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Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 55 | She charmed him by numerous attentions; now it was some new way of arranging paper sconces for the candles, a flounce that she altered on her gown, or an extraordinary name for some very simple dish that the servant had spoilt, but that Charles swallowed with pleasure to the last mouthful. At Rouen she saw some ladies who wore a bunch of charms on the watch-chains; she bought some charms. She wanted for her mantelpiece two large blue glass vases, and some time after an ivory necessaire with a silver-gilt thimble. The less Charles understood these refinements the more they seduced him. They added something to the pleasure of the senses and to the comfort of his fireside. It was like a golden dust sanding all along the narrow path of his life.
He was well, looked well; his reputation was firmly established.
The country-folk loved him because he was not proud. He petted the children, never went to the public house, and, moreover, his morals inspired confidence. He was specially successful with catarrhs and chest complaints. Being much afraid of killing his patients, Charles, in fact only prescribed sedatives, from time to time and emetic, a footbath, or leeches. It was not that he was afraid of surgery; he bled people copiously like horses, and for the taking out of teeth he had the “devil’s own wrist.”
Finally, to keep up with the times, he took in “La Ruche Medicale,” a new journal whose prospectus had been sent him. He read it a little after dinner, but in about five minutes the warmth of the room added to the effect of his dinner sent him to sleep; and he sat there, his chin on his two hands and his hair spreading like a mane to the foot of the lamp. Emma looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. Why, at least, was not her husband one of those men of taciturn passions who work at their books all night, and at last, when about sixty, the age of rheumatism sets in, wear a string of orders on their ill-fitting black coat? She could have wished this name of Bovary, which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers’, repeated in the newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 56 | An Yvetot doctor whom he had lately met in consultation had somewhat humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, before the assembled relatives. When, in the evening, Charles told her this anecdote, Emma inveighed loudly against his colleague. Charles was much touched. He kissed her forehead with a tear in his eyes. But she was angered with shame; she felt a wild desire to strike him; she went to open the window in the passage and breathed in the fresh air to calm herself.
“What a man! What a man!” she said in a low voice, biting her lips.
Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him. As he grew older his manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut the corks of the empty bottles; after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up to the temples.
Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-vest unto his waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw away the dirty gloves he was going to put on; and this was not, as he fancied, for himself; it was for herself, by a diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation. Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the “upper ten” that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock.
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when the pear trees began to blossom, she suffered from dyspnoea. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 57 | Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when the pear trees began to blossom, she suffered from dyspnoea.
From the beginning of July she counted how many weeks there were to October, thinking that perhaps the Marquis d’Andervilliers would give another ball at Vaubyessard. But all September passed without letters or visits.
After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once more remained empty, and then the same series of days recommenced. So now they would thus follow one another, always the same, immovable, and bringing nothing. Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some event. One adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences and the scene changed. But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so! The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast.
She gave up music. What was the good of playing? Who would hear her? Since she could never, in a velvet gown with short sleeves, striking with her light fingers the ivory keys of an Erard at a concert, feel the murmur of ecstasy envelop her like a breeze, it was not worth while boring herself with practicing. Her drawing cardboard and her embroidery she left in the cupboard. What was the good? What was the good? Sewing irritated her. “I have read everything,” she said to herself. And she sat there making the tongs red-hot, or looked at the rain falling.
How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded! She listened with dull attention to each stroke of the cracked bell. A cat slowly walking over some roof put up his back in the pale rays of the sun. The wind on the highroad blew up clouds of dust. Afar off a dog sometimes howled; and the bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing that died away over the fields.
But the people came out from church. The women in waxed clogs, the peasants in new blouses, the little bare-headed children skipping along in front of them, all were going home. And till nightfall, five or six men, always the same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door of the inn.
The winter was severe. The windows every morning were covered with rime, and the light shining through them, dim as through ground-glass, sometimes did not change the whole day long. At four o’clock the lamp had to be lighted. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 58 | The winter was severe. The windows every morning were covered with rime, and the light shining through them, dim as through ground-glass, sometimes did not change the whole day long. At four o’clock the lamp had to be lighted.
On fine days she went down into the garden. The dew had left on the cabbages a silver lace with long transparent threads spreading from one to the other. No birds were to be heard; everything seemed asleep, the espalier covered with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent under the coping of the wall, along which, on drawing near, one saw the many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the hedgerow, the curé in the three-cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right foot, and the very plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white scabs on his face.
Then she went up again, shut her door, put on coals, and fainting with the heat of the hearth, felt her boredom weigh more heavily than ever. She would have liked to go down and talk to the servant, but a sense of shame restrained her.
Every day at the same time the schoolmaster in a black skullcap opened the shutters of his house, and the rural policeman, wearing his sabre over his blouse, passed by. Night and morning the post-horses, three by three, crossed the street to water at the pond. From time to time the bell of a public house door rang, and when it was windy one could hear the little brass basins that served as signs for the hairdresser’s shop creaking on their two rods. This shop had as decoration an old engraving of a fashion-plate stuck against a windowpane and the wax bust of a woman with yellow hair. He, too, the hairdresser, lamented his wasted calling, his hopeless future, and dreaming of some shop in a big town—at Rouen, for example, overlooking the harbour, near the theatre—he walked up and down all day from the mairie to the church, sombre and waiting for customers. When Madame Bovary looked up, she always saw him there, like a sentinel on duty, with his skullcap over his ears and his vest of lasting. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 59 | Sometimes in the afternoon outside the window of her room, the head of a man appeared, a swarthy head with black whiskers, smiling slowly, with a broad, gentle smile that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately began and on the organ, in a little drawing room, dancers the size of a finger, women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in jackets, monkeys in frock coats, gentlemen in knee-breeches, turned and turned between the sofas, the consoles, multiplied in the bits of looking glass held together at their corners by a piece of gold paper. The man turned his handle, looking to the right and left, and up at the windows. Now and again, while he shot out a long squirt of brown saliva against the milestone, with his knee raised his instrument, whose hard straps tired his shoulder; and now, doleful and drawling, or gay and hurried, the music escaped from the box, droning through a curtain of pink taffeta under a brass claw in arabesque. They were airs played in other places at the theatres, sung in drawing rooms, danced to at night under lighted lustres, echoes of the world that reached even to Emma. Endless sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indian dancing girl on the flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leapt with the notes, swung from dream to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had caught some coppers in his cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth, hitched his organ on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She watched him going.
But it was above all the meal-times that were unbearable to her, in this small room on the ground floor, with its smoking stove, its creaking door, the walls that sweated, the damp flags; all the bitterness in life seemed served up on her plate, and with smoke of the boiled beef there rose from her secret soul whiffs of sickliness. Charles was a slow eater; she played with a few nuts, or, leaning on her elbow, amused herself with drawing lines along the oilcloth table cover with the point of her knife. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 60 | She now let everything in her household take care of itself, and Madame Bovary senior, when she came to spend part of Lent at Tostes, was much surprised at the change. She who was formerly so careful, so dainty, now passed whole days without dressing, wore grey cotton stockings, and burnt tallow candles. She kept saying they must be economical since they were not rich, adding that she was very contented, very happy, that Tostes pleased her very much, with other speeches that closed the mouth of her mother-in-law. Besides, Emma no longer seemed inclined to follow her advice; once even, Madame Bovary having thought fit to maintain that mistresses ought to keep an eye on the religion of their servants, she had answered with so angry a look and so cold a smile that the good woman did not interfere again.
Emma was growing difficult, capricious. She ordered dishes for herself, then she did not touch them; one day drank only pure milk, the next cups of tea by the dozen. Often she persisted in not going out, then, stifling, threw open the windows and put on light dresses. After she had well scolded her servant she gave her presents or sent her out to see neighbours, just as she sometimes threw beggars all the silver in her purse, although she was by no means tender-hearted or easily accessible to the feelings of others, like most country-bred people, who always retain in their souls something of the horny hardness of the paternal hands.
Towards the end of February old Rouault, in memory of his cure, himself brought his son-in-law a superb turkey, and stayed three days at Tostes. Charles being with his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the room, spat on the firedogs, talked farming, calves, cows, poultry, and municipal council, so that when he left she closed the door on him with a feeling of satisfaction that surprised even herself. Moreover she no longer concealed her contempt for anything or anybody, and at times she set herself to express singular opinions, finding fault with that which others approved, and approving things perverse and immoral, all of which made her husband open his eyes widely.
Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue from it? Yet she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls to weep; she envied lives of stir; longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these must surely yield. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 61 | She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart.
Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her the more.
On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and this over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which she remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms.
As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea, began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere.
From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp little cough, and completely lost her appetite.
It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and “when he was beginning to get on there.” Yet if it must be! He took her to Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous complaint: change of air was needed.
After looking about him on this side and on that, Charles learnt that in the Neufchâtel arrondissement there was a considerable market town called Yonville-l’Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a week before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask the number of the population, the distance from the nearest doctor, what his predecessor had made a year, and so forth; and the answer being satisfactory, he made up his mind to move towards the spring, if Emma’s health did not improve.
One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn.
The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney.
When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant.
Yonville-l’Abbaye (so called from an old Capuchin abbey of which not even the ruins remain) is a market-town twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville and Beauvais roads, at the foot of a valley watered by the Rieule, a little river that runs into the Andelle after turning three water-mills near its mouth, where there are a few trout that the lads amuse themselves by fishing for on Sundays. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 62 | We leave the highroad at La Boissiere and keep straight on to the top of the Leux hill, whence the valley is seen. The river that runs through it makes of it, as it were, two regions with distinct physiognomies—all on the left is pasture land, all of the right arable. The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond cornfields. The water, flowing by the grass, divides with a white line the colour of the roads and of the plains, and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.
Before us, on the verge of the horizon, lie the oaks of the forest of Argueil, with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills scarred from top to bottom with red irregular lines; they are rain tracks, and these brick-tones standing out in narrow streaks against the grey colour of the mountain are due to the quantity of iron springs that flow beyond in the neighboring country.
Here we are on the confines of Normandy, Picardy, and the Ile-de-France, a bastard land whose language is without accent and its landscape is without character. It is there that they make the worst Neufchâtel cheeses of all the arrondissement; and, on the other hand, farming is costly because so much manure is needed to enrich this friable soil full of sand and flints.
Up to 1835 there was no practicable road for getting to Yonville, but about this time a cross-road was made which joins that of Abbeville to that of Amiens, and is occasionally used by the Rouen wagoners on their way to Flanders. Yonville-l’Abbaye has remained stationary in spite of its “new outlet.” Instead of improving the soil, they persist in keeping up the pasture lands, however depreciated they may be in value, and the lazy borough, growing away from the plain, has naturally spread riverwards. It is seem from afar sprawling along the banks like a cowherd taking a siesta by the water-side. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 63 | At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards full of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds and distilleries scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith’s forge and then a wheelwright’s, with two or three new carts outside that partly block the way. Then across an open space appears a white house beyond a grass mound ornamented by a Cupid, his finger on his lips; two brass vases are at each end of a flight of steps; scutcheons blaze upon the door. It is the notary’s house, and the finest in the place.
The Church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces farther down, at the entrance of the square. The little cemetery that surrounds it, closed in by a wall breast high, is so full of graves that the old stones, level with the ground, form a continuous pavement, on which the grass of itself has marked out regular green squares. The church was rebuilt during the last years of the reign of Charles X. The wooden roof is beginning to rot from the top, and here and there has black hollows in its blue colour. Over the door, where the organ should be, is a loft for the men, with a spiral staircase that reverberates under their wooden shoes. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 64 | The daylight coming through the plain glass windows falls obliquely upon the pews ranged along the walls, which are adorned here and there with a straw mat bearing beneath it the words in large letters, “Mr. So-and-so’s pew.” Farther on, at a spot where the building narrows, the confessional forms a pendant to a statuette of the Virgin, clothed in a satin robe, coifed with a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars, and with red cheeks, like an idol of the Sandwich Islands; and, finally, a copy of the “Holy Family, presented by the Minister of the Interior,” overlooking the high altar, between four candlesticks, closes in the perspective. The choir stalls, of deal wood, have been left unpainted.
