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Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 379 |
And, despite the composure which he had promised his father and D’Artagnan to observe, Raoul could not resist uttering a few words of darkest menace. “And yet,” he continued, “if my name were De Wardes, and if I had the pliancy of character and strength of will of M. d’Artagnan, I should laugh, with my lips at least; I should convince other women that this perfidious girl, honored by the affection I have wasted on her, leaves me only one regret, that of having been abused and deceived by her seemingly modest and irreproachable conduct; a few might perhaps fawn on the king by jesting at my expense; I should put myself on the track of some of those buffoons; I should chastise a few of them, perhaps; the men would fear me, and by the time I had laid three dying or dead at my feet, I should be adored by the women. Yes, yes, that, indeed, would be the proper course to adopt, and the Comte de la Fere himself would not object to it. Has not he also been tried, in his earlier days, in the same manner as I have just been tried myself? Did he not replace affection by intoxication? He has often told me so. Why should I not replace love by pleasure? He must have suffered as much as I suffer, even more—if that is possible. The history of one man is the history of all, a dragging trial, more or less prolonged, more or less bitter—sorrowful. The note of human nature is nothing but one sustained cry. But what are the sufferings of others compared to those from which I am now suffering? Does the open wound in another’s breast soften the anguish of the gaping ulcer in our own? Does the blood which is welling from another man’s side stanch that which is pouring from our own? Does the general grief of our fellow-creatures lessen our own private and particular woe? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears. And besides,” he went on, “what has my life been up to the present moment? A cold, barren, sterile arena, in which I have always fought for others, never for myself. Sometimes for a king, sometimes for a woman. The king has betrayed, the woman disdained me. Miserable, unlucky wretch that I am! Women! Can I not make all expiate the crime of one of their sex? What does that need? To have a heart no longer, or to forget that I ever had one; to be strong, even against weakness itself; to lean always, even when one feels that the support is giving way. What is needed to attain, or succeed in all that? To be young, handsome, strong, valiant, rich. I am, or shall be, all that. But honor?” he still continued, “and what is honor after all? A theory which every man understands in his own way. My father tells me: ‘Honor is the consideration of what is due to others, and particularly what is due to oneself.’ But Guiche, and Manicamp, and Saint-Aignan particularly, would say to me: ‘What’s honor? Honor consists in studying and yielding to the passions and pleasures of one’s king.’ Honor such as that indeed, is easy and productive enough. With honor like that, I can keep my post at the court, become a gentleman of the chamber, and accept the command of a regiment, which may at any time be presented to me. With honor such as that, I can be duke and peer. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 380 | “The stain which that woman has stamped upon me, the grief that has broken my heart, the heart of the friend and playmate of her childhood, in no way affects M. de Bragelonne, an excellent officer, a courageous leader, who will cover himself with glory at the first encounter, and who will become a hundred times greater than Mademoiselle de la Valliere is to-day, the mistress of the king—for the king will not marry her—and the more publicly he will proclaim her as his mistress, the more opaque will grow the shadow of shame he casts upon her face, in the guise of a crown; and in proportion as others despise, as I despise her, I shall be gleaning honors in the field. Alas! we had walked together side by side, she and I, during the earliest, the brightest, the most angelic portion of our existence, hand in hand along the charming path of life, covered with the blossoms of youth; and then, alas! we reach a cross-road, where she separates herself from me, in which we have to follow a different route, whereby we become more and more widely separated from each other. And to attain the end of this path, oh, Heaven! I am now alone, in utter despair, and crushed to the very earth.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 381 | Such were the sinister reflections in which Raoul indulged, when his foot mechanically paused at the door of his own dwelling. He had reached it without remarking the streets through which he passed, without knowing how he had come; he pushed open the door, continued to advance, and ascended the staircase. The staircase, as in most of the houses at that period, was very dark, and the landings most obscure. Raoul lived on the first floor; he paused in order to ring. Olivain appeared, took his sword and cloak from his hands; Raoul himself opened the door which, from the ante-chamber, led into a small salon, richly furnished enough for the salon of a young man, and completely filled with flowers by Olivain, who, knowing his master’s tastes, had shown himself studiously attentive in gratifying them, without caring whether his master perceived his attention or not. There was a portrait of La Valliere in the salon, which had been drawn by herself and given by her to Raoul. This portrait, fastened above a large easy chair covered with dark colored damask, was the first point towards which Raoul bent his steps—the first object on which he fixed his eyes. It was, moreover, Raoul’s usual habit to do so; every time he entered his room, this portrait, before anything else, attracted his attention. This time, as usual, he walked straight up to the portrait, placed his knees upon the arm chair, and paused to look at it sadly. His arms were crossed upon his breast, his head slightly thrown back, his eyes filled with tears, his mouth worked into a bitter smile. He looked at the portrait of the one he had so tenderly loved; and then all that he had said passed before his mind again, all that he had suffered seemed again to assail his heart; and, after a long silence, he murmured for the third time, “Miserable, unhappy wretch that I am!”
He had hardly pronounced these words, when he heard the sound of a sigh and a groan behind him. He turned sharply round and perceived, in the angle of the salon, standing up, a bending veiled female figure, which he had been the means of concealing behind the door as he opened it, and which he had not perceived as he entered. He advanced towards the figure, whose presence in his room had not been announced to him; and as he bowed, and inquired at the same moment who she was, she suddenly raised her head, and removed the veil from her face, revealing her pale and sorrow-stricken features. Raoul staggered back as if he had seen a ghost. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 382 | “Louise!” he cried, in a tone of such absolute despair, one could hardly have thought the human voice was capable of so desponding a cry, without the snapping of the human heart.
Mademoiselle de la Valliere—for it was indeed she—advanced a few steps towards him. “Yes—Louise,” she murmured.
But this interval, short as it had been, was quite sufficient for Raoul to recover himself. “You, mademoiselle?” he said; and then added, in an indefinable tone, “You here!”
“Yes, Raoul,” the young girl replied, “I have been waiting for you.”
“I beg your pardon. When I came into the room I was not aware—”
“I know—but I entreated Olivain not to tell you—” She hesitated; and as Raoul did not attempt to interrupt her, a moment’s silence ensued, during which the sound of their throbbing hearts might have been heard, not in unison with each other, but the one beating as violently as the other. It was for Louise to speak, and she made an effort to do so.
“I wished to speak to you,” she said. “It was absolutely necessary that I should see you—myself—alone. I have not hesitated to adopt a step which must remain secret; for no one, except yourself, could understand my motive, Monsieur de Bragelonne.”
“In fact, mademoiselle,” Raoul stammered out, almost breathless from emotion, “as far as I am concerned, and despite the good opinion you have of me, I confess—”
“Will you do me the great kindness to sit down and listen to me?” said Louise, interrupting him with her soft, sweet voice.
Bragelonne looked at her for a moment; then mournfully shaking his head, he sat, or rather fell down on a chair. “Speak,” he said.
She cast a glance all round her. This look was a timid entreaty, and implored secrecy far more effectually than her expressed words had done a few minutes before. Raoul rouse, and went to the door, which he opened. “Olivain,” he said, “I am not within for any one.” And then, turning towards Louise, he added, “Is not that what you wished?”
Nothing could have produced a greater effect upon Louise than these few words, which seemed to signify, “You see that I still understand you.” She passed a handkerchief across her eyes, in order to remove a rebellious tear which she could not restrain; and then, having collected herself for a moment, she said, “Raoul, do not turn your kind, frank look away from me. You are not one of those men who despise a woman for having given her heart to another, even though her affection might render him unhappy, or might wound his pride.” Raoul did not reply. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 383 | “Alas!” continued La Valliere, “it is only too true, my cause is a bad one, and I cannot tell in what way to begin. It will be better for me, I think, to relate to you, very simply, everything that has befallen me. As I shall speak but the pure and simple truth, I shall always find my path clear before me in spite of the obscurity and obstacles I have to brave in order to solace my heart, which is full to overflowing, and wishes to pour itself out at your feet.”
Raoul continued to preserve the same unbroken silence. La Valliere looked at him with an air that seemed to say, “Encourage me; for pity’s sake, but a single word!” But Raoul did not open his lips; and the young girl was obliged to continue:
“Just now,” she said, “M. de Saint-Aignan came to me by the king’s directions.” She cast down her eyes as she said this; while Raoul, on his side, turned his away, in order to avoid looking at her. “M. de Saint-Aignan came to me from the king,” she repeated, “and told me that you knew all;” and she attempted to look Raoul in the face, after inflicting this further wound upon him, in addition to the many others he had already received; but it was impossible to meet Raoul’s eyes.
“He told me you were incensed with me—and justly so, I admit.”
This time Raoul looked at the young girl, and a smile full of disdain passed across his lips.
“Oh!” she continued, “I entreat you, do not say that you have had any other feeling against me than that of anger merely. Raoul, wait until I have told you all—wait until I have said to you all that I had to say—all that I came to say.”
Raoul, by the strength of his iron will, forced his features to assume a calmer expression, and the disdainful smile upon his lip passed away.
“In the first place,” said La Valliere, “in the first place, with my hands raised in entreaty towards you, with my forehead bowed to the ground before you, I entreat you, as the most generous, as the noblest of men, to pardon, to forgive me. If I have left you in ignorance of what was passing in my own bosom, never, at least, would I have consented to deceive you. Oh! I entreat you, Raoul—I implore you on my knees—answer me one word, even though you wrong me in doing so. Better, far better, an injurious word from your lips, than suspicion resting in your heart.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 384 | “I admire your subtlety of expression, mademoiselle,” said Raoul, making an effort to remain calm. “To leave another in ignorance that you are deceiving him, is loyal; but to deceive him—it seems that would be very wrong, and that you would not do it.”
“Monsieur, for a long time I thought that I loved you better than anything else; and so long as I believed in my affection for you, I told you that loved you. I could have sworn it on the altar; but a day came when I was undeceived.”
“Well, on that day, mademoiselle, knowing that I still continued to love you, true loyalty of conduct should have forced you to inform me you had ceased to love me.”
“But on that day, Raoul—on that day, when I read in the depths of my own heart, when I confessed to myself that you no longer filled my mind entirely, when I saw another future before me than that of being your friend, your life-long companion, your wife—on that day, Raoul, you were not, alas! any more beside me.”
“But you knew where I was, mademoiselle; you could have written to me.”
“Raoul, I did not dare to do so. Raoul, I have been weak and cowardly. I knew you so thoroughly—I knew how devotedly you loved me, that I trembled at the bare idea of the grief I was about to cause you; and that is so true, Raoul, that this very moment I am now speaking to you, bending thus before you, my heart crushed in my bosom, my voice full of sighs, my eyes full of tears, it is so perfectly true, that I have no other defense than my frankness, I have no other sorrow greater than that which I read in your eyes.”
Raoul attempted to smile.
“No!” said the young girl, with a profound conviction, “no, no; you will not do me so foul a wrong as to disguise your feelings before me now! You loved me; you were sure of your affection for me; you did not deceive yourself; you do not lie to your own heart—whilst I—I—” And pale as death, her arms thrown despairingly above her head, she fell upon her knees.
“Whilst you,” said Raoul, “you told me you loved me, and yet you loved another.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 385 | “Whilst you,” said Raoul, “you told me you loved me, and yet you loved another.”
“Alas, yes!” cried the poor girl; “alas, yes! I do love another; and that other—oh! for Heaven’s sake let me say it, Raoul, for it is my only excuse—that other I love better than my own life, better than my own soul even. Forgive my fault, or punish my treason, Raoul. I came here in no way to defend myself, but merely to say to you: ‘You know what it is to love!’—in such a case am I! I love to that degree, that I would give my life, my very soul, to the man I love. If he should ever cease to love me, I shall die of grief and despair, unless Heaven come to my assistance, unless Heaven does show pity upon me. Raoul, I came here to submit myself to your will, whatever it might be—to die, if it were your wish I should die. Kill me, then, Raoul! if in your heart you believe I deserve death.”
“Take care, mademoiselle,” said Raoul: “the woman who invites death is one who has nothing but her heart’s blood to offer to her deceived and betrayed lover.”
“You are right,” she said.
Raoul uttered a deep sigh, as he exclaimed, “And you love without being able to forget?”
“I love without a wish to forget; without a wish ever to love any one else,” replied La Valliere.
“Very well,” said Raoul. “You have said to me, in fact, all you had to say; all I could possibly wish to know. And now, mademoiselle, it is I who ask your forgiveness, for it is I who have almost been an obstacle in your life; I, too, who have been wrong, for, in deceiving myself, I helped to deceive you.”
“Oh!” said La Valliere, “I do not ask you so much as that, Raoul.”
“I only am to blame, mademoiselle,” continued Raoul, “better informed than yourself of the difficulties of this life, I should have enlightened you. I ought not to have relied upon uncertainty; I ought to have extracted an answer from your heart, whilst I hardly even sought an acknowledgement from your lips. Once more, mademoiselle, it is I who ask your forgiveness.”
“Impossible, impossible!” she cried, “you are mocking me.”
“How, impossible?”
“Yes, it is impossible to be so good, and kind, ah! perfect to such a degree as that.”
“Take care!” said Raoul, with a bitter smile, “for presently you may say perhaps I did not love you.”
“Oh! you love me like an affectionate brother; let me hope that, Raoul.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 386 | “Yes, it is impossible to be so good, and kind, ah! perfect to such a degree as that.”
“Take care!” said Raoul, with a bitter smile, “for presently you may say perhaps I did not love you.”
“Oh! you love me like an affectionate brother; let me hope that, Raoul.”
“As a brother! undeceive yourself, Louise. I love you as a lover—as a husband, with the deepest, the truest, the fondest affection.”
“Raoul, Raoul!”
“As a brother! Oh, Louise! I love you so deeply, that I would have shed my blood for you, drop by drop; I would, oh! how willingly, have suffered myself to be torn to pieces for your sake, have sacrificed my very future for you. I love you so deeply, Louise, that my heart feels dead and crushed within me,—my faith in human nature all is gone,—my eyes have lost their light; I loved you so deeply, that I now no longer see, think of, care for, anything, either in this world or the next.”
“Raoul—dear Raoul! spare me, I implore you!” cried La Valliere. “Oh! if I had but known—”
“It is too late, Louise; you love, you are happy in your affection; I read your happiness through your tears—behind the tears which the loyalty of your nature makes you shed; I feel the sighs your affection breathes forth. Louise, Louise, you have made me the most abjectly wretched man living; leave me, I entreat you. Adieu! adieu!”
“Forgive me! oh, forgive me, Raoul, for what I have done.”
“Have I not done much, much more? Have I not told you that I love you still?” She buried her face in her hands.
“And to tell you that—do you hear me, Louise?—to tell you that, at such a moment as this, to tell you that, as I have told you, is to pronounce my own sentence of death. Adieu!” La Valliere held out her hands to him in vain. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 387 | “And to tell you that—do you hear me, Louise?—to tell you that, at such a moment as this, to tell you that, as I have told you, is to pronounce my own sentence of death. Adieu!” La Valliere held out her hands to him in vain.
“We ought not to see each other again in this world,” he said, and as she was on the point of crying out in bitter agony at this remark, he placed his hand on her mouth to stifle the exclamation. She pressed her lips upon it, and fell fainting to the ground. “Olivain,” said Raoul, “take this young lady and bear her to the carriage which is waiting for her at the door.” As Olivain lifted her up, Raoul made a movement as if to dart towards La Valliere, in order to give her a first and last kiss, but, stopping abruptly, he said, “No! she is not mine. I am no thief—as is the king of France.” And he returned to his room, whilst the lackey carried La Valliere, still fainting, to the carriage.
As soon as Raoul had quitted Athos and D’Artagnan, as the two exclamations that had followed his departure escaped their lips, they found themselves face to face alone. Athos immediately resumed the earnest air that he had assumed at D’Artagnan’s arrival.
“Well,” he said, “what have you come to announce to me, my friend?”
“I?” inquired D’Artagnan.
“Yes; I do not see you in this way without some reason for it,” said Athos, smiling.
“The deuce!” said D’Artagnan.
“I will place you at your ease. The king is furious, I suppose?”
“Well, I must say he is not altogether pleased.”
“And you have come to arrest me, then?”
“My dear friend, you have hit the very mark.”
“Oh, I expected it. I am quite ready to go with you.”
“Deuce take it!” said D’Artagnan, “what a hurry you are in.”
“I am afraid of delaying you,” said Athos, smiling.
“I have plenty of time. Are you not curious, besides, to know how things went on between the king and me?”
“If you will be good enough to tell me, I will listen with the greatest of pleasure,” said Athos, pointing out to D’Artagnan a large chair, into which the latter threw himself, assuming the easiest possible attitude.
“Well, I will do so willingly enough,” continued D’Artagnan, “for the conversation is rather curious, I must say. In the first place the king sent for me.”
“As soon as I had left?” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 388 | “Well, I will do so willingly enough,” continued D’Artagnan, “for the conversation is rather curious, I must say. In the first place the king sent for me.”
“As soon as I had left?”
“You were just going down the last steps of the staircase, as the musketeers told me. I arrived. My dear Athos, he was not red in the face merely, he was positively purple. I was not aware, of course, of what had passed; only, on the ground, lying on the floor, I saw a sword broken in two.”
“‘Captain d’Artagnan,’ cried the king, as soon as he saw me.
“‘Sire,’ I replied.
“‘M. de la Fere has just left me; he is an insolent man.’
“‘An insolent man!’ I exclaimed, in such a tone that the king stopped suddenly short.
“‘Captain d’Artagnan,’ resumed the king, with his teeth clenched, ‘you will be good enough to listen to and hear me.’
“‘That is my duty, sire.’
“‘I have, out of consideration for M. de la Fere, wished to spare him—he is a man of whom I still retain some kind recollections—the discredit of being arrested in my palace. You will therefore take a carriage.’ At this I made a slight movement.
“‘If you object to arrest him yourself,’ continued the king, ‘send me my captain of the guards.’
“‘Sire,’ I replied, ‘there is no necessity for the captain of the guards, since I am on duty.’
“‘I should not like to annoy you,’ said the king, kindly, ‘for you have always served me well, Monsieur D’Artagnan.’
“‘You do not “annoy” me, sire,’ I replied; ‘I am on duty, that is all.’
“‘But,’ said the king, in astonishment, ‘I believe the comte is your friend?’
“‘If he were my father, sire, it would not make me less on duty than I am.’
“The king looked at me; he saw how unmoved my face was, and seemed satisfied. ‘You will arrest M. le Comte de la Fere, then?’ he inquired.
“‘Most certainly, sire, if you give me the order to do so.’
“‘Very well; I order you to do so.’
“I bowed, and replied, ‘Where is the comte, sire?’
“‘You will look for him.’
“‘And am I to arrest him, wherever he may be?’
“‘Yes; but try that he may be at his own house. If he should have started for his own estate, leave Paris at once, and arrest him on his way thither.’
“I bowed; but as I did not move, he said, ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’
“‘For the order to arrest the comte, signed by yourself.’ |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 389 | “I bowed; but as I did not move, he said, ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’
“‘For the order to arrest the comte, signed by yourself.’
“The king seemed annoyed; for, in point of fact, it was the exercise of a fresh act of authority, a repetition of the arbitrary act, if, indeed, it is to be considered as such. He took hold of his pen slowly, and evidently in no very good temper; and then he wrote, ‘Order for M. le Chevalier d’Artagnan, captain of my musketeers, to arrest M. le Comte de la Fere, wherever he is to be found.’ He then turned towards me; but I was looking on without moving a muscle of my face. In all probability he thought he perceived something like bravado in my tranquil manner, for he signed hurriedly, and then handing me the order, he said, ‘Go, monsieur!’ I obeyed; and here I am.”
Athos pressed his friend’s hand. “Well, let us set off,” he said.
“Oh! surely,” said D’Artagnan, “you must have some trifling matters to arrange before you leave your apartments in this manner.”
“I?—not at all.”
“Why not?”
“Why, you know, D’Artagnan, that I have always been a very simple traveler on this earth, ready to go to the end of the world by the order of my sovereign; ready to quit it at the summons of my Maker. What does a man who is thus prepared require in such a case?—a portmanteau, or a shroud. I am ready at this moment, as I have always been, my dear friend, and can accompany you at once.”
“But, Bragelonne—”
“I have brought him up in the same principles I laid down for my own guidance; and you observed that, as soon as he perceived you, he guessed, that very moment, the motive of your visit. We have thrown him off his guard for a moment; but do not be uneasy, he is sufficiently prepared for my disgrace not to be too much alarmed at it. So, let us go.”
