talent!”

They even spoke to Bovary about it. They put him to shame, and

especially the chemist.

“You are wrong. One should never let any of the faculties of nature lie

fallow. Besides, just think, my good friend, that by inducing madame to

study; you are economising on the subsequent musical education of

your child. For my own part, I think that mothers ought themselves to

instruct their children. That is an idea of Rousseau’s, still rather

new perhaps, but that will end by triumphing, I am certain of it, like

mothers nursing their own children and vaccination.”

So Charles returned once more to this question of the piano. Emma

replied bitterly that it would be better to sell it. This poor piano,

that had given her vanity so much satisfaction--to see it go was to

Bovary like the indefinable suicide of a part of herself.

“If you liked,” he said, “a lesson from time to time, that wouldn’t

after all be very ruinous.”

“But lessons,” she replied, “are only of use when followed up.”

And thus it was she set about obtaining her husband’s permission to go

to town once a week to see her lover. At the end of a month she was even

considered to have made considerable progress.

Chapter Five

She went on Thursdays. She got up and dressed silently, in order not to

awaken Charles, who would have made remarks about her getting ready too

early. Next she walked up and down, went to the windows, and looked out

at the Place. The early dawn was broadening between the pillars of the

market, and the chemist’s shop, with the shutters still up, showed in

the pale light of the dawn the large letters of his signboard.

When the clock pointed to a quarter past seven, she went off to the

“Lion d’Or,” whose door Artémise opened yawning. The girl then made

up the coals covered by the cinders, and Emma remained alone in the

kitchen. Now and again she went out. Hivert was leisurely harnessing his

horses, listening, moreover, to Mere Lefrancois, who, passing her head

and nightcap through a grating, was charging him with commissions and

giving him explanations that would have confused anyone else. Emma kept

beating the soles of her boots against the pavement of the yard.

At last, when he had eaten his soup, put on his cloak, lighted his pipe,

and grasped his whip, he calmly installed himself on his seat.

The “Hirondelle” started at a slow trot, and for about a mile stopped

here and there to pick up passengers who waited for it, standing at the

border of the road, in front of their yard gates.

Those who had secured seats the evening before kept it waiting; some

even were still in bed in their houses. Hivert called, shouted, swore;

then he got down from his seat and went and knocked loudly at the doors.

The wind blew through the cracked windows.

The four seats, however, filled up. The carriage rolled off; rows of

apple-trees followed one upon another, and the road between its two long

ditches, full of yellow water, rose, constantly narrowing towards the

horizon.

Emma knew it from end to end; she knew that after a meadow there was

a sign-post, next an elm, a barn, or the hut of a lime-kiln tender.

Sometimes even, in the hope of getting some surprise, she shut her eyes,

but she never lost the clear perception of the distance to be traversed.

At last the brick houses began to follow one another more closely, the

earth resounded beneath the wheels, the “Hirondelle” glided between the

gardens, where through an opening one saw statues, a periwinkle plant,

clipped yews, and a swing. Then on a sudden the town appeared. Sloping

down like an amphitheatre, and drowned in the fog, it widened out

beyond the bridges confusedly. Then the open country spread away with

a monotonous movement till it touched in the distance the vague line of

the pale sky. Seen thus from above, the whole landscape looked immovable

as a picture; the anchored ships were massed in one corner, the river

curved round the foot of the green hills, and the isles, oblique in

shape, lay on the water, like large, motionless, black fishes. The

factory chimneys belched forth immense brown fumes that were blown away

at the top. One heard the rumbling of the foundries, together with the

clear chimes of the churches that stood out in the mist. The leafless

trees on the boulevards made violet thickets in the midst of the

houses, and the roofs, all shining with the rain, threw back unequal

reflections, according to the height of the quarters in which they were.

Sometimes a gust of wind drove the clouds towards the Saint Catherine

hills, like aerial waves that broke silently against a cliff.

A giddiness seemed to her to detach itself from this mass of existence,

and her heart swelled as if the hundred and twenty thousand souls that

palpitated there had all at once sent into it the vapour of the passions

she fancied theirs. Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and

expanded with tumult to the vague murmurings that rose towards her. She

poured it out upon the square, on the walks, on the streets, and the

old Norman city outspread before her eyes as an enormous capital, as a

Babylon into which she was entering. She leant with both hands against

the window, drinking in the breeze; the three horses galloped, the

stones grated in the mud, the diligence rocked, and Hivert, from afar,

hailed the carts on the road, while the bourgeois who had spent the

night at the Guillaume woods came quietly down the hill in their little

family carriages.

They stopped at the barrier; Emma undid her overshoes, put on other

gloves, rearranged her shawl, and some twenty paces farther she got down

from the “Hirondelle.”

The town was then awakening. Shop-boys in caps were cleaning up the

shop-fronts, and women with baskets against their hips, at intervals

uttered sonorous cries at the corners of streets. She walked with

downcast eyes, close to the walls, and smiling with pleasure under her

lowered black veil.

For fear of being seen, she did not usually take the most direct road.

She plunged into dark alleys, and, all perspiring, reached the bottom

of the Rue Nationale, near the fountain that stands there. It is the

quarter for theatres, public-houses, and whores. Often a cart would

pass near her, bearing some shaking scenery. Waiters in aprons were

sprinkling sand on the flagstones between green shrubs. It all smelt of

absinthe, cigars, and oysters.

She turned down a street; she recognised him by his curling hair that

escaped from beneath his hat.

Léon walked along the pavement. She followed him to the hotel. He went

up, opened the door, entered--What an embrace!

Then, after the kisses, the words gushed forth. They told each other the

sorrows of the week, the presentiments, the anxiety for the letters; but

now everything was forgotten; they gazed into each other’s faces with

voluptuous laughs, and tender names.

The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat. The curtains

were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too

much towards the bell-shaped bedside; and nothing in the world was so

lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple

colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms,

hiding her face in her hands.

The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its

calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods,

ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs

shone suddenly when the sun came in. On the chimney between the

candelabra there were two of those pink shells in which one hears the

murmur of the sea if one holds them to the ear.

How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite its rather

faded splendour! They always found the furniture in the same place, and

sometimes hairpins, that she had forgotten the Thursday before, under

the pedestal of the clock. They lunched by the fireside on a little

round table, inlaid with rosewood. Emma carved, put bits on his plate

with all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed with a sonorous and

libertine laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the

glass to the rings on her fingers. They were so completely lost in

the possession of each other that they thought themselves in their

own house, and that they would live there till death, like two spouses

eternally young. They said “our room,” “our carpet,” she even said “my

slippers,” a gift of Léon’s, a whim she had had. They were pink satin,

bordered with swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too

short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was

held only by the toes to her bare foot.

He for the first time enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy of feminine

refinements. He had never met this grace of language, this reserve of

clothing, these poses of the weary dove. He admired the exaltation of

her soul and the lace on her petticoat. Besides, was she not “a lady”

and a married woman--a real mistress, in fine?

By the diversity of her humour, in turn mystical or mirthful, talkative,

taciturn, passionate, careless, she awakened in him a thousand desires,

called up instincts or memories. She was the mistress of all the novels,

the heroine of all the dramas, the vague “she” of all the volumes

of verse. He found again on her shoulder the amber colouring of the

“Odalisque Bathing”; she had the long waist of feudal chatelaines, and

she resembled the “Pale Woman of Barcelona.” But above all she was the

Angel!

Often looking at her, it seemed to him that his soul, escaping towards

her, spread like a wave about the outline of her head, and descended

drawn down into the whiteness of her breast. He knelt on the ground

before her, and with both elbows on her knees looked at her with a

smile, his face upturned.

She bent over him, and murmured, as if choking with intoxication--

“Oh, do not move! do not speak! look at me! Something so sweet comes

from your eyes that helps me so much!”

She called him “child.” “Child, do you love me?”

And she did not listen for his answer in the haste of her lips that

fastened to his mouth.

On the clock there was a bronze cupid, who smirked as he bent his arm

beneath a golden garland. They had laughed at it many a time, but when

they had to part everything seemed serious to them.

Motionless in front of each other, they kept repeating, “Till Thursday,

till Thursday.”

Suddenly she seized his head between her hands, kissed him hurriedly on

the forehead, crying, “Adieu!” and rushed down the stairs.

She went to a hairdresser’s in the Rue de la Comedie to have her hair

arranged. Night fell; the gas was lighted in the shop. She heard the

bell at the theatre calling the mummers to the performance, and she saw,

passing opposite, men with white faces and women in faded gowns going in

at the stage-door.

It was hot in the room, small, and too low where the stove was hissing

in the midst of wigs and pomades. The smell of the tongs, together with

the greasy hands that handled her head, soon stunned her, and she dozed

a little in her wrapper. Often, as he did her hair, the man offered her

tickets for a masked ball.

Then she went away. She went up the streets; reached the Croix-Rouge,

put on her overshoes, that she had hidden in the morning under the seat,

and sank into her place among the impatient passengers. Some got out

at the foot of the hill. She remained alone in the carriage. At every

turning all the lights of the town were seen more and more completely,

making a great luminous vapour about the dim houses. Emma knelt on the

cushions and her eyes wandered over the dazzling light. She sobbed;

called on Léon, sent him tender words and kisses lost in the wind.

On the hillside a poor devil wandered about with his stick in the midst

of the diligences. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and an old

staved-in beaver, turned out like a basin, hid his face; but when he

took it off he discovered in the place of eyelids empty and bloody

orbits. The flesh hung in red shreds, and there flowed from it liquids

that congealed into green scale down to the nose, whose black nostrils

sniffed convulsively. To speak to you he threw back his head with an

idiotic laugh; then his bluish eyeballs, rolling constantly, at the

temples beat against the edge of the open wound. He sang a little song

as he followed the carriages--

“Maids an the warmth of a summer day

Dream of love, and of love always”

And all the rest was about birds and sunshine and green leaves.

Sometimes he appeared suddenly behind Emma, bareheaded, and she drew

back with a cry. Hivert made fun of him. He would advise him to get a

booth at the Saint Romain fair, or else ask him, laughing, how his young

woman was.

Often they had started when, with a sudden movement, his hat entered the

diligence through the small window, while he clung with his other arm

to the footboard, between the wheels splashing mud. His voice, feeble

at first and quavering, grew sharp; it resounded in the night like the

indistinct moan of a vague distress; and through the ringing of the

bells, the murmur of the trees, and the rumbling of the empty vehicle,

it had a far-off sound that disturbed Emma. It went to the bottom of

her soul, like a whirlwind in an abyss, and carried her away into the

distances of a boundless melancholy. But Hivert, noticing a weight

behind, gave the blind man sharp cuts with his whip. The thong lashed

his wounds, and he fell back into the mud with a yell. Then the

passengers in the “Hirondelle” ended by falling asleep, some with open

mouths, others with lowered chins, leaning against their neighbour’s

shoulder, or with their arm passed through the strap, oscillating

regularly with the jolting of the carriage; and the reflection of the

lantern swinging without, on the crupper of the wheeler; penetrating

into the interior through the chocolate calico curtains, threw

sanguineous shadows over all these motionless people. Emma, drunk with

grief, shivered in her clothes, feeling her feet grow colder and colder,

and death in her soul.

Charles at home was waiting for her; the “Hirondelle” was always late

on Thursdays. Madame arrived at last, and scarcely kissed the child. The

dinner was not ready. No matter! She excused the servant. This girl now

seemed allowed to do just as she liked.

Often her husband, noting her pallor, asked if she were unwell.

“No,” said Emma.

“But,” he replied, “you seem so strange this evening.”

“Oh, it’s nothing! nothing!”

There were even days when she had no sooner come in than she went up to

her room; and Justin, happening to be there, moved about noiselessly,

quicker at helping her than the best of maids. He put the matches

ready, the candlestick, a book, arranged her nightgown, turned back the

bedclothes.

“Come!” said she, “that will do. Now you can go.”

For he stood there, his hands hanging down and his eyes wide open, as if

enmeshed in the innumerable threads of a sudden reverie.

The following day was frightful, and those that came after still more

unbearable, because of her impatience to once again seize her happiness;

an ardent lust, inflamed by the images of past experience, and that

burst forth freely on the seventh day beneath Léon’s caresses. His

ardours were hidden beneath outbursts of wonder and gratitude. Emma

tasted this love in a discreet, absorbed fashion, maintained it by all

the artifices of her tenderness, and trembled a little lest it should be

lost later on.

She often said to him, with her sweet, melancholy voice--

“Ah! you too, you will leave me! You will marry! You will be like all

the others.”

He asked, “What others?”

“Why, like all men,” she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a

languid movement--

“You are all evil!”

One day, as they were talking philosophically of earthly disillusions,

to experiment on his jealousy, or yielding, perhaps, to an over-strong

need to pour out her heart, she told him that formerly, before him, she

had loved someone.

“Not like you,” she went on quickly, protesting by the head of her child

that “nothing had passed between them.”

The young man believed her, but none the less questioned her to find out

what he was.

“He was a ship’s captain, my dear.”

Was this not preventing any inquiry, and, at the same time, assuming a

higher ground through this pretended fascination exercised over a man

who must have been of warlike nature and accustomed to receive homage?

The clerk then felt the lowliness of his position; he longed for

epaulettes, crosses, titles. All that would please her--he gathered that

from her spendthrift habits.

Emma nevertheless concealed many of these extravagant fancies, such as

her wish to have a blue tilbury to drive into Rouen, drawn by an

English horse and driven by a groom in top-boots. It was Justin who had

inspired her with this whim, by begging her to take him into her

service as _valet-de-chambre_,[19] and if the privation of it did not

lessen the pleasure of her arrival at each rendezvous, it certainly

augmented the bitterness of the return.

[19] Manservant.

Often, when they talked together of Paris, she ended by murmuring, “Ah!

how happy we should be there!”

“Are we not happy?” gently answered the young man passing his hands over

her hair.

“Yes, that is true,” she said. “I am mad. Kiss me!”

To her husband she was more charming than ever. She made him

pistachio-creams, and played him waltzes after dinner. So he thought

himself the most fortunate of men and Emma was without uneasiness, when,

one evening suddenly he said--

“It is Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn’t it, who gives you lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I saw her just now,” Charles went on, “at Madame Liegeard’s. I

spoke to her about you, and she doesn’t know you.”

This was like a thunderclap. However, she replied quite naturally--

“Ah! no doubt she forgot my name.”

“But perhaps,” said the doctor, “there are several Demoiselles Lempereur

at Rouen who are music-mistresses.”

“Possibly!” Then quickly--“But I have my receipts here. See!”

And she went to the writing-table, ransacked all the drawers, rummaged

the papers, and at last lost her head so completely that Charles

earnestly begged her not to take so much trouble about those wretched

receipts.

“Oh, I will find them,” she said.

And, in fact, on the following Friday, as Charles was putting on one

of his boots in the dark cabinet where his clothes were kept, he felt

a piece of paper between the leather and his sock. He took it out and

read--

“Received, for three months’ lessons and several pieces of music, the

sum of sixty-three francs.--Felicie Lempereur, professor of music.”

“How the devil did it get into my boots?”

“It must,” she replied, “have fallen from the old box of bills that is

on the edge of the shelf.”

From that moment her existence was but one long tissue of lies, in which

she enveloped her love as in veils to hide it. It was a want, a mania,

a pleasure carried to such an extent that if she said she had the day

before walked on the right side of a road, one might know she had taken

the left.

One morning, when she had gone, as usual, rather lightly clothed, it

suddenly began to snow, and as Charles was watching the weather from the

window, he caught sight of Monsieur Bournisien in the chaise of Monsieur

Tuvache, who was driving him to Rouen. Then he went down to give the

priest a thick shawl that he was to hand over to Emma as soon as he

reached the “Croix-Rouge.” When he got to the inn, Monsieur Bournisien

asked for the wife of the Yonville doctor. The landlady replied that

she very rarely came to her establishment. So that evening, when he

recognised Madame Bovary in the “Hirondelle,” the cure told her his

dilemma, without, however, appearing to attach much importance to it,

for he began praising a preacher who was doing wonders at the Cathedral,

and whom all the ladies were rushing to hear.

Still, if he did not ask for any explanation, others, later on, might

prove less discreet. So she thought well to get down each time at the

“Croix-Rouge,” so that the good folk of her village who saw her on the

stairs should suspect nothing.