The market, that is to say, a tiled roof supported by some twenty posts, occupies of itself about half the public square of Yonville. The town hall, constructed “from the designs of a Paris architect,” is a sort of Greek temple that forms the corner next to the chemist’s shop. On the ground-floor are three Ionic columns and on the first floor a semicircular gallery, while the dome that crowns it is occupied by a Gallic cock, resting one foot upon the “Charte” and holding in the other the scales of Justice.
But that which most attracts the eye is opposite the Lion d’Or inn, the chemist’s shop of Monsieur Homais. In the evening especially its argand lamp is lit up and the red and green jars that embellish his shop-front throw far across the street their two streams of colour; then across them as if in Bengal lights is seen the shadow of the chemist leaning over his desk. His house from top to bottom is placarded with inscriptions written in large hand, round hand, printed hand: “Vichy, Seltzer, Barege waters, blood purifiers, Raspail patent medicine, Arabian racahout, Darcet lozenges, Regnault paste, trusses, baths, hygienic chocolate,” etc. And the signboard, which takes up all the breadth of the shop, bears in gold letters, “Homais, Chemist.” Then at the back of the shop, behind the great scales fixed to the counter, the word “Laboratory” appears on a scroll above a glass door, which about half-way up once more repeats “Homais” in gold letters on a black ground.
Beyond this there is nothing to see at Yonville. The street (the only one) a gunshot in length and flanked by a few shops on either side stops short at the turn of the highroad. If it is left on the right hand and the foot of the Saint-Jean hills followed the cemetery is soon reached. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 65 | At the time of the cholera, in order to enlarge this, a piece of wall was pulled down, and three acres of land by its side purchased; but all the new portion is almost tenantless; the tombs, as heretofore, continue to crowd together towards the gate. The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or regret the burials.
“You live on the dead, Lestiboudois!” the curé at last said to him one day. This grim remark made him reflect; it checked him for some time; but to this day he carries on the cultivation of his little tubers, and even maintains stoutly that they grow naturally.
Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed at Yonville. The tin tricolour flag still swings at the top of the church-steeple; the two chintz streamers still flutter in the wind from the linen-draper’s; the chemist’s fetuses, like lumps of white amadou, rot more and more in their turbid alcohol, and above the big door of the inn the old golden lion, faded by rain, still shows passers-by its poodle mane.
On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrancois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated great drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was market-day. The meat had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and coffee made. Moreover, she had the boarders’ meal to see to, and that of the doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped.
From the poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls whom the servant was chasing in order to wring their necks.
A man slightly marked with small-pox, in green leather slippers, and wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was warming his back at the chimney. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he appeared to take life as calmly as the goldfinch suspended over his head in its wicker cage: this was the chemist. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 66 | “Artémise!” shouted the landlady, “chop some wood, fill the water bottles, bring some brandy, look sharp! If only I knew what dessert to offer the guests you are expecting! Good heavens! Those furniture-movers are beginning their racket in the billiard-room again; and their van has been left before the front door! The ‘Hirondelle’ might run into it when it draws up. Call Polyte and tell him to put it up. Only think, Monsieur Homais, that since morning they have had about fifteen games, and drunk eight jars of cider! Why, they’ll tear my cloth for me,” she went on, looking at them from a distance, her strainer in her hand.
“That wouldn’t be much of a loss,” replied Monsieur Homais. “You would buy another.”
“Another billiard-table!” exclaimed the widow.
“Since that one is coming to pieces, Madame Lefrancois. I tell you again you are doing yourself harm, much harm! And besides, players now want narrow pockets and heavy cues. Hazards aren’t played now; everything is changed! One must keep pace with the times! Just look at Tellier!”
The hostess reddened with vexation. The chemist went on—
“You may say what you like; his table is better than yours; and if one were to think, for example, of getting up a patriotic pool for Poland or the sufferers from the Lyons floods—”
“It isn’t beggars like him that’ll frighten us,” interrupted the landlady, shrugging her fat shoulders. “Come, come, Monsieur Homais; as long as the ‘Lion d’Or’ exists people will come to it. We’ve feathered our nest; while one of these days you’ll find the ‘Cafe Francais’ closed with a big placard on the shutters. Change my billiard-table!” she went on, speaking to herself, “the table that comes in so handy for folding the washing, and on which, in the hunting season, I have slept six visitors! But that dawdler, Hivert, doesn’t come!”
“Are you waiting for him for your gentlemen’s dinner?”
“Wait for him! And what about Monsieur Binet? As the clock strikes six you’ll see him come in, for he hasn’t his equal under the sun for punctuality. He must always have his seat in the small parlour. He’d rather die than dine anywhere else. And so squeamish as he is, and so particular about the cider! Not like Monsieur Léon; he sometimes comes at seven, or even half-past, and he doesn’t so much as look at what he eats. Such a nice young man! Never speaks a rough word!”
“Well, you see, there’s a great difference between an educated man and an old carabineer who is now a tax-collector.”
Six o’clock struck. Binet came in. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 67 | “Well, you see, there’s a great difference between an educated man and an old carabineer who is now a tax-collector.”
Six o’clock struck. Binet came in.
He wore a blue frock-coat falling in a straight line round his thin body, and his leather cap, with its lappets knotted over the top of his head with string, showed under the turned-up peak a bald forehead, flattened by the constant wearing of a helmet. He wore a black cloth waistcoat, a hair collar, grey trousers, and, all the year round, well-blacked boots, that had two parallel swellings due to the sticking out of his big-toes. Not a hair stood out from the regular line of fair whiskers, which, encircling his jaws, framed, after the fashion of a garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and the nose hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good hunter, and writing a fine hand, he had at home a lathe, and amused himself by turning napkin rings, with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an artist and the egotism of a bourgeois.
He went to the small parlour, but the three millers had to be got out first, and during the whole time necessary for laying the cloth, Binet remained silent in his place near the stove. Then he shut the door and took off his cap in his usual way.
“It isn’t with saying civil things that he’ll wear out his tongue,” said the chemist, as soon as he was along with the landlady.
“He never talks more,” she replied. “Last week two travelers in the cloth line were here—such clever chaps who told such jokes in the evening, that I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood there like a dab fish and never said a word.”
“Yes,” observed the chemist; “no imagination, no sallies, nothing that makes the society-man.”
“Yet they say he has parts,” objected the landlady.
“Parts!” replied Monsieur Homais; “he, parts! In his own line it is possible,” he added in a calmer tone. And he went on—
“Ah! That a merchant, who has large connections, a jurisconsult, a doctor, a chemist, should be thus absent-minded, that they should become whimsical or even peevish, I can understand; such cases are cited in history. But at least it is because they are thinking of something. Myself, for example, how often has it happened to me to look on the bureau for my pen to write a label, and to find, after all, that I had put it behind my ear!” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 68 | Madame Lefrancois just then went to the door to see if the “Hirondelle” were not coming. She started. A man dressed in black suddenly came into the kitchen. By the last gleam of the twilight one could see that his face was rubicund and his form athletic.
“What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curé?” asked the landlady, as she reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with their candles in a row. “Will you take something? A thimbleful of Cassis? A glass of wine?”
The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking Madame Lefrancois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.
When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the square, he thought the priest’s behaviour just now very unbecoming. This refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy; all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days of the tithe.
The landlady took up the defence of her curé.
“Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six trusses at once, he is so strong.”
“Bravo!” said the chemist. “Now just send your daughters to confess to fellows which such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I’d have the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrancois, every month—a good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals.”
“Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you’ve no religion.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 69 | “Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you’ve no religion.”
The chemist answered: “I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling. I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don’t need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know Him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! Mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the ‘Savoyard Vicar,’ and the immortal principles of ‘89! And I can’t admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.”
He ceased, looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a distant rolling. One could distinguish the noise of a carriage mingled with the clattering of loose horseshoes that beat against the ground, and at last the “Hirondelle” stopped at the door.
It was a yellow box on two large wheels, that, reaching to the tilt, prevented travelers from seeing the road and dirtied their shoulders. The small panes of the narrow windows rattled in their sashes when the coach was closed, and retained here and there patches of mud amid the old layers of dust, that not even storms of rain had altogether washed away. It was drawn by three horses, the first a leader, and when it came down-hill its bottom jolted against the ground. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 70 | Some of the inhabitants of Yonville came out into the square; they all spoke at once, asking for news, for explanations, for hampers. Hivert did not know whom to answer. It was he who did the errands of the place in town. He went to the shops and brought back rolls of leather for the shoemaker, old iron for the farrier, a barrel of herrings for his mistress, caps from the milliner’s, locks from the hair-dresser’s and all along the road on his return journey he distributed his parcels, which he threw, standing upright on his seat and shouting at the top of his voice, over the enclosures of the yards.
An accident had delayed him. Madame Bovary’s greyhound had run across the field. They had whistled for him a quarter of an hour; Hivert had even gone back a mile and a half expecting every moment to catch sight of her; but it had been necessary to go on.
Emma had wept, grown angry; she had accused Charles of this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a draper, who happened to be in the coach with her, had tried to console her by a number of examples of lost dogs recognizing their masters at the end of long years. One, he said had been told of, who had come back to Paris from Constantinople. Another had gone one hundred and fifty miles in a straight line, and swum four rivers; and his own father had possessed a poodle, which, after twelve years of absence, had all of a sudden jumped on his back in the street as he was going to dine in town.
Emma got out first, then Félicité, Monsieur Lheureux, and a nurse, and they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where he had slept soundly since night set in.
Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to madame and his respects to monsieur; said he was charmed to have been able to render them some slight service, and added with a cordial air that he had ventured to invite himself, his wife being away.
When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 71 | When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney.
With the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the knee, and having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out her foot in its black boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lit up the whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gowns, the fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she blinked now and again. A great red glow passed over her with the blowing of the wind through the half-open door.
On the other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watched her silently.
As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was a clerk at the notary’s, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Léon Dupuis (it was he who was the second habitue of the “Lion d’Or”) frequently put back his dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom he could chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done early, he had, for want of something else to do, to come punctually, and endure from soup to cheese a tête-à-tête with Binet. It was therefore with delight that he accepted the landlady’s suggestion that he should dine in company with the newcomers, and they passed into the large parlour where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the table laid for four.
Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza; then, turning to his neighbour—
“Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in our ‘Hirondelle.’”
“That is true,” replied Emma; “but moving about always amuses me. I like change of place.”
“It is so tedious,” sighed the clerk, “to be always riveted to the same places.”
“If you were like me,” said Charles, “constantly obliged to be in the saddle”—
“But,” Léon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, “nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant—when one can,” he added. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 72 | “It is so tedious,” sighed the clerk, “to be always riveted to the same places.”
“If you were like me,” said Charles, “constantly obliged to be in the saddle”—
“But,” Léon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, “nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant—when one can,” he added.
“Moreover,” said the druggist, “the practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad, and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which sucking up into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata—this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come—that is to say, the southern side—by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia.”
“At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?” continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 73 | “At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?” continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.
“Oh, very few,” he answered. “There is a place they call La Pâture, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.”
“I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets,” she resumed; “but especially by the side of the sea.”
“Oh, I adore the sea!” said Monsieur Léon.
“And then, does it not seem to you,” continued Madame Bovary, “that the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?”
“It is the same with mountainous landscapes,” continued Léon. “A cousin of mine who travelled in Switzerland last year told me that one could not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of incredible size across torrents, cottages suspended over precipices, and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some imposing site.”
“You play?” she asked.
“No, but I am very fond of music,” he replied.
“Ah! don’t you listen to him, Madame Bovary,” interrupted Homais, bending over his plate. “That’s sheer modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the other day in your room you were singing ‘L’Ange Gardien’ ravishingly. I heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor.”
Léon, in fact, lodged at the chemist’s where he had a small room on the second floor, overlooking the Place. He blushed at the compliment of his landlord, who had already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to him, one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He was telling anecdotes, giving information; the fortune of the notary was not known exactly, and “there was the Tuvache household,” who made a good deal of show.
Emma continued, “And what music do you prefer?”
“Oh, German music; that which makes you dream.”
“Have you been to the opera?”
“Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish reading for the bar.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 74 | Emma continued, “And what music do you prefer?”
“Oh, German music; that which makes you dream.”
“Have you been to the opera?”
“Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish reading for the bar.”