“Very well, let us go,” said D’Artagnan, quietly.
“As I broke my sword in the king’s presence, and threw the pieces at his feet, I presume that will dispense with the necessity of delivering it over to you.”
“You are quite right; and besides that, what the deuce do you suppose I could do with your sword?”
“Am I to walk behind, or before you?” inquired Athos, laughing. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 390 | “You are quite right; and besides that, what the deuce do you suppose I could do with your sword?”
“Am I to walk behind, or before you?” inquired Athos, laughing.
“You will walk arm in arm with me,” replied D’Artagnan, as he took the comte’s arm to descend the staircase; and in this manner they arrived at the landing. Grimaud, whom they had met in the ante-room, looked at them as they went out together in this manner, with some little uneasiness; his experience of affairs was quite sufficient to give him good reason to suspect that there was something wrong.
“Ah! is that you, Grimaud?” said Athos, kindly. “We are going—”
“To take a turn in my carriage,” interrupted D’Artagnan, with a friendly nod of the head.
Grimaud thanked D’Artagnan by a grimace, which was evidently intended for a smile, and accompanied both the friends to the door. Athos entered first into the carriage; D’Artagnan followed him without saying a word to the coachman. The departure had taken place so quietly, that it excited no disturbance or attention even in the neighborhood. When the carriage had reached the quays, “You are taking me to the Bastile, I perceive,” said Athos.
“I?” said D’Artagnan, “I take you wherever you may choose to go; nowhere else, I can assure you.”
“What do you mean?” said the comte, surprised.
“Why, surely, my dear friend,” said D’Artagnan, “you quite understand that I undertook the mission with no other object in view than that of carrying it out exactly as you liked. You surely did not expect that I was going to get you thrown into prison like that, brutally, and without any reflection. If I had anticipated that, I should have let the captain of the guards undertake it.”
“And so—?” said Athos.
“And so, I repeat again, we will go wherever you may choose.”
“My dear friend,” said Athos, embracing D’Artagnan, “how like you that is!” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 391 | “And so—?” said Athos.
“And so, I repeat again, we will go wherever you may choose.”
“My dear friend,” said Athos, embracing D’Artagnan, “how like you that is!”
“Well, it seems simple enough to me. The coachman will take you to the barrier of the Cours-la-Reine; you will find a horse there which I have ordered to be kept ready for you; with that horse you will be able to do three posts without stopping; and I, on my side, will take care not to return to the king, to tell him that you have gone away, until the very moment it will be impossible to overtake you. In the meantime you will have reached Le Havre, and from Le Havre across to England, where you will find the charming residence of which M. Monk made me a present, without speaking of the hospitality which King Charles will not fail to show you. Well, what do you think of this project?”
Athos shook his head, and then said, smiling as he did so, “No, no, take me to the Bastile.”
“You are an obstinate fellow, my dear Athos,” returned D’Artagnan, “reflect for a few moments.”
“On what subject?”
“That you are no longer twenty years of age. Believe me, I speak according to my own knowledge and experience. A prison is certain death for men who are at our time of life. No, no; I will never allow you to languish in prison in such a way. Why, the very thought of it makes my head turn giddy.”
“Dear D’Artagnan,” Athos replied, “Heaven most fortunately made my body as strong, powerful, and enduring as my mind; and, rely upon it, I shall retain my strength up to the very last moment.”
“But this is not strength of mind or character; it is sheer madness.”
“No, D’Artagnan, it is the highest order of reasoning. Do not suppose that I should in the slightest degree in the world discuss the question with you, whether you would not be ruined in endeavoring to save me. I should have done precisely as you propose if flight had been part of my plan of action; I should, therefore, have accepted from you what, without any doubt, you would have accepted from me. No! I know you too well even to breathe a word upon the subject.”
“Ah! if you would only let me do it,” said D’Artagnan, “what a dance we would give his most gracious majesty!”
“Still he is the king; do not forget that, my dear friend.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 392 | “Ah! if you would only let me do it,” said D’Artagnan, “what a dance we would give his most gracious majesty!”
“Still he is the king; do not forget that, my dear friend.”
“Oh! that is all the same to me; and king though he be, I would plainly tell him, ‘Sire, imprison, exile, kill every one in France and Europe; order me to arrest and poniard even whom you like—even were it Monsieur, your own brother; but do not touch one of the four musketeers, or if so, mordioux!’”
“My dear friend,” replied Athos, with perfect calmness, “I should like to persuade you of one thing; namely, that I wish to be arrested; that I desire above all things that my arrest should take place.”
D’Artagnan made a slight movement of his shoulders.
“Nay, I wish it, I repeat, more than anything; if you were to let me escape, it would be only to return of my own accord, and constitute myself a prisoner. I wish to prove to this young man, who is dazzled by the power and splendor of his crown, that he can be regarded as the first and chiefest among men only on the one condition of his proving himself to be the most generous and the wisest. He may punish me, imprison, torture me, it matters not. He abuses his opportunities, and I wish him to learn the bitterness of remorse, while Heaven teaches him what chastisement is.”
“Well, well,” replied D’Artagnan, “I know only too well that, when you have once said, ‘no,’ you mean ‘no.’ I do not insist any longer; you wish to go to the Bastile?”
“I do wish to go there.”
“Let us go, then! To the Bastile!” cried D’Artagnan to the coachman. And throwing himself back in the carriage, he gnawed the ends of his mustache with a fury which, for Athos, who knew him well, signified a resolution either already taken or in course of formation. A profound silence ensued in the carriage, which continued to roll on, but neither faster nor slower than before. Athos took the musketeer by the hand.
“You are not angry with me, D’Artagnan?” he said.
“I!—oh, no! certainly not; of course not. What you do for heroism, I should have done from obstinacy.”
“But you are quite of opinion, are you not, that Heaven will avenge me, D’Artagnan?”
“And I know one or two on earth who will not fail to lend a helping hand,” said the captain. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 393 | “But you are quite of opinion, are you not, that Heaven will avenge me, D’Artagnan?”
“And I know one or two on earth who will not fail to lend a helping hand,” said the captain.
The carriage arrived at the outside of the gate of the Bastile. A soldier on guard stopped it, but D’Artagnan had only to utter a single word to procure admittance, and the carriage passed on without further difficulty. Whilst they were proceeding along the covered way which led to the courtyard of the governor’s residence, D’Artagnan, whose lynx eyes saw everything, even through the walls, suddenly cried out, “What is that out yonder?”
“Well,” said Athos, quietly; “what is it?”
“Look yonder, Athos.”
“In the courtyard?”
“Yes, yes; make haste!”
“Well, a carriage; very likely conveying a prisoner like myself.”
“That would be too droll.”
“I do not understand you.”
“Make haste and look again, and look at the man who is just getting out of that carriage.”
At that very moment a second sentinel stopped D’Artagnan, and while the formalities were being gone through, Athos could see at a hundred paces from him the man whom his friend had pointed out to him. He was, in fact, getting out of the carriage at the door of the governor’s house. “Well,” inquired D’Artagnan, “do you see him?”
“Yes; he is a man in a gray suit.”
“What do you say of him?”
“I cannot very well tell; he is, as I have just now told you, a man in a gray suit, who is getting out of a carriage; that is all.”
“Athos, I will wager anything that it is he.”
“He, who?”
“Aramis.”
“Aramis arrested? Impossible!”
“I do not say he is arrested, since we see him alone in his carriage.”
“Well, then, what is he doing here?”
“Oh! he knows Baisemeaux, the governor,” replied the musketeer, slyly; “so we have arrived just in time.”
“What for?”
“In order to see what we can see.”
“I regret this meeting exceedingly. When Aramis sees me, he will be very much annoyed, in the first place, at seeing me, and in the next at being seen.”
“Very well reasoned.”
“Unfortunately, there is no remedy for it; whenever any one meets another in the Bastile, even if he wished to draw back to avoid him, it would be impossible.”
“Athos, I have an idea; the question is, to spare Aramis the annoyance you were speaking of, is it not?”
“What is to be done?” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 394 | “Athos, I have an idea; the question is, to spare Aramis the annoyance you were speaking of, is it not?”
“What is to be done?”
“I will tell you; or in order to explain myself in the best possible way, let me relate the affair in my own manner; I will not recommend you to tell a falsehood, for that would be impossible for you to do; but I will tell falsehoods enough for both; it is easy to do that when one is born to the nature and habits of a Gascon.”
Athos smiled. The carriage stopped where the one we have just now pointed out had stopped; namely, at the door of the governor’s house. “It is understood, then?” said D’Artagnan, in a low voice to his friend. Athos consented by a gesture. They ascended the staircase. There will be no occasion for surprise at the facility with which they had entered into the Bastile, if it be remembered that, before passing the first gate, in fact, the most difficult of all, D’Artagnan had announced that he had brought a prisoner of state. At the third gate, on the contrary, that is to say, when he had once fairly entered the prison, he merely said to the sentinel, “To M. Baisemeaux;” and they both passed on. In a few minutes they were in the governor’s dining-room, and the first face which attracted D’Artagnan’s observation was that of Aramis, who was seated side by side with Baisemeaux, awaiting the announcement of a meal whose odor impregnated the whole apartment. If D’Artagnan pretended surprise, Aramis did not pretend at all; he started when he saw his two friends, and his emotion was very apparent. Athos and D’Artagnan, however, complimented him as usual, and Baisemeaux, amazed, completely stupefied by the presence of his three guests, began to perform a few evolutions around them.
“By what lucky accident—”
“We were just going to ask you,” retorted D’Artagnan.
“Are we going to give ourselves up as prisoners?” cried Aramis, with an affection of hilarity.
“Ah! ah!” said D’Artagnan; “it is true the walls smell deucedly like a prison. Monsieur de Baisemeaux, you know you invited me to sup with you the other day.”
“I?” cried Baisemeaux.
“Yes, of course you did, although you now seem so struck with amazement. Don’t you remember it?”
Baisemeaux turned pale and then red, looked at Aramis, who looked at him, and finished by stammering out, “Certainly—I am delighted—but, upon my honor—I have not the slightest—Ah! I have such a wretched memory.”
“Well! I am wrong, I see,” said D’Artagnan, as if he were offended.
“Wrong, what for?”
“Wrong to remember anything about it, it seems.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 395 | “Well! I am wrong, I see,” said D’Artagnan, as if he were offended.
“Wrong, what for?”
“Wrong to remember anything about it, it seems.”
Baisemeaux hurried towards him. “Do not stand on ceremony, my dear captain,” he said; “I have the worst memory in the world. I no sooner leave off thinking of my pigeons and their pigeon-house, than I am no better than the rawest recruit.”
“At all events, you remember it now,” said D’Artagnan, boldly.
“Yes, yes,” replied the governor, hesitating; “I think I do remember.”
“It was when you came to the palace to see me; you told me some story or other about your accounts with M. de Louviere and M. de Tremblay.”
“Oh, yes! perfectly.”
“And about M. d’Herblay’s kindness towards you.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Aramis, looking at the unhappy governor full in the face, “and yet you just now said you had no memory, Monsieur de Baisemeaux.”
Baisemeaux interrupted the musketeer in the middle of his revelations. “Yes, yes; you’re quite right; how could I have forgotten; I remember it now as well as possible; I beg you a thousand pardons. But now, once for all, my dear M. d’Artagnan, be sure that at this present time, as at any other, whether invited or not, you are perfectly at home here, you and M. d’Herblay, your friend,” he said, turning towards Aramis; “and this gentleman, too,” he added, bowing to Athos.
“Well, I thought it would be sure to turn out so,” replied D’Artagnan, “and that is the reason I came. Having nothing to do this evening at the Palais Royal, I wished to judge for myself what your ordinary style of living was like; and as I was coming along, I met the Comte de la Fere.”
Athos bowed. “The comte, who had just left his majesty, handed me an order which required immediate attention. We were close by here; I wished to call in, even if it were for no other object than that of shaking hands with you and of presenting the comte to you, of whom you spoke so highly that evening at the palace when—”
“Certainly, certainly—M. le Comte de la Fere?”
“Precisely.”
“The comte is welcome, I am sure.”
“And he will sup with you two, I suppose, whilst I, unfortunate dog that I am, must run off on a matter of duty. Oh! what happy beings you are, compared to myself,” he added, sighing as loud as Porthos might have done.
“And so you are going away, then?” said Aramis and Baisemeaux together, with the same expression of delighted surprise, the tone of which was immediately noticed by D’Artagnan. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 396 | “And so you are going away, then?” said Aramis and Baisemeaux together, with the same expression of delighted surprise, the tone of which was immediately noticed by D’Artagnan.
“I leave you in my place,” he said, “a noble and excellent guest.” And he touched Athos gently on the shoulder, who, astonished also, could not help exhibiting his surprise a little; which was noticed by Aramis only, for M. de Baisemeaux was not quite equal to the three friends in point of intelligence.
“What, are you going to leave us?” resumed the governor.
“I shall only be about an hour, or an hour and a half. I will return in time for dessert.”
“Oh! we will wait for you,” said Baisemeaux.
“No, no; that would be really disobliging me.”
“You will be sure to return, though?” said Athos, with an expression of doubt.
“Most certainly,” he said, pressing his friend’s hand confidently; and he added, in a low voice, “Wait for me, Athos; be cheerful and lively as possible, and above all, don’t allude even to business affairs, for Heaven’s sake.”
And with a renewed pressure of the hand, he seemed to warn the comte of the necessity of keeping perfectly discreet and impenetrable. Baisemeaux led D’Artagnan to the gate. Aramis, with many friendly protestations of delight, sat down by Athos, determined to make him speak; but Athos possessed every virtue and quality to the very highest degree. If necessity had required it, he would have been the finest orator in the world, but on other occasions he would rather have died than have opened his lips. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 397 | Ten minutes after D’Artagnan’s departure, the three gentlemen sat down to table, which was covered with the most substantial display of gastronomic luxury. Large joints, exquisite dishes, preserves, the greatest variety of wines, appeared successively upon the table, which was served at the king’s expense, and of which expense M. Colbert would have found no difficulty in saving two thirds, without any one in the Bastile being the worse for it. Baisemeaux was the only one who ate and drank with gastronomic resolution. Aramis allowed nothing to pass by him, but merely touched everything he took; Athos, after the soup and three hors d’oeuvres, ate nothing more. The style of conversation was such as might have been anticipated between three men so opposite in temper and ideas. Aramis was incessantly asking himself by what extraordinary chance Athos was there at Baisemeaux’s when D’Artagnan was no longer there, and why D’Artagnan did not remain when Athos was there. Athos sounded all the depths of the mind of Aramis, who lived in the midst of subterfuge, evasion, and intrigue; he studied his man well and thoroughly, and felt convinced that he was engaged upon some important project. And then he too began to think of his own personal affair, and to lose himself in conjectures as to D’Artagnan’s reason for having left the Bastile so abruptly, and for leaving behind him a prisoner so badly introduced and so badly looked after by the prison authorities. But we shall not pause to examine into the thoughts and feelings of these personages, but will leave them to themselves, surrounded by the remains of poultry, game, and fish, which Baisemeaux’s generous knife and fork had so mutilated. We are going to follow D’Artagnan instead, who, getting into the carriage which had brought him, said to the coachman, “Return to the palace, as fast as the horses can gallop.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 398 | M. de Saint-Aignan had executed the commission with which the king had intrusted him for La Valliere—as we have already seen in one of the preceding chapters; but, whatever his eloquence, he did not succeed in persuading the young girl that she had in the king a protector powerful enough for her under any combination of circumstances, and that she had no need of any one else in the world when the king was on her side. In point of fact, at the very first word which the favorite mentioned of the discovery of the famous secret, Louise, in a passion of tears, abandoned herself in utter despair to a sorrow which would have been far from flattering for the king, if he had been a witness of it from one of the corners of the room. Saint-Aignan, in his character of ambassador, felt almost as greatly offended at it as his master himself would have been, and returned to inform the king what he had seen and heard; and it is thus we find him, in a state of great agitation, in the presence of the king, who was, if possible, in a state of even greater flurry than himself.
“But,” said the king to the courtier, when the latter had finished his report, “what did she decide to do? Shall I at least see her presently before supper? Will she come to me, or shall I be obliged to go to her room?”
“I believe, sire, that if your majesty wishes to see her, you will not only have to take the first step in advance, but will have to go the whole way.”
“That I do not mind. Do you think she has yet a secret fancy for young Bragelonne?” muttered the king between his teeth.
“Oh! sire, that is not possible; for it is you alone, I am convinced, Mademoiselle de la Valliere loves, and that, too, with all her heart. But you know that De Bragelonne belongs to that proud race who play the part of Roman heroes.”
The king smiled feebly; he knew how true the illustration was, for Athos had just left him.
“As for Mademoiselle de la Valliere,” Saint-Aignan continued, “she was brought up under the care of the Dowager Madame, that is to say, in the greatest austerity and formality. This young engaged couple coldly exchanged their little vows in the prim presence of the moon and stars; and now, when they find they have to break those vows asunder, it plays the very deuce with them.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 399 | Saint-Aignan thought to have made the king laugh; but on the contrary, from a mere smile Louis passed to the greatest seriousness of manner. He already began to experience that remorse which the comte had promised D’Artagnan he would inflict upon him. He reflected that, in fact, these young persons had loved and sworn fidelity to each other; that one of the two had kept his word, and that the other was too conscientious not to feel her perjury most bitterly. And his remorse was not unaccompanied; for bitter pangs of jealousy began to beset the king’s heart. He did not say another word, and instead of going to pay a visit to his mother, or the queen, or Madame, in order to amuse himself a little, and make the ladies laugh, as he himself used to say, he threw himself into the huge armchair in which his august father Louis XIII. had passed so many weary days and years in company with Barradat and Cinq-Mars. Saint-Aignan perceived the king was not to be amused at that moment; he tried a last resource, and pronounced Louise’s name, which made the king look up immediately. “What does your majesty intend to do this evening—shall Mademoiselle de la Valliere be informed of your intention to see her?”
“It seems she is already aware of that,” replied the king. “No, no, Saint-Aignan,” he continued, after a moment’s pause, “we will both of us pass our time in thinking, and musing, and dreaming; when Mademoiselle de la Valliere shall have sufficiently regretted what she now regrets, she will deign, perhaps, to give us some news of herself.”
“Ah! sire, is it possible you can so misunderstand her heart, which is so full of devotion?”
The king rose, flushed from vexation and annoyance; he was a prey to jealousy as well as to remorse. Saint-Aignan was just beginning to feel that his position was becoming awkward, when the curtain before the door was raised. The king turned hastily round; his first idea was that a letter from Louise had arrived; but, instead of a letter of love, he only saw his captain of musketeers, standing upright, and perfectly silent in the doorway. “M. d’Artagnan,” he said, “ah! Well, monsieur?”
D’Artagnan looked at Saint-Aignan; the king’s eyes took the same direction as those of his captain; these looks would have been clear to any one, and for a still greater reason they were so for Saint-Aignan. The courtier bowed and quitted the room, leaving the king and D’Artagnan alone.
“Is it done?” inquired the king.
“Yes, sire,” replied the captain of the musketeers, in a grave voice, “it is done.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 400 | “Is it done?” inquired the king.
“Yes, sire,” replied the captain of the musketeers, in a grave voice, “it is done.”
The king was unable to say another word. Pride, however, obliged him not to pause at what he had done; whenever a sovereign has adopted a decisive course, even though it be unjust, he is compelled to prove to all witnesses, and particularly to prove it to himself, that he was quite right all through. A good means for effecting that—an almost infallible means, indeed—is, to try and prove his victim to be in the wrong. Louis, brought up by Mazarin and Anne of Austria, knew better than any one else his vocation as a monarch; he therefore endeavored to prove it on the present occasion. After a few moment’s pause, which he had employed in making silently to himself the same reflections which we have just expressed aloud, he said, in an indifferent tone: “What did the comte say?”
“Nothing at all, sire.”
“Surely he did not allow himself to be arrested without saying something?”
“He said he expected to be arrested, sire.”
The king raised his head haughtily. “I presume,” he said, “that M. le Comte de la Fere has not continued to play his obstinate and rebellious part.”
“In the first place, sire, what do you wish to signify by rebellious?” quietly asked the musketeer. “A rebel, in the eyes of the king, is a man who not only allows himself to be shut up in the Bastile, but still more, who opposes those who do not wish to take him there.”
“Who do not wish to take him there!” exclaimed the king. “What do you say, captain! Are you mad?”
“I believe not, sire.”
“You speak of persons who did not wish to arrest M. de la Fere! Who are those persons, may I ask?”