One day, however, Monsieur Lheureux met her coming out of the Hotel

de Boulogne on Léon’s arm; and she was frightened, thinking he would

gossip. He was not such a fool. But three days after he came to her

room, shut the door, and said, “I must have some money.”

She declared she could not give him any. Lheureux burst into

lamentations and reminded her of all the kindnesses he had shown her.

In fact, of the two bills signed by Charles, Emma up to the present had

paid only one. As to the second, the shopkeeper, at her request, had

consented to replace it by another, which again had been renewed for a

long date. Then he drew from his pocket a list of goods not paid for; to

wit, the curtains, the carpet, the material for the armchairs, several

dresses, and divers articles of dress, the bills for which amounted to

about two thousand francs.

She bowed her head. He went on--

“But if you haven’t any ready money, you have an estate.” And he

reminded her of a miserable little hovel situated at Barneville, near

Aumale, that brought in almost nothing. It had formerly been part of a

small farm sold by Monsieur Bovary senior; for Lheureux knew everything,

even to the number of acres and the names of the neighbours.

“If I were in your place,” he said, “I should clear myself of my debts,

and have money left over.”

She pointed out the difficulty of getting a purchaser. He held out the

hope of finding one; but she asked him how she should manage to sell it.

“Haven’t you your power of attorney?” he replied.

The phrase came to her like a breath of fresh air. “Leave me the bill,”

said Emma.

“Oh, it isn’t worth while,” answered Lheureux.

He came back the following week and boasted of having, after much

trouble, at last discovered a certain Langlois, who, for a long time,

had had an eye on the property, but without mentioning his price.

“Never mind the price!” she cried.

But they would, on the contrary, have to wait, to sound the fellow.

The thing was worth a journey, and, as she could not undertake it, he

offered to go to the place to have an interview with Langlois. On his

return he announced that the purchaser proposed four thousand francs.

Emma was radiant at this news.

“Frankly,” he added, “that’s a good price.”

She drew half the sum at once, and when she was about to pay her account

the shopkeeper said--

“It really grieves me, on my word! to see you depriving yourself all at

once of such a big sum as that.”

Then she looked at the bank-notes, and dreaming of the unlimited number

of rendezvous represented by those two thousand francs, she stammered--

“What! what!”

“Oh!” he went on, laughing good-naturedly, “one puts anything one likes

on receipts. Don’t you think I know what household affairs are?” And he

looked at her fixedly, while in his hand he held two long papers that he

slid between his nails. At last, opening his pocket-book, he spread out

on the table four bills to order, each for a thousand francs.

“Sign these,” he said, “and keep it all!”

She cried out, scandalised.

“But if I give you the surplus,” replied Monsieur Lheureux impudently,

“is that not helping you?”

And taking a pen he wrote at the bottom of the account, “Received of

Madame Bovary four thousand francs.”

“Now who can trouble you, since in six months you’ll draw the arrears

for your cottage, and I don’t make the last bill due till after you’ve

been paid?”

Emma grew rather confused in her calculations, and her ears tingled

as if gold pieces, bursting from their bags, rang all round her on

the floor. At last Lheureux explained that he had a very good friend,

Vincart, a broker at Rouen, who would discount these four bills. Then

he himself would hand over to madame the remainder after the actual debt

was paid.

But instead of two thousand francs he brought only eighteen hundred, for

the friend Vincart (which was only fair) had deducted two hundred francs

for commission and discount. Then he carelessly asked for a receipt.

“You understand--in business--sometimes. And with the date, if you

please, with the date.”

A horizon of realisable whims opened out before Emma. She was prudent

enough to lay by a thousand crowns, with which the first three bills

were paid when they fell due; but the fourth, by chance, came to the

house on a Thursday, and Charles, quite upset, patiently awaited his

wife’s return for an explanation.

If she had not told him about this bill, it was only to spare him such

domestic worries; she sat on his knees, caressed him, cooed to him, gave

him a long enumeration of all the indispensable things that had been got

on credit.

“Really, you must confess, considering the quantity, it isn’t too dear.”

Charles, at his wit’s end, soon had recourse to the eternal Lheureux,

who swore he would arrange matters if the doctor would sign him two

bills, one of which was for seven hundred francs, payable in three

months. In order to arrange for this he wrote his mother a pathetic

letter. Instead of sending a reply she came herself; and when Emma

wanted to know whether he had got anything out of her, “Yes,” he

replied; “but she wants to see the account.” The next morning at

daybreak Emma ran to Lheureux to beg him to make out another account for

not more than a thousand francs, for to show the one for four thousand

it would be necessary to say that she had paid two-thirds, and confess,

consequently, the sale of the estate--a negotiation admirably carried

out by the shopkeeper, and which, in fact, was only actually known later

on.

Despite the low price of each article, Madame Bovary senior, of course,

thought the expenditure extravagant.

“Couldn’t you do without a carpet? Why have recovered the arm-chairs? In

my time there was a single arm-chair in a house, for elderly persons--at

any rate it was so at my mother’s, who was a good woman, I can tell you.

Everybody can’t be rich! No fortune can hold out against waste! I should

be ashamed to coddle myself as you do! And yet I am old. I need looking

after. And there! there! fitting up gowns! fallals! What! silk for

lining at two francs, when you can get jaconet for ten sous, or even for

eight, that would do well enough!”

Emma, lying on a lounge, replied as quietly as possible--“Ah! Madame,

enough! enough!”

The other went on lecturing her, predicting they would end in the

workhouse. But it was Bovary’s fault. Luckily he had promised to destroy

that power of attorney.

“What?”

“Ah! he swore he would,” went on the good woman.

Emma opened the window, called Charles, and the poor fellow was obliged

to confess the promise torn from him by his mother.

Emma disappeared, then came back quickly, and majestically handed her a

thick piece of paper.

“Thank you,” said the old woman. And she threw the power of attorney

into the fire.

Emma began to laugh, a strident, piercing, continuous laugh; she had an

attack of hysterics.

“Oh, my God!” cried Charles. “Ah! you really are wrong! You come here

and make scenes with her!”

His mother, shrugging her shoulders, declared it was “all put on.”

But Charles, rebelling for the first time, took his wife’s part, so that

Madame Bovary, senior, said she would leave. She went the very next day,

and on the threshold, as he was trying to detain her, she replied--

“No, no! You love her better than me, and you are right. It is natural.

For the rest, so much the worse! You will see. Good day--for I am not

likely to come soon again, as you say, to make scenes.”

Charles nevertheless was very crestfallen before Emma, who did not hide

the resentment she still felt at his want of confidence, and it needed

many prayers before she would consent to have another power of attorney.

He even accompanied her to Monsieur Guillaumin to have a second one,

just like the other, drawn up.

“I understand,” said the notary; “a man of science can’t be worried with

the practical details of life.”

And Charles felt relieved by this comfortable reflection, which gave his

weakness the flattering appearance of higher pre-occupation.

And what an outburst the next Thursday at the hotel in their room with

Léon! She laughed, cried, sang, sent for sherbets, wanted to smoke

cigarettes, seemed to him wild and extravagant, but adorable, superb.

He did not know what recreation of her whole being drove her more and

more to plunge into the pleasures of life. She was becoming irritable,

greedy, voluptuous; and she walked about the streets with him carrying

her head high, without fear, so she said, of compromising herself.

At times, however, Emma shuddered at the sudden thought of meeting

Rodolphe, for it seemed to her that, although they were separated

forever, she was not completely free from her subjugation to him.

One night she did not return to Yonville at all. Charles lost his head

with anxiety, and little Berthe would not go to bed without her mamma,

and sobbed enough to break her heart. Justin had gone out searching the

road at random. Monsieur Homais even had left his pharmacy.

At last, at eleven o’clock, able to bear it no longer, Charles

harnessed his chaise, jumped in, whipped up his horse, and reached the

“Croix-Rouge” about two o’clock in the morning. No one there! He thought

that the clerk had perhaps seen her; but where did he live? Happily,

Charles remembered his employer’s address, and rushed off there.

Day was breaking, and he could distinguish the escutcheons over the

door, and knocked. Someone, without opening the door, shouted out the

required information, adding a few insults to those who disturb people

in the middle of the night.

The house inhabited by the clerk had neither bell, knocker, nor porter.

Charles knocked loudly at the shutters with his hands. A policeman

happened to pass by. Then he was frightened, and went away.

“I am mad,” he said; “no doubt they kept her to dinner at Monsieur

Lormeaux’.” But the Lormeaux no longer lived at Rouen.

“She probably stayed to look after Madame Dubreuil. Why, Madame Dubreuil

has been dead these ten months! Where can she be?”

An idea occurred to him. At a cafe he asked for a Directory, and

hurriedly looked for the name of Mademoiselle Lempereur, who lived at

No. 74 Rue de la Renelle-des-Maroquiniers.

As he was turning into the street, Emma herself appeared at the other

end of it. He threw himself upon her rather than embraced her, crying--

“What kept you yesterday?”

“I was not well.”

“What was it? Where? How?”

She passed her hand over her forehead and answered, “At Mademoiselle

Lempereur’s.”

“I was sure of it! I was going there.”

“Oh, it isn’t worth while,” said Emma. “She went out just now; but for

the future don’t worry. I do not feel free, you see, if I know that the

least delay upsets you like this.”

This was a sort of permission that she gave herself, so as to get

perfect freedom in her escapades. And she profited by it freely, fully.

When she was seized with the desire to see Léon, she set out upon any

pretext; and as he was not expecting her on that day, she went to fetch

him at his office.

It was a great delight at first, but soon he no longer concealed the

truth, which was, that his master complained very much about these

interruptions.

“Pshaw! come along,” she said.

And he slipped out.

She wanted him to dress all in black, and grow a pointed beard, to

look like the portraits of Louis XIII. She wanted to see his lodgings;

thought them poor. He blushed at them, but she did not notice this, then

advised him to buy some curtains like hers, and as he objected to the

expense--

“Ah! ah! you care for your money,” she said laughing.

Each time Léon had to tell her everything that he had done since their

last meeting. She asked him for some verses--some verses “for herself,”

a “love poem” in honour of her. But he never succeeded in getting a

rhyme for the second verse; and at last ended by copying a sonnet in

a “Keepsake.” This was less from vanity than from the one desire of

pleasing her. He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes;

he was rather becoming her mistress than she his. She had tender words

and kisses that thrilled his soul. Where could she have learnt this

corruption almost incorporeal in the strength of its profanity and

dissimulation?

Chapter Six

During the journeys he made to see her, Léon had often dined at the

chemist’s, and he felt obliged from politeness to invite him in turn.

“With pleasure!” Monsieur Homais replied; “besides, I must invigorate

my mind, for I am getting rusty here. We’ll go to the theatre, to the

restaurant; we’ll make a night of it.”

“Oh, my dear!” tenderly murmured Madame Homais, alarmed at the vague

perils he was preparing to brave.

“Well, what? Do you think I’m not sufficiently ruining my health living

here amid the continual emanations of the pharmacy? But there! that is

the way with women! They are jealous of science, and then are opposed to

our taking the most legitimate distractions. No matter! Count upon

me. One of these days I shall turn up at Rouen, and we’ll go the pace

together.”

The druggist would formerly have taken good care not to use such an

expression, but he was cultivating a gay Parisian style, which he

thought in the best taste; and, like his neighbour, Madame Bovary, he

questioned the clerk curiously about the customs of the capital; he

even talked slang to dazzle the bourgeois, saying bender, crummy, dandy,

macaroni, the cheese, cut my stick and “I’ll hook it,” for “I am going.”

So one Thursday Emma was surprised to meet Monsieur Homais in the

kitchen of the “Lion d’Or,” wearing a traveller’s costume, that is to

say, wrapped in an old cloak which no one knew he had, while he carried

a valise in one hand and the foot-warmer of his establishment in the

other. He had confided his intentions to no one, for fear of causing the

public anxiety by his absence.

The idea of seeing again the place where his youth had been spent no

doubt excited him, for during the whole journey he never ceased talking,

and as soon as he had arrived, he jumped quickly out of the diligence

to go in search of Léon. In vain the clerk tried to get rid of him.

Monsieur Homais dragged him off to the large Cafe de la Normandie,

which he entered majestically, not raising his hat, thinking it very

provincial to uncover in any public place.

Emma waited for Léon three quarters of an hour. At last she ran to

his office; and, lost in all sorts of conjectures, accusing him of

indifference, and reproaching herself for her weakness, she spent the

afternoon, her face pressed against the window-panes.

At two o’clock they were still at a table opposite each other. The large

room was emptying; the stove-pipe, in the shape of a palm-tree, spread

its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the

window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white

basin, where; in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid

lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on

their sides.

Homais was enjoying himself. Although he was even more intoxicated with the

luxury than the rich fare, the Pommard wine all the same rather excited his

faculties; and when the omelette _au rhum_[20] appeared, he began propounding

immoral theories about women. What seduced him above all else was chic. He

admired an elegant toilette in a well-furnished apartment, and as to bodily

qualities, he didn’t dislike a young girl.

[20] In rum.

Léon watched the clock in despair. The druggist went on drinking,

eating, and talking.

“You must be very lonely,” he said suddenly, “here at Rouen. To be sure

your lady-love doesn’t live far away.”

And the other blushed--

“Come now, be frank. Can you deny that at Yonville--”

The young man stammered something.

“At Madame Bovary’s, you’re not making love to--”

“To whom?”

“The servant!”

He was not joking; but vanity getting the better of all prudence, Léon,

in spite of himself protested. Besides, he only liked dark women.

“I approve of that,” said the chemist; “they have more passion.”

And whispering into his friend’s ear, he pointed out the symptoms by

which one could find out if a woman had passion. He even launched into

an ethnographic digression: the German was vapourish, the French woman

licentious, the Italian passionate.

“And negresses?” asked the clerk.

“They are an artistic taste!” said Homais. “Waiter! two cups of coffee!”

“Are we going?” at last asked Léon impatiently.

“Ja!”

But before leaving he wanted to see the proprietor of the establishment

and made him a few compliments. Then the young man, to be alone, alleged

he had some business engagement.

“Ah! I will escort you,” said Homais.

And all the while he was walking through the streets with him he talked

of his wife, his children; of their future, and of his business; told

him in what a decayed condition it had formerly been, and to what a

degree of perfection he had raised it.

Arrived in front of the Hotel de Boulogne, Léon left him abruptly, ran

up the stairs, and found his mistress in great excitement. At mention of

the chemist she flew into a passion. He, however, piled up good reasons;

it wasn’t his fault; didn’t she know Homais--did she believe that he

would prefer his company? But she turned away; he drew her back, and,

sinking on his knees, clasped her waist with his arms in a languorous

pose, full of concupiscence and supplication.

She was standing up, her large flashing eyes looked at him seriously,

almost terribly. Then tears obscured them, her red eyelids were lowered,

she gave him her hands, and Léon was pressing them to his lips when a

servant appeared to tell the gentleman that he was wanted.

“You will come back?” she said.

“Yes.”

“But when?”

“Immediately.”

“It’s a trick,” said the chemist, when he saw Léon. “I wanted to

interrupt this visit, that seemed to me to annoy you. Let’s go and have

a glass of garus at Bridoux’.”

Léon vowed that he must get back to his office. Then the druggist joked

him about quill-drivers and the law.

“Leave Cujas and Barthole alone a bit. Who the devil prevents you? Be a

man! Let’s go to Bridoux’. You’ll see his dog. It’s very interesting.”

And as the clerk still insisted--

“I’ll go with you. I’ll read a paper while I wait for you, or turn over

the leaves of a ‘Code.’”

Léon, bewildered by Emma’s anger, Monsieur Homais’ chatter, and,

perhaps, by the heaviness of the luncheon, was undecided, and, as it

were, fascinated by the chemist, who kept repeating--

“Let’s go to Bridoux’. It’s just by here, in the Rue Malpalu.”

Then, through cowardice, through stupidity, through that indefinable

feeling that drags us into the most distasteful acts, he allowed

himself to be led off to Bridoux’, whom they found in his small yard,

superintending three workmen, who panted as they turned the large

wheel of a machine for making seltzer-water. Homais gave them some good

advice. He embraced Bridoux; they took some garus. Twenty times Léon

tried to escape, but the other seized him by the arm saying--

“Presently! I’m coming! We’ll go to the ‘Fanal de Rouen’ to see the

fellows there. I’ll introduce you to Thornassin.”