“As I had the honour of putting it to your husband,” said the chemist, “with regard to this poor Yanoda who has run away, you will find yourself, thanks to his extravagance, in the possession of one of the most comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience for a doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can go in and out unseen. Moreover, it contains everything that is agreeable in a household—a laundry, kitchen with offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He was a gay dog, who didn’t care what he spent. At the end of the garden, by the side of the water, he had an arbour built just for the purpose of drinking beer in summer; and if madame is fond of gardening she will be able—”
“My wife doesn’t care about it,” said Charles; “although she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room reading.”
“Like me,” replied Léon. “And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?”
“What, indeed?” she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon him.
“One thinks of nothing,” he continued; “the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.”
“That is true! That is true?” she said.
“Has it ever happened to you,” Léon went on, “to come across some vague idea of one’s own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?”
“I have experienced it,” she replied.
“That is why,” he said, “I especially love the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears.”
“Still in the long run it is tiring,” continued Emma. “Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 75 | “Still in the long run it is tiring,” continued Emma. “Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.”
“In fact,” observed the clerk, “these works, not touching the heart, miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself, living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but Yonville affords so few resources.”
“Like Tostes, no doubt,” replied Emma; “and so I always subscribed to a lending library.”
“If madame will do me the honour of making use of it”, said the chemist, who had just caught the last words, “I have at her disposal a library composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the ‘Echo des Feuilletons’; and in addition I receive various periodicals, among them the ‘Fanal de Rouen’ daily, having the advantage to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel, Yonville, and vicinity.”
For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant Artémis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags, brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and constantly left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat against the wall with its hooks.
Unconsciously, Léon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting. She wore a small blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar, and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently sunk into the linen or came out from it. Thus side by side, while Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked of everything till to the end of dinner. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 76 | When coffee was served Félicité went away to get ready the room in the new house, and the guests soon raised the siege. Madame Lefrancois was asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home. Bits of straw stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg. When he had taken in his other hand the cure’s umbrella, they started.
The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the earth was all grey as on a summer’s night. But as the doctor’s house was only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost immediately, and the company dispersed.
As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls were new and the wooden stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish light passed through the curtainless windows.
She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields, half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight along the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses on the chairs and basins on the ground—the two men who had brought the furniture had left everything about carelessly.
This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place.
The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth. And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in her life. She did not believe that things could present themselves in the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.
The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the Place. She had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and bowed. She nodded quickly and reclosed the window. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 77 | The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the Place. She had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and bowed. She nodded quickly and reclosed the window.
Léon waited all day for six o’clock in the evening to come, but on going to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur Binet, already at table. The dinner of the evening before had been a considerable event for him; he had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a “lady.” How then had he been able to explain, and in such language, the number of things that he could not have said so well before? He was usually shy, and maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and dissimulation.
At Yonville he was considered “well-bred.” He listened to the arguments of the older people, and did not seem hot about politics—a remarkable thing for a young man. Then he had some accomplishments; he painted in water-colours, could read the key of G, and readily talked literature after dinner when he did not play cards. Monsieur Homais respected him for his education; Madame Homais liked him for his good-nature, for he often took the little Homais into the garden—little brats who were always dirty, very much spoilt, and somewhat lymphatic, like their mother. Besides the servant to look after them, they had Justin, the chemist’s apprentice, a second cousin of Monsieur Homais, who had been taken into the house from charity, and who was useful at the same time as a servant.
The druggist proved the best of neighbours. He gave Madame Bovary information as to the trades-people, sent expressly for his own cider merchant, tasted the drink himself, and saw that the casks were properly placed in the cellar; he explained how to set about getting in a supply of butter cheap, and made an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the sacristan, who, besides his sacerdotal and funeral functions, looked after the principal gardens at Yonville by the hour or the year, according to the taste of the customers.
The need of looking after others was not the only thing that urged the chemist to such obsequious cordiality; there was a plan underneath it all. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 78 | The need of looking after others was not the only thing that urged the chemist to such obsequious cordiality; there was a plan underneath it all.
He had infringed the law of the 19th Ventose, year xi., article I, which forbade all persons not having a diploma to practise medicine; so that, after certain anonymous denunciations, Homais had been summoned to Rouen to see the procurer of the king in his own private room; the magistrate receiving him standing up, ermine on shoulder and cap on head. It was in the morning, before the court opened. In the corridors one heard the heavy boots of the gendarmes walking past, and like a far-off noise great locks that were shut. The druggist’s ears tingled as if he were about to have an apoplectic stroke; he saw the depths of dungeons, his family in tears, his shop sold, all the jars dispersed; and he was obliged to enter a cafe and take a glass of rum and seltzer to recover his spirits.
Little by little the memory of this reprimand grew fainter, and he continued, as heretofore, to give anodyne consultations in his back-parlour. But the mayor resented it, his colleagues were jealous, everything was to be feared; gaining over Monsieur Bovary by his attentions was to earn his gratitude, and prevent his speaking out later on, should he notice anything. So every morning Homais brought him “the paper,” and often in the afternoon left his shop for a few moments to have a chat with the Doctor.
Charles was dull: patients did not come. He remained seated for hours without speaking, went into his consulting room to sleep, or watched his wife sewing. Then for diversion he employed himself at home as a workman; he even tried to do up the attic with some paint which had been left behind by the painters. But money matters worried him. He had spent so much for repairs at Tostes, for madame’s toilette, and for the moving, that the whole dowry, over three thousand crowns, had slipped away in two years. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 79 | Then how many things had been spoilt or lost during their carriage from Tostes to Yonville, without counting the plaster cure, who falling out of the coach at an over-severe jolt, had been dashed into a thousand fragments on the pavements of Quincampoix! A pleasanter trouble came to distract him, namely, the pregnancy of his wife. As the time of her confinement approached he cherished her the more. It was another bond of the flesh establishing itself, and, as it were, a continued sentiment of a more complex union. When from afar he saw her languid walk, and her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when opposite one another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses in her armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds; he got up, embraced her, passed his hands over her face, called her little mamma, wanted to make her dance, and half-laughing, half-crying, uttered all kinds of caressing pleasantries that came into his head. The idea of having begotten a child delighted him. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human life from end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity.
Emma at first felt a great astonishment; then was anxious to be delivered that she might know what it was to be a mother. But not being able to spend as much as she would have liked, to have a swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, and embroidered caps, in a fit of bitterness she gave up looking after the trousseau, and ordered the whole of it from a village needlewoman, without choosing or discussing anything. Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that stimulate the tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was from the very outset, perhaps, to some extent attenuated.
As Charles, however, spoke of the boy at every meal, she soon began to think of him more consecutively.
She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains.
She was confined on a Sunday at about six o’clock, as the sun was rising.
“It is a girl!” said Charles. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 80 | She was confined on a Sunday at about six o’clock, as the sun was rising.
“It is a girl!” said Charles.
She turned her head away and fainted.
Madame Homais, as well as Madame Lefrancois of the Lion d’Or, almost immediately came running in to embrace her. The chemist, as man of discretion, only offered a few provincial felicitations through the half-opened door. He wished to see the child and thought it well made.
Whilst she was getting well she occupied herself much in seeking a name for her daughter. First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better.
Charles wanted the child to be called after her mother; Emma opposed this. They ran over the calendar from end to end, and then consulted outsiders.
“Monsieur Léon,” said the chemist, “with whom I was talking about it the other day, wonders you do not chose Madeleine. It is very much in fashion just now.”
But Madame Bovary, senior, cried out loudly against this name of a sinner. As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for all those that recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a generous idea, and it was on this system that he had baptized his four children. Thus Napoleon represented glory and Franklin liberty; Irma was perhaps a concession to romanticism, but Athalie was a homage to the greatest masterpiece of the French stage. For his philosophical convictions did not interfere with his artistic tastes; in him the thinker did not stifle the man of sentiment; he could make distinctions, make allowances for imagination and fanaticism. In this tragedy, for example, he found fault with the ideas, but admired the style; he detested the conception, but applauded all the details, and loathed the characters while he grew enthusiastic over their dialogue. When he read the fine passages he was transported, but when he thought that mummers would get something out of them for their show, he was disconsolate; and in this confusion of sentiments in which he was involved he would have liked at once to crown Racine with both his hands and discuss with him for a good quarter of an hour. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 81 | At last Emma remembered that at the château of Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from that moment this name was chosen; and as old Rouault could not come, Monsieur Homais was requested to stand godfather. His gifts were all products from his establishment, to wit: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three cakes of marshmallow paste, and six sticks of sugar-candy into the bargain that he had come across in a cupboard. On the evening of the ceremony there was a grand dinner; the cure was present; there was much excitement. Monsieur Homais towards liqueur-time began singing “Le Dieu des bonnes gens.” Monsieur Léon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior, who was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary, senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head. This mockery of the first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien angry; old Bovary replied by a quotation from “La Guerre des Dieux”; the cure wanted to leave; the ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they succeeded in making the priest sit down again, and he quietly went on with the half-finished coffee in his saucer.
Monsieur Bovary, senior, stayed at Yonville a month, dazzling the natives by a superb policeman’s cap with silver tassels that he wore in the morning when he smoked his pipe in the square. Being also in the habit of drinking a good deal of brandy, he often sent the servant to the Lion d’Or to buy him a bottle, which was put down to his son’s account, and to perfume his handkerchiefs he used up his daughter-in-law’s whole supply of eau-de-cologne.
The latter did not at all dislike his company. He had knocked about the world, he talked about Berlin, Vienna, and Strasbourg, of his soldier times, of the mistresses he had had, the grand luncheons of which he had partaken; then he was amiable, and sometimes even, either on the stairs, or in the garden, would seize hold of her waist, crying, “Charles, look out for yourself.”
Then Madame Bovary, senior, became alarmed for her son’s happiness, and fearing that her husband might in the long-run have an immoral influence upon the ideas of the young woman, took care to hurry their departure. Perhaps she had more serious reasons for uneasiness. Monsieur Bovary was not the man to respect anything. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 82 | One day Emma was suddenly seized with the desire to see her little girl, who had been put to nurse with the carpenter’s wife, and, without looking at the calendar to see whether the six weeks of the Virgin were yet passed, she set out for the Rollets’ house, situated at the extreme end of the village, between the highroad and the fields.
It was mid-day, the shutters of the houses were closed and the slate roofs that glittered beneath the fierce light of the blue sky seemed to strike sparks from the crest of the gables. A heavy wind was blowing; Emma felt weak as she walked; the stones of the pavement hurt her; she was doubtful whether she would not go home again, or go in somewhere to rest.
At this moment Monsieur Léon came out from a neighbouring door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came to greet her, and stood in the shade in front of the Lheureux’s shop under the projecting grey awning.
Madame Bovary said she was going to see her baby, but that she was beginning to grow tired.
“If—” said Léon, not daring to go on.
“Have you any business to attend to?” she asked.
And on the clerk’s answer, she begged him to accompany her. That same evening this was known in Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife, declared in the presence of her servant that “Madame Bovary was compromising herself.”
To get to the nurse’s it was necessary to turn to the left on leaving the street, as if making for the cemetery, and to follow between little houses and yards a small path bordered with privet hedges. They were in bloom, and so were the speedwells, eglantines, thistles, and the sweetbriar that sprang up from the thickets. Through openings in the hedges one could see into the huts, some pigs on a dung-heap, or tethered cows rubbing their horns against the trunk of trees. The two, side by side walked slowly, she leaning upon him, and he restraining his pace, which he regulated by hers; in front of them a swarm of midges fluttered, buzzing in the warm air.
They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 83 | They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it.
Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuce, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several indefinite rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country.
“Go in,” she said; “your little one is there asleep.”
The room on the ground-floor, the only one in the dwelling, had at its farther end, against the wall, a large bed without curtains, while a kneading-trough took up the side by the window, one pane of which was mended with a piece of blue paper. In the corner behind the door, shining hob-nailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth; a Matthieu Laensberg lay on the dusty mantelpiece amid gunflints, candle-ends, and bits of amadou.
Finally, the last luxury in the apartment was a “Fame” blowing her trumpets, a picture cut out, no doubt, from some perfumer’s prospectus and nailed to the wall with six wooden shoe-pegs.
Emma’s child was asleep in a wicker-cradle. She took it up in the wrapping that enveloped it and began singing softly as she rocked herself to and fro.
Léon walked up and down the room; it seemed strange to him to see this beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this poverty. Madam Bovary reddened; he turned away, thinking perhaps there had been an impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the little girl, who had just been sick over her collar.
The nurse at once came to dry her, protesting that it wouldn’t show.