“I should say those whom your majesty intrusted with that duty.”
“But it was you whom I intrusted with it,” exclaimed the king.
“Yes, sire; it was I.”
“And yet you say that, despite my orders, you had the intention of not arresting the man who had insulted me!”
“Yes, sire—that was really my intention. I even proposed to the comte to mount a horse that I had prepared for him at the Barriere de la Conference.”
“And what was your object in getting this horse ready?”
“Why, sire, in order that M. le Comte de la Fere might be able to reach Le Havre, and from that place make his escape to England.”
“You betrayed me, then, monsieur?” cried the king, kindling with a wild pride.
“Exactly so.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 401 | “Why, sire, in order that M. le Comte de la Fere might be able to reach Le Havre, and from that place make his escape to England.”
“You betrayed me, then, monsieur?” cried the king, kindling with a wild pride.
“Exactly so.”
There was nothing to say in answer to statements made in such a tone; the king was astounded at such an obstinate and open resistance on the part of D’Artagnan. “At least you had a reason, Monsieur d’Artagnan, for acting as you did?” said the king, proudly.
“I have always a reason for everything, sire.”
“Your reason cannot be your friendship for the comte, at all events,—the only one that can be of any avail, the only one that could possibly excuse you,—for I placed you perfectly at your ease in that respect.”
“Me, sire?”
“Did I not give you the choice to arrest, or not to arrest M. le Comte de la Fere?”
“Yes, sire, but—”
“But what?” exclaimed the king, impatiently.
“But you warned me, sire, that if I did not arrest him, your captain of the guard should do so.”
“Was I not considerate enough towards you, from the very moment I did not compel you to obey me?”
“To me, sire, you were, but not to my friend, for my friend would be arrested all the same, whether by myself or by the captain of the guards.”
“And this is your devotion, monsieur! a devotion which argues and reasons. You are no soldier, monsieur!”
“I wait for your majesty to tell me what I am.”
“Well, then—you are a Frondeur.”
“And since there is no longer any Fronde, sire, in that case—”
“But if what you say is true—”
“What I say is always true, sire.”
“What have you come to say to me, monsieur?”
“I have come to say to your majesty, ‘Sire, M. de la Fere is in the Bastile.’”
“That is not your fault, it would seem.”
“That is true, sire; but at all events he is there; and since he is there, it is important that your majesty should know it.”
“Ah! Monsieur d’Artagnan, so you set your king at defiance.”
“Sire—”
“Monsieur d’Artagnan! I warn you that you are abusing my patience.”
“On the contrary, sire.”
“What do you mean by ‘on the contrary’?”
“I have come to get myself arrested, too.”
“To get yourself arrested,—you!” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 402 | “Ah! Monsieur d’Artagnan, so you set your king at defiance.”
“Sire—”
“Monsieur d’Artagnan! I warn you that you are abusing my patience.”
“On the contrary, sire.”
“What do you mean by ‘on the contrary’?”
“I have come to get myself arrested, too.”
“To get yourself arrested,—you!”
“Of course. My friend will get wearied to death in the Bastile by himself; and I have come to propose to your majesty to permit me to bear him company; if your majesty will but give me the word, I will arrest myself; I shall not need the captain of the guards for that, I assure you.”
The king darted towards the table and seized hold of a pen to write the order for D’Artagnan’s imprisonment. “Pay attention, monsieur, that this is forever,” cried the king, in tones of sternest menace.
“I can quite believe that,” returned the musketeer; “for when you have once done such an act as that, you will never be able to look me in the face again.”
The king dashed down his pen violently. “Leave the room, monsieur!” he said.
“Not so, if it please your majesty.”
“What is that you say?”
“Sire, I came to speak gently and temperately to your majesty; your majesty got into a passion with me; that is a misfortune; but I shall not the less on that account say what I had to say to you.”
“Your resignation, monsieur,—your resignation!” cried the king.
“Sire, you know whether I care about my resignation or not, since at Blois, on the very day when you refused King Charles the million which my friend the Comte de la Fere gave him, I then tendered my resignation to your majesty.”
“Very well, monsieur—do it at once!”
“No, sire; for there is no question of my resignation at the present moment. Your majesty took up your pen just now to send me to the Bastile,—why should you change your intention?”
“D’Artagnan! Gascon that you are! who is king, allow me to ask,—you or myself?”
“You, sire, unfortunately.”
“What do you mean by ‘unfortunately’?”
“Yes, sire; for if it were I—”
“If it were you, you would approve of M. d’Artagnan’s rebellious conduct, I suppose?”
“Certainly.”
“Really!” said the king, shrugging his shoulders.
“And I should tell my captain of the musketeers,” continued D’Artagnan, “I should tell him, looking at him all the while with human eyes, and not with eyes like coals of fire, ‘M. d’Artagnan, I had forgotten that I was the king, for I descended from my throne in order to insult a gentleman.’”
“Monsieur,” said the king, “do you think you can excuse your friend by exceeding him in insolence?” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 403 | “Monsieur,” said the king, “do you think you can excuse your friend by exceeding him in insolence?”
“Oh! sire! I should go much further than he did,” said D’Artagnan; “and it would be your own fault. I should tell you what he, a man full of the finest sense of delicacy, did not tell you; I should say—‘Sire, you have sacrificed his son, and he defended his son—you sacrificed himself; he addressed you in the name of honor, of religion, of virtue—you repulsed, drove him away, imprisoned him.’ I should be harder than he was, for I should say to you—‘Sire; it is for you to choose. Do you wish to have friends or lackeys—soldiers or slaves—great men or mere puppets? Do you wish men to serve you, or to bend and crouch before you? Do you wish men to love you, or to be afraid of you? If you prefer baseness, intrigue, cowardice, say so at once, sire, and we will leave you,—we who are the only individuals who are left,—nay, I will say more, the only models of the valor of former times; we who have done our duty, and have exceeded, perhaps, in courage and in merit, the men already great for posterity. Choose, sire! and that, too, without delay. Whatever relics remain to you of the great nobility, guard them with a jealous eye; you will never be deficient in courtiers. Delay not—and send me to the Bastile with my friend; for, if you did not know how to listen to the Comte de la Fere, whose voice is the sweetest and noblest in all the world when honor is the theme; if you do not know how to listen to D’Artagnan, the frankest and honestest voice of sincerity, you are a bad king, and to-morrow will be a poor king. And learn from me, sire, that bad kings are hated by their people, and poor kings are driven ignominiously away.’ That is what I had to say to you, sire; you were wrong to drive me to say it.”
The king threw himself back in his chair, cold as death, and as livid as a corpse. Had a thunderbolt fallen at his feet, he could not have been more astonished; he seemed as if his respiration had utterly ceased, and that he was at the point of death. The honest voice of sincerity, as D’Artagnan had called it, had pierced through his heart like a sword-blade. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 404 | D’Artagnan had said all he had to say. Comprehending the king’s anger, he drew his sword, and, approaching Louis XIV. respectfully, he placed it on the table. But the king, with a furious gesture, thrust aside the sword, which fell on the ground and rolled to D’Artagnan’s feet. Notwithstanding the perfect mastery which D’Artagnan exercised over himself, he, too, in his turn, became pale, and, trembling with indignation, said: “A king may disgrace a soldier,—he may exile him, and may even condemn him to death; but were he a hundred times a king, he has no right to insult him by casting a dishonor upon his sword! Sire, a king of France has never repulsed with contempt the sword of a man such as I am! Stained with disgrace as this sword now is, it has henceforth no other sheath than either your heart or my own! I choose my own, sire; and you have to thank Heaven and my own patience that I do so.” Then snatching up his sword, he cried, “My blood be upon your head!” and, with a rapid gesture, he placed the hilt upon the floor and directed the point of the blade towards his breast. The king, however, with a movement far more rapid than that of D’Artagnan, threw his right arm around the musketeer’s neck, and with his left hand seized hold of the blade by the middle, and returned it silently to the scabbard. D’Artagnan, upright, pale, and still trembling, let the king do all to the very end. Louis, overcome and softened by gentler feelings, returned to the table, took a pen in his hand, wrote a few lines, signed them, and then held it out to D’Artagnan.
“What is this paper, sire?” inquired the captain.
“An order for M. d’Artagnan to set the Comte de la Fere at liberty immediately.”
D’Artagnan seized the king’s hand, and imprinted a kiss upon it; he then folded the order, placed it in his belt, and quitted the room. Neither the king nor the captain had uttered a syllable.
“Oh, human heart! thou guide and director of kings,” murmured Louis, when alone, “when shall I learn to read in your inmost recesses, as in the leaves of a book! Oh, I am not a bad king—nor am I a poor king; I am but still a child, when all is said and done.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 405 | D’Artagnan had promised M. de Baisemeaux to return in time for dessert, and he kept his word. They had just reached the finer and more delicate class of wines and liqueurs with which the governor’s cellar had the reputation of being most admirably stocked, when the silver spurs of the captain resounded in the corridor, and he himself appeared at the threshold. Athos and Aramis had played a close game; neither of the two had been able to gain the slightest advantage over the other. They had supped, talked a good deal about the Bastile, of the last journey to Fontainebleau, of the intended fete that M. Fouquet was about to give at Vaux; they had generalized on every possible subject; and no one, excepting Baisemeaux, had in the slightest degree alluded to private matters. D’Artagnan arrived in the very midst of the conversation, still pale and much disturbed by his interview with the king. Baisemeaux hastened to give him a chair; D’Artagnan accepted a glass of wine, and set it down empty. Athos and Aramis both remarked his emotion; as for Baisemeaux, he saw nothing more than the captain of the king’s musketeers, to whom he endeavored to show every possible attention. But, although Aramis had remarked his emotion, he had not been able to guess the cause of it. Athos alone believed he had detected it. For him, D’Artagnan’s return, and particularly the manner in which he, usually so impassible, seemed overcome, signified, “I have just asked the king something which the king has refused me.” Thoroughly convinced that his conjecture was correct, Athos smiled, rose from the table, and made a sign to D’Artagnan, as if to remind him that they had something else to do than to sup together. D’Artagnan immediately understood him, and replied by another sign. Aramis and Baisemeaux watched this silent dialogue, and looked inquiringly at each other. Athos felt that he was called upon to give an explanation of what was passing.
“The truth is, my friend,” said the Comte de la Fere, with a smile, “that you, Aramis, have been supping with a state criminal, and you, Monsieur de Baisemeaux, with your prisoner.”
Baisemeaux uttered an exclamation of surprise, and almost of delight; for he was exceedingly proud and vain of his fortress, and for his own individual profit, the more prisoners he had, the happier he was, and the higher in rank the prisoners happened to be, the prouder he felt. Aramis assumed the expression of countenance he thought the position justified, and said, “Well, dear Athos, forgive me, but I almost suspected what has happened. Some prank of Raoul and La Valliere, I suppose?”
“Alas!” said Baisemeaux. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 406 | “Alas!” said Baisemeaux.
“And,” continued Aramis, “you, a high and powerful nobleman as you are, forgetful that courtiers now exist—you have been to the king, I suppose, and told him what you thought of his conduct?”
“Yes, you have guessed right.”
“So that,” said Baisemeaux, trembling at having supped so familiarly with a man who had fallen into disgrace with the king; “so that, monsieur le comte—”
“So that, my dear governor,” said Athos, “my friend D’Artagnan will communicate to you the contents of the paper which I perceived just peeping out of his belt, and which assuredly can be nothing else than the order for my incarceration.”
Baisemeaux held out his hand with his accustomed eagerness. D’Artagnan drew two papers from his belt, and presented one of them to the governor, who unfolded it, and then read, in a low tone of voice, looking at Athos over the paper, as he did so, and pausing from time to time: “‘Order to detain, in my chateau of the Bastile, Monsieur le Comte de la Fere.’ Oh, monsieur! this is indeed a very melancholy day for me.”
“You will have a patient prisoner, monsieur,” said Athos, in his calm, soft voice.
“A prisoner, too, who will not remain a month with you, my dear governor,” said Aramis; while Baisemeaux, still holding the order in his hand, transcribed it upon the prison registry.
“Not a day, or rather not even a night,” said D’Artagnan, displaying the second order of the king, “for now, dear M. de Baisemeaux, you will have the goodness to transcribe also this order for setting the comte immediately at liberty.”
“Ah!” said Aramis, “it is a labor that you have deprived me of, D’Artagnan;” and he pressed the musketeer’s hand in a significant manner, at the same moment as that of Athos.
“What!” said the latter in astonishment, “the king sets me at liberty!”
“Read, my dear friend,” returned D’Artagnan.
Athos took the order and read it. “It is quite true,” he said.
“Are you sorry for it?” asked D’Artagnan.
“Oh, no, on the contrary. I wish the king no harm; and the greatest evil or misfortune that any one can wish kings, is that they should commit an act of injustice. But you have had a difficult and painful task, I know. Tell me, have you not, D’Artagnan?”
“I? not at all,” said the musketeer, laughing: “the king does everything I wish him to do.”
Aramis looked fixedly at D’Artagnan, and saw that he was not speaking the truth. But Baisemeaux had eyes for nothing but D’Artagnan, so great was his admiration for a man who seemed to make the king do all he wished. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 407 | Aramis looked fixedly at D’Artagnan, and saw that he was not speaking the truth. But Baisemeaux had eyes for nothing but D’Artagnan, so great was his admiration for a man who seemed to make the king do all he wished.
“And does the king exile Athos?” inquired Aramis.
“No, not precisely; the king did not explain himself upon that subject,” replied D’Artagnan; “but I think the comte could not well do better unless, indeed, he wishes particularly to thank the king—”
“No, indeed,” replied Athos, smiling.
“Well, then, I think,” resumed D’Artagnan, “that the comte cannot do better than to retire to his own chateau. However, my dear Athos, you have only to speak, to tell me what you want. If any particular place of residence is more agreeable to you than another, I am influential enough, perhaps, to obtain it for you.”
“No, thank you,” said Athos; “nothing can be more agreeable to me, my dear friend, than to return to my solitude beneath my noble trees on the banks of the Loire. If Heaven be the overruling physician of the evils of the mind, nature is a sovereign remedy. And so, monsieur,” continued Athos, turning again towards Baisemeaux, “I am now free, I suppose?”
“Yes, monsieur le comte, I think so—at least, I hope so,” said the governor, turning over and over the two papers in question, “unless, however, M. d’Artagnan has a third order to give me.”
“No, my dear Baisemeaux, no,” said the musketeer; “the second is quite enough: we will stop there—if you please.”
“Ah! monsieur le comte,” said Baisemeaux addressing Athos, “you do not know what you are losing. I should have placed you among the thirty-franc prisoners, like the generals—what am I saying?—I mean among the fifty-francs, like the princes, and you would have supped every evening as you have done to-night.”
“Allow me, monsieur,” said Athos, “to prefer my own simpler fare.” And then, turning to D’Artagnan, he said, “Let us go, my dear friend. Shall I have that greatest of all pleasures for me—that of having you as my companion?”
“To the city gate only,” replied D’Artagnan, “after which I will tell you what I told the king: ‘I am on duty.’”
“And you, my dear Aramis,” said Athos, smiling; “will you accompany me? La Fere is on the road to Vannes.”
“Thank you, my dear friend,” said Aramis, “but I have an appointment in Paris this evening, and I cannot leave without very serious interests suffering by my absence.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 408 | “And you, my dear Aramis,” said Athos, smiling; “will you accompany me? La Fere is on the road to Vannes.”
“Thank you, my dear friend,” said Aramis, “but I have an appointment in Paris this evening, and I cannot leave without very serious interests suffering by my absence.”
“In that case,” said Athos, “I must say adieu, and take my leave of you. My dear Monsieur de Baisemeaux, I have to thank you exceedingly for your kind and friendly disposition towards me, and particularly for the enjoyable specimen you have given me of the ordinary fare of the Bastile.” And, having embraced Aramis, and shaken hands with M. de Baisemeaux, and having received best wishes for a pleasant journey from them both, Athos set off with D’Artagnan. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 409 | Whilst the denouement of the scene of the Palais Royal was taking place at the Bastile, let us relate what was going on at the lodgings of Athos and Bragelonne. Grimaud, as we have seen, had accompanied his master to Paris; and, as we have said, he was present when Athos went out; he had observed D’Artagnan gnaw the corners of his mustache; he had seen his master get into the carriage; he had narrowly examined both their countenances, and he had known them both for a sufficiently long period to read and understand, through the mask of their impassibility, that something serious was the matter. As soon as Athos had gone, he began to reflect; he then, and then only, remembered the strange manner in which Athos had taken leave of him, the embarrassment—imperceptible as it would have been to any but himself—of the master whose ideas were, to him, so clear and defined, and the expression of whose wishes was so precise. He knew that Athos had taken nothing with him but the clothes he had on him at the time; and yet he seemed to fancy that Athos had not left for an hour merely; or even for a day. A long absence was signified by the manner in which he pronounced the word “Adieu.” All these circumstances recurred to his mind, with feelings of deep affection for Athos, with that horror of isolation and solitude which invariably besets the minds of those who love; and all these combined rendered poor Grimaud very melancholy, and particularly uneasy. Without being able to account to himself for what he did since his master’s departure, he wandered about the room, seeking, as it were, for some traces of him, like a faithful dog, who is not exactly uneasy about his absent master, but at least is restless. Only as, in addition to the instinct of the animal, Grimaud subjoined the reasoning faculties of the man, Grimaud therefore felt uneasy and restless too. Not having found any indication which could serve as a guide, and having neither seen nor discovered anything which could satisfy his doubts, Grimaud began to wonder what could possibly have happened. Besides, imagination is the resource, or rather the plague of gentle and affectionate hearts. In fact, never does a feeling heart represent its absent friend to itself as being happy or cheerful. Never does the dove that wings its flight in search of adventures inspire anything but terror at home. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 410 | Grimaud soon passed from uneasiness to terror; he carefully went over, in his own mind, everything that had taken place: D’Artagnan’s letter to Athos, the letter which had seemed to distress Athos so much after he had read it; then Raoul’s visit to Athos, which resulted in Athos desiring him (Grimaud) to get his various orders and his court dress ready to put on; then his interview with the king, at the end of which Athos had returned home so unusually gloomy; then the explanation between the father and the son, at the termination of which Athos had embraced Raoul with such sadness of expression, while Raoul himself went away equally weary and melancholy; and finally, D’Artagnan’s arrival, biting, as if he were vexed, the end of his mustache, and leaving again in the carriage, accompanied by the Comte de la Fere. All this composed a drama in five acts very clearly, particularly for so analytical an observer as Grimaud.
The first step he took was to search in his master’s coat for M. d’Artagnan’s letter; he found the letter still there, and its contents were found to run as follows:
“MY DEAR FRIEND,—Raoul has been to ask me for some particulars about the conduct of Mademoiselle de la Valliere, during our young friend’s residence in London. I am a poor captain of musketeers, and I am sickened to death every day by hearing all the scandal of the barracks and bedside conversations. If I had told Raoul all I believe, I know the poor fellow would have died of it; but I am in the king’s service, and cannot relate all I hear about the king’s affairs. If your heart tells you to do it, set off at once; the matter concerns you more than it does myself, and almost as much as Raoul.”
Grimaud tore, not a handful, but a finger-and-thumbful of hair out of his head; he would have done more if his head of hair had been in a more flourishing condition.
“Yes,” he said, “that is the key of the whole enigma. The young girl has been playing her pranks; what people say about her and the king is true, then; our young master has been deceived; he ought to know it. Monsieur le comte has been to see the king, and has told him a piece of his mind; and then the king sent M. d’Artagnan to arrange the affair. Ah! gracious goodness!” continued Grimaud, “monsieur le comte, I now remember, returned without his sword.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 411 | This discovery made the perspiration break out all over poor Grimaud’s face. He did not waste any more time in useless conjecture, but clapped his hat on his head, and ran to Raoul’s lodgings.
Raoul, after Louise had left him, had mastered his grief, if not his affection; and, compelled to look forward on that perilous road over which madness and revulsion were hurrying him, he had seen, from the very first glance, his father exposed to the royal obstinacy, since Athos had himself been the first to oppose any resistance to the royal will. At this moment, from a very natural sequence of feeling, the unhappy young man remembered the mysterious signs which Athos had made, and the unexpected visit of D’Artagnan; the result of the conflict between a sovereign and a subject revealed itself to his terrified vision. As D’Artagnan was on duty, that is, a fixture at his post without the possibility of leaving it, it was certainly not likely that he had come to pay Athos a visit merely for the pleasure of seeing him. He must have come to say something to him. This something in the midst of such painful conjectures must have been the news of either a misfortune or a danger. Raoul trembled at having been so selfish as to have forgotten his father for his affection; at having, in a word, passed his time in idle dreams, or in an indulgence of despair, at a time when a necessity existed for repelling such an imminent attack on Athos. The very idea nearly drove him frantic; he buckled on his sword and ran towards his father’s lodgings. On his way there he encountered Grimaud, who, having set off from the opposite pole, was running with equal eagerness in search of the truth. The two men embraced each other most warmly.