At last he managed to get rid of him, and rushed straight to the hotel.

Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She

detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an

insult, and she tried to rake up other reasons to separate herself from

him. He was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a

woman, avaricious too, and cowardly.

Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had, no doubt,

calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates

us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt

sticks to our fingers.

They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their

love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers,

verses, the moon and the stars, naive resources of a waning passion

striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly

promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then

she confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This

disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him

more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off

the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding

snake. She went on tiptoe, barefooted, to see once more that the

door was closed, then, pale, serious, and, without speaking, with one

movement, she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder.

Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those quivering

lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms, something vague

and dreary that seemed to Léon to glide between them subtly as if to

separate them.

He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must

have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of

pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides, he

rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked, by her personality.

He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove not to love her;

then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like

drunkards at the sight of strong drinks.

She did not fail, in truth, to lavish all sorts of attentions upon him,

from the delicacies of food to the coquettries of dress and languishing

looks. She brought roses to her breast from Yonville, which she threw

into his face; was anxious about his health, gave him advice as to his

conduct; and, in order the more surely to keep her hold on him, hoping

perhaps that heaven would take her part, she tied a medal of the

Virgin round his neck. She inquired like a virtuous mother about his

companions. She said to him--

“Don’t see them; don’t go out; think only of ourselves; love me!”

She would have liked to be able to watch over his life; and the idea

occurred to her of having him followed in the streets. Near the hotel

there was always a kind of loafer who accosted travellers, and who would

not refuse. But her pride revolted at this.

“Bah! so much the worse. Let him deceive me! What does it matter to me?

As If I cared for him!”

One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along

the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a

form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she

longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure

to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in

the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed

before her eyes. And Léon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the

others.

“Yet I love him,” she said to herself.

No matter! She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this

insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything

on which she leant? But if there were somewhere a being strong and

beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement,

a poet’s heart in an angel’s form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing

out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find

him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of

seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom,

every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left

upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.

A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard

from the convent-clock. Four o’clock! And it seemed to her that she had

been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of passions may be

contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space.

Emma lived all absorbed in hers, and troubled no more about money

matters than an archduchess.

Once, however, a wretched-looking man, rubicund and bald, came to her

house, saying he had been sent by Monsieur Vincart of Rouen. He took out

the pins that held together the side-pockets of his long green overcoat,

stuck them into his sleeve, and politely handed her a paper.

It was a bill for seven hundred francs, signed by her, and which

Lheureux, in spite of all his professions, had paid away to Vincart. She

sent her servant for him. He could not come. Then the stranger, who

had remained standing, casting right and left curious glances, that his

thick, fair eyebrows hid, asked with a naive air--

“What answer am I to take Monsieur Vincart?”

“Oh,” said Emma, “tell him that I haven’t it. I will send next week; he

must wait; yes, till next week.”

And the fellow went without another word.

But the next day at twelve o’clock she received a summons, and the sight

of the stamped paper, on which appeared several times in large letters,

“Maitre Hareng, bailiff at Buchy,” so frightened her that she rushed in

hot haste to the linendraper’s. She found him in his shop, doing up a

parcel.

“Your obedient!” he said; “I am at your service.”

But Lheureux, all the same, went on with his work, helped by a young

girl of about thirteen, somewhat hunch-backed, who was at once his clerk

and his servant.

Then, his clogs clattering on the shop-boards, he went up in front

of Madame Bovary to the first door, and introduced her into a narrow

closet, where, in a large bureau in sapon-wood, lay some ledgers,

protected by a horizontal padlocked iron bar. Against the wall, under

some remnants of calico, one glimpsed a safe, but of such dimensions

that it must contain something besides bills and money. Monsieur

Lheureux, in fact, went in for pawnbroking, and it was there that he had

put Madame Bovary’s gold chain, together with the earrings of poor old

Tellier, who, at last forced to sell out, had bought a meagre store

of grocery at Quincampoix, where he was dying of catarrh amongst his

candles, that were less yellow than his face.

Lheureux sat down in a large cane arm-chair, saying: “What news?”

“See!”

And she showed him the paper.

“Well how can I help it?”

Then she grew angry, reminding him of the promise he had given not to

pay away her bills. He acknowledged it.

“But I was pressed myself; the knife was at my own throat.”

“And what will happen now?” she went on.

“Oh, it’s very simple; a judgment and then a distraint--that’s about

it!”

Emma kept down a desire to strike him, and asked gently if there was no

way of quieting Monsieur Vincart.

“I dare say! Quiet Vincart! You don’t know him; he’s more ferocious than

an Arab!”

Still Monsieur Lheureux must interfere.

“Well, listen. It seems to me so far I’ve been very good to you.” And

opening one of his ledgers, “See,” he said. Then running up the page

with his finger, “Let’s see! let’s see! August 3d, two hundred francs;

June 17th, a hundred and fifty; March 23d, forty-six. In April--”

He stopped, as if afraid of making some mistake.

“Not to speak of the bills signed by Monsieur Bovary, one for seven

hundred francs, and another for three hundred. As to your little

installments, with the interest, why, there’s no end to ‘em; one gets

quite muddled over ‘em. I’ll have nothing more to do with it.”

She wept; she even called him “her good Monsieur Lheureux.” But he

always fell back upon “that rascal Vincart.” Besides, he hadn’t a brass

farthing; no one was paying him now-a-days; they were eating his coat

off his back; a poor shopkeeper like him couldn’t advance money.

Emma was silent, and Monsieur Lheureux, who was biting the feathers of a

quill, no doubt became uneasy at her silence, for he went on--

“Unless one of these days I have something coming in, I might--”

“Besides,” said she, “as soon as the balance of Barneville--”

“What!”

And on hearing that Langlois had not yet paid he seemed much surprised.

Then in a honied voice--

“And we agree, you say?”

“Oh! to anything you like.”

On this he closed his eyes to reflect, wrote down a few figures, and

declaring it would be very difficult for him, that the affair was shady,

and that he was being bled, he wrote out four bills for two hundred and

fifty francs each, to fall due month by month.

“Provided that Vincart will listen to me! However, it’s settled. I don’t

play the fool; I’m straight enough.”

Next he carelessly showed her several new goods, not one of which,

however, was in his opinion worthy of madame.

“When I think that there’s a dress at threepence-halfpenny a yard, and

warranted fast colours! And yet they actually swallow it! Of course you

understand one doesn’t tell them what it really is!” He hoped by this

confession of dishonesty to others to quite convince her of his probity

to her.

Then he called her back to show her three yards of guipure that he had

lately picked up “at a sale.”

“Isn’t it lovely?” said Lheureux. “It is very much used now for the

backs of arm-chairs. It’s quite the rage.”

And, more ready than a juggler, he wrapped up the guipure in some blue

paper and put it in Emma’s hands.

“But at least let me know--”

“Yes, another time,” he replied, turning on his heel.

That same evening she urged Bovary to write to his mother, to ask her

to send as quickly as possible the whole of the balance due from the

father’s estate. The mother-in-law replied that she had nothing more,

the winding up was over, and there was due to them besides Barneville an

income of six hundred francs, that she would pay them punctually.

Then Madame Bovary sent in accounts to two or three patients, and she

made large use of this method, which was very successful. She was always

careful to add a postscript: “Do not mention this to my husband; you

know how proud he is. Excuse me. Yours obediently.” There were some

complaints; she intercepted them.

To get money she began selling her old gloves, her old hats, the old

odds and ends, and she bargained rapaciously, her peasant blood standing

her in good stead. Then on her journey to town she picked up nick-nacks

secondhand, that, in default of anyone else, Monsieur Lheureux would

certainly take off her hands. She bought ostrich feathers, Chinese

porcelain, and trunks; she borrowed from Félicité, from Madame

Lefrancois, from the landlady at the Croix-Rouge, from everybody, no

matter where.

With the money she at last received from Barneville she paid two bills;

the other fifteen hundred francs fell due. She renewed the bills, and

thus it was continually.

Sometimes, it is true, she tried to make a calculation, but she

discovered things so exorbitant that she could not believe them

possible. Then she recommenced, soon got confused, gave it all up, and

thought no more about it.

The house was very dreary now. Tradesmen were seen leaving it with angry

faces. Handkerchiefs were lying about on the stoves, and little Berthe,

to the great scandal of Madame Homais, wore stockings with holes in

them. If Charles timidly ventured a remark, she answered roughly that it

wasn’t her fault.

What was the meaning of all these fits of temper? He explained

everything through her old nervous illness, and reproaching himself with

having taken her infirmities for faults, accused himself of egotism, and

longed to go and take her in his arms.

“Ah, no!” he said to himself; “I should worry her.”

And he did not stir.

After dinner he walked about alone in the garden; he took little Berthe

on his knees, and unfolding his medical journal, tried to teach her

to read. But the child, who never had any lessons, soon looked up with

large, sad eyes and began to cry. Then he comforted her; went to fetch

water in her can to make rivers on the sand path, or broke off branches

from the privet hedges to plant trees in the beds. This did not spoil

the garden much, all choked now with long weeds. They owed Lestiboudois

for so many days. Then the child grew cold and asked for her mother.

“Call the servant,” said Charles. “You know, dearie, that mamma does not

like to be disturbed.”

Autumn was setting in, and the leaves were already falling, as they did

two years ago when she was ill. Where would it all end? And he walked up

and down, his hands behind his back.

Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all

day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish

pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian’s shop. In order

not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of

manoeuvring, she at last succeeded in banishing him to the second floor,

while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of

orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried out,

and Charles hurried to her.

“Oh, go away!” she would say.

Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame

to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw

open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her

masses of hair, too heavy, and, gazing upon the stars, longed for some

princely love. She thought of him, of Léon. She would then have given

anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her.

These were her gala days. She wanted them to be sumptuous, and when he

alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally,

which happened pretty well every time. He tried to make her understand

that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller

hotel, but she always found some objection.

One day she drew six small silver-gilt spoons from her bag (they were

old Roualt’s wedding present), begging him to pawn them at once for her,

and Léon obeyed, though the proceeding annoyed him. He was afraid of

compromising himself.

Then, on, reflection, he began to think his mistress’s ways were growing

odd, and that they were perhaps not wrong in wishing to separate him

from her.

In fact someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her

that he was “ruining himself with a married woman,” and the good lady at

once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious

creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of

love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in

the affair. He kept him for three quarters of an hour trying to open

his eyes, to warn him of the abyss into which he was falling. Such

an intrigue would damage him later on, when he set up for himself. He

implored him to break with her, and, if he would not make this sacrifice

in his own interest, to do it at least for his, Dubocage’s sake.

At last Léon swore he would not see Emma again, and he reproached

himself with not having kept his word, considering all the worry and

lectures this woman might still draw down upon him, without reckoning

the jokes made by his companions as they sat round the stove in the

morning. Besides, he was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle

down. So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every

bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment,

has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises.

The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears

within him the debris of a poet.

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his

heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music,

dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted.

They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession

that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he

was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of

marriage.

But how to get rid of him? Then, though she might feel humiliated at

the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to it from habit or from

corruption, and each day she hungered after them the more, exhausting

all felicity in wishing for too much of it. She accused Léon of her

baffled hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some

catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she had not

the courage to make up her mind to it herself.

She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the

notion that a woman must write to her lover.

But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out

of her most ardent memories, of her finest reading, her strongest

lusts, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that she palpitated

wondering, without, however, the power to imagine him clearly, so lost

was he, like a god, beneath the abundance of his attributes. He dwelt in

that azure land where silk ladders hang from balconies under the breath

of flowers, in the light of the moon. She felt him near her; he was

coming, and would carry her right away in a kiss.

Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied

her more than great debauchery.

She now felt constant ache all over her. Often she even received

summonses, stamped paper that she barely looked at. She would have liked

not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

On Mid-Lent she did not return to Yonville, but in the evening went to

a masked ball. She wore velvet breeches, red stockings, a club wig, and

three-cornered hat cocked on one side. She danced all night to the wild

tones of the trombones; people gathered round her, and in the morning

she found herself on the steps of the theatre together with five or six

masks, _débardeuses_[21] and sailors, Léon’s comrades, who were talking

about having supper.

[21] People dressed as longshoremen.

The neighbouring cafes were full. They caught sight of one on the

harbour, a very indifferent restaurant, whose proprietor showed them to

a little room on the fourth floor.

The men were whispering in a corner, no doubt consorting about expenses.

There were a clerk, two medical students, and a shopman--what company

for her! As to the women, Emma soon perceived from the tone of their

voices that they must almost belong to the lowest class. Then she was

frightened, pushed back her chair, and cast down her eyes.

The others began to eat; she ate nothing. Her head was on fire, her eyes

smarted, and her skin was ice-cold. In her head she seemed to feel the

floor of the ball-room rebounding again beneath the rhythmical pulsation

of the thousands of dancing feet. And now the smell of the punch, the

smoke of the cigars, made her giddy. She fainted, and they carried her

to the window.

Day was breaking, and a great stain of purple colour broadened out

in the pale horizon over the St. Catherine hills. The livid river was

shivering in the wind; there was no one on the bridges; the street lamps

were going out.

She revived, and began thinking of Berthe asleep yonder in the servant’s

room. Then a cart filled with long strips of iron passed by, and made a

deafening metallic vibration against the walls of the houses.

She slipped away suddenly, threw off her costume, told Léon she must get

back, and at last was alone at the Hotel de Boulogne. Everything, even

herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a

bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there

grow young again.

She went out, crossed the Boulevard, the Place Cauchoise, and the

Faubourg, as far as an open street that overlooked some gardens. She

walked rapidly; the fresh air calming her; and, little by little, the

faces of the crowd, the masks, the quadrilles, the lights, the supper,

those women, all disappeared like mists fading away. Then, reaching the

“Croix-Rouge,” she threw herself on the bed in her little room on the

second floor, where there were pictures of the “Tour de Nesle.” At four

o’clock Hivert awoke her.

When she got home, Félicité showed her behind the clock a grey paper.

She read--

“In virtue of the seizure in execution of a judgment.”

What judgment? As a matter of fact, the evening before another paper

had been brought that she had not yet seen, and she was stunned by these

words--

“By order of the king, law, and justice, to Madame Bovary.” Then,

skipping several lines, she read, “Within twenty-four hours, without

fail--” But what? “To pay the sum of eight thousand francs.” And there

was even at the bottom, “She will be constrained thereto by every

form of law, and notably by a writ of distraint on her furniture and

effects.”

What was to be done? In twenty-four hours--tomorrow. Lheureux, she

thought, wanted to frighten her again; for she saw through all his

devices, the object of his kindnesses. What reassured her was the very

magnitude of the sum.

However, by dint of buying and not paying, of borrowing, signing bills,

and renewing these bills that grew at each new falling-in, she had ended

by preparing a capital for Monsieur Lheureux which he was impatiently

awaiting for his speculations.

She presented herself at his place with an offhand air.

“You know what has happened to me? No doubt it’s a joke!”

“How so?”

He turned away slowly, and, folding his arms, said to her--

“My good lady, did you think I should go on to all eternity being your

purveyor and banker, for the love of God? Now be just. I must get back

what I’ve laid out. Now be just.”

She cried out against the debt.

“Ah! so much the worse. The court has admitted it. There’s a judgment.

It’s been notified to you. Besides, it isn’t my fault. It’s Vincart’s.”

“Could you not--?”

“Oh, nothing whatever.”

“But still, now talk it over.”

And she began beating about the bush; she had known nothing about it; it

was a surprise.

“Whose fault is that?” said Lheureux, bowing ironically. “While I’m

slaving like a nigger, you go gallivanting about.”

“Ah! no lecturing.”

“It never does any harm,” he replied.

She turned coward; she implored him; she even pressed her pretty white

and slender hand against the shopkeeper’s knee.

“There, that’ll do! Anyone’d think you wanted to seduce me!”

“You are a wretch!” she cried.

“Oh, oh! go it! go it!”