“She gives me other doses,” she said: “I am always a-washing of her. If you would have the goodness to order Camus, the grocer, to let me have a little soap, it would really be more convenient for you, as I needn’t trouble you then.”
“Very well! very well!” said Emma. “Good morning, Madame Rollet,” and she went out, wiping her shoes at the door. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 84 | “Very well! very well!” said Emma. “Good morning, Madame Rollet,” and she went out, wiping her shoes at the door.
The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the time of the trouble she had getting up of nights.
“I’m that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I’m sure you might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that’d last me a month, and I’d take it of a morning with some milk.”
After having submitted to her thanks, Madam Bovary left. She had gone a little way down the path when, at the sound of wooden shoes, she turned round. It was the nurse.
“What is it?”
Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an elm tree, began talking to her of her husband, who with his trade and six francs a year that the captain—
“Oh, be quick!” said Emma.
“Well,” the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each word, “I’m afraid he’ll be put out seeing me have coffee alone, you know men—”
“But you are to have some,” Emma repeated; “I will give you some. You bother me!”
“Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see in consequence of his wounds he has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider weakens him.”
“Do make haste, Mere Rollet!”
“Well,” the latter continued, making a curtsey, “if it weren’t asking too much,” and she curtsied once more, “if you would”—and her eyes begged—“a jar of brandy,” she said at last, “and I’d rub your little one’s feet with it; they’re as tender as one’s tongue.”
Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took Monsieur Léon’s arm. She walked fast for some time, then more slowly, and looking straight in front of her, her eyes rested on the shoulder of the young man, whose frock-coat had a black-velvety collar. His brown hair fell over it, straight and carefully arranged. She noticed his nails which were longer than one wore them at Yonville. It was one of the clerk’s chief occupations to trim them, and for this purpose he kept a special knife in his writing desk. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 85 | They returned to Yonville by the water-side. In the warm season the bank, wider than at other times, showed to their foot the garden walls whence a few steps led to the river. It flowed noiselessly, swift, and cold to the eye; long, thin grasses huddled together in it as the current drove them, and spread themselves upon the limpid water like streaming hair; sometimes at the tip of the reeds or on the leaf of a water-lily an insect with fine legs crawled or rested. The sun pierced with a ray the small blue bubbles of the waves that, breaking, followed each other; branchless old willows mirrored their grey backs in the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was the dinner-hour at the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard nothing as they walked but the fall of their steps on the earth of the path, the words they spoke, and the sound of Emma’s dress rustling round her.
The walls of the gardens with pieces of bottle on their coping were hot as the glass windows of a conservatory. Wallflowers had sprung up between the bricks, and with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary, as she passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a yellow dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and clematis caught in its fringe and dangled for a moment over the silk.
They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected shortly at the Rouen theatre.
“Are you going?” she asked.
“If I can,” he answered.
Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices. Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.
In one place the ground had been trodden down by the cattle; they had to step on large green stones put here and there in the mud.
She often stopped a moment to look where to place her foot, and tottering on a stone that shook, her arms outspread, her form bent forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles of water. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 86 | She often stopped a moment to look where to place her foot, and tottering on a stone that shook, her arms outspread, her form bent forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles of water.
When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared.
Léon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went out.
He went to La Pâture at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of the forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and watched the sky through his fingers.
“How bored I am!” he said to himself, “how bored I am!”
He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais for a friend and Monsieur Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements, although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the beginning had impressed the clerk.
As to the chemist’s spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle as a sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins, weeping for other’s woes, letting everything go in her household, and detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms next each other and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might be a woman for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex than the gown.
And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers, two or three publicans, the cure, and finally, Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his two sons, rich, crabbed, obtuse persons, who farmed their own lands and had feasts among themselves, bigoted to boot, and quite unbearable companions.
But from the general background of all these human faces Emma’s stood out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to see a vague abyss.
In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him again, and Léon did not know what to do between his fear of being indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 87 | In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him again, and Léon did not know what to do between his fear of being indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible.
When the first cold days set in Emma left her bedroom for the sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in which there was on the mantelpiece a large bunch of coral spread out against the looking-glass. Seated in her arm chair near the window, she could see the villagers pass along the pavement.
Twice a day Léon went from his office to the Lion d’Or. Emma could hear him coming from afar; she leant forward listening, and the young man glided past the curtain, always dressed in the same way, and without turning his head. But in the twilight, when, her chin resting on her left hand, she let the embroidery she had begun fall on her knees, she often shuddered at the apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding past. She would get up and order the table to be laid.
Monsieur Homais called at dinner-time. Skull-cap in hand, he came in on tiptoe, in order to disturb no one, always repeating the same phrase, “Good evening, everybody.” Then, when he had taken his seat at the table between the pair, he asked the doctor about his patients, and the latter consulted his as to the probability of their payment. Next they talked of “what was in the paper.”
Homais by this hour knew it almost by heart, and he repeated it from end to end, with the reflections of the penny-a-liners, and all the stories of individual catastrophes that had occurred in France or abroad. But the subject becoming exhausted, he was not slow in throwing out some remarks on the dishes before him.
Sometimes even, half-rising, he delicately pointed out to madame the tenderest morsel, or turning to the servant, gave her some advice on the manipulation of stews and the hygiene of seasoning.
He talked aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatine in a bewildering manner. Moreover, Homais, with his head fuller of recipes than his shop of jars, excelled in making all kinds of preserves, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs; he knew also all the latest inventions in economic stoves, together with the art of preserving cheese and of curing sick wines.
At eight o’clock Justin came to fetch him to shut up the shop.
Then Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look, especially if Félicité was there, for he half noticed that his apprentice was fond of the doctor’s house. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 88 | At eight o’clock Justin came to fetch him to shut up the shop.
Then Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look, especially if Félicité was there, for he half noticed that his apprentice was fond of the doctor’s house.
“The young dog,” he said, “is beginning to have ideas, and the devil take me if I don’t believe he’s in love with your servant!”
But a more serious fault with which he reproached Justin was his constantly listening to conversation. On Sunday, for example, one could not get him out of the drawing-room, whither Madame Homais had called him to fetch the children, who were falling asleep in the arm-chairs, and dragging down with their backs calico chair-covers that were too large.
Not many people came to these soirees at the chemist’s, his scandal-mongering and political opinions having successfully alienated various respectable persons from him. The clerk never failed to be there. As soon as he heard the bell he ran to meet Madame Bovary, took her shawl, and put away under the shop-counter the thick list shoes that she wore over her boots when there was snow.
First they played some hands at trente-et-un; next Monsieur Homais played ecarte with Emma; Léon behind her gave her advice.
Standing up with his hands on the back of her chair he saw the teeth of her comb that bit into her chignon. With every movement that she made to throw her cards the right side of her dress was drawn up. From her turned-up hair a dark colour fell over her back, and growing gradually paler, lost itself little by little in the shade. Then her dress fell on both sides of her chair, puffing out full of folds, and reached the ground. When Léon occasionally felt the sole of his boot resting on it, he drew back as if he had trodden upon some one. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 89 | When the game of cards was over, the druggist and the Doctor played dominoes, and Emma, changing her place, leant her elbow on the table, turning over the leaves of “L’Illustration”. She had brought her ladies’ journal with her. Léon sat down near her; they looked at the engravings together, and waited for one another at the bottom of the pages. She often begged him to read her the verses; Léon declaimed them in a languid voice, to which he carefully gave a dying fall in the love passages. But the noise of the dominoes annoyed him. Monsieur Homais was strong at the game; he could beat Charles and give him a double-six. Then the three hundred finished, they both stretched themselves out in front of the fire, and were soon asleep. The fire was dying out in the cinders; the teapot was empty, Léon was still reading.
Emma listened to him, mechanically turning around the lampshade, on the gauze of which were painted clowns in carriages, and tight-rope dances with their balancing-poles. Léon stopped, pointing with a gesture to his sleeping audience; then they talked in low tones, and their conversation seemed the more sweet to them because it was unheard.
Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce of books and of romances. Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, did not trouble himself about it.
On his birthday he received a beautiful phrenological head, all marked with figures to the thorax and painted blue. This was an attention of the clerk’s. He showed him many others, even to doing errands for him at Rouen; and the book of a novelist having made the mania for cactuses fashionable, Léon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on his knees in the “Hirondelle,” pricking his fingers on their hard hairs.
She had a board with a balustrade fixed against her window to hold the pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they saw each other tending their flowers at their windows.
Of the windows of the village there was one yet more often occupied; for on Sundays from morning to night, and every morning when the weather was bright, one could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could be heard at the Lion d’Or. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 90 | One evening on coming home Léon found in his room a rug in velvet and wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief; every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the doctor’s wife give the clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his lover.
He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and of her wit; so much so, that Binet once roughly answered him—
“What does it matter to me since I’m not in her set?”
He tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to her, and always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the shame of being such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire. Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put it off to times that he again deferred.
Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but this resolution soon deserted him in Emma’s presence, and when Charles, dropping in, invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some patient in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and went out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her? As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a rent in the wall of it.
It was a Sunday in February, an afternoon when the snow was falling.
They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and Monsieur Léon, gone to see a yarn-mill that was being built in the valley a mile and a half from Yonville. The druggist had taken Napoleon and Athalie to give them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them, carrying the umbrellas on his shoulder. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 91 | Nothing, however, could be less curious than this curiosity. A great piece of waste ground, on which pell-mell, amid a mass of sand and stones, were a few break-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a quadrangular building pierced by a number of little windows. The building was unfinished; the sky could be seen through the joists of the roofing. Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of straw mixed with corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured ribbons in the wind.
Homais was talking. He explained to the company the future importance of this establishment, computed the strength of the floorings, the thickness of the walls, and regretted extremely not having a yard-stick such as Monsieur Binet possessed for his own special use.
Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and she looked at the sun’s disc shedding afar through the mist his pale splendour. She turned. Charles was there. His cap was drawn down over his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of the bearer.
While she was considering him thus, tasting in her irritation a sort of depraved pleasure, Léon made a step forward. The cold that made him pale seemed to add a more gentle languor to his face; between his cravat and his neck the somewhat loose collar of his shirt showed the skin; the lobe of his ear looked out from beneath a lock of hair, and his large blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain-lakes where the heavens are mirrored.
“Wretched boy!” suddenly cried the chemist.
And he ran to his son, who had just precipitated himself into a heap of lime in order to whiten his boots. At the reproaches with which he was being overwhelmed Napoleon began to roar, while Justin dried his shoes with a wisp of straw. But a knife was wanted; Charles offered his.
“Ah!” she said to herself, “he carried a knife in his pocket like a peasant.”
The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yonville. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 92 | “Ah!” she said to herself, “he carried a knife in his pocket like a peasant.”
The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yonville.
In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbour’s, and when Charles had left and she felt herself alone, the comparison re-began with the clearness of a sensation almost actual, and with that lengthening of perspective which memory gives to things. Looking from her bed at the clean fire that was burning, she still saw, as she had down there, Léon standing up with one hand behind his cane, and with the other holding Athalie, who was quietly sucking a piece of ice. She thought him charming; she could not tear herself away from him; she recalled his other attitudes on other days, the words he had spoken, the sound of his voice, his whole person; and she repeated, pouting out her lips as if for a kiss—
“Yes, charming! charming! Is he not in love?” she asked herself; “but with whom? With me?”
All the proofs arose before her at once; her heart leapt. The flame of the fire threw a joyous light upon the ceiling; she turned on her back, stretching out her arms.
Then began the eternal lamentation: “Oh, if Heaven had not willed it! And why not? What prevented it?”
When Charles came home at midnight, she seemed to have just awakened, and as he made a noise undressing, she complained of a headache, then asked carelessly what had happened that evening.
“Monsieur Léon,” he said, “went to his room early.”
She could not help smiling, and she fell asleep, her soul filled with a new delight.