“Grimaud,” exclaimed Raoul, “is the comte well?”
“Have you seen him?”
“No; where is he?”
“I am trying to find out.”
“And M. d’Artagnan?”
“Went out with him.”
“When?”
“Ten minutes after you did.”
“In what way did they go out?”
“In a carriage.”
“Where did they go?”
“I have no idea at all.”
“Did my father take any money with him?”
“No.”
“Or his sword?”
“No.”
“I have an idea, Grimaud, that M. d’Artagnan came in order to—”
“Arrest monsieur le comte, do you not think, monsieur?”
“Yes, Grimaud.”
“I could have sworn it.”
“What road did they take?”
“The way leading towards the quay.”
“To the Bastile, then?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Quick, quick; let us run.”
“Yes, let us not lose a moment.”
“But where are we to go?” said Raoul, overwhelmed. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 412 | “Yes, Grimaud.”
“I could have sworn it.”
“What road did they take?”
“The way leading towards the quay.”
“To the Bastile, then?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Quick, quick; let us run.”
“Yes, let us not lose a moment.”
“But where are we to go?” said Raoul, overwhelmed.
“We will go to M. d’Artagnan’s first, we may perhaps learn something there.”
“No; if they keep me in ignorance at my father’s, they will do the same everywhere. Let us go to—Oh, good heavens! why, I must be mad to-day, Grimaud; I have forgotten M. du Vallon, who is waiting for and expecting me still.”
“Where is he, then?”
“At the Minimes of Vincennes.”
“Thank goodness, that is on the same side as the Bastile. I will run and saddle the horses, and we will go at once,” said Grimaud.
“Do, my friend, do.”
The good and worthy Porthos, faithful to all the laws of ancient chivalry, had determined to wait for M. de Saint-Aignan until sunset; and as Saint-Aignan did not come, as Raoul had forgotten to communicate with his second, and as he found that waiting so long was very wearisome, Porthos had desired one of the gate-keepers to fetch him a few bottles of good wine and a good joint of meat,—so that, at least, he might pass away the time by means of a glass or two and a mouthful of something to eat. He had just finished when Raoul arrived, escorted by Grimaud, both of them riding at full speed. As soon as Porthos saw the two cavaliers riding at such a pace along the road, he did not for a moment doubt but that they were the men he was expecting, and he rose from the grass upon which he had been indolently reclining and began to stretch his legs and arms, saying, “See what it is to have good habits. The fellow has finished by coming, after all. If I had gone away he would have found no one here and would have taken advantage of that.” He then threw himself into a martial attitude, and drew himself up to the full height of his gigantic stature. But instead of Saint-Aignan, he only saw Raoul, who, with the most despairing gestures, accosted him by crying out, “Pray forgive me, my dear friend, I am most wretched.”
“Raoul!” cried Porthos, surprised.
“You have been angry with me?” said Raoul, embracing Porthos.
“I? What for?”
“For having forgotten you. But I assure you my head seems utterly lost. If you only knew!”
“You have killed him?”
“Who?”
“Saint-Aignan; or, if that is not the case, what is the matter?” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 413 | “You have been angry with me?” said Raoul, embracing Porthos.
“I? What for?”
“For having forgotten you. But I assure you my head seems utterly lost. If you only knew!”
“You have killed him?”
“Who?”
“Saint-Aignan; or, if that is not the case, what is the matter?”
“The matter is, that Monsieur le Comte de la Fere has by this time been arrested.”
Porthos gave a start that would have thrown down a wall.
“Arrested!” he cried out; “by whom?”
“By D’Artagnan.”
“It is impossible,” said Porthos.
“My dear friend, it is perfectly true.”
Porthos turned towards Grimaud, as if he needed a second confirmation of the intelligence.
Grimaud nodded his head. “And where have they taken him?”
“Probably to the Bastile.”
“What makes you think that?”
“As we came along we questioned some persons, who saw the carriage pass; and others who saw it enter the Bastile.”
“Oh!” muttered Porthos.
“What do you intend to do?” inquired Raoul.
“I? Nothing; only I will not have Athos remain at the Bastile.”
“Do you know,” said Raoul, advancing nearer to Porthos, “that the arrest was made by order of the king?”
Porthos looked at the young man, as if to say, “What does that matter to me?” This dumb language seemed so eloquent of meaning to Raoul that he did not ask any other question. He mounted his horse again; and Porthos, assisted by Grimaud, had already done the same.
“Let us arrange our plan of action,” said Raoul.
“Yes,” returned Porthos, “that is the best thing we can do.”
Raoul sighed deeply, and then paused suddenly.
“What is the matter?” asked Porthos; “are you faint?”
“No, only I feel how utterly helpless our position is. Can we three pretend to go and take the Bastile?”
“Well, if D’Artagnan were only here,” replied Porthos, “I am not so very certain we would fail.”
Raoul could not resist a feeling of admiration at the sight of such perfect confidence, heroic in its simplicity. These were truly the celebrated men who, by three or four, attacked armies and assaulted castles! Men who had terrified death itself, who had survived the wrecks of a tempestuous age, and still stood, stronger than the most robust of the young.
“Monsieur,” said he to Porthos, “you have just given me an idea; we absolutely must see M. d’Artagnan.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“He ought by this time to have returned home, after having taken my father to the Bastile. Let us go to his house.”
“First inquire at the Bastile,” said Grimaud, who was in the habit of speaking little, but that to the purpose. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 414 | “Undoubtedly.”
“He ought by this time to have returned home, after having taken my father to the Bastile. Let us go to his house.”
“First inquire at the Bastile,” said Grimaud, who was in the habit of speaking little, but that to the purpose.
Accordingly, they hastened towards the fortress, when one of those chances which Heaven bestows on men of strong will caused Grimaud suddenly to perceive the carriage, which was entering by the great gate of the drawbridge. This was the moment that D’Artagnan was, as we have seen, returning from his visit to the king. In vain was it that Raoul urged on his horse in order to join the carriage, and to see whom it contained. The horses had already gained the other side of the great gate, which again closed, while one of the sentries struck the nose of Raoul’s horse with his musket; Raoul turned about, only too happy to find he had ascertained something respecting the carriage which had contained his father.
“We have him,” said Grimaud.
“If we wait a little it is certain he will leave; don’t you think so, my friend?”
“Unless, indeed, D’Artagnan also be a prisoner,” replied Porthos, “in which case everything is lost.”
Raoul returned no answer, for any hypothesis was admissible. He instructed Grimaud to lead the horses to the little street Jean-Beausire, so as to give rise to less suspicion, and himself with his piercing gaze watched for the exit either of D’Artagnan or the carriage. Nor had he decided wrongly; for twenty minutes had not elapsed before the gate reopened and the carriage reappeared. A dazzling of the eyes prevented Raoul from distinguishing what figures occupied the interior. Grimaud averred that he had seen two persons, and that one of them was his master. Porthos kept looking at Raoul and Grimaud by turns, in the hope of understanding their idea.
“It is clear,” said Grimaud, “that if the comte is in the carriage, either he is set at liberty or they are taking him to another prison.”
“We shall soon see that by the road he takes,” answered Porthos.
“If he is set at liberty,” said Grimaud, “they will conduct him home.”
“True,” rejoined Porthos.
“The carriage does not take that way,” cried Raoul; and indeed the horses were just disappearing down the Faubourg St. Antoine.
“Let us hasten,” said Porthos; “we will attack the carriage on the road and tell Athos to flee.”
“Rebellion,” murmured Raoul. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 415 | “True,” rejoined Porthos.
“The carriage does not take that way,” cried Raoul; and indeed the horses were just disappearing down the Faubourg St. Antoine.
“Let us hasten,” said Porthos; “we will attack the carriage on the road and tell Athos to flee.”
“Rebellion,” murmured Raoul.
Porthos darted a second glance at Raoul, quite worthy of the first. Raoul replied only by spurring the flanks of his steed. In a few moments the three cavaliers had overtaken the carriage, and followed it so closely that their horses’ breath moistened the back of it. D’Artagnan, whose senses were ever on the alert, heard the trot of the horses, at the moment when Raoul was telling Porthos to pass the chariot, so as to see who was the person accompanying Athos. Porthos complied, but could not see anything, for the blinds were lowered. Rage and impatience were gaining mastery over Raoul. He had just noticed the mystery preserved by Athos’s companion, and determined on proceeding to extremities. On his part D’Artagnan had perfectly recognized Porthos, and Raoul also, from under the blinds, and had communicated to the comte the result of his observation. They were desirous only of seeing whether Raoul and Porthos would push the affair to the uttermost. And this they speedily did, for Raoul, presenting his pistol, threw himself on the leader, commanding the coachmen to stop. Porthos seized the coachman, and dragged him from his seat. Grimaud already had hold of the carriage door. Raoul threw open his arms, exclaiming, “M. le comte! M. le comte!”
“Ah! is it you, Raoul?” said Athos, intoxicated with joy.
“Not bad, indeed!” added D’Artagnan, with a burst of laughter, and they both embraced the young man and Porthos, who had taken possession of them.
“My brave Porthos! best of friends,” cried Athos, “it is still the same old way with you.”
“He is still only twenty,” said D’Artagnan, “brave Porthos!”
“Confound it,” answered Porthos, slightly confused, “we thought that you were being arrested.”
“While,” rejoined Athos, “the matter in question was nothing but my taking a drive in M. d’Artagnan’s carriage.”
“But we followed you from the Bastile,” returned Raoul, with a tone of suspicion and reproach.
“Where we had been to take supper with our friend M. Baisemeaux. Do you recollect Baisemeaux, Porthos?”
“Very well, indeed.”
“And there we saw Aramis.”
“In the Bastile?”
“At supper.”
“Ah!” said Porthos, again breathing freely.
“He gave us a thousand messages to you.”
“And where is M. le comte going?” asked Grimaud, already recompensed by a smile from his master.
“We were going home to Blois.”
“How can that be?”
“At once?” said Raoul.
“Yes, right forward.”
“Without any luggage?” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 416 | “He gave us a thousand messages to you.”
“And where is M. le comte going?” asked Grimaud, already recompensed by a smile from his master.
“We were going home to Blois.”
“How can that be?”
“At once?” said Raoul.
“Yes, right forward.”
“Without any luggage?”
“Oh! Raoul would have been instructed to forward me mine, or to bring it with him on his return, if he returns.”
“If nothing detains him longer in Paris,” said D’Artagnan, with a glance firm and cutting as steel, and as painful (for it reopened the poor young fellow’s wounds), “he will do well to follow you, Athos.”
“There is nothing to keep me any longer in Paris,” said Raoul.
“Then we will go immediately.”
“And M. d’Artagnan?”
“Oh! as for me, I was only accompanying Athos as far as the barrier, and I return with Porthos.”
“Very good,” said the latter.
“Come, my son,” added the comte, gently passing his arm around Raoul’s neck to draw him into the carriage, and again embracing him. “Grimaud,” continued the comte, “you will return quietly to Paris with your horse and M. du Vallon’s, for Raoul and I will mount here and give up the carriage to these two gentlemen to return to Paris in; and then, as soon as you arrive, you will take my clothes and letters and forward the whole to me at home.”
“But,” observed Raoul, who was anxious to make the comte converse, “when you return to Paris, there will not be a single thing there for you—which will be very inconvenient.”
“I think it will be a very long time, Raoul, ere I return to Paris. The last sojourn we have made there has not been of a nature to encourage me to repeat it.”
Raoul hung down his head and said not a word more. Athos descended from the carriage and mounted the horse which had brought Porthos, and which seemed no little pleased at the exchange. Then they embraced, and clasped each other’s hands, and interchanged a thousand pledges of eternal friendship. Porthos promised to spend a month with Athos at the first opportunity. D’Artagnan engaged to take advantage of his first leave of absence; and then, having embraced Raoul for the last time: “To you, my boy,” said he, “I will write.” Coming from D’Artagnan, who he knew wrote very seldom, these words expressed everything. Raoul was moved even to tears. He tore himself away from the musketeer and departed.
D’Artagnan rejoined Porthos in the carriage: “Well,” said he, “my dear friend, what a day we have had!”
“Indeed we have,” answered Porthos.
“You must be quite worn out.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 417 | D’Artagnan rejoined Porthos in the carriage: “Well,” said he, “my dear friend, what a day we have had!”
“Indeed we have,” answered Porthos.
“You must be quite worn out.”
“Not quite; however, I shall retire early to rest, so as to be ready for to-morrow.”
“And wherefore?”
“Why! to complete what I have begun.”
“You make me shudder, my friend, you seem to me quite angry. What the devil have you begun which is not finished?”
“Listen; Raoul has not fought, but I must fight!”
“With whom? with the king?”
“How!” exclaimed Porthos, astounded, “with the king?”
“Yes, I say, you great baby, with the king.”
“I assure you it is with M. Saint-Aignan.”
“Look now, this is what I mean; you draw your sword against the king in fighting with this gentleman.”
“Ah!” said Porthos, staring; “are you sure of it?”
“Indeed I am.”
“What in the world are we to do, then?”
“We must try and make a good supper, Porthos. The captain of the musketeers keeps a tolerable table. There you will see the handsome Saint-Aignan, and will drink his health.”
“I?” cried Porthos, horrified.
“What!” said D’Artagnan, “you refuse to drink the king’s health?”
“But, body alive! I am not talking to you about the king at all; I am speaking of M. de Saint-Aignan.”
“But when I repeat that it is the same thing?”
“Ah, well, well!” said Porthos, overcome.
“You understand, don’t you?”
“No,” answered Porthos, “but ‘tis all the same.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 418 | “But, body alive! I am not talking to you about the king at all; I am speaking of M. de Saint-Aignan.”
“But when I repeat that it is the same thing?”
“Ah, well, well!” said Porthos, overcome.
“You understand, don’t you?”
“No,” answered Porthos, “but ‘tis all the same.”
The reader has not forgotten that, on quitting the Bastile, D’Artagnan and the Comte de la Fere had left Aramis in close confabulation with Baisemeaux. When once these two guests had departed, Baisemeaux did not in the least perceive that the conversation suffered by their absence. He used to think that wine after supper, and that of the Bastile in particular, was excellent, and that it was a stimulation quite sufficient to make any honest man talkative. But he little knew his Greatness, who was never more impenetrable than at dessert. His Greatness, however, perfectly understood M. de Baisemeaux, when he reckoned on making the governor discourse by the means which the latter regarded as efficacious. The conversation, therefore, without flagging in appearance, flagged in reality; for Baisemeaux not only had it nearly all to himself, but further, kept speaking only of that singular event, the incarceration of Athos, followed by so prompt an order to set him again at liberty. Nor, moreover, had Baisemeaux failed to observe that the two orders of arrest and of liberation, were both in the king’s hand. But then, the king would not take the trouble to write similar orders except under pressing circumstances. All this was very interesting, and, above all, very puzzling to Baisemeaux; but as, on the other hand, all this was very clear to Aramis, the latter did not attach to the occurrence the same importance as did the worthy governor. Besides, Aramis rarely put himself out of the way for anything, and he had not yet told M. de Baisemeaux for what reason he had now done so. And so at the very climax of Baisemeaux’s dissertation, Aramis suddenly interrupted him.
“Tell me, my dear Baisemeaux,” said he, “have you never had any other diversions at the Bastile than those at which I assisted during the two or three visits I have had the honor to pay you?”
This address was so unexpected that the governor, like a vane which suddenly receives an impulsion opposed to that of the wind, was quite dumbfounded at it. “Diversions!” said he; “but I take them continually, monseigneur.”
“Oh, to be sure! And these diversions?”
“Are of every kind.”
“Visits, no doubt?”
“No, not visits. Visits are not frequent at the Bastile.”
“What, are visits rare, then?”
“Very much so.”
“Even on the part of your society?”
“What do you term my society—the prisoners?” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 419 | “Oh, to be sure! And these diversions?”
“Are of every kind.”
“Visits, no doubt?”
“No, not visits. Visits are not frequent at the Bastile.”
“What, are visits rare, then?”
“Very much so.”
“Even on the part of your society?”
“What do you term my society—the prisoners?”
“Oh, no!—your prisoners, indeed! I know well it is you who visit them, and not they you. By your society, I mean, my dear Baisemeaux, the society of which you are a member.”
Baisemeaux looked fixedly at Aramis, and then, as if the idea which had flashed across his mind were impossible, “Oh,” he said, “I have very little society at present. If I must own it to you, dear M. d’Herblay, the fact is, to stay at the Bastile appears, for the most part, distressing and distasteful to persons of the gay world. As for the ladies, it is never without a certain dread, which costs me infinite trouble to allay, that they succeed in reaching my quarters. And, indeed, how should they avoid trembling a little, poor things, when they see those gloomy dungeons, and reflect that they are inhabited by prisoners who—” And in proportion as the eyes of Baisemeaux concentrated their gaze on the face of Aramis, the worthy governor’s tongue faltered more and more until it ended by stopping altogether.
“No, you don’t understand me, my dear M. Baisemeaux; you don’t understand me. I do not at all mean to speak of society in general, but of a particular society—of the society, in a word—to which you are affiliated.”
Baisemeaux nearly dropped the glass of muscat which he was in the act of raising to his lips. “Affiliated,” cried he, “affiliated!”
“Yes, affiliated, undoubtedly,” repeated Aramis, with the greatest self-possession. “Are you not a member of a secret society, my dear M. Baisemeaux?”
“Secret?”
“Secret or mysterious.”
“Oh, M. d’Herblay!”
“Consider, now, don’t deny it.”
“But believe me.”
“I believe what I know.”
“I swear to you.”
“Listen to me, my dear M. Baisemeaux; I say yes, you say no; one of us two necessarily says what is true, and the other, it inevitably follows, what is false.”
“Well, and then?”
“Well, we shall come to an understanding presently.”
“Let us see,” said Baisemeaux; “let us see.”
“Now drink your glass of muscat, dear Monsieur de Baisemeaux,” said Aramis. “What the devil! you look quite scared.”
“No, no; not the least in the world; oh, no.”
“Drink then.” Baisemeaux drank, but he swallowed the wrong way. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 420 | “Let us see,” said Baisemeaux; “let us see.”
“Now drink your glass of muscat, dear Monsieur de Baisemeaux,” said Aramis. “What the devil! you look quite scared.”
“No, no; not the least in the world; oh, no.”
“Drink then.” Baisemeaux drank, but he swallowed the wrong way.
“Well,” resumed Aramis, “if, I say, you are not a member of a secret or mysterious society, which you like to call it—the epithet is of no consequence—if, I say, you are not a member of a society similar to that I wish to designate, well, then, you will not understand a word of what I am going to say. That is all.”
“Oh! be sure beforehand that I shall not understand anything.”
“Well, well!”
“Try, now; let us see!”
“That is what I am going to do.”
“If, on the contrary, you are one of the members of this society, you will immediately answer me—yes or no.”
“Begin your questions,” continued Baisemeaux, trembling.
“You will agree, dear Monsieur de Baisemeaux,” continued Aramis, with the same impassibility, “that it is evident a man cannot be a member of a society, it is evident that he cannot enjoy the advantages it offers to the affiliated, without being himself bound to certain little services.”
“In short,” stammered Baisemeaux, “that would be intelligible, if—”
“Well,” resumed Aramis, “there is in the society of which I speak, and of which, as it seems you are not a member—”
“Allow me,” said Baisemeaux. “I should not like to say absolutely.”
“There is an engagement entered into by all the governors and captains of fortresses affiliated to the order.” Baisemeaux grew pale.
“Now the engagement,” continued Aramis firmly, “is of this nature.”
Baisemeaux rose, manifesting unspeakable emotion: “Go on, dear M. d’Herblay: go on,” said he.
Aramis then spoke, or rather recited the following paragraph, in the same tone as if he had been reading it from a book: “The aforesaid captain or governor of a fortress shall allow to enter, when need shall arise, and on demand of the prisoner, a confessor affiliated to the order.” He stopped. Baisemeaux was quite distressing to look at, being so wretchedly pale and trembling. “Is not that the text of the agreement?” quietly asked Aramis.
“Monseigneur!” began Baisemeaux.