“I will show you up. I shall tell my husband.”

“All right! I too. I’ll show your husband something.”

And Lheureux drew from his strong box the receipt for eighteen hundred

francs that she had given him when Vincart had discounted the bills.

“Do you think,” he added, “that he’ll not understand your little theft,

the poor dear man?”

She collapsed, more overcome than if felled by the blow of a pole-axe.

He was walking up and down from the window to the bureau, repeating all

the while--

“Ah! I’ll show him! I’ll show him!” Then he approached her, and in a

soft voice said--

“It isn’t pleasant, I know; but, after all, no bones are broken, and,

since that is the only way that is left for you paying back my money--”

“But where am I to get any?” said Emma, wringing her hands.

“Bah! when one has friends like you!”

And he looked at her in so keen, so terrible a fashion, that she

shuddered to her very heart.

“I promise you,” she said, “to sign--”

“I’ve enough of your signatures.”

“I will sell something.”

“Get along!” he said, shrugging his shoulders; “you’ve not got

anything.”

And he called through the peep-hole that looked down into the shop--

“Annette, don’t forget the three coupons of No. 14.”

The servant appeared. Emma understood, and asked how much money would be

wanted to put a stop to the proceedings.

“It is too late.”

“But if I brought you several thousand francs--a quarter of the sum--a

third--perhaps the whole?”

“No; it’s no use!”

And he pushed her gently towards the staircase.

“I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days more!” She was

sobbing.

“There! tears now!”

“You are driving me to despair!”

“What do I care?” said he, shutting the door.

Chapter Seven

She was stoical the next day when Maitre Hareng, the bailiff, with two

assistants, presented himself at her house to draw up the inventory for

the distraint.

They began with Bovary’s consulting-room, and did not write down

the phrenological head, which was considered an “instrument of his

profession”; but in the kitchen they counted the plates; the saucepans,

the chairs, the candlesticks, and in the bedroom all the nick-nacks on

the whatnot. They examined her dresses, the linen, the dressing-room;

and her whole existence to its most intimate details, was, like a corpse

on whom a post-mortem is made, outspread before the eyes of these three

men.

Maitre Hareng, buttoned up in his thin black coat, wearing a white

choker and very tight foot-straps, repeated from time to time--“Allow

me, madame. You allow me?” Often he uttered exclamations. “Charming!

very pretty.” Then he began writing again, dipping his pen into the horn

inkstand in his left hand.

When they had done with the rooms they went up to the attic. She kept a

desk there in which Rodolphe’s letters were locked. It had to be opened.

“Ah! a correspondence,” said Maitre Hareng, with a discreet smile. “But

allow me, for I must make sure the box contains nothing else.” And he

tipped up the papers lightly, as if to shake out napoleons. Then she

grew angered to see this coarse hand, with fingers red and pulpy like

slugs, touching these pages against which her heart had beaten.

They went at last. Félicité came back. Emma had sent her out to watch

for Bovary in order to keep him off, and they hurriedly installed the

man in possession under the roof, where he swore he would remain.

During the evening Charles seemed to her careworn. Emma watched him with

a look of anguish, fancying she saw an accusation in every line of his

face. Then, when her eyes wandered over the chimney-piece ornamented

with Chinese screens, over the large curtains, the armchairs, all

those things, in a word, that had, softened the bitterness of her life,

remorse seized her or rather an immense regret, that, far from crushing,

irritated her passion. Charles placidly poked the fire, both his feet on

the fire-dogs.

Once the man, no doubt bored in his hiding-place, made a slight noise.

“Is anyone walking upstairs?” said Charles.

“No,” she replied; “it is a window that has been left open, and is

rattling in the wind.”

The next day, Sunday, she went to Rouen to call on all the brokers whose

names she knew. They were at their country-places or on journeys. She

was not discouraged; and those whom she did manage to see she asked for

money, declaring she must have some, and that she would pay it back.

Some laughed in her face; all refused.

At two o’clock she hurried to Léon, and knocked at the door. No one

answered. At length he appeared.

“What brings you here?”

“Do I disturb you?”

“No; but--” And he admitted that his landlord didn’t like his having

“women” there.

“I must speak to you,” she went on.

Then he took down the key, but she stopped him.

“No, no! Down there, in our home!”

And they went to their room at the Hotel de Boulogne.

On arriving she drank off a large glass of water. She was very pale. She

said to him--

“Léon, you will do me a service?”

And, shaking him by both hands that she grasped tightly, she added--

“Listen, I want eight thousand francs.”

“But you are mad!”

“Not yet.”

And thereupon, telling him the story of the distraint, she explained

her distress to him; for Charles knew nothing of it; her mother-in-law

detested her; old Rouault could do nothing; but he, Léon, he would set

about finding this indispensable sum.

“How on earth can I?”

“What a coward you are!” she cried.

Then he said stupidly, “You are exaggerating the difficulty. Perhaps,

with a thousand crowns or so the fellow could be stopped.”

All the greater reason to try and do something; it was impossible that

they could not find three thousand francs. Besides, Léon, could be

security instead of her.

“Go, try, try! I will love you so!”

He went out, and came back at the end of an hour, saying, with solemn

face--

“I have been to three people with no success.”

Then they remained sitting face to face at the two chimney corners,

motionless, in silence. Emma shrugged her shoulders as she stamped her

feet. He heard her murmuring--

“If I were in your place _I_ should soon get some.”

“But where?”

“At your office.” And she looked at him.

An infernal boldness looked out from her burning eyes, and their lids

drew close together with a lascivious and encouraging look, so that the

young man felt himself growing weak beneath the mute will of this woman

who was urging him to a crime. Then he was afraid, and to avoid any

explanation he smote his forehead, crying--

“Morel is to come back to-night; he will not refuse me, I hope” (this

was one of his friends, the son of a very rich merchant); “and I will

bring it you to-morrow,” he added.

Emma did not seem to welcome this hope with all the joy he had expected.

Did she suspect the lie? He went on, blushing--

“However, if you don’t see me by three o’clock do not wait for me, my

darling. I must be off now; forgive me! Goodbye!”

He pressed her hand, but it felt quite lifeless. Emma had no strength

left for any sentiment.

Four o’clock struck, and she rose to return to Yonville, mechanically

obeying the force of old habits.

The weather was fine. It was one of those March days, clear and sharp,

when the sun shines in a perfectly white sky. The Rouen folk, in

Sunday-clothes, were walking about with happy looks. She reached the

Place du Parvis. People were coming out after vespers; the crowd flowed

out through the three doors like a stream through the three arches of

a bridge, and in the middle one, more motionless than a rock, stood the

beadle.

Then she remembered the day when, all anxious and full of hope, she had

entered beneath this large nave, that had opened out before her, less

profound than her love; and she walked on weeping beneath her veil,

giddy, staggering, almost fainting.

“Take care!” cried a voice issuing from the gate of a courtyard that was

thrown open.

She stopped to let pass a black horse, pawing the ground between the

shafts of a tilbury, driven by a gentleman in sable furs. Who was it?

She knew him. The carriage darted by and disappeared.

Why, it was he--the Viscount. She turned away; the street was empty. She

was so overwhelmed, so sad, that she had to lean against a wall to keep

herself from falling.

Then she thought she had been mistaken. Anyhow, she did not know. All

within her and around her was abandoning her. She felt lost, sinking

at random into indefinable abysses, and it was almost with joy that, on

reaching the “Croix-Rouge,” she saw the good Homais, who was watching

a large box full of pharmaceutical stores being hoisted on to the

“Hirondelle.” In his hand he held tied in a silk handkerchief six

cheminots for his wife.

Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy turban-shaped loaves,

that are eaten in Lent with salt butter; a last vestige of Gothic food

that goes back, perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which

the robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they saw on the

table, in the light of the yellow torches, between tankards of hippocras

and huge boars’ heads, the heads of Saracens to be devoured. The

druggist’s wife crunched them up as they had done--heroically, despite

her wretched teeth. And so whenever Homais journeyed to town, he never

failed to bring her home some that he bought at the great baker’s in the

Rue Massacre.

“Charmed to see you,” he said, offering Emma a hand to help her into the

“Hirondelle.” Then he hung up his cheminots to the cords of the netting,

and remained bare-headed in an attitude pensive and Napoleonic.

But when the blind man appeared as usual at the foot of the hill he

exclaimed--

“I can’t understand why the authorities tolerate such culpable

industries. Such unfortunates should be locked up and forced to work.

Progress, my word! creeps at a snail’s pace. We are floundering about in

mere barbarism.”

The blind man held out his hat, that flapped about at the door, as if it

were a bag in the lining that had come unnailed.

“This,” said the chemist, “is a scrofulous affection.”

And though he knew the poor devil, he pretended to see him for the first

time, murmured something about “cornea,” “opaque cornea,” “sclerotic,”

“facies,” then asked him in a paternal tone--

“My friend, have you long had this terrible infirmity? Instead of

getting drunk at the public, you’d do better to die yourself.”

He advised him to take good wine, good beer, and good joints. The blind

man went on with his song; he seemed, moreover, almost idiotic. At last

Monsieur Homais opened his purse--

“Now there’s a sou; give me back two lairds, and don’t forget my advice:

you’ll be the better for it.”

Hivert openly cast some doubt on the efficacy of it. But the druggist

said that he would cure himself with an antiphlogistic pomade of his own

composition, and he gave his address--“Monsieur Homais, near the market,

pretty well known.”

“Now,” said Hivert, “for all this trouble you’ll give us your

performance.”

The blind man sank down on his haunches, with his head thrown back,

whilst he rolled his greenish eyes, lolled out his tongue, and rubbed

his stomach with both hands as he uttered a kind of hollow yell like a

famished dog. Emma, filled with disgust, threw him over her shoulder

a five-franc piece. It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine

thus to throw it away.

The coach had gone on again when suddenly Monsieur Homais leant out

through the window, crying--

“No farinaceous or milk food, wear wool next the skin, and expose the

diseased parts to the smoke of juniper berries.”

The sight of the well-known objects that defiled before her eyes

gradually diverted Emma from her present trouble. An intolerable fatigue

overwhelmed her, and she reached her home stupefied, discouraged, almost

asleep.

“Come what may come!” she said to herself. “And then, who knows? Why, at

any moment could not some extraordinary event occur? Lheureux even might

die!”

At nine o’clock in the morning she was awakened by the sound of voices

in the Place. There was a crowd round the market reading a large bill

fixed to one of the posts, and she saw Justin, who was climbing on to

a stone and tearing down the bill. But at this moment the rural guard

seized him by the collar. Monsieur Homais came out of his shop, and Mere

Lefrançois, in the midst of the crowd, seemed to be perorating.

“Madame! madame!” cried Félicité, running in, “it’s abominable!”

And the poor girl, deeply moved, handed her a yellow paper that she had

just torn off the door. Emma read with a glance that all her furniture

was for sale.

Then they looked at one another silently. The servant and mistress had

no secret one from the other. At last Félicité sighed--

“If I were you, madame, I should go to Monsieur Guillaumin.”

“Do you think--”

And this question meant to say--

“You who know the house through the servant, has the master spoken

sometimes of me?”

“Yes, you’d do well to go there.”

She dressed, put on her black gown, and her hood with jet beads, and

that she might not be seen (there was still a crowd on the Place), she

took the path by the river, outside the village.

She reached the notary’s gate quite breathless. The sky was sombre, and

a little snow was falling. At the sound of the bell, Theodore in a

red waistcoat appeared on the steps; he came to open the door almost

familiarly, as to an acquaintance, and showed her into the dining-room.

A large porcelain stove crackled beneath a cactus that filled up the

niche in the wall, and in black wood frames against the oak-stained

paper hung Steuben’s “Esmeralda” and Schopin’s “Potiphar.” The

ready-laid table, the two silver chafing-dishes, the crystal door-knobs,

the parquet and the furniture, all shone with a scrupulous, English

cleanliness; the windows were ornamented at each corner with stained

glass.

“Now this,” thought Emma, “is the dining-room I ought to have.”

The notary came in pressing his palm-leaf dressing-gown to his breast

with his left arm, while with the other hand he raised and quickly put

on again his brown velvet cap, pretentiously cocked on the right side,

whence looked out the ends of three fair curls drawn from the back of

the head, following the line of his bald skull.

After he had offered her a seat he sat down to breakfast, apologising

profusely for his rudeness.

“I have come,” she said, “to beg you, sir--”

“What, madame? I am listening.”

And she began explaining her position to him. Monsieur Guillaumin knew

it, being secretly associated with the linendraper, from whom he always

got capital for the loans on mortgages that he was asked to make.

So he knew (and better than she herself) the long story of the bills,

small at first, bearing different names as endorsers, made out at long

dates, and constantly renewed up to the day, when, gathering together

all the protested bills, the shopkeeper had bidden his friend Vincart

take in his own name all the necessary proceedings, not wishing to pass

for a tiger with his fellow-citizens.

She mingled her story with recriminations against Lheureux, to which the

notary replied from time to time with some insignificant word. Eating

his cutlet and drinking his tea, he buried his chin in his sky-blue

cravat, into which were thrust two diamond pins, held together by a

small gold chain; and he smiled a singular smile, in a sugary, ambiguous

fashion. But noticing that her feet were damp, he said--

“Do get closer to the stove; put your feet up against the porcelain.”

She was afraid of dirtying it. The notary replied in a gallant tone--

“Beautiful things spoil nothing.”

Then she tried to move him, and, growing moved herself, she began

telling him about the poorness of her home, her worries, her wants.

He could understand that; an elegant woman! and, without leaving off

eating, he had turned completely round towards her, so that his knee

brushed against her boot, whose sole curled round as it smoked against

the stove.

But when she asked for a thousand sous, he closed his lips, and declared

he was very sorry he had not had the management of her fortune before,

for there were hundreds of ways very convenient, even for a lady, of

turning her money to account. They might, either in the turf-peats

of Grumesnil or building-ground at Havre, almost without risk, have

ventured on some excellent speculations; and he let her consume herself

with rage at the thought of the fabulous sums that she would certainly

have made.

“How was it,” he went on, “that you didn’t come to me?”

“I hardly know,” she said.

“Why, hey? Did I frighten you so much? It is I, on the contrary, who

ought to complain. We hardly know one another; yet I am very devoted to

you. You do not doubt that, I hope?”

He held out his hand, took hers, covered it with a greedy kiss, then

held it on his knee; and he played delicately with her fingers whilst

he murmured a thousand blandishments. His insipid voice murmured like a

running brook; a light shone in his eyes through the glimmering of his

spectacles, and his hand was advancing up Emma’s sleeve to press her

arm. She felt against her cheek his panting breath. This man oppressed

her horribly.

She sprang up and said to him--

“Sir, I am waiting.”

“For what?” said the notary, who suddenly became very pale.

“This money.”

“But--” Then, yielding to the outburst of too powerful a desire, “Well,

yes!”

He dragged himself towards her on his knees, regardless of his

dressing-gown.

“For pity’s sake, stay. I love you!”

He seized her by her waist. Madame Bovary’s face flushed purple. She

recoiled with a terrible look, crying--

“You are taking a shameless advantage of my distress, sir! I am to be

pitied--not to be sold.”

And she went out.

The notary remained quite stupefied, his eyes fixed on his fine

embroidered slippers. They were a love gift, and the sight of them at

last consoled him. Besides, he reflected that such an adventure might

have carried him too far.

“What a wretch! what a scoundrel! what an infamy!” she said to herself,

as she fled with nervous steps beneath the aspens of the path. The

disappointment of her failure increased the indignation of her outraged

modesty; it seemed to her that Providence pursued her implacably, and,

strengthening herself in her pride, she had never felt so much esteem

for herself nor so much contempt for others. A spirit of warfare

transformed her. She would have liked to strike all men, to spit in

their faces, to crush them, and she walked rapidly straight on, pale,

quivering, maddened, searching the empty horizon with tear-dimmed eyes,

and as it were rejoicing in the hate that was choking her.

When she saw her house a numbness came over her. She could not go on;

and yet she must. Besides, whither could she flee?

Félicité was waiting for her at the door. “Well?”

“No!” said Emma.

And for a quarter of an hour the two of them went over the various

persons in Yonville who might perhaps be inclined to help her. But each

time that Félicité named someone Emma replied--

“Impossible! they will not!”