The next day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lheureux, the draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a decoction of liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the keen brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had been formerly; a pedlar said some, a banker at Routot according to others. What was certain was that he made complex calculations in his head that would have frightened Binet himself. Polite to obsequiousness, he always held himself with his back bent in the position of one who bows or who invites. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 93 | After leaving at the door his hat surrounded with crape, he put down a green bandbox on the table, and began by complaining to madame, with many civilities, that he should have remained till that day without gaining her confidence. A poor shop like his was not made to attract a “fashionable lady”; he emphasized the words; yet she had only to command, and he would undertake to provide her with anything she might wish, either in haberdashery or linen, millinery or fancy goods, for he went to town regularly four times a month. He was connected with the best houses. You could speak of him at the “Trois Freres,” at the “Barbe d’Or,” or at the “Grand Sauvage”; all these gentlemen knew him as well as the insides of their pockets. To-day, then he had come to show madame, in passing, various articles he happened to have, thanks to the most rare opportunity. And he pulled out half-a-dozen embroidered collars from the box.
Madame Bovary examined them. “I do not require anything,” she said.
Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited three Algerian scarves, several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and finally, four eggcups in cocoanut wood, carved in open work by convicts. Then, with both hands on the table, his neck stretched out, his figure bent forward, open-mouthed, he watched Emma’s look, who was walking up and down undecided amid these goods. From time to time, as if to remove some dust, he filliped with his nail the silk of the scarves spread out at full length, and they rustled with a little noise, making in the green twilight the gold spangles of their tissue scintillate like little stars.
“How much are they?”
“A mere nothing,” he replied, “a mere nothing. But there’s no hurry; whenever it’s convenient. We are not Jews.”
She reflected for a few moments, and ended by again declining Monsieur Lheureux’s offer. He replied quite unconcernedly—
“Very well. We shall understand one another by and by. I have always got on with ladies—if I didn’t with my own!”
Emma smiled.
“I wanted to tell you,” he went on good-naturedly, after his joke, “that it isn’t the money I should trouble about. Why, I could give you some, if need be.”
She made a gesture of surprise.
“Ah!” said he quickly and in a low voice, “I shouldn’t have to go far to find you some, rely on that.”
And he began asking after Pere Tellier, the proprietor of the “Cafe Francais,” whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 94 | She made a gesture of surprise.
“Ah!” said he quickly and in a low voice, “I shouldn’t have to go far to find you some, rely on that.”
And he began asking after Pere Tellier, the proprietor of the “Cafe Francais,” whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending.
“What’s the matter with Pere Tellier? He coughs so that he shakes his whole house, and I’m afraid he’ll soon want a deal covering rather than a flannel vest. He was such a rake as a young man! Those sort of people, madame, have not the least regularity; he’s burnt up with brandy. Still it’s sad, all the same, to see an acquaintance go off.”
And while he fastened up his box he discoursed about the doctor’s patients.
“It’s the weather, no doubt,” he said, looking frowningly at the floor, “that causes these illnesses. I, too, don’t feel the thing. One of these days I shall even have to consult the doctor for a pain I have in my back. Well, good-bye, Madame Bovary. At your service; your very humble servant.” And he closed the door gently.
Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray by the fireside; she was a long time over it; everything was well with her.
“How good I was!” she said to herself, thinking of the scarves.
She heard some steps on the stairs. It was Léon. She got up and took from the chest of drawers the first pile of dusters to be hemmed. When he came in she seemed very busy.
The conversation languished; Madame Bovary gave it up every few minutes, whilst he himself seemed quite embarrassed. Seated on a low chair near the fire, he turned round in his fingers the ivory thimble-case. She stitched on, or from time to time turned down the hem of the cloth with her nail. She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her speech.
“Poor fellow!” she thought.
“How have I displeased her?” he asked himself.
At last, however, Léon said that he should have, one of these days, to go to Rouen on some office business.
“Your music subscription is out; am I to renew it?”
“No,” she replied.
“Why?”
“Because—”
And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of grey thread.
This work irritated Léon. It seemed to roughen the ends of her fingers. A gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it.
“Then you are giving it up?” he went on. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 95 | “Why?”
“Because—”
And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of grey thread.
This work irritated Léon. It seemed to roughen the ends of her fingers. A gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it.
“Then you are giving it up?” he went on.
“What?” she asked hurriedly. “Music? Ah! yes! Have I not my house to look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, in fact, many duties that must be considered first?”
She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then, she affected anxiety. Two or three times she even repeated, “He is so good!”
The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this tenderness on his behalf astonished him unpleasantly; nevertheless he took up on his praises, which he said everyone was singing, especially the chemist.
“Ah! he is a good fellow,” continued Emma.
“Certainly,” replied the clerk.
And he began talking of Madame Homais, whose very untidy appearance generally made them laugh.
“What does it matter?” interrupted Emma. “A good housewife does not trouble about her appearance.”
Then she relapsed into silence.
It was the same on the following days; her talks, her manners, everything changed. She took interest in the housework, went to church regularly, and looked after her servant with more severity.
She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called, Félicité brought her in, and Madame Bovary undressed her to show off her limbs. She declared she adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion, and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outburst which would have reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette in “Notre Dame de Paris.”
When Charles came home he found his slippers put to warm near the fire. His waistcoat now never wanted lining, nor his shirt buttons, and it was quite a pleasure to see in the cupboard the night-caps arranged in piles of the same height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking a turn in the garden; what he proposed was always done, although she did not understand the wishes to which she submitted without a murmur; and when Léon saw him by his fireside after dinner, his two hands on his stomach, his two feet on the fender, his two cheeks red with feeding, his eyes moist with happiness, the child crawling along the carpet, and this woman with the slender waist who came behind his arm-chair to kiss his forehead: “What madness!” he said to himself. “And how to reach her!” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 96 | And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him that he lost all hope, even the faintest. But by this renunciation he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle. To him she stood outside those fleshly attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she rose ever, and became farther removed from him after the magnificent manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their passion rejoices.
Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the marble. The others even did not escape from this seduction. The chemist said—
“She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn’t be misplaced in a sub-prefecture.”
The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the poor her charity.
But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. That dress with the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of whose torment those chaste lips said nothing. She was in love with Léon, and sought solitude that she might with the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his form troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation. Emma thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 97 | Léon did not know that when he left her in despair she rose after he had gone to see him in the street. She concerned herself about his comings and goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history to find an excuse for going to his room. The chemist’s wife seemed happy to her to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centered upon this house, like the “Lion d’Or” pigeons, who came there to dip their red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might make it less. She would have liked Léon to guess it, and she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this.
What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then, pride, and joy of being able to say to herself, “I am virtuous,” and to look at herself in the glass taking resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she was making.
Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it. She was irritated by an ill-served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow home.
What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 98 | On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.
Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with Léon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul.
“Besides, he no longer loves me,” she thought. “What is to become of me? What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?”
She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with flowing tears.
“Why don’t you tell master?” the servant asked her when she came in during these crises.
“It is the nerves,” said Emma. “Do not speak to him of it; it would worry him.”
“Ah! yes,” Félicité went on, “you are just like La Guerine, Pere Guerin’s daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, to see her standing upright on the threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a winding-sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears, was a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could not do anything, nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say.”
“But with me,” replied Emma, “it was after marriage that it began.”
One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard the Angelus ringing. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 99 | “But with me,” replied Emma, “it was after marriage that it began.”
One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard the Angelus ringing.
It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fetes. Through the bars of the arbour and away beyond the river seen in the fields, meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its peaceful lamentation.
With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here and there by the stuff black hoods of the good sisters bending over their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, included to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it.
On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his way back, for, in order not to shorten his day’s labour, he preferred interrupting his work, then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads of catechism hour.
Already a few who had arrived were playing marbles on the stones of the cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their legs, kicking with their clogs the large nettles growing between the little enclosure and the newest graves. This was the only green spot. All the rest was but stones, always covered with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 100 | The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure made for them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp was burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and the corners.
“Where is the cure?” asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it.
“He is just coming,” he answered.
And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbe Bournisien appeared; the children, pell-mell, fled into the church.
“These young scamps!” murmured the priest, “always the same!”
Then, picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with his foot, “They respect nothing!” But as soon as he caught sight of Madame Bovary, “Excuse me,” he said; “I did not recognise you.”
He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing the heavy vestry key between his two fingers.
The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows, unravelled at the hem. Grease and tobacco stains followed along his broad chest the lines of the buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were from his neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this was dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of his greyish beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily.
“How are you?” he added.
“Not well,” replied Emma; “I am ill.”
“Well, and so am I,” answered the priest. “These first warm days weaken one most remarkably, don’t they? But, after all, we are born to suffer, as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?”
“He!” she said with a gesture of contempt.
“What!” replied the good fellow, quite astonished, “doesn’t he prescribe something for you?”
“Ah!” said Emma, “it is no earthly remedy I need.”
But the cure from time to time looked into the church, where the kneeling boys were shouldering one another, and tumbling over like packs of cards. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 101 | “What!” replied the good fellow, quite astonished, “doesn’t he prescribe something for you?”
“Ah!” said Emma, “it is no earthly remedy I need.”
But the cure from time to time looked into the church, where the kneeling boys were shouldering one another, and tumbling over like packs of cards.
“I should like to know—” she went on.
“You look out, Riboudet,” cried the priest in an angry voice; “I’ll warm your ears, you imp!” Then turning to Emma, “He’s Boudet the carpenter’s son; his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he could learn quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. And so sometimes for a joke I call him Riboudet (like the road one takes to go to Maromme) and I even say ‘Mon Riboudet.’ Ha! Ha! ‘Mont Riboudet.’ The other day I repeated that just to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?”
She seemed not to hear him. And he went on—
“Always very busy, no doubt; for he and I are certainly the busiest people in the parish. But he is doctor of the body,” he added with a thick laugh, “and I of the soul.”
She fixed her pleading eyes upon the priest. “Yes,” she said, “you solace all sorrows.”
“Ah! don’t talk to me of it, Madame Bovary. This morning I had to go to Bas-Diauville for a cow that was ill; they thought it was under a spell. All their cows, I don’t know how it is—But pardon me! Longuemarre and Boudet! Bless me! Will you leave off?”
And with a bound he ran into the church.
The boys were just then clustering round the large desk, climbing over the precentor’s footstool, opening the missal; and others on tiptoe were just about to venture into the confessional. But the priest suddenly distributed a shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them by the collars of their coats, he lifted them from the ground, and deposited them on their knees on the stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant planting them there.
“Yes,” said he, when he returned to Emma, unfolding his large cotton handkerchief, one corner of which he put between his teeth, “farmers are much to be pitied.”
“Others, too,” she replied.
“Assuredly. Town-labourers, for example.”
“It is not they—”
“Pardon! I’ve there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread.”
“But those,” replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she spoke, “those, Monsieur le Cure, who have bread and have no—”
“Fire in the winter,” said the priest. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 102 | “Pardon! I’ve there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread.”
“But those,” replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she spoke, “those, Monsieur le Cure, who have bread and have no—”
“Fire in the winter,” said the priest.
“Oh, what does that matter?”
“What! What does it matter? It seems to me that when one has firing and food—for, after all—”
“My God! my God!” she sighed.
“It is indigestion, no doubt? You must get home, Madame Bovary; drink a little tea, that will strengthen you, or else a glass of fresh water with a little moist sugar.”
“Why?” And she looked like one awaking from a dream.
“Well, you see, you were putting your hand to your forehead. I thought you felt faint.” Then, bethinking himself, “But you were asking me something? What was it? I really don’t remember.”
“I? Nothing! nothing!” repeated Emma.
And the glance she cast round her slowly fell upon the old man in the cassock. They looked at one another face to face without speaking.
“Then, Madame Bovary,” he said at last, “excuse me, but duty first, you know; I must look after my good-for-nothings. The first communion will soon be upon us, and I fear we shall be behind after all. So after Ascension Day I keep them recta an extra hour every Wednesday. Poor children! One cannot lead them too soon into the path of the Lord, as, moreover, he has himself recommended us to do by the mouth of his Divine Son. Good health to you, madame; my respects to your husband.”
And he went into the church making a genuflexion as soon as he reached the door.
Emma saw him disappear between the double row of forms, walking with a heavy tread, his head a little bent over his shoulder, and with his two hands half-open behind him.
Then she turned on her heel all of one piece, like a statue on a pivot, and went homewards. But the loud voice of the priest, the clear voices of the boys still reached her ears, and went on behind her.
“Are you a Christian?”
“Yes, I am a Christian.”
“What is a Christian?”
“He who, being baptized-baptized-baptized—”
She went up the steps of the staircase holding on to the banisters, and when she was in her room threw herself into an arm-chair.
The whitish light of the window-panes fell with soft undulations. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 103 | “Yes, I am a Christian.”