“Ah! well, you begin to understand, I think.”
“Monseigneur,” cried Baisemeaux, “do not trifle so with my unhappy mind! I find myself as nothing in your hands, if you have the malignant desire to draw from me the little secrets of my administration.”
“Oh! by no means; pray undeceive yourself, dear M. Baisemeaux; it is not the little secrets of your administration, but those of your conscience that I aim at.” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 421 | “Oh! by no means; pray undeceive yourself, dear M. Baisemeaux; it is not the little secrets of your administration, but those of your conscience that I aim at.”
“Well, then, my conscience be it, dear M. d’Herblay. But have some consideration for the situation I am in, which is no ordinary one.”
“It is no ordinary one, my dear monsieur,” continued the inflexible Aramis, “if you are a member of this society; but it is a quite natural one if free from all engagement. You are answerable only to the king.”
“Well, monsieur, well! I obey only the king, and whom else would you have a French nobleman obey?”
Aramis did not yield an inch, but with that silvery voice of his continued: “It is very pleasant,” said he, “for a French nobleman, for a prelate of France, to hear a man of your mark express himself so loyally, dear De Baisemeaux, and having heard you to believe no more than you do.”
“Have you doubted, monsieur?”
“I? oh, no!”
“And so you doubt no longer?”
“I have no longer any doubt that such a man as you, monsieur,” said Aramis, gravely, “does not faithfully serve the masters whom he voluntarily chose for himself.”
“Masters!” cried Baisemeaux.
“Yes, masters, I said.”
“Monsieur d’Herblay, you are still jesting, are you not?”
“Oh, yes! I understand that it is a more difficult position to have several masters than one; but the embarrassment is owing to you, my dear Baisemeaux, and I am not the cause of it.”
“Certainly not,” returned the unfortunate governor, more embarrassed than ever; “but what are you doing? You are leaving the table?”
“Assuredly.”
“Are you going?”
“Yes, I am going.”
“But you are behaving very strangely towards me, monseigneur.”
“I am behaving strangely—how do you make that out?”
“Have you sworn, then, to put me to the torture?”
“No, I should be sorry to do so.”
“Remain, then.”
“I cannot.”
“And why?”
“Because I have no longer anything to do here; and, indeed, I have duties to fulfil elsewhere.”
“Duties, so late as this?”
“Yes; understand me now, my dear De Baisemeaux: they told me at the place whence I came, ‘The aforesaid governor or captain will allow to enter, as need shall arise, on the prisoner’s demand, a confessor affiliated with the order.’ I came; you do not know what I mean, and so I shall return to tell them that they are mistaken, and that they must send me elsewhere.”
“What! you are—” cried Baisemeaux, looking at Aramis almost in terror.
“The confessor affiliated to the order,” said Aramis, without changing his voice. |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 422 | “What! you are—” cried Baisemeaux, looking at Aramis almost in terror.
“The confessor affiliated to the order,” said Aramis, without changing his voice.
But, gentle as the words were, they had the same effect on the unhappy governor as a clap of thunder. Baisemeaux became livid, and it seemed to him as if Aramis’s beaming eyes were two forks of flame, piercing to the very bottom of his soul. “The confessor!” murmured he; “you, monseigneur, the confessor of the order!”
“Yes, I; but we have nothing to unravel together, seeing that you are not one of the affiliated.”
“Monseigneur!”
“And I understand that, not being so, you refuse to comply with its command.”
“Monseigneur, I beseech you, condescend to hear me.”
“And wherefore?”
“Monseigneur, I do not say that I have nothing to do with the society.”
“Ah! ah!”
“I say not that I refuse to obey.”
“Nevertheless, M. de Baisemeaux, what has passed wears very much the air of resistance.”
“Oh, no! monseigneur, no; I only wished to be certain.”
“To be certain of what?” said Aramis, in a tone of supreme contempt.
“Of nothing at all, monseigneur.” Baisemeaux lowered his voice, and bending before the prelate, said, “I am at all times and in all places at the disposal of my superiors, but—”
“Very good. I like you better thus, monsieur,” said Aramis, as he resumed his seat, and put out his glass to Baisemeaux, whose hand trembled so that he could not fill it. “You were saying ‘but’—” continued Aramis.
“But,” replied the unhappy man, “having received no notice, I was very far from expecting it.”
“Does not the Gospel say, ‘Watch, for the moment is known only of God?’ Do not the rules of the order say, ‘Watch, for that which I will, you ought always to will also.’ And what pretext will serve you now that you did not expect the confessor, M. de Baisemeaux?”
“Because, monseigneur, there is at present in the Bastile no prisoner ill.”
Aramis shrugged his shoulders. “What do you know about that?” said he.
“But, nevertheless, it appears to me—”
“M. de Baisemeaux,” said Aramis, turning round in his chair, “here is your servant, who wishes to speak with you;” and at this moment, De Baisemeaux’s servant appeared at the threshold of the door.
“What is it?” asked Baisemeaux, sharply.
“Monsieur,” said the man, “they are bringing you the doctor’s return.”
Aramis looked at De Baisemeaux with a calm and confident eye.
“Well,” said he, “let the messenger enter.”
The messenger entered, saluted, and handed in the report. Baisemeaux ran his eye over it, and raising his head, said in surprise, “No. 12 is ill!” |
Louise_de_la_Valliere_-_Alexandre_Dumas | 31 | 423 | Aramis looked at De Baisemeaux with a calm and confident eye.
“Well,” said he, “let the messenger enter.”
The messenger entered, saluted, and handed in the report. Baisemeaux ran his eye over it, and raising his head, said in surprise, “No. 12 is ill!”
“How was it, then,” said Aramis, carelessly, “that you told me everybody was well in your hotel, M. de Baisemeaux?” And he emptied his glass without removing his eyes from Baisemeaux.
The governor then made a sign to the messenger, and when he had quitted the room, said, still trembling, “I think that there is in the article, ‘on the prisoner’s demand.’”
“Yes, it is so,” answered Aramis. “But see what it is they want with you now.”
And that moment a sergeant put his head in at the door. “What do you want now?” cried Baisemeaux. “Can you not leave me in peace for ten minutes?”
“Monsieur,” said the sergeant, “the sick man, No. 12, has commissioned the turnkey to request you to send him a confessor.”
Baisemeaux very nearly sank on the floor; but Aramis disdained to reassure him, just as he had disdained to terrify him. “What must I answer?” inquired Baisemeaux.
“Just what you please,” replied Aramis, compressing his lips; “that is your business. I am not the governor of the Bastile.”
“Tell the prisoner,” cried Baisemeaux, quickly,—“tell the prisoner that his request is granted.” The sergeant left the room. “Oh! monseigneur, monseigneur,” murmured Baisemeaux, “how could I have suspected!—how could I have foreseen this!”
“Who requested you to suspect, and who besought you to foresee?” contemptuously answered Aramis. “The order suspects; the order knows; the order foresees—is that not enough?”
“What is it you command?” added Baisemeaux.
“I?—nothing at all. I am nothing but a poor priest, a simple confessor. Have I your orders to go and see the sufferer?”
“Oh, monseigneur, I do not order; I pray you to go.”
“‘Tis well; conduct me to him.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 0 | We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a “new fellow,” not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.
The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice—
“Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care; he’ll be in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one of the upper classes, as becomes his age.”
The “new fellow,” standing in the corner behind the door so that he could hardly be seen, was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut square on his forehead like a village chorister’s; he looked reliable, but very ill at ease. Although he was not broad-shouldered, his short school jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have been tight about the arm-holes, and showed at the opening of the cuffs red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, looked out from beneath yellow trousers, drawn tight by braces, He wore stout, ill-cleaned, hob-nailed boots.
We began repeating the lesson. He listened with all his ears, as attentive as if at a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and when at two o’clock the bell rang, the master was obliged to tell him to fall into line with the rest of us.
When we came back to work, we were in the habit of throwing our caps on the ground so as to have our hands more free; we used from the door to toss them under the form, so that they hit against the wall and made a lot of dust: it was “the thing.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 1 | But, whether he had not noticed the trick, or did not dare to attempt it, the “new fellow,” was still holding his cap on his knees even after prayers were over. It was one of those head-gears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton night-cap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile’s face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the manner of a tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone.
“Rise,” said the master.
He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh. He stooped to pick it up. A neighbor knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it up once more.
“Get rid of your helmet,” said the master, who was a bit of a wag.
There was a burst of laughter from the boys, which so thoroughly put the poor lad out of countenance that he did not know whether to keep his cap in his hand, leave it on the ground, or put it on his head. He sat down again and placed it on his knee.
“Rise,” repeated the master, “and tell me your name.”
The new boy articulated in a stammering voice an unintelligible name.
“Again!”
The same sputtering of syllables was heard, drowned by the tittering of the class.
“Louder!” cried the master; “louder!”
The “new fellow” then took a supreme resolution, opened an inordinately large mouth, and shouted at the top of his voice as if calling someone in the word “Charbovari.”
A hubbub broke out, rose in crescendo with bursts of shrill voices (they yelled, barked, stamped, repeated “Charbovari! Charbovari”), then died away into single notes, growing quieter only with great difficulty, and now and again suddenly recommencing along the line of a form whence rose here and there, like a damp cracker going off, a stifled laugh.
However, amid a rain of impositions, order was gradually re-established in the class; and the master having succeeded in catching the name of “Charles Bovary,” having had it dictated to him, spelt out, and re-read, at once ordered the poor devil to go and sit down on the punishment form at the foot of the master’s desk. He got up, but before going hesitated.
“What are you looking for?” asked the master. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 2 | “What are you looking for?” asked the master.
“My c-a-p,” timidly said the “new fellow,” casting troubled looks round him.
“Five hundred lines for all the class!” shouted in a furious voice stopped, like the Quos ego, a fresh outburst. “Silence!” continued the master indignantly, wiping his brow with his handkerchief, which he had just taken from his cap. “As to you, ‘new boy,’ you will conjugate ‘ridiculus sum’ twenty times.”
Then, in a gentler tone, “Come, you’ll find your cap again; it hasn’t been stolen.”
Quiet was restored. Heads bent over desks, and the “new fellow” remained for two hours in an exemplary attitude, although from time to time some paper pellet flipped from the tip of a pen came bang in his face. But he wiped his face with one hand and continued motionless, his eyes lowered.
In the evening, at preparation, he pulled out his pens from his desk, arranged his small belongings, and carefully ruled his paper. We saw him working conscientiously, looking up every word in the dictionary, and taking the greatest pains. Thanks, no doubt, to the willingness he showed, he had not to go down to the class below. But though he knew his rules passably, he had little finish in composition. It was the cure of his village who had taught him his first Latin; his parents, from motives of economy, having sent him to school as late as possible.
His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Bartolome Bovary, retired assistant-surgeon-major, compromised about 1812 in certain conscription scandals, and forced at this time to leave the service, had taken advantage of his fine figure to get hold of a dowry of sixty thousand francs that offered in the person of a hosier’s daughter who had fallen in love with his good looks. A fine man, a great talker, making his spurs ring as he walked, wearing whiskers that ran into his moustache, his fingers always garnished with rings and dressed in loud colours, he had the dash of a military man with the easy go of a commercial traveller.
Once married, he lived for three or four years on his wife’s fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking long porcelain pipes, not coming in at night till after the theatre, and haunting cafes. The father-in-law died, leaving little; he was indignant at this, “went in for the business,” lost some money in it, then retired to the country, where he thought he would make money. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 3 | But, as he knew no more about farming than calico, as he rode his horses instead of sending them to plough, drank his cider in bottle instead of selling it in cask, ate the finest poultry in his farmyard, and greased his hunting-boots with the fat of his pigs, he was not long in finding out that he would do better to give up all speculation.
For two hundred francs a year he managed to live on the border of the provinces of Caux and Picardy, in a kind of place half farm, half private house; and here, soured, eaten up with regrets, cursing his luck, jealous of everyone, he shut himself up at the age of forty-five, sick of men, he said, and determined to live at peace.
His wife had adored him once on a time; she had bored him with a thousand servilities that had only estranged him the more. Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She had suffered so much without complaint at first, until she had seem him going after all the village drabs, and until a score of bad houses sent him back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk. Then her pride revolted. After that she was silent, burying her anger in a dumb stoicism that she maintained till her death. She was constantly going about looking after business matters. She called on the lawyers, the president, remembered when bills fell due, got them renewed, and at home ironed, sewed, washed, looked after the workmen, paid the accounts, while he, troubling himself about nothing, eternally besotted in sleepy sulkiness, whence he only roused himself to say disagreeable things to her, sat smoking by the fire and spitting into the cinders. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 4 | When she had a child, it had to be sent out to nurse. When he came home, the lad was spoilt as if he were a prince. His mother stuffed him with jam; his father let him run about barefoot, and, playing the philosopher, even said he might as well go about quite naked like the young of animals. As opposed to the maternal ideas, he had a certain virile idea of childhood on which he sought to mould his son, wishing him to be brought up hardily, like a Spartan, to give him a strong constitution. He sent him to bed without any fire, taught him to drink off large draughts of rum and to jeer at religious processions. But, peaceable by nature, the lad answered only poorly to his notions. His mother always kept him near her; she cut out cardboard for him, told him tales, entertained him with endless monologues full of melancholy gaiety and charming nonsense. In her life’s isolation she centered on the child’s head all her shattered, broken little vanities. She dreamed of high station; she already saw him, tall, handsome, clever, settled as an engineer or in the law. She taught him to read, and even, on an old piano, she had taught him two or three little songs. But to all this Monsieur Bovary, caring little for letters, said, “It was not worth while. Would they ever have the means to send him to a public school, to buy him a practice, or start him in business? Besides, with cheek a man always gets on in the world.” Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child knocked about the village.
He went after the labourers, drove away with clods of earth the ravens that were flying about. He ate blackberries along the hedges, minded the geese with a long switch, went haymaking during harvest, ran about in the woods, played hop-scotch under the church porch on rainy days, and at great fetes begged the beadle to let him toll the bells, that he might hang all his weight on the long rope and feel himself borne upward by it in its swing. Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong on hand, fresh of colour. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 5 | When he was twelve years old his mother had her own way; he began lessons. The curé took him in hand; but the lessons were so short and irregular that they could not be of much use. They were given at spare moments in the sacristy, standing up, hurriedly, between a baptism and a burial; or else the curé, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil after the Angelus. They went up to his room and settled down; the flies and moths fluttered round the candle. It was close, the child fell asleep, and the good man, beginning to doze with his hands on his stomach, was soon snoring with his mouth wide open. On other occasions, when Monsieur le Curé, on his way back after administering the viaticum to some sick person in the neighbourhood, caught sight of Charles playing about the fields, he called him, lectured him for a quarter of an hour and took advantage of the occasion to make him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree. The rain interrupted them or an acquaintance passed. All the same he was always pleased with him, and even said the “young man” had a very good memory.
Charles could not go on like this. Madame Bovary took strong steps. Ashamed, or rather tired out, Monsieur Bovary gave in without a struggle, and they waited one year longer, so that the lad should take his first communion.
Six months more passed, and the year after Charles was finally sent to school at Rouen, where his father took him towards the end of October, at the time of the St. Romain fair.
It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him. He was a youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in school-hours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well in the refectory. He had in loco parentis a wholesale ironmonger in the Rue Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the boats, and then brought him back to college at seven o’clock before supper. Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother with red ink and three wafers; then he went over his history note-books, or read an old volume of “Anarchasis” that was knocking about the study. When he went for walks he talked to the servant, who, like himself, came from the country. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 6 | By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once even he got a certificate in natural history. But at the end of his third year his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study medicine, convinced that he could even take his degree by himself.
His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer’s she knew, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his board, got him furniture, table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with the supply of wood that was to warm the poor child.
Then at the end of a week she departed, after a thousand injunctions to be good now that he was going to be left to himself.
The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him; lectures on anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics, without counting hygiene and materia medica—all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.
He understood nothing of it all; it was all very well to listen—he did not follow. Still he worked; he had bound note-books, he attended all the courses, never missed a single lecture. He did his little daily task like a mill-horse, who goes round and round with his eyes bandaged, not knowing what work he is doing.
To spare him expense his mother sent him every week by the carrier a piece of veal baked in the oven, with which he lunched when he came back from the hospital, while he sat kicking his feet against the wall. After this he had to run off to lectures, to the operation-room, to the hospital, and return to his home at the other end of the town. In the evening, after the poor dinner of his landlord, he went back to his room and set to work again in his wet clothes, which smoked as he sat in front of the hot stove. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 7 | On the fine summer evenings, at the time when the close streets are empty, when the servants are playing shuttle-cock at the doors, he opened his window and leaned out. The river, that makes of this quarter of Rouen a wretched little Venice, flowed beneath him, between the bridges and the railings, yellow, violet, or blue. Working men, kneeling on the banks, washed their bare arms in the water. On poles projecting from the attics, skeins of cotton were drying in the air. Opposite, beyond the roots spread the pure heaven with the red sun setting. How pleasant it must be at home! How fresh under the beech-tree! And he expanded his nostrils to breathe in the sweet odours of the country which did not reach him.
He grew thin, his figure became taller, his face took a saddened look that made it nearly interesting. Naturally, through indifference, he abandoned all the resolutions he had made. Once he missed a lecture; the next day all the lectures; and, enjoying his idleness, little by little, he gave up work altogether. He got into the habit of going to the public-house, and had a passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every evening in the dirty public room, to push about on marble tables the small sheep bones with black dots, seemed to him a fine proof of his freedom, which raised him in his own esteem. It was beginning to see life, the sweetness of stolen pleasures; and when he entered, he put his hand on the door-handle with a joy almost sensual. Then many things hidden within him came out; he learnt couplets by heart and sang them to his boon companions, became enthusiastic about Beranger, learnt how to make punch, and, finally, how to make love.
Thanks to these preparatory labours, he failed completely in his examination for an ordinary degree. He was expected home the same night to celebrate his success. He started on foot, stopped at the beginning of the village, sent for his mother, and told her all. She excused him, threw the blame of his failure on the injustice of the examiners, encouraged him a little, and took upon herself to set matters straight. It was only five years later that Monsieur Bovary knew the truth; it was old then, and he accepted it. Moreover, he could not believe that a man born of him could be a fool.
So Charles set to work again and crammed for his examination, ceaselessly learning all the old questions by heart. He passed pretty well. What a happy day for his mother! They gave a grand dinner. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 8 | So Charles set to work again and crammed for his examination, ceaselessly learning all the old questions by heart. He passed pretty well. What a happy day for his mother! They gave a grand dinner.
Where should he go to practice? To Tostes, where there was only one old doctor. For a long time Madame Bovary had been on the look-out for his death, and the old fellow had barely been packed off when Charles was installed, opposite his place, as his successor.
But it was not everything to have brought up a son, to have had him taught medicine, and discovered Tostes, where he could practice it; he must have a wife. She found him one—the widow of a bailiff at Dieppe—who was forty-five and had an income of twelve hundred francs. Though she was ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds, Madame Dubuc had no lack of suitors. To attain her ends Madame Bovary had to oust them all, and she even succeeded in very cleverly baffling the intrigues of a pork-butcher backed up by the priests.
Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was master; he had to say this and not say that in company, to fast every Friday, dress as she liked, harass at her bidding those patients who did not pay. She opened his letter, watched his comings and goings, and listened at the partition-wall when women came to consult him in his surgery.
She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles returned in the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets, put them round his neck, and having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he was neglecting her, he loved another. She had been warned she would be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 9 | One night towards eleven o’clock they were awakened by the noise of a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant opened the garret-window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below. He came for the doctor, had a letter for him. Natasie came downstairs shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left his horse, and, following the servant, suddenly came in behind her. He pulled out from his wool cap with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in a rag and presented it gingerly to Charles, who rested on his elbow on the pillow to read it. Natasie, standing near the bed, held the light. Madame in modesty had turned to the wall and showed only her back.
This letter, sealed with a small seal in blue wax, begged Monsieur Bovary to come immediately to the farm of the Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now from Tostes to the Bertaux was a good eighteen miles across country by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. It was a dark night; Madame Bovary junior was afraid of accidents for her husband. So it was decided the stable-boy should go on first; Charles would start three hours later when the moon rose. A boy was to be sent to meet him, and show him the way to the farm, and open the gates for him.