“And the master’ll soon be in.”

“I know that well enough. Leave me alone.”

She had tried everything; there was nothing more to be done now; and

when Charles came in she would have to say to him--

“Go away! This carpet on which you are walking is no longer ours. In

your own house you do not possess a chair, a pin, a straw, and it is I,

poor man, who have ruined you.”

Then there would be a great sob; next he would weep abundantly, and at

last, the surprise past, he would forgive her.

“Yes,” she murmured, grinding her teeth, “he will forgive me, he who

would give a million if I would forgive him for having known me! Never!

never!”

This thought of Bovary’s superiority to her exasperated her. Then,

whether she confessed or did not confess, presently, immediately,

to-morrow, he would know the catastrophe all the same; so she must wait

for this horrible scene, and bear the weight of his magnanimity. The

desire to return to Lheureux’s seized her--what would be the use? To

write to her father--it was too late; and perhaps, she began to repent

now that she had not yielded to that other, when she heard the trot of

a horse in the alley. It was he; he was opening the gate; he was whiter

than the plaster wall. Rushing to the stairs, she ran out quickly to the

square; and the wife of the mayor, who was talking to Lestiboudois in

front of the church, saw her go in to the tax-collector’s.

She hurried off to tell Madame Caron, and the two ladies went up to

the attic, and, hidden by some linen spread across props, stationed

themselves comfortably for overlooking the whole of Binet’s room.

He was alone in his garret, busy imitating in wood one of those

indescribable bits of ivory, composed of crescents, of spheres hollowed

out one within the other, the whole as straight as an obelisk, and of no

use whatever; and he was beginning on the last piece--he was nearing his

goal. In the twilight of the workshop the white dust was flying from his

tools like a shower of sparks under the hoofs of a galloping horse; the

two wheels were turning, droning; Binet smiled, his chin lowered, his

nostrils distended, and, in a word, seemed lost in one of those complete

happinesses that, no doubt, belong only to commonplace occupations,

which amuse the mind with facile difficulties, and satisfy by a

realisation of that beyond which such minds have not a dream.

“Ah! there she is!” exclaimed Madame Tuvache.

But it was impossible because of the lathe to hear what she was saying.

At last these ladies thought they made out the word “francs,” and Madame

Tuvache whispered in a low voice--

“She is begging him to give her time for paying her taxes.”

“Apparently!” replied the other.

They saw her walking up and down, examining the napkin-rings, the

candlesticks, the banister rails against the walls, while Binet stroked

his beard with satisfaction.

“Do you think she wants to order something of him?” said Madame Tuvache.

“Why, he doesn’t sell anything,” objected her neighbour.

The tax-collector seemed to be listening with wide-open eyes, as if he

did not understand. She went on in a tender, suppliant manner. She came

nearer to him, her breast heaving; they no longer spoke.

“Is she making him advances?” said Madame Tuvache. Binet was scarlet to

his very ears. She took hold of his hands.

“Oh, it’s too much!”

And no doubt she was suggesting something abominable to him; for the

tax-collector--yet he was brave, had fought at Bautzen and at Lutzen,

had been through the French campaign, and had even been recommended for

the cross--suddenly, as at the sight of a serpent, recoiled as far as he

could from her, crying--

“Madame! what do you mean?”

“Women like that ought to be whipped,” said Madame Tuvache.

“But where is she?” continued Madame Caron, for she had disappeared

whilst they spoke; then catching sight of her going up the Grande Rue,

and turning to the right as if making for the cemetery, they were lost

in conjectures.

“Nurse Rollet,” she said on reaching the nurse’s, “I am choking; unlace

me!” She fell on the bed sobbing. Nurse Rollet covered her with a

petticoat and remained standing by her side. Then, as she did not

answer, the good woman withdrew, took her wheel and began spinning flax.

“Oh, leave off!” she murmured, fancying she heard Binet’s lathe.

“What’s bothering her?” said the nurse to herself. “Why has she come

here?”

She had rushed thither; impelled by a kind of horror that drove her from

her home.

Lying on her back, motionless, and with staring eyes, she saw things but

vaguely, although she tried to with idiotic persistence. She looked

at the scales on the walls, two brands smoking end to end, and a long

spider crawling over her head in a rent in the beam. At last she began

to collect her thoughts. She remembered--one day--Léon--Oh! how long

ago that was--the sun was shining on the river, and the clematis were

perfuming the air. Then, carried away as by a rushing torrent, she soon

began to recall the day before.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Mere Rollet went out, raised the fingers of her right hand to that side

of the sky that was brightest, and came back slowly, saying--

“Nearly three.”

“Ah! thanks, thanks!”

For he would come; he would have found some money. But he would,

perhaps, go down yonder, not guessing she was here, and she told the

nurse to run to her house to fetch him.

“Be quick!”

“But, my dear lady, I’m going, I’m going!”

She wondered now that she had not thought of him from the first.

Yesterday he had given his word; he would not break it. And she already

saw herself at Lheureux’s spreading out her three bank-notes on his

bureau. Then she would have to invent some story to explain matters to

Bovary. What should it be?

The nurse, however, was a long while gone. But, as there was no clock

in the cot, Emma feared she was perhaps exaggerating the length of time.

She began walking round the garden, step by step; she went into the path

by the hedge, and returned quickly, hoping that the woman would have

come back by another road. At last, weary of waiting, assailed by fears

that she thrust from her, no longer conscious whether she had been here

a century or a moment, she sat down in a corner, closed her eyes, and

stopped her ears. The gate grated; she sprang up. Before she had spoken

Mere Rollet said to her--

“There is no one at your house!”

“What?”

“Oh, no one! And the doctor is crying. He is calling for you; they’re

looking for you.”

Emma answered nothing. She gasped as she turned her eyes about

her, while the peasant woman, frightened at her face, drew back

instinctively, thinking her mad. Suddenly she struck her brow and

uttered a cry; for the thought of Rodolphe, like a flash of lightning in

a dark night, had passed into her soul. He was so good, so delicate, so

generous! And besides, should he hesitate to do her this service, she

would know well enough how to constrain him to it by re-waking, in a

single moment, their lost love. So she set out towards La Huchette, not

seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while

ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution.

Chapter Eight

She asked herself as she walked along, “What am I going to say? How

shall I begin?” And as she went on she recognised the thickets,

the trees, the sea-rushes on the hill, the château yonder. All the

sensations of her first tenderness came back to her, and her poor aching

heart opened out amorously. A warm wind blew in her face; the melting

snow fell drop by drop from the buds to the grass.

She entered, as she used to, through the small park-gate. She reached

the avenue bordered by a double row of dense lime-trees. They were

swaying their long whispering branches to and fro. The dogs in their

kennels all barked, and the noise of their voices resounded, but brought

out no one.

She went up the large straight staircase with wooden balusters that led

to the corridor paved with dusty flags, into which several doors in a

row opened, as in a monastery or an inn. His was at the top, right

at the end, on the left. When she placed her fingers on the lock her

strength suddenly deserted her. She was afraid, almost wished he

would not be there, though this was her only hope, her last chance of

salvation. She collected her thoughts for one moment, and, strengthening

herself by the feeling of present necessity, went in.

He was in front of the fire, both his feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a

pipe.

“What! it is you!” he said, getting up hurriedly.

“Yes, it is I, Rodolphe. I should like to ask your advice.”

And, despite all her efforts, it was impossible for her to open her

lips.

“You have not changed; you are charming as ever!”

“Oh,” she replied bitterly, “they are poor charms since you disdained

them.”

Then he began a long explanation of his conduct, excusing himself in

vague terms, in default of being able to invent better.

She yielded to his words, still more to his voice and the sight of him,

so that, she pretended to believe, or perhaps believed; in the pretext

he gave for their rupture; this was a secret on which depended the

honour, the very life of a third person.

“No matter!” she said, looking at him sadly. “I have suffered much.”

He replied philosophically--

“Such is life!”

“Has life,” Emma went on, “been good to you at least, since our

separation?”

“Oh, neither good nor bad.”

“Perhaps it would have been better never to have parted.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“You think so?” she said, drawing nearer, and she sighed. “Oh, Rodolphe!

if you but knew! I loved you so!”

It was then that she took his hand, and they remained some time, their

fingers intertwined, like that first day at the Show. With a gesture of

pride he struggled against this emotion. But sinking upon his breast she

said to him--

“How did you think I could live without you? One cannot lose the habit

of happiness. I was desolate. I thought I should die. I will tell you

about all that and you will see. And you--you fled from me!”

For, all the three years, he had carefully avoided her in consequence

of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex. Emma went

on, with dainty little nods, more coaxing than an amorous kitten--

“You love others, confess it! Oh, I understand them, dear! I excuse

them. You probably seduced them as you seduced me. You are indeed a man;

you have everything to make one love you. But we’ll begin again, won’t

we? We will love one another. See! I am laughing; I am happy! Oh,

speak!”

And she was charming to see, with her eyes, in which trembled a tear,

like the rain of a storm in a blue corolla.

He had drawn her upon his knees, and with the back of his hand was

caressing her smooth hair, where in the twilight was mirrored like a

golden arrow one last ray of the sun. She bent down her brow; at last he

kissed her on the eyelids quite gently with the tips of his lips.

“Why, you have been crying! What for?”

She burst into tears. Rodolphe thought this was an outburst of her

love. As she did not speak, he took this silence for a last remnant of

resistance, and then he cried out--

“Oh, forgive me! You are the only one who pleases me. I was imbecile and

cruel. I love you. I will love you always. What is it. Tell me!” He was

kneeling by her.

“Well, I am ruined, Rodolphe! You must lend me three thousand francs.”

“But--but--” said he, getting up slowly, while his face assumed a grave

expression.

“You know,” she went on quickly, “that my husband had placed his whole

fortune at a notary’s. He ran away. So we borrowed; the patients don’t

pay us. Moreover, the settling of the estate is not yet done; we shall

have the money later on. But to-day, for want of three thousand francs,

we are to be sold up. It is to be at once, this very moment, and,

counting upon your friendship, I have come to you.”

“Ah!” thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, “that was what she came for.”

At last he said with a calm air--

“Dear madame, I have not got them.”

He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them,

although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand

for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and

most destructive.

First she looked at him for some moments.

“You have not got them!” she repeated several times. “You have not got

them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me.

You are no better than the others.”

She was betraying, ruining herself.

Rodolphe interrupted her, declaring he was “hard up” himself.

“Ah! I pity you,” said Emma. “Yes--very much.”

And fixing her eyes upon an embossed carabine, that shone against its

panoply, “But when one is so poor one doesn’t have silver on the butt of

one’s gun. One doesn’t buy a clock inlaid with tortoise shell,” she went

on, pointing to a buhl timepiece, “nor silver-gilt whistles for one’s

whips,” and she touched them, “nor charms for one’s watch. Oh, he wants

for nothing! even to a liqueur-stand in his room! For you love yourself;

you live well. You have a château, farms, woods; you go hunting; you

travel to Paris. Why, if it were but that,” she cried, taking up two

studs from the mantelpiece, “but the least of these trifles, one can get

money for them. Oh, I do not want them, keep them!”

And she threw the two links away from her, their gold chain breaking as

it struck against the wall.

“But I! I would have given you everything. I would have sold all, worked

for you with my hands, I would have begged on the highroads for a smile,

for a look, to hear you say ‘Thanks!’ And you sit there quietly in your

arm-chair, as if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you,

and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made you do it? Was

it a bet? Yet you loved me--you said so. And but a moment since--Ah!

it would have been better to have driven me away. My hands are hot with

your kisses, and there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you

swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years you

held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! Eh! Our plans for

the journey, do you remember? Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my

heart! And then when I come back to him--to him, rich, happy, free--to

implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and

bringing back to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would

cost him three thousand francs!”

“I haven’t got them,” replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with

which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield.

She went out. The walls trembled, the ceiling was crushing her, and she

passed back through the long alley, stumbling against the heaps of dead

leaves scattered by the wind. At last she reached the ha-ha hedge in

front of the gate; she broke her nails against the lock in her haste to

open it. Then a hundred steps farther on, breathless, almost falling,

she stopped. And now turning round, she once more saw the impassive

château, with the park, the gardens, the three courts, and all the

windows of the facade.

She remained lost in stupor, and having no more consciousness of herself

than through the beating of her arteries, that she seemed to hear

bursting forth like a deafening music filling all the fields. The earth

beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed

to her immense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her

head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand pieces of

fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux’s closet, their room at home,

another landscape. Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and

managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did

not in the least remember the cause of the terrible condition she was

in, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her

love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory; as wounded men,

dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds.

Night was falling, crows were flying about.

Suddenly it seemed to her that fiery spheres were exploding in the air

like fulminating balls when they strike, and were whirling, whirling,

to melt at last upon the snow between the branches of the trees. In the

midst of each of them appeared the face of Rodolphe. They multiplied and

drew near her, penetrating her. It all disappeared; she recognised the

lights of the houses that shone through the fog.

Now her situation, like an abyss, rose up before her. She was panting as

if her heart would burst. Then in an ecstasy of heroism, that made

her almost joyous, she ran down the hill, crossed the cow-plank, the

foot-path, the alley, the market, and reached the chemist’s shop. She

was about to enter, but at the sound of the bell someone might come, and

slipping in by the gate, holding her breath, feeling her way along the

walls, she went as far as the door of the kitchen, where a candle stuck

on the stove was burning. Justin in his shirt-sleeves was carrying out a

dish.

“Ah! they are dining; I will wait.”

He returned; she tapped at the window. He went out.

“The key! the one for upstairs where he keeps the--”

“What?”

And he looked at her, astonished at the pallor of her face, that stood

out white against the black background of the night. She seemed to

him extraordinarily beautiful and majestic as a phantom. Without

understanding what she wanted, he had the presentiment of something

terrible.

But she went on quickly in a love voice; in a sweet, melting voice, “I

want it; give it to me.”

As the partition wall was thin, they could hear the clatter of the forks

on the plates in the dining-room.

She pretended that she wanted to kill the rats that kept her from

sleeping.

“I must tell master.”

“No, stay!” Then with an indifferent air, “Oh, it’s not worth while;

I’ll tell him presently. Come, light me upstairs.”

She entered the corridor into which the laboratory door opened. Against

the wall was a key labelled Capharnaum.

“Justin!” called the druggist impatiently.

“Let us go up.”

And he followed her. The key turned in the lock, and she went straight

to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue

jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, and withdrawing it full of

a white powder, she began eating it.

“Stop!” he cried, rushing at her.

“Hush! someone will come.”

He was in despair, was calling out.

“Say nothing, or all the blame will fall on your master.”

Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity

of one that had performed a duty.

When Charles, distracted by the news of the distraint, returned home,

Emma had just gone out. He cried aloud, wept, fainted, but she did not

return. Where could she be? He sent Félicité to Homais, to Monsieur

Tuvache, to Lheureux, to the “Lion d’Or,” everywhere, and in the

intervals of his agony he saw his reputation destroyed, their fortune

lost, Berthe’s future ruined. By what?--Not a word! He waited till six

in the evening. At last, unable to bear it any longer, and fancying she

had gone to Rouen, he set out along the highroad, walked a mile, met no

one, again waited, and returned home. She had come back.

“What was the matter? Why? Explain to me.”

She sat down at her writing-table and wrote a letter, which she sealed

slowly, adding the date and the hour. Then she said in a solemn tone:

“You are to read it to-morrow; till then, I pray you, do not ask me a

single question. No, not one!”

“But--”

“Oh, leave me!”

She lay down full length on her bed. A bitter taste that she felt in her

mouth awakened her. She saw Charles, and again closed her eyes.

She was studying herself curiously, to see if she were not suffering.

But no! nothing as yet. She heard the ticking of the clock, the

crackling of the fire, and Charles breathing as he stood upright by her

bed.

“Ah! it is but a little thing, death!” she thought. “I shall fall asleep

and all will be over.”

She drank a mouthful of water and turned to the wall. The frightful

taste of ink continued.

“I am thirsty; oh! so thirsty,” she sighed.

“What is it?” said Charles, who was handing her a glass.

“It is nothing! Open the window; I am choking.”

She was seized with a sickness so sudden that she had hardly time to

draw out her handkerchief from under the pillow.