“What is a Christian?”
“He who, being baptized-baptized-baptized—”
She went up the steps of the staircase holding on to the banisters, and when she was in her room threw herself into an arm-chair.
The whitish light of the window-panes fell with soft undulations.
The furniture in its place seemed to have become more immobile, and to lose itself in the shadow as in an ocean of darkness. The fire was out, the clock went on ticking, and Emma vaguely marvelled at this calm of all things while within herself was such tumult. But little Berthe was there, between the window and the work-table, tottering on her knitted shoes, and trying to come to her mother to catch hold of the ends of her apron-strings.
“Leave me alone,” said the latter, putting her from her with her hand.
The little girl soon came up closer against her knees, and leaning on them with her arms, she looked up with her large blue eyes, while a small thread of pure saliva dribbled from her lips on to the silk apron.
“Leave me alone,” repeated the young woman quite irritably.
Her face frightened the child, who began to scream.
“Will you leave me alone?” she said, pushing her with her elbow.
Berthe fell at the foot of the drawers against the brass handle, cutting her cheek, which began to bleed, against it. Madame Bovary sprang to lift her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the servant with all her might, and she was just going to curse herself when Charles appeared. It was the dinner-hour; he had come home.
“Look, dear!” said Emma, in a calm voice, “the little one fell down while she was playing, and has hurt herself.”
Charles reassured her; the case was not a serious one, and he went for some sticking plaster.
Madame Bovary did not go downstairs to the dining-room; she wished to remain alone to look after the child. Then watching her sleep, the little anxiety she felt gradually wore off, and she seemed very stupid to herself, and very good to have been so worried just now at so little. Berthe, in fact, no longer sobbed.
Her breathing now imperceptibly raised the cotton covering. Big tears lay in the corner of the half-closed eyelids, through whose lashes one could see two pale sunken pupils; the plaster stuck on her cheek drew the skin obliquely.
“It is very strange,” thought Emma, “how ugly this child is!”
When at eleven o’clock Charles came back from the chemist’s shop, whither he had gone after dinner to return the remainder of the sticking-plaster, he found his wife standing by the cradle. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 104 | “It is very strange,” thought Emma, “how ugly this child is!”
When at eleven o’clock Charles came back from the chemist’s shop, whither he had gone after dinner to return the remainder of the sticking-plaster, he found his wife standing by the cradle.
“I assure you it’s nothing.” he said, kissing her on the forehead. “Don’t worry, my poor darling; you will make yourself ill.”
He had stayed a long time at the chemist’s. Although he had not seemed much moved, Homais, nevertheless, had exerted himself to buoy him up, to “keep up his spirits.” Then they had talked of the various dangers that threaten childhood, of the carelessness of servants. Madame Homais knew something of it, having still upon her chest the marks left by a basin full of soup that a cook had formerly dropped on her pinafore, and her good parents took no end of trouble for her. The knives were not sharpened, nor the floors waxed; there were iron gratings to the windows and strong bars across the fireplace; the little Homais, in spite of their spirit, could not stir without someone watching them; at the slightest cold their father stuffed them with pectorals; and until they were turned four they all, without pity, had to wear wadded head-protectors. This, it is true, was a fancy of Madame Homais’; her husband was inwardly afflicted at it. Fearing the possible consequences of such compression to the intellectual organs. He even went so far as to say to her, “Do you want to make Caribs or Botocudos of them?”
Charles, however, had several times tried to interrupt the conversation. “I should like to speak to you,” he had whispered in the clerk’s ear, who went upstairs in front of him.
“Can he suspect anything?” Léon asked himself. His heart beat, and he racked his brain with surmises.
At last, Charles, having shut the door, asked him to see himself what would be the price at Rouen of a fine daguerreotypes. It was a sentimental surprise he intended for his wife, a delicate attention—his portrait in a frock-coat. But he wanted first to know “how much it would be.” The inquiries would not put Monsieur Léon out, since he went to town almost every week.
Why? Monsieur Homais suspected some “young man’s affair” at the bottom of it, an intrigue. But he was mistaken. Léon was after no love-making. He was sadder than ever, as Madame Lefrancois saw from the amount of food he left on his plate. To find out more about it she questioned the tax-collector. Binet answered roughly that he “wasn’t paid by the police.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 105 | All the same, his companion seemed very strange to him, for Léon often threw himself back in his chair, and stretching out his arms, complained vaguely of life.
“It’s because you don’t take enough recreation,” said the collector.
“What recreation?”
“If I were you I’d have a lathe.”
“But I don’t know how to turn,” answered the clerk.
“Ah! that’s true,” said the other, rubbing his chin with an air of mingled contempt and satisfaction.
Léon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the sight of certain persons, of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced him.
This apprehension soon changed into impatience, and then Paris from afar sounded its fanfare of masked balls with the laugh of grisettes. As he was to finish reading there, why not set out at once? What prevented him? And he began making home-preparations; he arranged his occupations beforehand. He furnished in his head an apartment. He would lead an artist’s life there! He would take lessons on the guitar! He would have a dressing-gown, a Basque cap, blue velvet slippers! He even already was admiring two crossed foils over his chimney-piece, with a death’s head on the guitar above them.
The difficulty was the consent of his mother; nothing, however, seemed more reasonable. Even his employer advised him to go to some other chambers where he could advance more rapidly. Taking a middle course, then, Léon looked for some place as second clerk at Rouen; found none, and at last wrote his mother a long letter full of details, in which he set forth the reasons for going to live at Paris immediately. She consented.
He did not hurry. Every day for a month Hivert carried boxes, valises, parcels for him from Yonville to Rouen and from Rouen to Yonville; and when Léon had packed up his wardrobe, had his three arm-chairs restuffed, bought a stock of neckties, in a word, had made more preparations than for a voyage around the world, he put it off from week to week, until he received a second letter from his mother urging him to leave, since he wanted to pass his examination before the vacation. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 106 | When the moment for the farewells had come, Madame Homais wept, Justin sobbed; Homais, as a man of nerve, concealed his emotion; he wished to carry his friend’s overcoat himself as far as the gate of the notary, who was taking Léon to Rouen in his carriage.
The latter had just time to bid farewell to Monsieur Bovary.
When he reached the head of the stairs, he stopped, he was so out of breath. As he came in, Madame Bovary arose hurriedly.
“It is I again!” said Léon.
“I was sure of it!”
She bit her lips, and a rush of blood flowing under her skin made her red from the roots of her hair to the top of her collar. She remained standing, leaning with her shoulder against the wainscot.
“The doctor is not here?” he went on.
“He is out.” She repeated, “He is out.”
Then there was silence. They looked at one another and their thoughts, confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two throbbing breasts.
“I should like to kiss Berthe,” said Léon.
Emma went down a few steps and called Félicité.
He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the decorations, the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away everything. But she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was swinging a windmill roof downwards at the end of a string. Léon kissed her several times on the neck.
“Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear little one! good-bye!” And he gave her back to her mother.
“Take her away,” she said.
They remained alone—Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed against a window-pane; Léon held his cap in his hand, knocking it softly against his thigh.
“It is going to rain,” said Emma.
“I have a cloak,” he answered.
“Ah!”
She turned around, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward.
The light fell on it as on a piece of marble, to the curve of the eyebrows, without one’s being able to guess what Emma was seeing on the horizon or what she was thinking within herself.
“Well, good-bye,” he sighed.
She raised her head with a quick movement.
“Yes, good-bye—go!”
They advanced towards each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated.
“In the English fashion, then,” she said, giving her own hand wholly to him, and forcing a laugh.
Léon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their eyes met again, and he disappeared. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 107 | Léon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their eyes met again, and he disappeared.
When he reached the market-place, he stopped and hid behind a pillar to look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds. He thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it, slowly opened its long oblique folds that spread out with a single movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Léon set off running.
From afar he saw his employer’s gig in the road, and by it a man in a coarse apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were talking. They were waiting for him.
“Embrace me,” said the druggist with tears in his eyes. “Here is your coat, my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after yourself.”
“Come, Léon, jump in,” said the notary.
Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs uttered these three sad words—
“A pleasant journey!”
“Good-night,” said Monsieur Guillaumin. “Give him his head.” They set out, and Homais went back.
Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and watched the clouds. They gathered around the sunset on the side of Rouen and then swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great rays of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy, while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain. But a gust of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered against the green leaves.
Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows shook their wings in the damp thickets, and the pools of water on the gravel as they flowed away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia.
“Ah! how far off he must be already!” she thought.
Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner.
“Well,” said he, “so we’ve sent off our young friend!”
“So it seems,” replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair; “Any news at home?”
“Nothing much. Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon. You know women—a nothing upsets them, especially my wife. And we should be wrong to object to that, since their nervous organization is much more malleable than ours.”
“Poor Léon!” said Charles. “How will he live at Paris? Will he get used to it?”
Madame Bovary sighed. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 108 | “Poor Léon!” said Charles. “How will he live at Paris? Will he get used to it?”
Madame Bovary sighed.
“Get along!” said the chemist, smacking his lips. “The outings at restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne—all that’ll be jolly enough, I assure you.”
“I don’t think he’ll go wrong,” objected Bovary.
“Nor do I,” said Monsieur Homais quickly; “although he’ll have to do like the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit. And you don’t know what a life those dogs lead in the Latin quarter with actresses. Besides, students are thought a great deal of in Paris. Provided they have a few accomplishments, they are received in the best society; there are even ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them, which subsequently furnishes them opportunities for making very good matches.”
“But,” said the doctor, “I fear for him that down there—”
“You are right,” interrupted the chemist; “that is the reverse of the medal. And one is constantly obliged to keep one’s hand in one’s pocket there. Thus, we will suppose you are in a public garden. An individual presents himself, well dressed, even wearing an order, and whom one would take for a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates himself; offers you a pinch of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become more intimate; he takes you to a cafe, invites you to his country-house, introduces you, between two drinks, to all sorts of people; and three-fourths of the time it’s only to plunder your watch or lead you into some pernicious step.
“That is true,” said Charles; “but I was thinking especially of illnesses—of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the provinces.”
Emma shuddered.
“Because of the change of regimen,” continued the chemist, “and of the perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the water at Paris, don’t you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever people may say of them, a good soup. For my own part, I have always preferred plain living; it is more healthy. So when I was studying pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a boarding house; I dined with the professors.”
And thus he went on, expounding his opinions generally and his personal likings, until Justin came to fetch him for a mulled egg that was wanted.
“Not a moment’s peace!” he cried; “always at it! I can’t go out for a minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling. What drudgery!” Then, when he was at the door, “By the way, do you know the news?”
“What news?” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 109 | “Not a moment’s peace!” he cried; “always at it! I can’t go out for a minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling. What drudgery!” Then, when he was at the door, “By the way, do you know the news?”
“What news?”
“That it is very likely,” Homais went on, raising his eyebrows and assuming one of his most serious expression, “that the agricultural meeting of the Seine-Inferieure will be held this year at Yonville-l’Abbaye. The rumour, at all events, is going the round. This morning the paper alluded to it. It would be of the utmost importance for our district. But we’ll talk it over later on. I can see, thank you; Justin has the lantern.”
The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Everything seemed to her enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with soft shrieks such as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings on.
As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair. Léon reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of the house seemed to hold his shadow.
She could not detach her eyes from the carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had sat. The river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 110 | She could not detach her eyes from the carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had sat. The river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks.
They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves over the moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy afternoons they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He read aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh wind of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nasturtiums of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life, the only possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it came to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees, when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not having loved Léon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession of her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms and say to him, “It is I; I am yours.” But Emma recoiled beforehand at the difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires, increased by regret, became only the more acute.
Henceforth the memory of Léon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tête-à-tête—she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no help came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in the terrible cold that pierced her. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 111 | Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herself now far more unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty that it would not end.
A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself certain whims. She bought a Gothic prie-dieu, and in a month spent fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux’s finest scarves, and wore it knotted around her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on a couch in this garb.
She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair a la Chinoise, in flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted in on one side and rolled it under like a man’s.
She wanted to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and a supply of white paper. She tried serious reading, history, and philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start, thinking he was being called to a patient. “I’m coming,” he stammered; and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the lamp. But her reading fared like her piece of embroidery, all of which, only just begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other books.
She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.
In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age.
She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed around her showing his anxiety—
“Bah!” she answered, “what does it matter?”
Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table, sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head.
Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long consultations together on the subject of Emma. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 112 | Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table, sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head.
Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long consultations together on the subject of Emma.
What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all medical treatment? “Do you know what your wife wants?” replied Madame Bovary senior.
“She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn’t have these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her head, and from the idleness in which she lives.”
“Yet she is always busy,” said Charles.
“Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Anyone who has no religion always ends by turning out badly.”
So it was decided to stop Emma reading novels. The enterprise did not seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous trade? The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During the three weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged half-a-dozen words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at table and in the evening before going to bed.
Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville.
The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on end and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses from the church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths, where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold, together with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky straw stuck out. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 113 | Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks through the bars of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same place and unwilling to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the shop front of the chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and the people pushed in less to buy drugs than for consultations. So great was Homais’ reputation in the neighbouring villages. His robust aplomb had fascinated the rustics. They considered him a greater doctor than all the doctors.
Emma was leaning out at the window; she was often there. The window in the provinces replaces the theatre and the promenade, she was amusing herself with watching the crowd of boors when she saw a gentleman in a green velvet coat. He had on yellow gloves, although he wore heavy gaiters; he was coming towards the doctor’s house, followed by a peasant walking with a bent head and quite a thoughtful air.
“Can I see the doctor?” he asked Justin, who was talking on the doorsteps with Félicité, and, taking him for a servant of the house—“Tell him that Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette is here.”
It was not from territorial vanity that the new arrival added “of La Huchette” to his name, but to make himself the better known.
La Huchette, in fact, was an estate near Yonville, where he had just bought the château and two farms that he cultivated himself, without, however, troubling very much about them. He lived as a bachelor, and was supposed to have “at least fifteen thousand francs a year.”
Charles came into the room. Monsieur Boulanger introduced his man, who wanted to be bled because he felt “a tingling all over.”
“That’ll purge me,” he urged as an objection to all reasoning.
So Bovary ordered a bandage and a basin, and asked Justin to hold it. Then addressing the peasant, who was already pale—
“Don’t be afraid, my lad.”
“No, no, sir,” said the other; “get on.”
And with an air of bravado he held out his great arm. At the prick of the lancet the blood spurted out, splashing against the looking-glass.
“Hold the basin nearer,” exclaimed Charles.
“Lor!” said the peasant, “one would swear it was a little fountain flowing. How red my blood is! That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes,” answered the doctor, “one feels nothing at first, and then syncope sets in, and more especially with people of strong constitution like this man.”
At these words the rustic let go the lancet-case he was twisting between his fingers. A shudder of his shoulders made the chair-back creak. His hat fell off.
“I thought as much,” said Bovary, pressing his finger on the vein. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 114 | At these words the rustic let go the lancet-case he was twisting between his fingers. A shudder of his shoulders made the chair-back creak. His hat fell off.
“I thought as much,” said Bovary, pressing his finger on the vein.
The basin was beginning to tremble in Justin’s hands; his knees shook, he turned pale.
“Emma! Emma!” called Charles.
With one bound she came down the staircase.
“Some vinegar,” he cried. “O dear! two at once!”
And in his emotion he could hardly put on the compress.
“It is nothing,” said Monsieur Boulanger quietly, taking Justin in his arms. He seated him on the table with his back resting against the wall.
Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat. The strings of his shirt had got into a knot, and she was for some minutes moving her light fingers about the young fellow’s neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her cambric handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and then blew upon them softly. The ploughman revived, but Justin’s syncope still lasted, and his eyeballs disappeared in the pale sclerotics like blue flowers in milk.
“We must hide this from him,” said Charles.
Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the movement she made in bending down, her dress (it was a summer dress with four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma stooping, staggered a little as she stretched out her arms.
The stuff here and there gave with the inflections of her bust.
Then she went to fetch a bottle of water, and she was melting some pieces of sugar when the chemist arrived. The servant had been to fetch him in the tumult. Seeing his pupil’s eyes staring he drew a long breath; then going around him he looked at him from head to foot.
“Fool!” he said, “really a little fool! A fool in four letters! A phlebotomy’s a big affair, isn’t it! And a fellow who isn’t afraid of anything; a kind of squirrel, just as he is who climbs to vertiginous heights to shake down nuts. Oh, yes! you just talk to me, boast about yourself! Here’s a fine fitness for practising pharmacy later on; for under serious circumstances you may be called before the tribunals in order to enlighten the minds of the magistrates, and you would have to keep your head then, to reason, show yourself a man, or else pass for an imbecile.”
Justin did not answer. The chemist went on— |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 115 | Justin did not answer. The chemist went on—
“Who asked you to come? You are always pestering the doctor and madame. On Wednesday, moreover, your presence is indispensable to me. There are now twenty people in the shop. I left everything because of the interest I take in you. Come, get along! Sharp! Wait for me, and keep an eye on the jars.”
When Justin, who was rearranging his dress, had gone, they talked for a little while about fainting-fits. Madame Bovary had never fainted.
“That is extraordinary for a lady,” said Monsieur Boulanger; “but some people are very susceptible. Thus in a duel, I have seen a second lose consciousness at the mere sound of the loading of pistols.”
“For my part,” said the chemist, “the sight of other people’s blood doesn’t affect me at all, but the mere thought of my own flowing would make me faint if I reflected upon it too much.”
Monsieur Boulanger, however, dismissed his servant, advising him to calm himself, since his fancy was over.
“It procured me the advantage of making your acquaintance,” he added, and he looked at Emma as he said this. Then he put three francs on the corner of the table, bowed negligently, and went out.
He was soon on the other side of the river (this was his way back to La Huchette), and Emma saw him in the meadow, walking under the poplars, slackening his pace now and then as one who reflects.
“She is very pretty,” he said to himself; “she is very pretty, this doctor’s wife. Fine teeth, black eyes, a dainty foot, a figure like a Parisienne’s. Where the devil does she come from? Wherever did that fat fellow pick her up?”
Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was thirty-four; he was of brutal temperament and intelligent perspicacity, having, moreover, had much to do with women, and knowing them well. This one had seemed pretty to him; so he was thinking about her and her husband.
“I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty nails, and hasn’t shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his patients, she sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would like to live in town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman! She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table. With three words of gallantry she’d adore one, I’m sure of it. She’d be tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 116 | Then the difficulties of love-making seen in the distance made him by contrast think of his mistress. She was an actress at Rouen, whom he kept; and when he had pondered over this image, with which, even in remembrance, he was satiated—
“Ah! Madame Bovary,” he thought, “is much prettier, especially fresher. Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat. She is so finiky about her pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for prawns.”
The fields were empty, and around him Rodolphe only heard the regular beating of the grass striking against his boots, with a cry of the grasshopper hidden at a distance among the oats. He again saw Emma in her room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her.
“Oh, I will have her,” he cried, striking a blow with his stick at a clod in front of him. And he at once began to consider the political part of the enterprise. He asked himself—
“Where shall we meet? By what means? We shall always be having the brat on our hands, and the servant, the neighbours, and husband, all sorts of worries. Pshaw! one would lose too much time over it.”
Then he resumed, “She really has eyes that pierce one’s heart like a gimlet. And that pale complexion! I adore pale women!”
When he reached the top of the Arguiel hills he had made up his mind. “It’s only finding the opportunities. Well, I will call in now and then. I’ll send them venison, poultry; I’ll have myself bled, if need be. We shall become friends; I’ll invite them to my place. By Jove!” added he, “there’s the agricultural show coming on. She’ll be there. I shall see her. We’ll begin boldly, for that’s the surest way.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 117 | At last it came, the famous agricultural show. On the morning of the solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors were chatting over the preparations. The pediment of the town hall had been hung with garlands of ivy; a tent had been erected in a meadow for the banquet; and in the middle of the Place, in front of the church, a kind of bombarde was to announce the arrival of the prefect and the names of the successful farmers who had obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy (there was none at Yonville) had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom Binet was captain. On that day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and, tightly buttoned in his tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless that the whole vital portion of his person seemed to have descended into his legs, which rose in a cadence of set steps with a single movement. As there was some rivalry between the tax-collector and the colonel, both, to show off their talents, drilled their men separately. One saw the red epaulettes and the black breastplates pass and re-pass alternately; there was no end to it, and it constantly began again. There had never been such a display of pomp. Several citizens had scoured their houses the evening before; tri-coloured flags hung from half-open windows; all the public-houses were full; and in the lovely weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the coloured neckerchiefs seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and relieved with the motley colours the sombre monotony of the frock-coats and blue smocks. The neighbouring farmers’ wives, when they got off their horses, pulled out the long pins that fastened around them their dresses, turned up for fear of mud; and the husbands, for their part, in order to save their hats, kept their handkerchiefs around them, holding one corner between their teeth.
The crowd came into the main street from both ends of the village. People poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the houses; and from time to time one heard knockers banging against doors closing behind women with their gloves, who were going out to see the fete. What was most admired were two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that flanked a platform on which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there were against the four columns of the town hall four kinds of poles, each bearing a small standard of greenish cloth, embellished with inscriptions in gold letters.
On one was written, “To Commerce”; on the other, “To Agriculture”; on the third, “To Industry”; and on the fourth, “To the Fine Arts.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 118 | On one was written, “To Commerce”; on the other, “To Agriculture”; on the third, “To Industry”; and on the fourth, “To the Fine Arts.”
But the jubilation that brightened all faces seemed to darken that of Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen-steps she muttered to herself, “What rubbish! what rubbish! With their canvas booth! Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down there under a tent like a gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to the place! Then it wasn’t worth while sending to Neufchâtel for the keeper of a cookshop! And for whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!”
The druggist was passing. He had on a frock-coat, nankeen trousers, beaver shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a low crown.
“Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry.” And as the fat widow asked where he was going—
“It seems odd to you, doesn’t it, I who am always more cooped up in my laboratory than the man’s rat in his cheese.”
“What cheese?” asked the landlady.
“Oh, nothing! nothing!” Homais continued. “I merely wished to convey to you, Madame Lefrancois, that I usually live at home like a recluse. To-day, however, considering the circumstances, it is necessary—”
“Oh, you’re going down there!” she said contemptuously.
“Yes, I am going,” replied the druggist, astonished. “Am I not a member of the consulting commission?”
Mere Lefrancois looked at him for a few moments, and ended by saying with a smile—
“That’s another pair of shoes! But what does agriculture matter to you? Do you understand anything about it?”
“Certainly I understand it, since I am a druggist—that is to say, a chemist. And the object of chemistry, Madame Lefrancois, being the knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of all natural bodies, it follows that agriculture is comprised within its domain. And, in fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is all this, if it isn’t chemistry, pure and simple?”
The landlady did not answer. Homais went on— |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 119 | The landlady did not answer. Homais went on—
“Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled the earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is necessary rather to know the composition of the substances in question—the geological strata, the atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the minerals, the waters, the density of the different bodies, their capillarity, and what not. And one must be master of all the principles of hygiene in order to direct, criticize the construction of buildings, the feeding of animals, the diet of domestics. And, moreover, Madame Lefrancois, one must know botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand, which are the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are unproductive and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and re-sow them there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must keep pace with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be always on the alert to find out improvements.”
The landlady never took her eyes off the “Cafe Francois” and the chemist went on—
“Would to God our agriculturists were chemists, or that at least they would pay more attention to the counsels of science. Thus lately I myself wrote a considerable tract, a memoir of over seventy-two pages, entitled, ‘Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects, together with some New Reflections on the Subject,’ that I sent to the Agricultural Society of Rouen, and which even procured me the honour of being received among its members—Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological. Well, if my work had been given to the public—” But the druggist stopped, Madame Lefrancois seemed so preoccupied.
“Just look at them!” she said. “It’s past comprehension! Such a cookshop as that!” And with a shrug of the shoulders that stretched out over her breast the stitches of her knitted bodice, she pointed with both hands at her rival’s inn, whence songs were heard issuing. “Well, it won’t last long,” she added. “It’ll be over before a week.”
Homais drew back with stupefaction. She came down three steps and whispered in his ear—
“What! you didn’t know it? There is to be an execution in next week. It’s Lheureux who is selling him out; he has killed him with bills.”
“What a terrible catastrophe!” cried the druggist, who always found expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances.
Then the landlady began telling him the story that she had heard from Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, and although she detested Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was “a wheedler, a sneak.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 120 | “What a terrible catastrophe!” cried the druggist, who always found expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances.