Towards four o’clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his cloak, set out for the Bertaux. Still sleepy from the warmth of his bed, he let himself be lulled by the quiet trot of his horse. When it stopped of its own accord in front of those holes surrounded with thorns that are dug on the margin of furrows, Charles awoke with a start, suddenly remembered the broken leg, and tried to call to mind all the fractures he knew. The rain had stopped, day was breaking, and on the branches of the leafless trees birds roosted motionless, their little feathers bristling in the cold morning wind. The flat country stretched as far as eye could see, and the tufts of trees round the farms at long intervals seemed like dark violet stains on the cast grey surface, that on the horizon faded into the gloom of the sky. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 10 | Charles from time to time opened his eyes, his mind grew weary, and, sleep coming upon him, he soon fell into a doze wherein, his recent sensations blending with memories, he became conscious of a double self, at once student and married man, lying in his bed as but now, and crossing the operation theatre as of old. The warm smell of poultices mingled in his brain with the fresh odour of dew; he heard the iron rings rattling along the curtain-rods of the bed and saw his wife sleeping. As he passed Vassonville he came upon a boy sitting on the grass at the edge of a ditch.
“Are you the doctor?” asked the child.
And on Charles’s answer he took his wooden shoes in his hands and ran on in front of him.
The general practitioner, riding along, gathered from his guide’s talk that Monsieur Rouault must be one of the well-to-do farmers.
He had broken his leg the evening before on his way home from a Twelfth-night feast at a neighbour’s. His wife had been dead for two years. There was with him only his daughter, who helped him to keep house.
The ruts were becoming deeper; they were approaching the Bertaux.
The little lad, slipping through a hole in the hedge, disappeared; then he came back to the end of a courtyard to open the gate. The horse slipped on the wet grass; Charles had to stoop to pass under the branches. The watchdogs in their kennels barked, dragging at their chains. As he entered the Bertaux, the horse took fright and stumbled.
It was a substantial-looking farm. In the stables, over the top of the open doors, one could see great cart-horses quietly feeding from new racks. Right along the outbuildings extended a large dunghill, from which manure liquid oozed, while amidst fowls and turkeys, five or six peacocks, a luxury in Chauchois farmyards, were foraging on the top of it. The sheepfold was long, the barn high, with walls smooth as your hand. Under the cart-shed were two large carts and four ploughs, with their whips, shafts and harnesses complete, whose fleeces of blue wool were getting soiled by the fine dust that fell from the granaries. The courtyard sloped upwards, planted with trees set out symmetrically, and the chattering noise of a flock of geese was heard near the pond. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 11 | A young woman in a blue merino dress with three flounces came to the threshold of the door to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she led to the kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The servant’s breakfast was boiling beside it in small pots of all sizes. Some damp clothes were drying inside the chimney-corner. The shovel, tongs, and the nozzle of the bellows, all of colossal size, shone like polished steel, while along the walls hung many pots and pans in which the clear flame of the hearth, mingling with the first rays of the sun coming in through the window, was mirrored fitfully.
Charles went up the first floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed, sweating under his bed-clothes, having thrown his cotton nightcap right away from him. He was a fat little man of fifty, with white skin and blue eyes, the forepart of his head bald, and he wore earrings. By his side on a chair stood a large decanter of brandy, whence he poured himself a little from time to time to keep up his spirits; but as soon as he caught sight of the doctor his elation subsided, and instead of swearing, as he had been doing for the last twelve hours, began to groan freely.
The fracture was a simple one, without any kind of complication.
Charles could not have hoped for an easier case. Then calling to mind the devices of his masters at the bedsides of patients, he comforted the sufferer with all sorts of kindly remarks, those caresses of the surgeon that are like the oil they put on bistouries. In order to make some splints a bundle of laths was brought up from the cart-house. Charles selected one, cut it into two pieces and planed it with a fragment of windowpane, while the servant tore up sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads. As she was a long time before she found her work-case, her father grew impatient; she did not answer, but as she sewed she pricked her fingers, which she then put to her mouth to suck them. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips, more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles; besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines. Her real beauty was in her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 12 | The bandaging over, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to “pick a bit” before he left.
Charles went down into the room on the ground floor. Knives and forks and silver goblets were laid for two on a little table at the foot of a huge bed that had a canopy of printed cotton with figures representing Turks. There was an odour of iris-root and damp sheets that escaped from a large oak chest opposite the window. On the floor in corners were sacks of flour stuck upright in rows. These were the overflow from the neighbouring granary, to which three stone steps led. By way of decoration for the apartment, hanging to a nail in the middle of the wall, whose green paint scaled off from the effects of the saltpetre, was a crayon head of Minerva in gold frame, underneath which was written in Gothic letters “To dear Papa.”
First they spoke of the patient, then of the weather, of the great cold, of the wolves that infested the fields at night.
Mademoiselle Rouault did not at all like the country, especially now that she had to look after the farm almost alone. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate. This showed something of her full lips, that she had a habit of biting when silent.
Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two black folds seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was parted in the middle by a delicate line that curved slightly with the curve of the head; and, just showing the tip of the ear, it was joined behind in a thick chignon, with a wavy movement at the temples that the country doctor saw now for the first time in his life. The upper part of her cheek was rose-coloured. She had, like a man, thrust in between two buttons of her bodice a tortoise-shell eyeglass.
When Charles, after bidding farewell to old Rouault, returned to the room before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the window, looking into the garden, where the bean props had been knocked down by the wind. She turned round. “Are you looking for anything?” she asked.
“My whip, if you please,” he answered.
He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had fallen to the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma saw it, and bent over the flour sacks. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 13 | “My whip, if you please,” he answered.
He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had fallen to the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma saw it, and bent over the flour sacks.
Charles out of politeness made a dash also, and as he stretched out his arm, at the same moment felt his breast brush against the back of the young girl bending beneath him. She drew herself up, scarlet, and looked at him over her shoulder as she handed him his whip.
Instead of returning to the Bertaux in three days as he had promised, he went back the very next day, then regularly twice a week, without counting the visits he paid now and then as if by accident.
Everything, moreover, went well; the patient progressed favourably; and when, at the end of forty-six days, old Rouault was seen trying to walk alone in his “den,” Monsieur Bovary began to be looked upon as a man of great capacity. Old Rouault said that he could not have been cured better by the first doctor of Yvetot, or even of Rouen.
As to Charles, he did not stop to ask himself why it was a pleasure to him to go to the Bertaux. Had he done so, he would, no doubt, have attributed his zeal to the importance of the case, or perhaps to the money he hoped to make by it. Was it for this, however, that his visits to the farm formed a delightful exception to the meagre occupations of his life? On these days he rose early, set off at a gallop, urging on his horse, then got down to wipe his boots in the grass and put on black gloves before entering. He liked going into the courtyard, and noticing the gate turn against his shoulder, the cock crow on the wall, the lads run to meet him. He liked the granary and the stables; he liked old Rouault, who pressed his hand and called him his saviour; he liked the small wooden shoes of Mademoiselle Emma on the scoured flags of the kitchen—her high heels made her a little taller; and when she walked in front of him, the wooden soles springing up quickly struck with a sharp sound against the leather of her boots. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 14 | She always accompanied him to the first step of the stairs. When his horse had not yet been brought round she stayed there. They had said “Good-bye”; there was no more talking. The open air wrapped her round, playing with the soft down on the back of her neck, or blew to and fro on her hips the apron-strings, that fluttered like streamers. Once, during a thaw the bark of the trees in the yard was oozing, the snow on the roofs of the outbuildings was melting; she stood on the threshold, and went to fetch her sunshade and opened it. The sunshade of silk of the colour of pigeons’ breasts, through which the sun shone, lighted up with shifting hues the white skin of her face. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of water could be heard falling one by one on the stretched silk.
During the first period of Charles’s visits to the Bertaux, Madame Bovary junior never failed to inquire after the invalid, and she had even chosen in the book that she kept on a system of double entry a clean blank page for Monsieur Rouault. But when she heard he had a daughter, she began to make inquiries, and she learnt the Mademoiselle Rouault, brought up at the Ursuline Convent, had received what is called “a good education”; and so knew dancing, geography, drawing, how to embroider and play the piano. That was the last straw.
“So it is for this,” she said to herself, “that his face beams when he goes to see her, and that he puts on his new waistcoat at the risk of spoiling it with the rain. Ah! that woman! That woman!”
And she detested her instinctively. At first she solaced herself by allusions that Charles did not understand, then by casual observations that he let pass for fear of a storm, finally by open apostrophes to which he knew not what to answer. “Why did he go back to the Bertaux now that Monsieur Rouault was cured and that these folks hadn’t paid yet? Ah! it was because a young lady was there, some one who know how to talk, to embroider, to be witty. That was what he cared about; he wanted town misses.” And she went on— |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 15 | “The daughter of old Rouault a town miss! Get out! Their grandfather was a shepherd, and they have a cousin who was almost had up at the assizes for a nasty blow in a quarrel. It is not worth while making such a fuss, or showing herself at church on Sundays in a silk gown like a countess. Besides, the poor old chap, if it hadn’t been for the colza last year, would have had much ado to pay up his arrears.”
For very weariness Charles left off going to the Bertaux. Heloise made him swear, his hand on the prayer-book, that he would go there no more after much sobbing and many kisses, in a great outburst of love. He obeyed then, but the strength of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct; and he thought, with a kind of naive hypocrisy, that his interdict to see her gave him a sort of right to love her. And then the widow was thin; she had long teeth; wore in all weathers a little black shawl, the edge of which hung down between her shoulder-blades; her bony figure was sheathed in her clothes as if they were a scabbard; they were too short, and displayed her ankles with the laces of her large boots crossed over grey stockings.
Charles’s mother came to see them from time to time, but after a few days the daughter-in-law seemed to put her own edge on her, and then, like two knives, they scarified him with their reflections and observations. It was wrong of him to eat so much. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 16 | Charles’s mother came to see them from time to time, but after a few days the daughter-in-law seemed to put her own edge on her, and then, like two knives, they scarified him with their reflections and observations. It was wrong of him to eat so much.
Why did he always offer a glass of something to everyone who came? What obstinacy not to wear flannels! In the spring it came about that a notary at Ingouville, the holder of the widow Dubuc’s property, one fine day went off, taking with him all the money in his office. Heloise, it is true, still possessed, besides a share in a boat valued at six thousand francs, her house in the Rue St. Francois; and yet, with all this fortune that had been so trumpeted abroad, nothing, excepting perhaps a little furniture and a few clothes, had appeared in the household. The matter had to be gone into. The house at Dieppe was found to be eaten up with mortgages to its foundations; what she had placed with the notary God only knew, and her share in the boat did not exceed one thousand crowns. She had lied, the good lady! In his exasperation, Monsieur Bovary the elder, smashing a chair on the flags, accused his wife of having caused misfortune to the son by harnessing him to such a harridan, whose harness wasn’t worth her hide. They came to Tostes. Explanations followed. There were scenes. Heloise in tears, throwing her arms about her husband, implored him to defend her from his parents.
Charles tried to speak up for her. They grew angry and left the house.
But “the blow had struck home.” A week after, as she was hanging up some washing in her yard, she was seized with a spitting of blood, and the next day, while Charles had his back turned to her drawing the window-curtain, she said, “O God!” gave a sigh and fainted. She was dead! What a surprise! When all was over at the cemetery Charles went home. He found no one downstairs; he went up to the first floor to their room; saw her dress still hanging at the foot of the alcove; then, leaning against the writing-table, he stayed until the evening, buried in a sorrowful reverie. She had loved him after all!
One morning old Rouault brought Charles the money for setting his leg—seventy-five francs in forty-sou pieces, and a turkey. He had heard of his loss, and consoled him as well as he could. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 17 | One morning old Rouault brought Charles the money for setting his leg—seventy-five francs in forty-sou pieces, and a turkey. He had heard of his loss, and consoled him as well as he could.
“I know what it is,” said he, clapping him on the shoulder; “I’ve been through it. When I lost my dear departed, I went into the fields to be quite alone. I fell at the foot of a tree; I cried; I called on God; I talked nonsense to Him. I wanted to be like the moles that I saw on the branches, their insides swarming with worms, dead, and an end of it. And when I thought that there were others at that very moment with their nice little wives holding them in their embrace, I struck great blows on the earth with my stick. I was pretty well mad with not eating; the very idea of going to a cafe disgusted me—you wouldn’t believe it. Well, quite softly, one day following another, a spring on a winter, and an autumn after a summer, this wore away, piece by piece, crumb by crumb; it passed away, it is gone, I should say it has sunk; for something always remains at the bottom as one would say—a weight here, at one’s heart. But since it is the lot of all of us, one must not give way altogether, and, because others have died, want to die too. You must pull yourself together, Monsieur Bovary. It will pass away. Come to see us; my daughter thinks of you now and again, d’ye know, and she says you are forgetting her. Spring will soon be here. We’ll have some rabbit-shooting in the warrens to amuse you a bit.”
Charles followed his advice. He went back to the Bertaux. He found all as he had left it, that is to say, as it was five months ago. The pear trees were already in blossom, and Farmer Rouault, on his legs again, came and went, making the farm more full of life.
Thinking it his duty to heap the greatest attention upon the doctor because of his sad position, he begged him not to take his hat off, spoke to him in an undertone as if he had been ill, and even pretended to be angry because nothing rather lighter had been prepared for him than for the others, such as a little clotted cream or stewed pears. He told stories. Charles found himself laughing, but the remembrance of his wife suddenly coming back to him depressed him. Coffee was brought in; he thought no more about her. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 18 | He thought less of her as he grew accustomed to living alone. The new delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable. He could now change his meal-times, go in or out without explanation, and when he was very tired stretch himself at full length on his bed. So he nursed and coddled himself and accepted the consolations that were offered him. On the other hand, the death of his wife had not served him ill in his business, since for a month people had been saying, “The poor young man! what a loss!” His name had been talked about, his practice had increased; and moreover, he could go to the Bertaux just as he liked. He had an aimless hope, and was vaguely happy; he thought himself better looking as he brushed his whiskers before the looking-glass.
One day he got there about three o’clock. Everybody was in the fields. He went into the kitchen, but did not at once catch sight of Emma; the outside shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across the flooring long fine rays that were broken at the corners of the furniture and trembled along the ceiling. Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.
After the fashion of country folks she asked him to have something to drink. He said no; she insisted, and at last laughingly offered to have a glass of liqueur with him. So she went to fetch a bottle of curacao from the cupboard, reached down two small glasses, filled one to the brim, poured scarcely anything into the other, and, after having clinked glasses, carried hers to her mouth. As it was almost empty she bent back to drink, her head thrown back, her lips pouting, her neck on the strain. She laughed at getting none of it, while with the tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by drop the bottom of her glass. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 19 | She sat down again and took up her work, a white cotton stocking she was darning. She worked with her head bent down; she did not speak, nor did Charles. The air coming in under the door blew a little dust over the flags; he watched it drift along, and heard nothing but the throbbing in his head and the faint clucking of a hen that had laid an egg in the yard. Emma from time to time cooled her cheeks with the palms of her hands, and cooled these again on the knobs of the huge fire-dogs.
She complained of suffering since the beginning of the season from giddiness; she asked if sea-baths would do her any good; she began talking of her convent, Charles of his school; words came to them. They went up into her bedroom. She showed him her old music-books, the little prizes she had won, and the oak-leaf crowns, left at the bottom of a cupboard. She spoke to him, too, of her mother, of the country, and even showed him the bed in the garden where, on the first Friday of every month, she gathered flowers to put on her mother’s tomb. But the gardener they had never knew anything about it; servants are so stupid! She would have dearly liked, if only for the winter, to live in town, although the length of the fine days made the country perhaps even more wearisome in the summer. And, according to what she was saying, her voice was clear, sharp, or, on a sudden all languor, drawn out in modulations that ended almost in murmurs as she spoke to herself, now joyous, opening big naive eyes, then with her eyelids half closed, her look full of boredom, her thoughts wandering. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 20 | Going home at night, Charles went over her words one by one, trying to recall them, to fill out their sense, that he might piece out the life she had lived before he knew her. But he never saw her in his thoughts other than he had seen her the first time, or as he had just left her. Then he asked himself what would become of her—if she would be married, and to whom! Alas! Old Rouault was rich, and she!—so beautiful! But Emma’s face always rose before his eyes, and a monotone, like the humming of a top, sounded in his ears, “If you should marry after all! If you should marry!” At night he could not sleep; his throat was parched; he was athirst. He got up to drink from the water-bottle and opened the window. The night was covered with stars, a warm wind blowing in the distance; the dogs were barking. He turned his head towards the Bertaux.
Thinking that, after all, he should lose nothing, Charles promised himself to ask her in marriage as soon as occasion offered, but each time such occasion did offer the fear of not finding the right words sealed his lips.
Old Rouault would not have been sorry to be rid of his daughter, who was of no use to him in the house. In his heart he excused her, thinking her too clever for farming, a calling under the ban of Heaven, since one never saw a millionaire in it. Far from having made a fortune by it, the good man was losing every year; for if he was good in bargaining, in which he enjoyed the dodges of the trade, on the other hand, agriculture properly so called, and the internal management of the farm, suited him less than most people. He did not willingly take his hands out of his pockets, and did not spare expense in all that concerned himself, liking to eat well, to have good fires, and to sleep well. He liked old cider, underdone legs of mutton, glorias well beaten up. He took his meals in the kitchen alone, opposite the fire, on a little table brought to him all ready laid as on the stage. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 21 | When, therefore, he perceived that Charles’s cheeks grew red if near his daughter, which meant that he would propose for her one of these days, he chewed the cud of the matter beforehand. He certainly thought him a little meagre, and not quite the son-in-law he would have liked, but he was said to be well brought-up, economical, very learned, and no doubt would not make too many difficulties about the dowry. Now, as old Rouault would soon be forced to sell twenty-two acres of “his property,” as he owed a good deal to the mason, to the harness-maker, and as the shaft of the cider-press wanted renewing, “If he asks for her,” he said to himself, “I’ll give her to him.”
At Michaelmas Charles went to spend three days at the Bertaux.
The last had passed like the others in procrastinating from hour to hour. Old Rouault was seeing him off; they were walking along the road full of ruts; they were about to part. This was the time. Charles gave himself as far as to the corner of the hedge, and at last, when past it—
“Monsieur Rouault,” he murmured, “I should like to say something to you.”
They stopped. Charles was silent.
“Well, tell me your story. Don’t I know all about it?” said old Rouault, laughing softly.
“Monsieur Rouault—Monsieur Rouault,” stammered Charles.
“I ask nothing better”, the farmer went on. “Although, no doubt, the little one is of my mind, still we must ask her opinion. So you get off—I’ll go back home. If it is ‘yes’, you needn’t return because of all the people about, and besides it would upset her too much. But so that you mayn’t be eating your heart, I’ll open wide the outer shutter of the window against the wall; you can see it from the back by leaning over the hedge.”
And he went off.
Charles fastened his horse to a tree; he ran into the road and waited. Half an hour passed, then he counted nineteen minutes by his watch. Suddenly a noise was heard against the wall; the shutter had been thrown back; the hook was still swinging.
The next day by nine o’clock he was at the farm. Emma blushed as he entered, and she gave a little forced laugh to keep herself in countenance. Old Rouault embraced his future son-in-law. The discussion of money matters was put off; moreover, there was plenty of time before them, as the marriage could not decently take place till Charles was out of mourning, that is to say, about the spring of the next year. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 22 | The winter passed waiting for this. Mademoiselle Rouault was busy with her trousseau. Part of it was ordered at Rouen, and she made herself chemises and nightcaps after fashion-plates that she borrowed. When Charles visited the farmer, the preparations for the wedding were talked over; they wondered in what room they should have dinner; they dreamed of the number of dishes that would be wanted, and what should be entrees.
Emma would, on the contrary, have preferred to have a midnight wedding with torches, but old Rouault could not understand such an idea. So there was a wedding at which forty-three persons were present, at which they remained sixteen hours at table, began again the next day, and to some extent on the days following.
The guests arrived early in carriages, in one-horse chaises, two-wheeled cars, old open gigs, waggonettes with leather hoods, and the young people from the nearer villages in carts, in which they stood up in rows, holding on to the sides so as not to fall, going at a trot and well shaken up. Some came from a distance of thirty miles, from Goderville, from Normanville, and from Cany.
All the relatives of both families had been invited, quarrels between friends arranged, acquaintances long since lost sight of written to. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 23 | All the relatives of both families had been invited, quarrels between friends arranged, acquaintances long since lost sight of written to.