“Take it away,” she said quickly; “throw it away.”

He spoke to her; she did not answer. She lay motionless, afraid that

the slightest movement might make her vomit. But she felt an icy cold

creeping from her feet to her heart.

“Ah! it is beginning,” she murmured.

“What did you say?”

She turned her head from side to side with a gentle movement full of

agony, while constantly opening her mouth as if something very heavy

were weighing upon her tongue. At eight o’clock the vomiting began

again.

Charles noticed that at the bottom of the basin there was a sort of

white sediment sticking to the sides of the porcelain.

“This is extraordinary--very singular,” he repeated.

But she said in a firm voice, “No, you are mistaken.”

Then gently, and almost as caressing her, he passed his hand over her

stomach. She uttered a sharp cry. He fell back terror-stricken.

Then she began to groan, faintly at first. Her shoulders were shaken by

a strong shuddering, and she was growing paler than the sheets in which

her clenched fingers buried themselves. Her unequal pulse was now almost

imperceptible.

Drops of sweat oozed from her bluish face, that seemed as if rigid in

the exhalations of a metallic vapour. Her teeth chattered, her dilated

eyes looked vaguely about her, and to all questions she replied only

with a shake of the head; she even smiled once or twice. Gradually, her

moaning grew louder; a hollow shriek burst from her; she pretended she

was better and that she would get up presently. But she was seized with

convulsions and cried out--

“Ah! my God! It is horrible!”

He threw himself on his knees by her bed.

“Tell me! what have you eaten? Answer, for heaven’s sake!”

And he looked at her with a tenderness in his eyes such as she had never

seen.

“Well, there--there!” she said in a faint voice. He flew to the

writing-table, tore open the seal, and read aloud: “Accuse no one.” He

stopped, passed his hands across his eyes, and read it over again.

“What! help--help!”

He could only keep repeating the word: “Poisoned! poisoned!” Félicité

ran to Homais, who proclaimed it in the market-place; Madame Lefrancois

heard it at the “Lion d’Or”; some got up to go and tell their

neighbours, and all night the village was on the alert.

Distraught, faltering, reeling, Charles wandered about the room. He

knocked against the furniture, tore his hair, and the chemist had never

believed that there could be so terrible a sight.

He went home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to Doctor Lariviere. He

lost his head, and made more than fifteen rough copies. Hippolyte went

to Neufchâtel, and Justin so spurred Bovary’s horse that he left it

foundered and three parts dead by the hill at Bois-Guillaume.

Charles tried to look up his medical dictionary, but could not read it;

the lines were dancing.

“Be calm,” said the druggist; “we have only to administer a powerful

antidote. What is the poison?”

Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic.

“Very well,” said Homais, “we must make an analysis.”

For he knew that in cases of poisoning an analysis must be made; and the

other, who did not understand, answered--

“Oh, do anything! save her!”

Then going back to her, he sank upon the carpet, and lay there with his

head leaning against the edge of her bed, sobbing.

“Don’t cry,” she said to him. “Soon I shall not trouble you any more.”

“Why was it? Who drove you to it?”

She replied. “It had to be, my dear!”

“Weren’t you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!”

“Yes, that is true--you are good--you.”

And she passed her hand slowly over his hair. The sweetness of this

sensation deepened his sadness; he felt his whole being dissolving

in despair at the thought that he must lose her, just when she was

confessing more love for him than ever. And he could think of nothing;

he did not know, he did not dare; the urgent need for some immediate

resolution gave the finishing stroke to the turmoil of his mind.

So she had done, she thought, with all the treachery; and meanness,

and numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a

twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly

noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor

heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying away.

“Bring me the child,” she said, raising herself on her elbow.

“You are not worse, are you?” asked Charles.

“No, no!”

The child, serious, and still half-asleep, was carried in on the

servant’s arm in her long white nightgown, from which her bare

feet peeped out. She looked wonderingly at the disordered room, and

half-closed her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning on the table. They

reminded her, no doubt, of the morning of New Year’s day and Mid-Lent,

when thus awakened early by candle-light she came to her mother’s bed to

fetch her presents, for she began saying--

“But where is it, mamma?” And as everybody was silent, “But I can’t see

my little stocking.”

Félicité held her over the bed while she still kept looking towards the

mantelpiece.

“Has nurse taken it?” she asked.

And at this name, that carried her back to the memory of her adulteries

and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned away her head, as at the

loathing of another bitterer poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe

remained perched on the bed.

“Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you are! how hot you are!”

Her mother looked at her. “I am frightened!” cried the child, recoiling.

Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled.

“That will do. Take her away,” cried Charles, who was sobbing in the

alcove.

Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed less agitated; and at

every insignificant word, at every respiration a little more easy, he

regained hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his

arms.

“Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See! look at

her.”

His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he said of

himself, “never beating about the bush,” he prescribed, an emetic in

order to empty the stomach completely.

She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were

convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse

slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string

nearly breaking.

After this she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, railed

at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust away with her stiffened

arms everything that Charles, in more agony than herself, tried to make

her drink. He stood up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling

sound in his throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his whole

body. Félicité was running hither and thither in the room. Homais,

motionless, uttered great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, always retaining

his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy.

“The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the moment that the cause

ceases--”

“The effect must cease,” said Homais, “that is evident.”

“Oh, save her!” cried Bovary.

And, without listening to the chemist, who was still venturing the

hypothesis, “It is perhaps a salutary paroxysm,” Canivet was about to

administer some theriac, when they heard the cracking of a whip; all the

windows rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to

their ears in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of the market. It

was Doctor Lariviere.

The apparition of a god would not have caused more commotion. Bovary

raised his hands; Canivet stopped short; and Homais pulled off his

skull-cap long before the doctor had come in.

He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of Bichat, to that

generation, now extinct, of philosophical practitioners, who, loving

their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with enthusiasm and

wisdom. Everyone in his hospital trembled when he was angry; and his

students so revered him that they tried, as soon as they were themselves

in practice, to imitate him as much as possible. So that in all the

towns about they were found wearing his long wadded merino overcoat

and black frock-coat, whose buttoned cuffs slightly covered his brawny

hands--very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be

more ready to plunge into suffering. Disdainful of honours, of titles,

and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospitallers, generous,

fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, he

would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect

had not caused him to be feared as a demon. His glance, more penetrating

than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected every

lie athwart all assertions and all reticences. And thus he went along,

full of that debonair majesty that is given by the consciousness

of great talent, of fortune, and of forty years of a labourious and

irreproachable life.

He frowned as soon as he had passed the door when he saw the cadaverous

face of Emma stretched out on her back with her mouth open. Then, while

apparently listening to Canivet, he rubbed his fingers up and down

beneath his nostrils, and repeated--

“Good! good!”

But he made a slow gesture with his shoulders. Bovary watched him; they

looked at one another; and this man, accustomed as he was to the sight

of pain, could not keep back a tear that fell on his shirt-frill.

He tried to take Canivet into the next room. Charles followed him.

“She is very ill, isn’t she? If we put on sinapisms? Anything! Oh, think

of something, you who have saved so many!”

Charles caught him in both his arms, and gazed at him wildly,

imploringly, half-fainting against his breast.

“Come, my poor fellow, courage! There is nothing more to be done.”

And Doctor Lariviere turned away.

“You are going?”

“I will come back.”

He went out only to give an order to the coachman, with Monsieur

Canivet, who did not care either to have Emma die under his hands.

The chemist rejoined them on the Place. He could not by temperament keep

away from celebrities, so he begged Monsieur Lariviere to do him the

signal honour of accepting some breakfast.

He sent quickly to the “Lion d’Or” for some pigeons; to the butcher’s

for all the cutlets that were to be had; to Tuvache for cream; and

to Lestiboudois for eggs; and the druggist himself aided in the

preparations, while Madame Homais was saying as she pulled together the

strings of her jacket--

“You must excuse us, sir, for in this poor place, when one hasn’t been

told the night before--”

“Wine glasses!” whispered Homais.

“If only we were in town, we could fall back upon stuffed trotters.”

“Be quiet! Sit down, doctor!”

He thought fit, after the first few mouthfuls, to give some details as

to the catastrophe.

“We first had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then intolerable

pains at the epigastrium, super purgation, coma.”

“But how did she poison herself?”

“I don’t know, doctor, and I don’t even know where she can have procured

the arsenious acid.”

Justin, who was just bringing in a pile of plates, began to tremble.

“What’s the matter?” said the chemist.

At this question the young man dropped the whole lot on the ground with

a crash.

“Imbecile!” cried Homais, “awkward lout! block-head! confounded ass!”

But suddenly controlling himself--

“I wished, doctor, to make an analysis, and primo I delicately

introduced a tube--”

“You would have done better,” said the physician, “to introduce your

fingers into her throat.”

His colleague was silent, having just before privately received a severe

lecture about his emetic, so that this good Canivet, so arrogant and so

verbose at the time of the clubfoot, was to-day very modest. He smiled

without ceasing in an approving manner.

Homais dilated in Amphytrionic pride, and the affecting thought of

Bovary vaguely contributed to his pleasure by a kind of egotistic

reflex upon himself. Then the presence of the doctor transported him.

He displayed his erudition, cited pell-mell cantharides, upas, the

manchineel, vipers.

“I have even read that various persons have found themselves

under toxicological symptoms, and, as it were, thunderstricken by

black-pudding that had been subjected to a too vehement fumigation.

At least, this was stated in a very fine report drawn up by one of our

pharmaceutical chiefs, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de

Gassicourt!”

Madame Homais reappeared, carrying one of those shaky machines that

are heated with spirits of wine; for Homais liked to make his coffee

at table, having, moreover, torrefied it, pulverised it, and mixed it

himself.

“Saccharum, doctor?” said he, offering the sugar.

Then he had all his children brought down, anxious to have the

physician’s opinion on their constitutions.

At last Monsieur Lariviere was about to leave, when Madame Homais asked

for a consultation about her husband. He was making his blood too thick

by going to sleep every evening after dinner.

“Oh, it isn’t his blood that’s too thick,” said the physician.

And, smiling a little at his unnoticed joke, the doctor opened the

door. But the chemist’s shop was full of people; he had the greatest

difficulty in getting rid of Monsieur Tuvache, who feared his spouse

would get inflammation of the lungs, because she was in the habit of

spitting on the ashes; then of Monsieur Binet, who sometimes experienced

sudden attacks of great hunger; and of Madame Caron, who suffered

from tinglings; of Lheureux, who had vertigo; of Lestiboudois, who had

rheumatism; and of Madame Lefrancois, who had heartburn. At last the

three horses started; and it was the general opinion that he had not

shown himself at all obliging.

Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur

Bournisien, who was going across the market with the holy oil.

Homais, as was due to his principles, compared priests to ravens

attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was

personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the

shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other.

Nevertheless, not shrinking from what he called his mission, he returned

to Bovary’s in company with Canivet whom Monsieur Lariviere, before

leaving, had strongly urged to make this visit; and he would, but for

his wife’s objections, have taken his two sons with him, in order

to accustom them to great occasions; that this might be a lesson, an

example, a solemn picture, that should remain in their heads later on.

The room when they went in was full of mournful solemnity. On the

work-table, covered over with a white cloth, there were five or six

small balls of cotton in a silver dish, near a large crucifix between

two lighted candles.

Emma, her chin sunken upon her breast, had her eyes inordinately wide

open, and her poor hands wandered over the sheets with that hideous

and soft movement of the dying, that seems as if they wanted already to

cover themselves with the shroud. Pale as a statue and with eyes red as

fire, Charles, not weeping, stood opposite her at the foot of the bed,

while the priest, bending one knee, was muttering words in a low voice.

She turned her face slowly, and seemed filled with joy on seeing

suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of

a temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first

mystical transports, with the visions of eternal beatitude that were

beginning.

The priest rose to take the crucifix; then she stretched forward her

neck as one who is athirst, and glueing her lips to the body of the

Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest

kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he recited the Misereatur and

the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began to give

extreme unction. First upon the eyes, that had so coveted all worldly

pomp; then upon the nostrils, that had been greedy of the warm breeze

and amorous odours; then upon the mouth, that had uttered lies, that had

curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then upon the hands that

had delighted in sensual touches; and finally upon the soles of the

feet, so swift of yore, when she was running to satisfy her desires, and

that would now walk no more.

The cure wiped his fingers, threw the bit of cotton dipped in oil into

the fire, and came and sat down by the dying woman, to tell her that

she must now blend her sufferings with those of Jesus Christ and abandon

herself to the divine mercy.

Finishing his exhortations, he tried to place in her hand a blessed

candle, symbol of the celestial glory with which she was soon to be

surrounded. Emma, too weak, could not close her fingers, and the taper,

but for Monsieur Bournisien would have fallen to the ground.

However, she was not quite so pale, and her face had an expression of

serenity as if the sacrament had cured her.

The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary

that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it

meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near

death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to

despair, he thought.

In fact, she looked around her slowly, as one awakening from a dream;

then in a distinct voice she asked for her looking-glass, and remained

some time bending over it, until the big tears fell from her eyes. Then

she turned away her head with a sigh and fell back upon the pillows.

Her chest soon began panting rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded

from her mouth; her eyes, as they rolled, grew paler, like the two

globes of a lamp that is going out, so that one might have thought

her already dead but for the fearful labouring of her ribs, shaken

by violent breathing, as if the soul were struggling to free itself.

Félicité knelt down before the crucifix, and the druggist himself

slightly bent his knees, while Monsieur Canivet looked out vaguely at

the Place. Bournisien had again begun to pray, his face bowed against

the edge of the bed, his long black cassock trailing behind him in the

room. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms outstretched

towards Emma. He had taken her hands and pressed them, shuddering at

every beat of her heart, as at the shaking of a falling ruin. As the

death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his prayers

mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all seemed lost

in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled like a passing

bell.

Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs and the

clattering of a stick; and a voice rose--a raucous voice--that sang--

“Maids in the warmth of a summer day

Dream of love and of love always”

Emma raised herself like a galvanised corpse, her hair undone, her eyes

fixed, staring.

“Where the sickle blades have been,

Nannette, gathering ears of corn,

Passes bending down, my queen,

To the earth where they were born.”

“The blind man!” she cried. And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious,

frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor

wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a menace.

“The wind is strong this summer day,

Her petticoat has flown away.”

She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She

was dead.

Chapter Nine

There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction;

so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign

ourselves to believe in it. But still, when he saw that she did not

move, Charles threw himself upon her, crying--

“Farewell! farewell!”

Homais and Canivet dragged him from the room.

“Restrain yourself!”

“Yes.” said he, struggling, “I’ll be quiet. I’ll not do anything. But

leave me alone. I want to see her. She is my wife!”

And he wept.

“Cry,” said the chemist; “let nature take her course; that will solace

you.”

Weaker than a child, Charles let himself be led downstairs into the

sitting-room, and Monsieur Homais soon went home. On the Place he

was accosted by the blind man, who, having dragged himself as far as

Yonville, in the hope of getting the antiphlogistic pomade, was asking

every passer-by where the druggist lived.

“There now! as if I hadn’t got other fish to fry. Well, so much the

worse; you must come later on.”

And he entered the shop hurriedly.

He had to write two letters, to prepare a soothing potion for Bovary, to

invent some lie that would conceal the poisoning, and work it up into an

article for the “Fanal,” without counting the people who were waiting to

get the news from him; and when the Yonvillers had all heard his story

of the arsenic that she had mistaken for sugar in making a vanilla

cream. Homais once more returned to Bovary’s.

He found him alone (Monsieur Canivet had left), sitting in an arm-chair

near the window, staring with an idiotic look at the flags of the floor.

“Now,” said the chemist, “you ought yourself to fix the hour for the

ceremony.”

“Why? What ceremony?” Then, in a stammering, frightened voice, “Oh, no!

not that. No! I want to see her here.”

Homais, to keep himself in countenance, took up a water-bottle on the

whatnot to water the geraniums.

“Ah! thanks,” said Charles; “you are good.”

But he did not finish, choking beneath the crowd of memories that this

action of the druggist recalled to him.

Then to distract him, Homais thought fit to talk a little horticulture:

plants wanted humidity. Charles bowed his head in sign of approbation.