From time to time one heard the crack of a whip behind the hedge; then the gates opened, a chaise entered. Galloping up to the foot of the steps, it stopped short and emptied its load. They got down from all sides, rubbing knees and stretching arms. The ladies, wearing bonnets, had on dresses in the town fashion, gold watch chains, pelerines with the ends tucked into belts, or little coloured fichus fastened down behind with a pin, and that left the back of the neck bare. The lads, dressed like their papas, seemed uncomfortable in their new clothes (many that day hand-sewed their first pair of boots), and by their sides, speaking never a work, wearing the white dress of their first communion lengthened for the occasion were some big girls of fourteen or sixteen, cousins or elder sisters no doubt, rubicund, bewildered, their hair greasy with rose pomade, and very much afraid of dirtying their gloves. As there were not enough stable-boys to unharness all the carriages, the gentlemen turned up their sleeves and set about it themselves. According to their different social positions they wore tail-coats, overcoats, shooting jackets, cutaway-coats; fine tail-coats, redolent of family respectability, that only came out of the wardrobe on state occasions; overcoats with long tails flapping in the wind and round capes and pockets like sacks; shooting jackets of coarse cloth, generally worn with a cap with a brass-bound peak; very short cutaway-coats with two small buttons in the back, close together like a pair of eyes, and the tails of which seemed cut out of one piece by a carpenter’s hatchet. Some, too (but these, you may be sure, would sit at the bottom of the table), wore their best blouses—that is to say, with collars turned down to the shoulders, the back gathered into small plaits and the waist fastened very low down with a worked belt.
And the shirts stood out from the chests like cuirasses! Everyone had just had his hair cut; ears stood out from the heads; they had been close-shaved; a few, even, who had had to get up before daybreak, and not been able to see to shave, had diagonal gashes under their noses or cuts the size of a three-franc piece along the jaws, which the fresh air en route had enflamed, so that the great white beaming faces were mottled here and there with red dabs. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 24 | The mairie was a mile and a half from the farm, and they went thither on foot, returning in the same way after the ceremony in the church. The procession, first united like one long coloured scarf that undulated across the fields, along the narrow path winding amid the green corn, soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons at its pegs. Then came the married pair, the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell; the children stayed behind amusing themselves plucking the bell-flowers from oat-ears, or playing amongst themselves unseen. Emma’s dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the thistledowns, while Charles, empty handed, waited till she had finished. Old Rouault, with a new silk hat and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands up to the nails, gave his arm to Madame Bovary senior. As to Monsieur Bovary senior, who, heartily despising all these folk, had come simply in a frock-coat of military cut with one row of buttons—he was passing compliments of the bar to a fair young peasant. She bowed, blushed, and did not know what to say. The other wedding guests talked of their business or played tricks behind each other’s backs, egging one another on in advance to be jolly. Those who listened could always catch the squeaking of the fiddler, who went on playing across the fields. When he saw that the rest were far behind he stopped to take breath, slowly rosined his bow, so that the strings should sound more shrilly, then set off again, by turns lowering and raising his neck, the better to mark time for himself. The noise of the instrument drove away the little birds from afar. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 25 | The table was laid under the cart-shed. On it were four sirloins, six chicken fricassees, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and in the middle a fine roast suckling pig, flanked by four chitterlings with sorrel. At the corners were decanters of brandy. Sweet bottled-cider frothed round the corks, and all the glasses had been filled to the brim with wine beforehand. Large dishes of yellow cream, that trembled with the least shake of the table, had designed on their smooth surface the initials of the newly wedded pair in nonpareil arabesques. A confectioner of Yvetot had been intrusted with the tarts and sweets. As he had only just set up on the place, he had taken a lot of trouble, and at dessert he himself brought in a set dish that evoked loud cries of wonderment. To begin with, at its base there was a square of blue cardboard, representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and stucco statuettes all round, and in the niches constellations of gilt paper stars; then on the second stage was a dungeon of Savoy cake, surrounded by many fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of oranges; and finally, on the upper platform a green field with rocks set in lakes of jam, nutshell boats, and a small Cupid balancing himself in a chocolate swing whose two uprights ended in real roses for balls at the top.
Until night they ate. When any of them were too tired of sitting, they went out for a stroll in the yard, or for a game with corks in the granary, and then returned to table. Some towards the finish went to sleep and snored. But with the coffee everyone woke up. Then they began songs, showed off tricks, raised heavy weights, performed feats with their fingers, then tried lifting carts on their shoulders, made broad jokes, kissed the women. At night when they left, the horses, stuffed up to the nostrils with oats, could hardly be got into the shafts; they kicked, reared, the harness broke, their masters laughed or swore; and all night in the light of the moon along country roads there were runaway carts at full gallop plunging into the ditches, jumping over yard after yard of stones, clambering up the hills, with women leaning out from the tilt to catch hold of the reins.
Those who stayed at the Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen. The children had fallen asleep under the seats. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 26 | Those who stayed at the Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen. The children had fallen asleep under the seats.
The bride had begged her father to be spared the usual marriage pleasantries. However, a fishmonger, one of their cousins (who had even brought a pair of soles for his wedding present), began to squirt water from his mouth through the keyhole, when old Rouault came up just in time to stop him, and explain to him that the distinguished position of his son-in-law would not allow of such liberties. The cousin all the same did not give in to these reasons readily. In his heart he accused old Rouault of being proud, and he joined four or five other guests in a corner, who having, through mere chance, been several times running served with the worst helps of meat, also were of opinion they had been badly used, and were whispering about their host, and with covered hints hoping he would ruin himself.
Madame Bovary, senior, had not opened her mouth all day. She had been consulted neither as to the dress of her daughter-in-law nor as to the arrangement of the feast; she went to bed early. Her husband, instead of following her, sent to Saint-Victor for some cigars, and smoked till daybreak, drinking kirsch-punch, a mixture unknown to the company. This added greatly to the consideration in which he was held.
Charles, who was not of a facetious turn, did not shine at the wedding. He answered feebly to the puns, doubles entendres, compliments, and chaff that it was felt a duty to let off at him as soon as the soup appeared.
The next day, on the other hand, he seemed another man. It was he who might rather have been taken for the virgin of the evening before, whilst the bride gave no sign that revealed anything. The shrewdest did not know what to make of it, and they looked at her when she passed near them with an unbounded concentration of mind. But Charles concealed nothing. He called her “my wife”, tutoyéd her, asked for her of everyone, looked for her everywhere, and often he dragged her into the yards, where he could be seen from far between the trees, putting his arm around her waist, and walking half-bending over her, ruffling the chemisette of her bodice with his head. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 27 | Two days after the wedding the married pair left. Charles, on account of his patients, could not be away longer. Old Rouault had them driven back in his cart, and himself accompanied them as far as Vassonville. Here he embraced his daughter for the last time, got down, and went his way. When he had gone about a hundred paces he stopped, and as he saw the cart disappearing, its wheels turning in the dust, he gave a deep sigh. Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road. He felt dreary as an empty house; and tender memories mingling with the sad thoughts in his brain, addled by the fumes of the feast, he felt inclined for a moment to take a turn towards the church. As he was afraid, however, that this sight would make him yet more sad, he went right away home.
Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived at Tostes about six o’clock.
The neighbors came to the windows to see their doctor’s new wife.
The old servant presented herself, curtsied to her, apologised for not having dinner ready, and suggested that madame, in the meantime, should look over her house. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 28 | Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived at Tostes about six o’clock.
The neighbors came to the windows to see their doctor’s new wife.
The old servant presented herself, curtsied to her, apologised for not having dinner ready, and suggested that madame, in the meantime, should look over her house.
The brick front was just in a line with the street, or rather the road. Behind the door hung a cloak with a small collar, a bridle, and a black leather cap, and on the floor, in a corner, were a pair of leggings, still covered with dry mud. On the right was the one apartment, that was both dining and sitting room. A canary yellow paper, relieved at the top by a garland of pale flowers, was puckered everywhere over the badly stretched canvas; white calico curtains with a red border hung crossways at the length of the window; and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two plate candlesticks under oval shades. On the other side of the passage was Charles’s consulting room, a little room about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office chair. Volumes of the “Dictionary of Medical Science,” uncut, but the binding rather the worse for the successive sales through which they had gone, occupied almost along the six shelves of a deal bookcase.
The smell of melted butter penetrated through the walls when he saw patients, just as in the kitchen one could hear the people coughing in the consulting room and recounting their histories.
Then, opening on the yard, where the stable was, came a large dilapidated room with a stove, now used as a wood-house, cellar, and pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements past service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to guess.
The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud walls with espaliered apricots, to a hawthorn hedge that separated it from the field. In the middle was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal; four flower beds with eglantines surrounded symmetrically the more useful kitchen garden bed. Right at the bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a cure in plaster reading his breviary. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 29 | Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second, which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red drapery. A shell box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary near the window a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin ribbons stood in a bottle. It was a bride’s bouquet; it was the other one’s. She looked at it. Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it up to the attic, while Emma seated in an arm-chair (they were putting her things down around her) thought of her bridal flowers packed up in a bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she were to die.
During the first days she occupied herself in thinking about changes in the house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the sundial; she even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain and fishes. Finally her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out, picked up a second-hand dogcart, which, with new lamps and splashboard in striped leather, looked almost like a tilbury. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 30 | He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together, a walk in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now made up the endless round of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, by her side, on the pillow, he watched the sunlight sinking into the down on her fair cheek, half hidden by the lappets of her night-cap. Seen thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on waking up, she opened and shut them rapidly many times. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, depths of different colours, that, darker in the centre, grew paler towards the surface of the eye. His own eyes lost themselves in these depths; he saw himself in miniature down to the shoulders, with his handkerchief round his head and the top of his shirt open. He rose. She came to the window to see him off, and stayed leaning on the sill between two pots of geranium, clad in her dressing gown hanging loosely about her. Charles, in the street buckled his spurs, his foot on the mounting stone, while she talked to him from above, picking with her mouth some scrap of flower or leaf that she blew out at him. Then this, eddying, floating, described semicircles in the air like a bird, and was caught before it reached the ground in the ill-groomed mane of the old white mare standing motionless at the door. Charles from horseback threw her a kiss; she answered with a nod; she shut the window, and he set off. And then along the highroad, spreading out its long ribbon of dust, along the deep lanes that the trees bent over as in arbours, along paths where the corn reached to the knees, with the sun on his back and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the joys of the past night, his mind at rest, his flesh at ease, he went on, re-chewing his happiness, like those who after dinner taste again the truffles which they are digesting. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 31 | Until now what good had he had of his life? His time at school, when he remained shut up within the high walls, alone, in the midst of companions richer than he or cleverer at their work, who laughed at his accent, who jeered at his clothes, and whose mothers came to the school with cakes in their muffs? Later on, when he studied medicine, and never had his purse full enough to treat some little work-girl who would have become his mistress? Afterwards, he had lived fourteen months with the widow, whose feet in bed were cold as icicles. But now he had for life this beautiful woman whom he adored. For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat, and he reproached himself with not loving her. He wanted to see her again; he turned back quickly, ran up the stairs with a beating heart. Emma, in her room, was dressing; he came up on tiptoe, kissed her back; she gave a cry.
He could not keep from constantly touching her comb, her ring, her fichu; sometimes he gave her great sounding kisses with all his mouth on her cheeks, or else little kisses in a row all along her bare arm from the tip of her fingers up to her shoulder, and she put him away half-smiling, half-vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you.
Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.
She had read “Paul and Virginia,” and she had dreamed of the little bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.
When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town to place her in the convent. They stopped at an inn in the St. Gervais quarter, where, at their supper, they used painted plates that set forth the story of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. The explanatory legends, chipped here and there by the scratching of knives, all glorified religion, the tendernesses of the heart, and the pomps of court. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 32 | Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took pleasure in the society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, took her to the chapel, which one entered from the refectory by a long corridor. She played very little during recreation hours, knew her catechism well, and it was she who always answered Monsieur le Vicaire’s difficult questions. Living thus, without ever leaving the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, and amid these pale-faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she was softly lulled by the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes of the altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the lights of the tapers. Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfil.
When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined, her face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest. The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness.
In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the “Genie du Christianisme,” as a recreation. How she listened at first to the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies reechoing through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the shop-parlour of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well; she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs.
Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.
She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 33 | She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.
At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution, she dined in the refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit of chat with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped out from the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away.
She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work. They were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, “gentlemen” brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and Clemence Isaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven, where also were seen, lost in shadow, and all unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI, a little of St. Bartholomew’s Day, the plume of the Bearnais, and always the remembrance of the plates painted in honour of Louis XIV. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 34 | In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes, gondoliers;-mild compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse athwart the obscurity of style and the weakness of the music of the attractive phantasmagoria of sentimental realities. Some of her companions brought “keepsakes” given them as new year’s gifts to the convent. These had to be hidden; it was quite an undertaking; they were read in the dormitory. Delicately handling the beautiful satin bindings, Emma looked with dazzled eyes at the names of the unknown authors, who had signed their verses for the most part as counts or viscounts.
She trembled as she blew back the tissue paper over the engraving and saw it folded in two and fall gently against the page. Here behind the balustrade of a balcony was a young man in a short cloak, holding in his arms a young girl in a white dress wearing an alms-bag at her belt; or there were nameless portraits of English ladies with fair curls, who looked at you from under their round straw hats with their large clear eyes. Some there were lounging in their carriages, gliding through parks, a greyhound bounding along in front of the equipage driven at a trot by two midget postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming on sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon through a slightly open window half draped by a black curtain. The naive ones, a tear on their cheeks, were kissing doves through the bars of a Gothic cage, or, smiling, their heads on one side, were plucking the leaves of a marguerite with their taper fingers, that curved at the tips like peaked shoes. And you, too, were there, Sultans with long pipes reclining beneath arbours in the arms of Bayaderes; Djiaours, Turkish sabres, Greek caps; and you especially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that often show us at once palm trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by a very neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam trembling in the water, where, standing out in relief like white excoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about.
And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall above Emma’s head lighted up all these pictures of the world, that passed before her one by one in the silence of the dormitory, and to the distant noise of some belated carriage rolling over the Boulevards. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 35 | And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall above Emma’s head lighted up all these pictures of the world, that passed before her one by one in the silence of the dormitory, and to the distant noise of some belated carriage rolling over the Boulevards.
When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had a funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried later on in the same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it, would not confess it, continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her brow.
The good nuns, who had been so sure of her vocation, perceived with great astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping from them. They had indeed been so lavish to her of prayers, retreats, novenas, and sermons, they had so often preached the respect due to saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice as to the modesty of the body and the salvation of her soul, that she did as tightly reined horses; she pulled up short and the bit slipped from her teeth. This nature, positive in the midst of its enthusiasms, that had loved the church for the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs, and literature for its passional stimulus, rebelled against the mysteries of faith as it grew irritated by discipline, a thing antipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her from school, no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior even thought that she had latterly been somewhat irreverent to the community.
Emma, at home once more, first took pleasure in looking after the servants, then grew disgusted with the country and missed her convent. When Charles came to the Bertaux for the first time, she thought herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing more to feel. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 36 | Emma, at home once more, first took pleasure in looking after the servants, then grew disgusted with the country and missed her convent. When Charles came to the Bertaux for the first time, she thought herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing more to feel.
But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the disturbance caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed to make her believe that she at last felt that wondrous passion which, till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings, hung in the splendour of the skies of poesy; and now she could not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness she had dreamed.
She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life—the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.
If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that separated her from him. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 37 | Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel.
A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.
Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers, little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers glided over it the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb, and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.
Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house. She sent the patients’ accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of a bill. When they had a neighbour to dinner on Sundays, she managed to have some tasty dish—piled up pyramids of greengages on vine leaves, served up preserves turned out into plates—and even spoke of buying finger-glasses for dessert. From all this much consideration was extended to Bovary.
Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife. He showed with pride in the sitting room two small pencil sketches by her that he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the wallpaper by long green cords. People returning from mass saw him at his door in his wool-work slippers. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 38 | He came home late—at ten o’clock, at midnight sometimes. Then he asked for something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited on him. He took off his coat to dine more at his ease. He told her, one after the other, the people he had met, the villages where he had been, the prescriptions he had written, and, well pleased with himself, he finished the remainder of the boiled beef and onions, picked pieces off the cheese, munched an apple, emptied his water-bottle, and then went to bed, and lay on his back and snored.
As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps, his handkerchief would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was all tumbled pell-mell about his face and whitened with the feathers of the pillow, whose strings came untied during the night. He always wore thick boots that had two long creases over the instep running obliquely towards the ankle, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight line as if stretched on a wooden foot. He said that “was quite good enough for the country.”
His mother approved of his economy, for she came to see him as formerly when there had been some violent row at her place; and yet Madame Bovary senior seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She thought “her ways too fine for their position”; the wood, the sugar, and the candles disappeared as “at a grand establishment,” and the amount of firing in the kitchen would have been enough for twenty-five courses. She put her linen in order for her in the presses, and taught her to keep an eye on the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma put up with these lessons. Madame Bovary was lavish of them; and the words “daughter” and “mother” were exchanged all day long, accompanied by little quiverings of the lips, each one uttering gentle words in a voice trembling with anger.
In Madame Dubuc’s time the old woman felt that she was still the favorite; but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son’s happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house. She recalled to him as remembrances her troubles and her sacrifices, and, comparing these with Emma’s negligence, came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to adore her so exclusively. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 39 | Charles knew not what to answer: he respected his mother, and he loved his wife infinitely; he considered the judgment of the one infallible, and yet he thought the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madam Bovary had gone, he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from his mamma. Emma proved to him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his patients.
And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she wanted to make herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after as before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.
When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles’s passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony of dinner.
A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had given madame a little Italian greyhound; she took her out walking, for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far as the beeches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion which forms an angle of the wall on the side of the country. Amidst the vegetation of the ditch there are long reeds with leaves that cut you.
She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield.
Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, “Good heavens! Why did I marry?” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 40 | Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, “Good heavens! Why did I marry?”
She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would have not been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would have been these unrealised events, this different life, this unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old companions of the convent had married. What were they doing now? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands, the senses bourgeon out. But she—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
She recalled the prize days, when she mounted the platform to receive her little crowns, with her hair in long plaits. In her white frock and open prunella shoes she had a pretty way, and when she went back to her seat, the gentlemen bent over her to congratulate her; the courtyard was full of carriages; farewells were called to her through their windows; the music master with his violin case bowed in passing by. How far all of this! How far away! She called Djali, took her between her knees, and smoothed the long delicate head, saying, “Come, kiss mistress; you have no troubles.”
Then noting the melancholy face of the graceful animal, who yawned slowly, she softened, and comparing her to herself, spoke to her aloud as to somebody in trouble whom one is consoling.
Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. Emma drew her shawl round her shoulders and rose. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 41 | In the avenue a green light dimmed by the leaves lit up the short moss that crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was setting; the sky showed red between the branches, and the trunks of the trees, uniform, and planted in a straight line, seemed a brown colonnade standing out against a background of gold. A fear took hold of her; she called Djali, and hurriedly returned to Tostes by the high road, threw herself into an armchair, and for the rest of the evening did not speak.
But towards the end of September something extraordinary fell upon her life; she was invited by the Marquis d’Andervilliers to Vaubyessard.
Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, anxious to re-enter political life, set about preparing for his candidature to the Chamber of Deputies long beforehand. In the winter he distributed a great deal of wood, and in the Conseil General always enthusiastically demanded new roads for his arrondissement. During the dog-days he had suffered from an abscess, which Charles had cured as if by miracle by giving a timely little touch with the lancet. The steward sent to Tostes to pay for the operation reported in the evening that he had seen some superb cherries in the doctor’s little garden. Now cherry trees did not thrive at Vaubyessard; the Marquis asked Bovary for some slips; made it his business to thank his personally; saw Emma; thought she had a pretty figure, and that she did not bow like a peasant; so that he did not think he was going beyond the bounds of condescension, nor, on the other hand, making a mistake, in inviting the young couple.
On Wednesday at three o’clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, seated in their dog-cart, set out for Vaubyessard, with a great trunk strapped on behind and a bonnet-box in front of the apron. Besides these Charles held a bandbox between his knees.
They arrived at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park were being lit to show the way for the carriages. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 42 | They arrived at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park were being lit to show the way for the carriages.
The château, a modern building in Italian style, with two projecting wings and three flights of steps, lay at the foot of an immense green-sward, on which some cows were grazing among groups of large trees set out at regular intervals, while large beds of arbutus, rhododendron, syringas, and guelder roses bulged out their irregular clusters of green along the curve of the gravel path. A river flowed under a bridge; through the mist one could distinguish buildings with thatched roofs scattered over the field bordered by two gently sloping, well timbered hillocks, and in the background amid the trees rose in two parallel lines the coach houses and stables, all that was left of the ruined old château.
Charles’s dog-cart pulled up before the middle flight of steps; servants appeared; the Marquis came forward, and, offering his arm to the doctor’s wife, conducted her to the vestibule.
It was paved with marble slabs, was very lofty, and the sound of footsteps and that of voices re-echoed through it as in a church.
Opposite rose a straight staircase, and on the left a gallery overlooking the garden led to the billiard room, through whose door one could hear the click of the ivory balls. As she crossed it to go to the drawing room, Emma saw standing round the table men with grave faces, their chins resting on high cravats. They all wore orders, and smiled silently as they made their strokes.
On the dark wainscoting of the walls large gold frames bore at the bottom names written in black letters. She read: “Jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers d’Yvervonbille, Count de la Vaubyessard and Baron de la Fresnay, killed at the battle of Coutras on the 20th of October, 1587.” And on another: “Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d’Andervilliers de la Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Chevalier of the Order of St. Michael, wounded at the battle of the Hougue-Saint-Vaast on the 29th of May, 1692; died at Vaubyessard on the 23rd of January 1693.” One could hardly make out those that followed, for the light of the lamps lowered over the green cloth threw a dim shadow round the room. Burnishing the horizontal pictures, it broke up against these in delicate lines where there were cracks in the varnish, and from all these great black squares framed in with gold stood out here and there some lighter portion of the painting—a pale brow, two eyes that looked at you, perukes flowing over and powdering red-coated shoulders, or the buckle of a garter above a well-rounded calf. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 43 | The Marquis opened the drawing room door; one of the ladies (the Marchioness herself) came to meet Emma. She made her sit down by her on an ottoman, and began talking to her as amicably as if she had known her a long time. She was a woman of about forty, with fine shoulders, a hook nose, a drawling voice, and on this evening she wore over her brown hair a simple guipure fichu that fell in a point at the back. A fair young woman sat in a high-backed chair in a corner; and gentlemen with flowers in their buttonholes were talking to ladies round the fire.
At seven dinner was served. The men, who were in the majority, sat down at the first table in the vestibule; the ladies at the second in the dining room with the Marquis and Marchioness.
Emma, on entering, felt herself wrapped round by the warm air, a blending of the perfume of flowers and of the fine linen, of the fumes of the viands, and the odour of the truffles. The silver dish covers reflected the lighted wax candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal covered with light steam reflected from one to the other pale rays; bouquets were placed in a row the whole length of the table; and in the large-bordered plates each napkin, arranged after the fashion of a bishop’s mitre, held between its two gaping folds a small oval shaped roll. The red claws of lobsters hung over the dishes; rich fruit in open baskets was piled up on moss; there were quails in their plumage; smoke was rising; and in silk stockings, knee-breeches, white cravat, and frilled shirt, the steward, grave as a judge, offering ready carved dishes between the shoulders of the guests, with a touch of the spoon gave you the piece chosen. On the large stove of porcelain inlaid with copper baguettes the statue of a woman, draped to the chin, gazed motionless on the room full of life.
Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in their glasses. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 44 | Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in their glasses.
But at the upper end of the table, alone amongst all these women, bent over his full plate, and his napkin tied round his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with black ribbon. He was the Marquis’s father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdiere, once on a time favourite of the Count d’Artois, in the days of the Vaudreuil hunting-parties at the Marquis de Conflans’, and had been, it was said, the lover of Queen Marie Antoinette, between Monsieur de Coigny and Monsieur de Lauzun. He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family. A servant behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the dishes that he pointed to stammering, and constantly Emma’s eyes turned involuntarily to this old man with hanging lips, as to something extraordinary. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens! Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pineapples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere.
The ladies afterwards went to their rooms to prepare for the ball.
Emma made her toilet with the fastidious care of an actress on her debut. She did her hair according to the directions of the hairdresser, and put on the barege dress spread out upon the bed.
Charles’s trousers were tight across the belly.
“My trouser-straps will be rather awkward for dancing,” he said.
“Dancing?” repeated Emma.
“Yes!”
“Why, you must be mad! They would make fun of you; keep your place. Besides, it is more becoming for a doctor,” she added.
Charles was silent. He walked up and down waiting for Emma to finish dressing.
He saw her from behind in the glass between two lights. Her black eyes seemed blacker than ever. Her hair, undulating towards the ears, shone with a blue lustre; a rose in her chignon trembled on its mobile stalk, with artificial dewdrops on the tip of the leaves. She wore a gown of pale saffron trimmed with three bouquets of pompon roses mixed with green.
Charles came and kissed her on her shoulder.
“Let me alone!” she said; “you are tumbling me.”
One could hear the flourish of the violin and the notes of a horn. She went downstairs restraining herself from running.
Dancing had begun. Guests were arriving. There was some crushing. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 45 | Charles came and kissed her on her shoulder.
“Let me alone!” she said; “you are tumbling me.”
One could hear the flourish of the violin and the notes of a horn. She went downstairs restraining herself from running.
Dancing had begun. Guests were arriving. There was some crushing.
She sat down on a form near the door.
The quadrille over, the floor was occupied by groups of men standing up and talking and servants in livery bearing large trays. Along the line of seated women painted fans were fluttering, bouquets half hid smiling faces, and gold stoppered scent-bottles were turned in partly-closed hands, whose white gloves outlined the nails and tightened on the flesh at the wrists. Lace trimmings, diamond brooches, medallion bracelets trembled on bodices, gleamed on breasts, clinked on bare arms.
The hair, well-smoothed over the temples and knotted at the nape, bore crowns, or bunches, or sprays of myosotis, jasmine, pomegranate blossoms, ears of corn, and corn-flowers. Calmly seated in their places, mothers with forbidding countenances were wearing red turbans.
Emma’s heart beat rather faster when, her partner holding her by the tips of the fingers, she took her place in a line with the dancers, and waited for the first note to start. But her emotion soon vanished, and, swaying to the rhythm of the orchestra, she glided forward with slight movements of the neck. A smile rose to her lips at certain delicate phrases of the violin, that sometimes played alone while the other instruments were silent; one could hear the clear clink of the louis d’or that were being thrown down upon the card tables in the next room; then all struck again, the cornet-a-piston uttered its sonorous note, feet marked time, skirts swelled and rustled, hands touched and parted; the same eyes falling before you met yours again.
A few men (some fifteen or so), of twenty-five to forty, scattered here and there among the dancers or talking at the doorways, distinguished themselves from the crowd by a certain air of breeding, whatever their differences in age, dress, or face. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 46 | A few men (some fifteen or so), of twenty-five to forty, scattered here and there among the dancers or talking at the doorways, distinguished themselves from the crowd by a certain air of breeding, whatever their differences in age, dress, or face.
Their clothes, better made, seemed of finer cloth, and their hair, brought forward in curls towards the temples, glossy with more delicate pomades. They had the complexion of wealth—that clear complexion that is heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the veneer of old furniture, and that an ordered regimen of exquisite nurture maintains at its best. Their necks moved easily in their low cravats, their long whiskers fell over their turned-down collars, they wiped their lips upon handkerchiefs with embroidered initials that gave forth a subtle perfume. Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young. In their unconcerned looks was the calm of passions daily satiated, and through all their gentleness of manner pierced that peculiar brutality, the result of a command of half-easy things, in which force is exercised and vanity amused—the management of thoroughbred horses and the society of loose women.
A few steps from Emma a gentleman in a blue coat was talking of Italy with a pale young woman wearing a parure of pearls.
They were praising the breadth of the columns of St. Peter’s, Tivoly, Vesuvius, Castellamare, and Cassines, the roses of Genoa, the Coliseum by moonlight. With her other ear Emma was listening to a conversation full of words she did not understand. A circle gathered round a very young man who the week before had beaten “Miss Arabella” and “Romolus,” and won two thousand louis jumping a ditch in England. One complained that his racehorses were growing fat; another of the printers’ errors that had disfigured the name of his horse.
The atmosphere of the ball was heavy; the lamps were growing dim. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 47 | The atmosphere of the ball was heavy; the lamps were growing dim.
Guests were flocking to the billiard room. A servant got upon a chair and broke the window-panes. At the crash of the glass Madame Bovary turned her head and saw in the garden the faces of peasants pressed against the window looking in at them. Then the memory of the Bertaux came back to her. She saw the farm again, the muddy pond, her father in a blouse under the apple trees, and she saw herself again as formerly, skimming with her finger the cream off the milk-pans in the dairy. But in the refulgence of the present hour her past life, so distinct until then, faded away completely, and she almost doubted having lived it. She was there; beyond the ball was only shadow overspreading all the rest. She was just eating a maraschino ice that she held with her left hand in a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, and the spoon between her teeth.
A lady near her dropped her fan. A gentlemen was passing.
“Would you be so good,” said the lady, “as to pick up my fan that has fallen behind the sofa?”
The gentleman bowed, and as he moved to stretch out his arm, Emma saw the hand of a young woman throw something white, folded in a triangle, into his hat. The gentleman, picking up the fan, offered it to the lady respectfully; she thanked him with an inclination of the head, and began smelling her bouquet.
After supper, where were plenty of Spanish and Rhine wines, soups à la bisque and au lait d’amandes, puddings à la Trafalgar, and all sorts of cold meats with jellies that trembled in the dishes, the carriages one after the other began to drive off. Raising the corners of the muslin curtain, one could see the light of their lanterns glimmering through the darkness. The seats began to empty, some card-players were still left; the musicians were cooling the tips of their fingers on their tongues. Charles was half asleep, his back propped against a door.
At three o’clock the cotillion began. Emma did not know how to waltz. Everyone was waltzing, Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers herself and the Marquis; only the guests staying at the castle were still there, about a dozen persons.
One of the waltzers, however, who was familiarly called Viscount, and whose low cut waistcoat seemed moulded to his chest, came a second time to ask Madame Bovary to dance, assuring her that he would guide her, and that she would get through it very well. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 48 | One of the waltzers, however, who was familiarly called Viscount, and whose low cut waistcoat seemed moulded to his chest, came a second time to ask Madame Bovary to dance, assuring her that he would guide her, and that she would get through it very well.
They began slowly, then went more rapidly. They turned; all around them was turning—the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like a disc on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma’s dress caught against his trousers.
Their legs commingled; he looked down at her; she raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They started again, and with a more rapid movement; the Viscount, dragging her along disappeared with her to the end of the gallery, where panting, she almost fell, and for a moment rested her head upon his breast. And then, still turning, but more slowly, he guided her back to her seat. She leaned back against the wall and covered her eyes with her hands.
When she opened them again, in the middle of the drawing room three waltzers were kneeling before a lady sitting on a stool.
She chose the Viscount, and the violin struck up once more.
Everyone looked at them. They passed and re-passed, she with rigid body, her chin bent down, and he always in the same pose, his figure curved, his elbow rounded, his chin thrown forward. That woman knew how to waltz! They kept up a long time, and tired out all the others.
Then they talked a few moments longer, and after the goodnights, or rather good mornings, the guests of the château retired to bed.
Charles dragged himself up by the balusters. His “knees were going up into his body.” He had spent five consecutive hours standing bolt upright at the card tables, watching them play whist, without understanding anything about it, and it was with a deep sigh of relief that he pulled off his boots.
Emma threw a shawl over her shoulders, opened the window, and leant out.
The night was dark; some drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the damp wind that refreshed her eyelids. The music of the ball was still murmuring in her ears. And she tried to keep herself awake in order to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to give up. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 49 | Day began to break. She looked long at the windows of the château, trying to guess which were the rooms of all those she had noticed the evening before. She would fain have known their lives, have penetrated, blended with them. But she was shivering with cold. She undressed, and cowered down between the sheets against Charles, who was asleep.
There were a great many people to luncheon. The repast lasted ten minutes; no liqueurs were served, which astonished the doctor.
Next, Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers collected some pieces of roll in a small basket to take them to the swans on the ornamental waters, and they went to walk in the hot-houses, where strange plants, bristling with hairs, rose in pyramids under hanging vases, whence, as from over-filled nests of serpents, fell long green cords interlacing. The orangery, which was at the other end, led by a covered way to the outhouses of the château. The Marquis, to amuse the young woman, took her to see the stables.
Above the basket-shaped racks porcelain slabs bore the names of the horses in black letters. Each animal in its stall whisked its tail when anyone went near and said “Tchk! tchk!” The boards of the harness room shone like the flooring of a drawing room. The carriage harness was piled up in the middle against two twisted columns, and the bits, the whips, the spurs, the curbs, were ranged in a line all along the wall.
Charles, meanwhile, went to ask a groom to put his horse to. The dog-cart was brought to the foot of the steps, and, all the parcels being crammed in, the Bovarys paid their respects to the Marquis and Marchioness and set out again for Tostes.
Emma watched the turning wheels in silence. Charles, on the extreme edge of the seat, held the reins with his two arms wide apart, and the little horse ambled along in the shafts that were too big for him. The loose reins hanging over his crupper were wet with foam, and the box fastened on behind the chaise gave great regular bumps against it.
They were on the heights of Thibourville when suddenly some horsemen with cigars between their lips passed laughing. Emma thought she recognized the Viscount, turned back, and caught on the horizon only the movement of the heads rising or falling with the unequal cadence of the trot or gallop.
A mile farther on they had to stop to mend with some string the traces that had broken. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 50 | A mile farther on they had to stop to mend with some string the traces that had broken.
But Charles, giving a last look to the harness, saw something on the ground between his horse’s legs, and he picked up a cigar-case with a green silk border and beblazoned in the centre like the door of a carriage.
“There are even two cigars in it,” said he; “they’ll do for this evening after dinner.”
“Why, do you smoke?” she asked.
“Sometimes, when I get a chance.”
He put his find in his pocket and whipped up the nag.
When they reached home the dinner was not ready. Madame lost her temper. Nastasie answered rudely.
“Leave the room!” said Emma. “You are forgetting yourself. I give you warning.”
For dinner there was onion soup and a piece of veal with sorrel.
Charles, seated opposite Emma, rubbed his hands gleefully.
“How good it is to be at home again!”
Nastasie could be heard crying. He was rather fond of the poor girl. She had formerly, during the wearisome time of his widowhood, kept him company many an evening. She had been his first patient, his oldest acquaintance in the place.
“Have you given her warning for good?” he asked at last.
“Yes. Who is to prevent me?” she replied.
Then they warmed themselves in the kitchen while their room was being made ready. Charles began to smoke. He smoked with lips protruding, spitting every moment, recoiling at every puff.
“You’ll make yourself ill,” she said scornfully.
He put down his cigar and ran to swallow a glass of cold water at the pump. Emma seizing hold of the cigar case threw it quickly to the back of the cupboard.
The next day was a long one. She walked about her little garden, up and down the same walks, stopping before the beds, before the espalier, before the plaster curate, looking with amazement at all these things of once-on-a-time that she knew so well. How far off the ball seemed already! What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day? Her journey to Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like one of those great crevices that a storm will sometimes make in one night in mountains. Still she was resigned. She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced.
The memory of this ball, then, became an occupation for Emma. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 51 | The memory of this ball, then, became an occupation for Emma.
Whenever the Wednesday came round she said to herself as she awoke, “Ah! I was there a week—a fortnight—three weeks ago.”
And little by little the faces grew confused in her remembrance.
She forgot the tune of the quadrilles; she no longer saw the liveries and appointments so distinctly; some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.
Often when Charles was out she took from the cupboard, between the folds of the linen where she had left it, the green silk cigar case. She looked at it, opened it, and even smelt the odour of the lining—a mixture of verbena and tobacco. Whose was it? The Viscount’s? Perhaps it was a present from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some rosewood frame, a pretty little thing, hidden from all eyes, that had occupied many hours, and over which had fallen the soft curls of the pensive worker. A breath of love had passed over the stitches on the canvas; each prick of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and all those interwoven threads of silk were but the continuity of the same silent passion. And then one morning the Viscount had taken it away with him. Of what had they spoken when it lay upon the wide-mantelled chimneys between flower-vases and Pompadour clocks? She was at Tostes; he was at Paris now, far away! What was this Paris like? What a vague name! She repeated it in a low voice, for the mere pleasure of it; it rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it shone before her eyes, even on the labels of her pomade-pots.
At night, when the carriers passed under her windows in their carts singing the “Marjolaine,” she awoke, and listened to the noise of the iron-bound wheels, which, as they gained the country road, was soon deadened by the soil. “They will be there to-morrow!” she said to herself.
And she followed them in thought up and down the hills, traversing villages, gliding along the highroads by the light of the stars. At the end of some indefinite distance there was always a confused spot, into which her dream died. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 52 | And she followed them in thought up and down the hills, traversing villages, gliding along the highroads by the light of the stars. At the end of some indefinite distance there was always a confused spot, into which her dream died.
She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map she walked about the capital. She went up the boulevards, stopping at every turning, between the lines of the streets, in front of the white squares that represented the houses. At last she would close the lids of her weary eyes, and see in the darkness the gas jets flaring in the wind and the steps of carriages lowered with much noise before the peristyles of theatres.
She took in “La Corbeille,” a lady’s journal, and the “Sylphe des Salons.” She devoured, without skipping a word, all the accounts of first nights, races, and soirees, took interest in the debut of a singer, in the opening of a new shop. She knew the latest fashions, the addresses of the best tailors, the days of the Bois and the Opera. In Eugene Sue she studied descriptions of furniture; she read Balzac and George Sand, seeking in them imaginary satisfaction for her own desires. Even at table she had her book by her, and turned over the pages while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Viscount always returned as she read. Between him and the imaginary personages she made comparisons. But the circle of which he was the centre gradually widened round him, and the aureole that he bore, fading from his form, broadened out beyond, lighting up her other dreams. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 53 | Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma’s eyes in an atmosphere of vermilion. The many lives that stirred amid this tumult were, however, divided into parts, classed as distinct pictures. Emma perceived only two or three that hid from her all the rest, and in themselves represented all humanity. The world of ambassadors moved over polished floors in drawing rooms lined with mirrors, round oval tables covered with velvet and gold-fringed cloths. There were dresses with trains, deep mysteries, anguish hidden beneath smiles. Then came the society of the duchesses; all were pale; all got up at four o’clock; the women, poor angels, wore English point on their petticoats; and the men, unappreciated geniuses under a frivolous outward seeming, rode horses to death at pleasure parties, spent the summer season at Baden, and towards the forties married heiresses. In the private rooms of restaurants, where one sups after midnight by the light of wax candles, laughed the motley crowd of men of letters and actresses. They were prodigal as kings, full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic frenzy. This was an existence outside that of all others, between heaven and earth, in the midst of storms, having something of the sublime. For the rest of the world it was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent. The nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them. All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions. She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like Indian plants, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Signs by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness could not be separated from the balconies of great castles full of indolence, from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-filled flower-stands, a bed on a raised dias, nor from the flashing of precious stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 54 | The lad from the posting house who came to groom the mare every morning passed through the passage with his heavy wooden shoes; there were holes in his blouse; his feet were bare in list slippers. And this was the groom in knee-britches with whom she had to be content! His work done, he did not come back again all day, for Charles on his return put up his horse himself, unsaddled him and put on the halter, while the servant-girl brought a bundle of straw and threw it as best she could into the manger.
To replace Nastasie (who left Tostes shedding torrents of tears) Emma took into her service a young girl of fourteen, an orphan with a sweet face. She forbade her wearing cotton caps, taught her to address her in the third person, to bring a glass of water on a plate, to knock before coming into a room, to iron, starch, and to dress her—wanted to make a lady’s-maid of her. The new servant obeyed without a murmur, so as not to be sent away; and as madame usually left the key in the sideboard, Félicité every evening took a small supply of sugar that she ate alone in her bed after she had said her prayers.
Sometimes in the afternoon she went to chat with the postilions.
Madame was in her room upstairs. She wore an open dressing gown that showed between the shawl facings of her bodice a pleated chamisette with three gold buttons. Her belt was a corded girdle with great tassels, and her small garnet coloured slippers had a large knot of ribbon that fell over her instep. She had bought herself a blotting book, writing case, pen-holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her what-not, looked at herself in the glass, picked up a book, and then, dreaming between the lines, let it drop on her knees. She longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.
Charles in snow and rain trotted across country. He ate omelettes on farmhouse tables, poked his arm into damp beds, received the tepid spurt of blood-lettings in his face, listened to death-rattles, examined basins, turned over a good deal of dirty linen; but every evening he found a blazing fire, his dinner ready, easy-chairs, and a well-dressed woman, charming with an odour of freshness, though no one could say whence the perfume came, or if it were not her skin that made odorous her chemise. |
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