“Besides, the fine days will soon be here again.”

“Ah!” said Bovary.

The druggist, at his wit’s end, began softly to draw aside the small

window-curtain.

“Hallo! there’s Monsieur Tuvache passing.”

Charles repeated like a machine---

“Monsieur Tuvache passing!”

Homais did not dare to speak to him again about the funeral

arrangements; it was the priest who succeeded in reconciling him to

them.

He shut himself up in his consulting-room, took a pen, and after sobbing

for some time, wrote--

“I wish her to be buried in her wedding-dress, with white shoes, and a

wreath. Her hair is to be spread out over her shoulders. Three coffins,

one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. Let no one say anything to me.

I shall have strength. Over all there is to be placed a large piece of

green velvet. This is my wish; see that it is done.”

The two men were much surprised at Bovary’s romantic ideas. The chemist

at once went to him and said--

“This velvet seems to me a superfetation. Besides, the expense--”

“What’s that to you?” cried Charles. “Leave me! You did not love her.

Go!”

The priest took him by the arm for a turn in the garden. He discoursed

on the vanity of earthly things. God was very great, was very good: one

must submit to his decrees without a murmur; nay, must even thank him.

Charles burst out into blasphemies: “I hate your God!”

“The spirit of rebellion is still upon you,” sighed the ecclesiastic.

Bovary was far away. He was walking with great strides along by the

wall, near the espalier, and he ground his teeth; he raised to heaven

looks of malediction, but not so much as a leaf stirred.

A fine rain was falling: Charles, whose chest was bare, at last began to

shiver; he went in and sat down in the kitchen.

At six o’clock a noise like a clatter of old iron was heard on the

Place; it was the “Hirondelle” coming in, and he remained with his

forehead against the windowpane, watching all the passengers get

out, one after the other. Félicité put down a mattress for him in the

drawing-room. He threw himself upon it and fell asleep.

Although a philosopher, Monsieur Homais respected the dead. So bearing

no grudge to poor Charles, he came back again in the evening to sit up

with the body; bringing with him three volumes and a pocket-book for

taking notes.

Monsieur Bournisien was there, and two large candles were burning at the

head of the bed, that had been taken out of the alcove. The druggist, on

whom the silence weighed, was not long before he began formulating some

regrets about this “unfortunate young woman.” and the priest replied

that there was nothing to do now but pray for her.

“Yet,” Homais went on, “one of two things; either she died in a state of

grace (as the Church has it), and then she has no need of our prayers;

or else she departed impertinent (that is, I believe, the ecclesiastical

expression), and then--”

Bournisien interrupted him, replying testily that it was none the less

necessary to pray.

“But,” objected the chemist, “since God knows all our needs, what can be

the good of prayer?”

“What!” cried the ecclesiastic, “prayer! Why, aren’t you a Christian?”

“Excuse me,” said Homais; “I admire Christianity. To begin with, it

enfranchised the slaves, introduced into the world a morality--”

“That isn’t the question. All the texts-”

“Oh! oh! As to texts, look at history; it, is known that all the texts

have been falsified by the Jesuits.”

Charles came in, and advancing towards the bed, slowly drew the

curtains.

Emma’s head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of her

mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower part of her

face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her hands; a kind

of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to

disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a thin web, as if

spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her breast to her

knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it seemed to Charles

that infinite masses, an enormous load, were weighing upon her.

The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the

river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur

Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily, and Homais’ pen was

scratching over the paper.

“Come, my good friend,” he said, “withdraw; this spectacle is tearing

you to pieces.”

Charles once gone, the chemist and the cure recommenced their

discussions.

“Read Voltaire,” said the one, “read D’Holbach, read the

‘Encyclopaedia’!”

“Read the ‘Letters of some Portuguese Jews,’” said the other; “read ‘The

Meaning of Christianity,’ by Nicolas, formerly a magistrate.”

They grew warm, they grew red, they both talked at once without

listening to each other. Bournisien was scandalized at such audacity;

Homais marvelled at such stupidity; and they were on the point of

insulting one another when Charles suddenly reappeared. A fascination

drew him. He was continually coming upstairs.

He stood opposite her, the better to see her, and he lost himself in a

contemplation so deep that it was no longer painful.

He recalled stories of catalepsy, the marvels of magnetism, and he

said to himself that by willing it with all his force he might perhaps

succeed in reviving her. Once he even bent towards he, and cried in a

low voice, “Emma! Emma!” His strong breathing made the flames of the

candles tremble against the wall.

At daybreak Madame Bovary senior arrived. Charles as he embraced her

burst into another flood of tears. She tried, as the chemist had done,

to make some remarks to him on the expenses of the funeral. He became so

angry that she was silent, and he even commissioned her to go to town at

once and buy what was necessary.

Charles remained alone the whole afternoon; they had taken Berthe

to Madame Homais’; Félicité was in the room upstairs with Madame

Lefrancois.

In the evening he had some visitors. He rose, pressed their hands,

unable to speak. Then they sat down near one another, and formed a large

semicircle in front of the fire. With lowered faces, and swinging one

leg crossed over the other knee, they uttered deep sighs at intervals;

each one was inordinately bored, and yet none would be the first to go.

Homais, when he returned at nine o’clock (for the last two days only

Homais seemed to have been on the Place), was laden with a stock of

camphor, of benzine, and aromatic herbs. He also carried a large jar

full of chlorine water, to keep off all miasmata. Just then the servant,

Madame Lefrancois, and Madame Bovary senior were busy about Emma,

finishing dressing her, and they were drawing down the long stiff veil

that covered her to her satin shoes.

Félicité was sobbing--“Ah! my poor mistress! my poor mistress!”

“Look at her,” said the landlady, sighing; “how pretty she still is!

Now, couldn’t you swear she was going to get up in a minute?”

Then they bent over her to put on her wreath. They had to raise the head

a little, and a rush of black liquid issued, as if she were vomiting,

from her mouth.

“Oh, goodness! The dress; take care!” cried Madame Lefrancois. “Now,

just come and help,” she said to the chemist. “Perhaps you’re afraid?”

“I afraid?” replied he, shrugging his shoulders. “I dare say! I’ve seen

all sorts of things at the hospital when I was studying pharmacy. We

used to make punch in the dissecting room! Nothingness does not terrify

a philosopher; and, as I often say, I even intend to leave my body to

the hospitals, in order, later on, to serve science.”

The cure on his arrival inquired how Monsieur Bovary was, and, on

the reply of the druggist, went on--“The blow, you see, is still too

recent.”

Then Homais congratulated him on not being exposed, like other people,

to the loss of a beloved companion; whence there followed a discussion

on the celibacy of priests.

“For,” said the chemist, “it is unnatural that a man should do without

women! There have been crimes--”

“But, good heaven!” cried the ecclesiastic, “how do you expect an

individual who is married to keep the secrets of the confessional, for

example?”

Homais fell foul of the confessional. Bournisien defended it; he

enlarged on the acts of restitution that it brought about. He cited

various anecdotes about thieves who had suddenly become honest. Military

men on approaching the tribunal of penitence had felt the scales fall

from their eyes. At Fribourg there was a minister--

His companion was asleep. Then he felt somewhat stifled by the

over-heavy atmosphere of the room; he opened the window; this awoke the

chemist.

“Come, take a pinch of snuff,” he said to him. “Take it; it’ll relieve

you.”

A continual barking was heard in the distance. “Do you hear that dog

howling?” said the chemist.

“They smell the dead,” replied the priest. “It’s like bees; they leave

their hives on the decease of any person.”

Homais made no remark upon these prejudices, for he had again dropped

asleep. Monsieur Bournisien, stronger than he, went on moving his lips

gently for some time, then insensibly his chin sank down, he let fall

his big black boot, and began to snore.

They sat opposite one another, with protruding stomachs, puffed-up

faces, and frowning looks, after so much disagreement uniting at last in

the same human weakness, and they moved no more than the corpse by their

side, that seemed to be sleeping.

Charles coming in did not wake them. It was the last time; he came to

bid her farewell.

The aromatic herbs were still smoking, and spirals of bluish vapour

blended at the window-sash with the fog that was coming in. There were

few stars, and the night was warm. The wax of the candles fell in great

drops upon the sheets of the bed. Charles watched them burn, tiring his

eyes against the glare of their yellow flame.

The watering on the satin gown shimmered white as moonlight. Emma was

lost beneath it; and it seemed to him that, spreading beyond her own

self, she blended confusedly with everything around her--the silence,

the night, the passing wind, the damp odours rising from the ground.

Then suddenly he saw her in the garden at Tostes, on a bench against the

thorn hedge, or else at Rouen in the streets, on the threshold of their

house, in the yard at Bertaux. He again heard the laughter of the happy

boys beneath the apple-trees: the room was filled with the perfume

of her hair; and her dress rustled in his arms with a noise like

electricity. The dress was still the same.

For a long while he thus recalled all his lost joys, her attitudes,

her movements, the sound of her voice. Upon one fit of despair followed

another, and even others, inexhaustible as the waves of an overflowing

sea.

A terrible curiosity seized him. Slowly, with the tips of his fingers,

palpitating, he lifted her veil. But he uttered a cry of horror that

awoke the other two.

They dragged him down into the sitting-room. Then Félicité came up to

say that he wanted some of her hair.

“Cut some off,” replied the druggist.

And as she did not dare to, he himself stepped forward, scissors in

hand. He trembled so that he pierced the skin of the temple in several

places. At last, stiffening himself against emotion, Homais gave two

or three great cuts at random that left white patches amongst that

beautiful black hair.

The chemist and the cure plunged anew into their occupations, not

without sleeping from time to time, of which they accused each other

reciprocally at each fresh awakening. Then Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled

the room with holy water and Homais threw a little chlorine water on the

floor.

Félicité had taken care to put on the chest of drawers, for each

of them, a bottle of brandy, some cheese, and a large roll. And the

druggist, who could not hold out any longer, about four in the morning

sighed--

“My word! I should like to take some sustenance.”

The priest did not need any persuading; he went out to go and say mass,

came back, and then they ate and hobnobbed, giggling a little without

knowing why, stimulated by that vague gaiety that comes upon us after

times of sadness, and at the last glass the priest said to the druggist,

as he clapped him on the shoulder--

“We shall end by understanding one another.”

In the passage downstairs they met the undertaker’s men, who were coming

in. Then Charles for two hours had to suffer the torture of hearing the

hammer resound against the wood. Next day they lowered her into her

oak coffin, that was fitted into the other two; but as the bier was

too large, they had to fill up the gaps with the wool of a mattress. At

last, when the three lids had been planed down, nailed, soldered, it was

placed outside in front of the door; the house was thrown open, and the

people of Yonville began to flock round.

Old Rouault arrived, and fainted on the Place when he saw the black

cloth!

Chapter Ten

He had only received the chemist’s letter thirty-six hours after the

event; and, from consideration for his feelings, Homais had so worded it

that it was impossible to make out what it was all about.

First, the old fellow had fallen as if struck by apoplexy. Next, he

understood that she was not dead, but she might be. At last, he had put

on his blouse, taken his hat, fastened his spurs to his boots, and set

out at full speed; and the whole of the way old Rouault, panting, was

torn by anguish. Once even he was obliged to dismount. He was dizzy; he

heard voices round about him; he felt himself going mad.

Day broke. He saw three black hens asleep in a tree. He shuddered,

horrified at this omen. Then he promised the Holy Virgin three chasubles

for the church, and that he would go barefooted from the cemetery at

Bertaux to the chapel of Vassonville.

He entered Maromme shouting for the people of the inn, burst open the

door with a thrust of his shoulder, made for a sack of oats, emptied a

bottle of sweet cider into the manger, and again mounted his nag, whose

feet struck fire as it dashed along.

He said to himself that no doubt they would save her; the doctors would

discover some remedy surely. He remembered all the miraculous cures

he had been told about. Then she appeared to him dead. She was there;

before his eyes, lying on her back in the middle of the road. He reined

up, and the hallucination disappeared.

At Quincampoix, to give himself heart, he drank three cups of coffee

one after the other. He fancied they had made a mistake in the name in

writing. He looked for the letter in his pocket, felt it there, but did

not dare to open it.

At last he began to think it was all a joke; someone’s spite, the jest

of some wag; and besides, if she were dead, one would have known it. But

no! There was nothing extraordinary about the country; the sky was blue,

the trees swayed; a flock of sheep passed. He saw the village; he was

seen coming bending forward upon his horse, belabouring it with great

blows, the girths dripping with blood.

When he had recovered consciousness, he fell, weeping, into Bovary’s

arms: “My girl! Emma! my child! tell me--”

The other replied, sobbing, “I don’t know! I don’t know! It’s a curse!”

The druggist separated them. “These horrible details are useless. I will

tell this gentleman all about it. Here are the people coming. Dignity!

Come now! Philosophy!”

The poor fellow tried to show himself brave, and repeated several times.

“Yes! courage!”

“Oh,” cried the old man, “so I will have, by God! I’ll go along o’ her

to the end!”

The bell began tolling. All was ready; they had to start. And seated in

a stall of the choir, side by side, they saw pass and repass in front of

them continually the three chanting choristers.

The serpent-player was blowing with all his might. Monsieur Bournisien,

in full vestments, was singing in a shrill voice. He bowed before the

tabernacle, raising his hands, stretched out his arms. Lestiboudois

went about the church with his whalebone stick. The bier stood near the

lectern, between four rows of candles. Charles felt inclined to get up

and put them out.

Yet he tried to stir himself to a feeling of devotion, to throw himself

into the hope of a future life in which he should see her again. He

imagined to himself she had gone on a long journey, far away, for a long

time. But when he thought of her lying there, and that all was over,

that they would lay her in the earth, he was seized with a fierce,

gloomy, despairful rage. At times he thought he felt nothing more, and

he enjoyed this lull in his pain, whilst at the same time he reproached

himself for being a wretch.

The sharp noise of an iron-ferruled stick was heard on the stones,

striking them at irregular intervals. It came from the end of the

church, and stopped short at the lower aisles. A man in a coarse brown

jacket knelt down painfully. It was Hippolyte, the stable-boy at the

“Lion d’Or.” He had put on his new leg.

One of the choristers went round the nave making a collection, and the

coppers chinked one after the other on the silver plate.

“Oh, make haste! I am in pain!” cried Bovary, angrily throwing him a

five-franc piece. The churchman thanked him with a deep bow.

They sang, they knelt, they stood up; it was endless! He remembered that

once, in the early times, they had been to mass together, and they had

sat down on the other side, on the right, by the wall. The bell began

again. There was a great moving of chairs; the bearers slipped their

three staves under the coffin, and everyone left the church.

Then Justin appeared at the door of the shop. He suddenly went in again,

pale, staggering.

People were at the windows to see the procession pass. Charles at the

head walked erect. He affected a brave air, and saluted with a nod those

who, coming out from the lanes or from their doors, stood amidst the

crowd.

The six men, three on either side, walked slowly, panting a little. The

priests, the choristers, and the two choirboys recited the _De

profundis_,[22] and their voices echoed over the fields, rising and

falling with their undulations. Sometimes they disappeared in the

windings of the path; but the great silver cross rose always before the

trees.

[22] Psalm CXXX.

The women followed in black cloaks with turned-down hoods; each of them

carried in her hands a large lighted candle, and Charles felt himself

growing weaker at this continual repetition of prayers and torches,

beneath this oppressive odour of wax and of cassocks. A fresh breeze was

blowing; the rye and colza were sprouting, little dewdrops trembled at

the roadsides and on the hawthorn hedges. All sorts of joyous sounds

filled the air; the jolting of a cart rolling afar off in the ruts, the

crowing of a cock, repeated again and again, or the gambling of a foal

running away under the apple-trees: The pure sky was fretted with rosy

clouds; a bluish haze rested upon the cots covered with iris. Charles as

he passed recognised each courtyard. He remembered mornings like this,

when, after visiting some patient, he came out from one and returned to

her.

The black cloth bestrewn with white beads blew up from time to time,

laying bare the coffin. The tired bearers walked more slowly, and it

advanced with constant jerks, like a boat that pitches with every wave.

They reached the cemetery. The men went right down to a place in the

grass where a grave was dug. They ranged themselves all round; and while

the priest spoke, the red soil thrown up at the sides kept noiselessly

slipping down at the corners.

Then when the four ropes were arranged the coffin was placed upon them.

He watched it descend; it seemed descending for ever. At last a thud was

heard; the ropes creaked as they were drawn up. Then Bournisien took

the spade handed to him by Lestiboudois; with his left hand all the

time sprinkling water, with the right he vigorously threw in a large

spadeful; and the wood of the coffin, struck by the pebbles, gave forth

that dread sound that seems to us the reverberation of eternity.

The ecclesiastic passed the holy water sprinkler to his neighbour. This

was Homais. He swung it gravely, then handed it to Charles, who sank to

his knees in the earth and threw in handfuls of it, crying, “Adieu!” He

sent her kisses; he dragged himself towards the grave, to engulf himself

with her. They led him away, and he soon grew calmer, feeling perhaps,

like the others, a vague satisfaction that it was all over.

Old Rouault on his way back began quietly smoking a pipe, which Homais

in his innermost conscience thought not quite the thing. He also noticed

that Monsieur Binet had not been present, and that Tuvache had “made

off” after mass, and that Theodore, the notary’s servant wore a blue

coat, “as if one could not have got a black coat, since that is the

custom, by Jove!” And to share his observations with others he went from

group to group. They were deploring Emma’s death, especially Lheureux,

who had not failed to come to the funeral.

“Poor little woman! What a trouble for her husband!”

The druggist continued, “Do you know that but for me he would have

committed some fatal attempt upon himself?”

“Such a good woman! To think that I saw her only last Saturday in my

shop.”

“I haven’t had leisure,” said Homais, “to prepare a few words that I

would have cast upon her tomb.”

Charles on getting home undressed, and old Rouault put on his blue

blouse. It was a new one, and as he had often during the journey wiped

his eyes on the sleeves, the dye had stained his face, and the traces of

tears made lines in the layer of dust that covered it.

Madame Bovary senior was with them. All three were silent. At last the

old fellow sighed--

“Do you remember, my friend, that I went to Tostes once when you had

just lost your first deceased? I consoled you at that time. I thought of

something to say then, but now--” Then, with a loud groan that shook his

whole chest, “Ah! this is the end for me, do you see! I saw my wife go,

then my son, and now to-day it’s my daughter.”

He wanted to go back at once to Bertaux, saying that he could not sleep

in this house. He even refused to see his granddaughter.

“No, no! It would grieve me too much. Only you’ll kiss her many times

for me. Good-bye! you’re a good fellow! And then I shall never forget

that,” he said, slapping his thigh. “Never fear, you shall always have

your turkey.”

But when he reached the top of the hill he turned back, as he had turned

once before on the road of Saint-Victor when he had parted from her. The

windows of the village were all on fire beneath the slanting rays of the

sun sinking behind the field. He put his hand over his eyes, and saw

in the horizon an enclosure of walls, where trees here and there formed

black clusters between white stones; then he went on his way at a gentle

trot, for his nag had gone lame.

Despite their fatigue, Charles and his mother stayed very long that

evening talking together. They spoke of the days of the past and of the

future. She would come to live at Yonville; she would keep house for

him; they would never part again. She was ingenious and caressing,

rejoicing in her heart at gaining once more an affection that had

wandered from her for so many years. Midnight struck. The village as

usual was silent, and Charles, awake, thought always of her.

Rodolphe, who, to distract himself, had been rambling about the wood all

day, was sleeping quietly in his château, and Léon, down yonder, always

slept.

There was another who at that hour was not asleep.

On the grave between the pine-trees a child was on his knees weeping,

and his heart, rent by sobs, was beating in the shadow beneath the load

of an immense regret, sweeter than the moon and fathomless as the night.

The gate suddenly grated. It was Lestiboudois; he came to fetch his

spade, that he had forgotten. He recognised Justin climbing over the

wall, and at last knew who was the culprit who stole his potatoes.

Chapter Eleven

The next day Charles had the child brought back. She asked for her

mamma. They told her she was away; that she would bring her back some

playthings. Berthe spoke of her again several times, then at last

thought no more of her. The child’s gaiety broke Bovary’s heart, and he

had to bear besides the intolerable consolations of the chemist.

Money troubles soon began again, Monsieur Lheureux urging on anew his

friend Vincart, and Charles pledged himself for exorbitant sums; for he

would never consent to let the smallest of the things that had belonged

to HER be sold. His mother was exasperated with him; he grew even more

angry than she did. He had altogether changed. She left the house.

Then everyone began “taking advantage” of him. Mademoiselle Lempereur

presented a bill for six months’ teaching, although Emma had never taken

a lesson (despite the receipted bill she had shown Bovary); it was an

arrangement between the two women. The man at the circulating library

demanded three years’ subscriptions; Mere Rollet claimed the postage due

for some twenty letters, and when Charles asked for an explanation, she

had the delicacy to reply--

“Oh, I don’t know. It was for her business affairs.”

With every debt he paid Charles thought he had come to the end of them.

But others followed ceaselessly. He sent in accounts for professional

attendance. He was shown the letters his wife had written. Then he had

to apologise.

Félicité now wore Madame Bovary’s gowns; not all, for he had kept some

of them, and he went to look at them in her dressing-room, locking

himself up there; she was about her height, and often Charles, seeing

her from behind, was seized with an illusion, and cried out--

“Oh, stay, stay!”

But at Whitsuntide she ran away from Yonville, carried off by Theodore,

stealing all that was left of the wardrobe.

It was about this time that the widow Dupuis had the honour to inform

him of the “marriage of Monsieur Léon Dupuis her son, notary at Yvetot,

to Mademoiselle Leocadie Leboeuf of Bondeville.” Charles, among the

other congratulations he sent him, wrote this sentence--

“How glad my poor wife would have been!”

One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the

attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper. He opened it

and read: “Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your

life.” It was Rodolphe’s letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes,

where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had just

blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in

the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even

than he, had thought of dying. At last he discovered a small R at the

bottom of the second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodolphe’s

attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained air when they

had met two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter

deceived him.

“Perhaps they loved one another platonically,” he said to himself.

Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he

shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity

of his woe.

Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have

coveted her. She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he

was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his

despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable.

To please her, as if she were still living, he adopted her

predilections, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots and took to

wearing white cravats. He put cosmetics on his moustache, and, like her,

signed notes of hand. She corrupted him from beyond the grave.

He was obliged to sell his silver piece by piece; next he sold the

drawing-room furniture. All the rooms were stripped; but the bedroom,

her own room, remained as before. After his dinner Charles went up

there. He pushed the round table in front of the fire, and drew up her

armchair. He sat down opposite it. A candle burnt in one of the gilt

candlesticks. Berthe by his side was painting prints.

He suffered, poor man, at seeing her so badly dressed, with laceless

boots, and the arm-holes of her pinafore torn down to the hips; for the

charwoman took no care of her. But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her

little head bent forward so gracefully, letting the dear fair hair fall

over her rosy cheeks, that an infinite joy came upon him, a happiness

mingled with bitterness, like those ill-made wines that taste of

resin. He mended her toys, made her puppets from cardboard, or sewed up

half-torn dolls. Then, if his eyes fell upon the workbox, a ribbon lying

about, or even a pin left in a crack of the table, he began to dream,

and looked so sad that she became as sad as he.

No one now came to see them, for Justin had run away to Rouen, where he

was a grocer’s assistant, and the druggist’s children saw less and less

of the child, Monsieur Homais not caring, seeing the difference of their

social position, to continue the intimacy.

The blind man, whom he had not been able to cure with the pomade, had

gone back to the hill of Bois-Guillaume, where he told the travellers of

the vain attempt of the druggist, to such an extent, that Homais when

he went to town hid himself behind the curtains of the “Hirondelle” to

avoid meeting him. He detested him, and wishing, in the interests of his

own reputation, to get rid of him at all costs, he directed against

him a secret battery, that betrayed the depth of his intellect and the

baseness of his vanity. Thus, for six consecutive months, one could read

in the “Fanal de Rouen” editorials such as these--

“All who bend their steps towards the fertile plains of Picardy have, no

doubt, remarked, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a wretch suffering from

a horrible facial wound. He importunes, persecutes one, and levies a

regular tax on all travellers. Are we still living in the monstrous

times of the Middle Ages, when vagabonds were permitted to display in

our public places leprosy and scrofulas they had brought back from the

Crusades?”

Or--

“In spite of the laws against vagabondage, the approaches to our great

towns continue to be infected by bands of beggars. Some are seen going

about alone, and these are not, perhaps, the least dangerous. What are

our ediles about?”

Then Homais invented anecdotes--

“Yesterday, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a skittish horse--” And then

followed the story of an accident caused by the presence of the blind

man.

He managed so well that the fellow was locked up. But he was released.

He began again, and Homais began again. It was a struggle. Homais won

it, for his foe was condemned to life-long confinement in an asylum.

This success emboldened him, and henceforth there was no longer a dog

run over, a barn burnt down, a woman beaten in the parish, of which

he did not immediately inform the public, guided always by the love of

progress and the hate of priests. He instituted comparisons between the

elementary and clerical schools to the detriment of the latter; called

to mind the massacre of St. Bartholomew a propos of a grant of one

hundred francs to the church, and denounced abuses, aired new views.

That was his phrase. Homais was digging and delving; he was becoming

dangerous.

However, he was stifling in the narrow limits of journalism, and soon a

book, a work was necessary to him. Then he composed “General Statistics

of the Canton of Yonville, followed by Climatological Remarks.” The

statistics drove him to philosophy. He busied himself with great

questions: the social problem, moralisation of the poorer classes,

pisciculture, caoutchouc, railways, etc. He even began to blush at being

a bourgeois. He affected the artistic style, he smoked. He bought two

chic Pompadour statuettes to adorn his drawing-room.

He by no means gave up his shop. On the contrary, he kept well abreast

of new discoveries. He followed the great movement of chocolates; he

was the first to introduce “cocoa” and “revalenta” into the

Seine-Inferieure. He was enthusiastic about the hydro-electric

Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off

his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden

spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for

this man more bandaged than a Scythian, and splendid as one of the Magi.

He had fine ideas about Emma’s tomb. First he proposed a broken column

with some drapery, next a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta, a sort of

rotunda, or else a “mass of ruins.” And in all his plans Homais always

stuck to the weeping willow, which he looked upon as the indispensable

symbol of sorrow.

Charles and he made a journey to Rouen together to look at some tombs

at a funeral furnisher’s, accompanied by an artist, one Vaufrylard, a

friend of Bridoux’s, who made puns all the time. At last, after having

examined some hundred designs, having ordered an estimate and made

another journey to Rouen, Charles decided in favour of a mausoleum,

which on the two principal sides was to have a “spirit bearing an

extinguished torch.”

As to the inscription, Homais could think of nothing so fine as _Sta

viator_,[23] and he got no further; he racked his brain, he constantly

repeated _Sta viator_. At last he hit upon _Amabilen conjugem

calcas_,[24] which was adopted.

[23] Rest traveler.

[24] Tread upon a loving wife.

A strange thing was that Bovary, while continually thinking of Emma, was

forgetting her. He grew desperate as he felt this image fading from his

memory in spite of all efforts to retain it. Yet every night he dreamt

of her; it was always the same dream. He drew near her, but when he was

about to clasp her she fell into decay in his arms.

For a week he was seen going to church in the evening. Monsieur

Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then gave him up.

Moreover, the old fellow was growing intolerant, fanatic, said Homais.

He thundered against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every

other week, in his sermon, to recount the death agony of Voltaire, who

died devouring his excrements, as everyone knows.

In spite of the economy with which Bovary lived, he was far from being

able to pay off his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any more

bills. A distraint became imminent. Then he appealed to his mother, who

consented to let him take a mortgage on her property, but with a great

many recriminations against Emma; and in return for her sacrifice she

asked for a shawl that had escaped the depredations of Félicité. Charles

refused to give it her; they quarrelled.

She made the first overtures of reconciliation by offering to have the

little girl, who could help her in the house, to live with her. Charles

consented to this, but when the time for parting came, all his courage

failed him. Then there was a final, complete rupture.

As his affections vanished, he clung more closely to the love of his

child. She made him anxious, however, for she coughed sometimes, and had

red spots on her cheeks.

Opposite his house, flourishing and merry, was the family of the

chemist, with whom everything was prospering. Napoleon helped him in the

laboratory, Athalie embroidered him a skullcap, Irma cut out rounds of

paper to cover the preserves, and Franklin recited Pythagoras’ table in

a breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men.

Not so! A secret ambition devoured him. Homais hankered after the cross

of the Legion of Honour. He had plenty of claims to it.

“First, having at the time of the cholera distinguished myself by a

boundless devotion; second, by having published, at my expense,

various works of public utility, such as” (and he recalled his pamphlet

entitled, “Cider, its manufacture and effects,” besides observation

on the lanigerous plant-louse, sent to the Academy; his volume of

statistics, and down to his pharmaceutical thesis); “without counting

that I am a member of several learned societies” (he was member of a

single one).

“In short!” he cried, making a pirouette, “if it were only for

distinguishing myself at fires!”

Then Homais inclined towards the Government. He secretly did the

prefect great service during the elections. He sold himself--in a word,

prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign

in which he implored him to “do him justice”; he called him “our good

king,” and compared him to Henri IV.

And every morning the druggist rushed for the paper to see if his

nomination were in it. It was never there. At last, unable to bear it

any longer, he had a grass plot in his garden designed to represent the

Star of the Cross of Honour with two little strips of grass running from

the top to imitate the ribband. He walked round it with folded arms,

meditating on the folly of the Government and the ingratitude of men.

From respect, or from a sort of sensuality that made him carry on his

investigations slowly, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer of

a rosewood desk which Emma had generally used. One day, however, he

sat down before it, turned the key, and pressed the spring. All Léon’s

letters were there. There could be no doubt this time. He devoured them

to the very last, ransacked every corner, all the furniture, all the

drawers, behind the walls, sobbing, crying aloud, distraught, mad. He

found a box and broke it open with a kick. Rodolphe’s portrait flew full

in his face in the midst of the overturned love-letters.

People wondered at his despondency. He never went out, saw no one,

refused even to visit his patients. Then they said “he shut himself up

to drink.”

Sometimes, however, some curious person climbed on to the garden hedge,

and saw with amazement this long-bearded, shabbily clothed, wild man,

who wept aloud as he walked up and down.

In the evening in summer he took his little girl with him and led her to

the cemetery. They came back at nightfall, when the only light left in

the Place was that in Binet’s window.

The voluptuousness of his grief was, however, incomplete, for he had no

one near him to share it, and he paid visits to Madame Lefrancois to be

able to speak of her.

But the landlady only listened with half an ear, having troubles

like himself. For Lheureux had at last established the “Favorites du

Commerce,” and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for doing errands,

insisted on a rise of wages, and was threatening to go over “to the

opposition shop.”

One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse--his

last resource--he met Rodolphe.

They both turned pale when they caught sight of one another. Rodolphe,

who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew

bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and

very hot) to the length of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the

public-house.

Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and

Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved. He seemed

to see again something of her in it. It was a marvel to him. He would

have liked to have been this man.

The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out

with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in. Charles

was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the

succession of memories that crossed his face. This gradually grew

redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at

last a moment when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on

Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon the same

look of weary lassitude came back to his face.

“I don’t blame you,” he said.

Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a

broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow--

“No, I don’t blame you now.”

He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made--

“It is the fault of fatality!”

Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand

from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean.

The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the arbour. Rays

of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their

shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were

blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was

suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled

his aching heart.

At seven o’clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon,

went to fetch him to dinner.

His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth

open, and in his hand was a long tress of black hair.

“Come along, papa,” she said.

And thinking he wanted to play; she pushed him gently. He fell to the

ground. He was dead.

Thirty-six hours after, at the druggist’s request, Monsieur Canivet came

thither. He made a post-mortem and found nothing.

When everything had been sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes

remained, that served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary’s going to

her grandmother. The good woman died the same year; old Rouault was

paralysed, and it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor, and

sends her to a cotton-factory to earn a living.

Since Bovary’s death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville

without any success, so severely did Homais attack them. He has an

enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and

public opinion protects him.

He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.