Then the landlady began telling him the story that she had heard from Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, and although she detested Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was “a wheedler, a sneak.”
“There!” she said. “Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to Madame Bovary, who’s got on a green bonnet. Why, she’s taking Monsieur Boulanger’s arm.”
“Madame Bovary!” exclaimed Homais. “I must go at once and pay her my respects. Perhaps she’ll be very glad to have a seat in the enclosure under the peristyle.” And, without heeding Madame Lefrancois, who was calling him back to tell him more about it, the druggist walked off rapidly with a smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing copiously to right and left, and taking up much room with the large tails of his frock-coat that fluttered behind him in the wind.
Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from afar, hurried on, but Madame Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more slowly, and, smiling at her, said in a rough tone—
“It’s only to get away from that fat fellow, you know, the druggist.” She pressed his elbow.
“What’s the meaning of that?” he asked himself. And he looked at her out of the corner of his eyes.
Her profile was so calm that one could guess nothing from it. It stood out in the light from the oval of her bonnet, with pale ribbons on it like the leaves of weeds. Her eyes with their long curved lashes looked straight before her, and though wide open, they seemed slightly puckered by the cheek-bones, because of the blood pulsing gently under the delicate skin. A pink line ran along the partition between her nostrils. Her head was bent upon her shoulder, and the pearl tips of her white teeth were seen between her lips.
“Is she making fun of me?” thought Rodolphe.
Emma’s gesture, however, had only been meant for a warning; for Monsieur Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke now and again as if to enter into the conversation.
“What a superb day! Everybody is out! The wind is east!”
And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe answered him, whilst at the slightest movement made by them he drew near, saying, “I beg your pardon!” and raised his hat.
When they reached the farrier’s house, instead of following the road up to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him Madame Bovary. He called out—
“Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently.”
“How you got rid of him!” she said, laughing. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 121 | When they reached the farrier’s house, instead of following the road up to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him Madame Bovary. He called out—
“Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently.”
“How you got rid of him!” she said, laughing.
“Why,” he went on, “allow oneself to be intruded upon by others? And as to-day I have the happiness of being with you—”
Emma blushed. He did not finish his sentence. Then he talked of the fine weather and of the pleasure of walking on the grass. A few daisies had sprung up again.
“Here are some pretty Easter daisies,” he said, “and enough of them to furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the place.”
He added, “Shall I pick some? What do you think?”
“Are you in love?” she asked, coughing a little.
“H’m, h’m! who knows?” answered Rodolphe.
The meadow began to fill, and the housewives hustled you with their great umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. One had often to get out of the way of a long file of country folk, servant-maids with blue stockings, flat shoes, silver rings, and who smelt of milk, when one passed close to them. They walked along holding one another by the hand, and thus they spread over the whole field from the row of open trees to the banquet tent.
But this was the examination time, and the farmers one after the other entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long cord supported on sticks.
The beasts were there, their noses towards the cord, and making a confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass, slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats that buzzed round them. Plough-men with bare arms were holding by the halter prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils looking towards the mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and flowing manes, while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then came and sucked them. And above the long undulation of these crowded animals one saw some white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some sharp horns sticking out, and the heads of men running about. Apart, outside the enclosure, a hundred paces off, was a large black bull, muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, and who moved no more than if he had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding him by a rope. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 122 | Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps, examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville. As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he came forward quickly, and smiling amiably, said—
“What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?”
Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had disappeared—
“Ma foi!” said he, “I shall not go. Your company is better than his.”
And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily, showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire. He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters.
These were so polished that they reflected the grass. He trampled on horses’s dung with them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his straw hat on one side.
“Besides,” added he, “when one lives in the country—”
“It’s waste of time,” said Emma.
“That is true,” replied Rodolphe. “To think that not one of these people is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!”
Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the illusions lost there.
“And I too,” said Rodolphe, “am drifting into depression.”
“You!” she said in astonishment; “I thought you very light-hearted.”
“Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were not better to join those sleeping there!”
“Oh! and your friends?” she said. “You do not think of them.”
“My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?” And he accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 123 | “Oh! and your friends?” she said. “You do not think of them.”
“My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?” And he accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips.
But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them. He was so overladen with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the ends of his two outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, who was carrying the church chairs about amongst the people. Alive to all that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of turning the show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew which way to turn. In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for these seats, whose straw smelt of incense, and they leant against the thick backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration.
Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe’s arm; he went on as if speaking to himself—
“Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! if I had some aim in life, if I had met some love, if I had found someone! Oh, how I would have spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted everything, overcome everything!”
“Yet it seems to me,” said Emma, “that you are not to be pitied.”
“Ah! you think so?” said Rodolphe.
“For, after all,” she went on, “you are free—” she hesitated, “rich—”
“Do not mock me,” he replied.
And she protested that she was not mocking him, when the report of a cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling one another pell-mell towards the village.
It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed not to be coming, and the members of the jury felt much embarrassed, not knowing if they ought to begin the meeting or still wait.
At last at the end of the Place a large hired landau appeared, drawn by two thin horses, which a coachman in a white hat was whipping lustily. Binet had only just time to shout, “Present arms!” and the colonel to imitate him. All ran towards the enclosure; everyone pushed forward. A few even forgot their collars; but the equipage of the prefect seemed to anticipate the crowd, and the two yoked jades, trapesing in their harness, came up at a little trot in front of the peristyle of the town hall at the very moment when the National Guard and firemen deployed, beating drums and marking time.
“Present!” shouted Binet.
“Halt!” shouted the colonel. “Left about, march.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 124 | “Present!” shouted Binet.
“Halt!” shouted the colonel. “Left about, march.”
And after presenting arms, during which the clang of the band, letting loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns were lowered. Then was seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he raised his sharp nose, and forced a smile upon his sunken mouth. He recognised the mayor by his scarf, and explained to him that the prefect was not able to come. He himself was a councillor at the prefecture; then he added a few apologies. Monsieur Tuvache answered them with compliments; the other confessed himself nervous; and they remained thus, face to face, their foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all round, the municipal council, the notable personages, the National Guard and the crowd. The councillor pressing his little cocked hat to his breast repeated his bows, while Tuvache, bent like a bow, also smiled, stammered, tried to say something, protested his devotion to the monarchy and the honour that was being done to Yonville.
Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the head of the horses from the coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot, led them to the door of the “Lion d’Or”, where a number of peasants collected to look at the carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen one by one mounted the platform, where they sat down in red utrecht velvet arm-chairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache.
All these people looked alike. Their fair flabby faces, somewhat tanned by the sun, were the colour of sweet cider, and their puffy whiskers emerged from stiff collars, kept up by white cravats with broad bows. All the waist-coats were of velvet, double-breasted; all the watches had, at the end of a long ribbon, an oval cornelian seal; everyone rested his two hands on his thighs, carefully stretching the stride of their trousers, whose unsponged glossy cloth shone more brilliantly than the leather of their heavy boots. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 125 | The ladies of the company stood at the back under the vestibule between the pillars while the common herd was opposite, standing up or sitting on chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had brought thither all those that he had moved from the field, and he even kept running back every minute to fetch others from the church. He caused such confusion with this piece of business that one had great difficulty in getting to the small steps of the platform.
“I think,” said Monsieur Lheureux to the chemist, who was passing to his place, “that they ought to have put up two Venetian masts with something rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would have been a very pretty effect.”
“To be sure,” replied Homais; “but what can you expect? The mayor took everything on his own shoulders. He hasn’t much taste. Poor Tuvache! and he is even completely destitute of what is called the genius of art.”
Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary, had gone up to the first floor of the town hall, to the “council-room,” and, as it was empty, he declared that they could enjoy the sight there more comfortably. He fetched three stools from the round table under the bust of the monarch, and having carried them to one of the windows, they sat down by each other.
There was commotion on the platform, long whisperings, much parleying. At last the councillor got up. They knew now that his name was Lieuvain, and in the crowd the name was passed from one to the other. After he had collated a few pages, and bent over them to see better, he began—
“Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment will, I am sure, be shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the higher administration, to the government to the monarch, gentle men, our sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts?”
“I ought,” said Rodolphe, “to get back a little further.”
“Why?” said Emma.
But at this moment the voice of the councillor rose to an extraordinary pitch. He declaimed— |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 126 | “I ought,” said Rodolphe, “to get back a little further.”
“Why?” said Emma.
But at this moment the voice of the councillor rose to an extraordinary pitch. He declaimed—
“This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined our public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins, when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations.”
“Well, someone down there might see me,” Rodolphe resumed, “then I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad reputation—”
“Oh, you are slandering yourself,” said Emma.
“No! It is dreadful, I assure you.”
“But, gentlemen,” continued the councillor, “if, banishing from my memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there? Everywhere commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state, establish within it new relations. Our great industrial centres have recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in all hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France breathes once more!”
“Besides,” added Rodolphe, “perhaps from the world’s point of view they are right.”
“How so?” she asked.
“What!” said he. “Do you not know that there are souls constantly tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all sorts of fantasies, of follies.”
Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveller who has voyaged over strange lands, and went on—
“We have not even this distraction, we poor women!”
“A sad distraction, for happiness isn’t found in it.”
“But is it ever found?” she asked.
“Yes; one day it comes,” he answered.
“And this is what you have understood,” said the councillor.
“You, farmers, agricultural labourers! you pacific pioneers of a work that belongs wholly to civilization! you, men of progress and morality, you have understood, I say, that political storms are even more redoubtable than atmospheric disturbances!”
“It comes one day,” repeated Rodolphe, “one day suddenly, and when one is despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice cried, ‘It is here!’ You feel the need of confiding the whole of your life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this being. There is no need for explanations; they understand one another. They have seen each other in dreams!” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 127 | (And he looked at her.) “In fine, here it is, this treasure so sought after, here before you. It glitters, it flashes; yet one still doubts, one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if one went out from darkness into light.”
And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word. He passed his hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness. Then he let it fall on Emma’s. She took hers away.
“And who would be surprised at it, gentlemen? He only who is so blind, so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so plunged in the prejudices of another age as still to misunderstand the spirit of agricultural populations. Where, indeed, is to be found more patriotism than in the country, greater devotion to the public welfare, more intelligence, in a word? And, gentlemen, I do not mean that superficial intelligence, vain ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and balanced intelligence that applies itself above all else to useful objects, thus contributing to the good of all, to the common amelioration and to the support of the state, born of respect for law and the practice of duty—”
“Ah! again!” said Rodolphe. “Always ‘duty.’ I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears ‘Duty, duty!’ Ah! by Jove! one’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”
“Yet—yet—” objected Madame Bovary.
“No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?”
“But one must,” said Emma, “to some extent bow to the opinion of the world and accept its moral code.”
“Ah! but there are two,” he replied. “The small, the conventional, that of men, that which constantly changes, that brays out so loudly, that makes such a commotion here below, of the earth earthly, like the mass of imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the eternal, that is about us and above, like the landscape that surrounds us, and the blue heavens that give us light.”
Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief. He continued— |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 128 | Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief. He continued—
“And what should I do here gentlemen, pointing out to you the uses of agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who provides our means of subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The agriculturist, gentlemen, who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the country, brings forth the corn, which, being ground, is made into a powder by means of ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the name of flour, and from there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered at the baker’s, who makes it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it not the agriculturist who fattens, for our clothes, his abundant flocks in the pastures? For how should we clothe ourselves, how nourish ourselves, without the agriculturist? And, gentlemen, is it even necessary to go so far for examples? Who has not frequently reflected on all the momentous things that we get out of that modest animal, the ornament of poultry-yards, that provides us at once with a soft pillow for our bed, with succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I should never end if I were to enumerate one after the other all the different products which the earth, well cultivated, like a generous mother, lavishes upon her children. Here it is the vine, elsewhere the apple tree for cider, there colza, farther on cheeses and flax. Gentlemen, let us not forget flax, which has made such great strides of late years, and to which I will more particularly call your attention.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 129 | He had no need to call it, for all the mouths of the multitude were wide open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache by his side listened to him with staring eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time to time softly closed his eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son Napoleon between his knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose a syllable. The chins of the other members of the jury went slowly up and down in their waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the platform rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with out-turned elbows, the point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could hear, but certainly he could see nothing, because of the visor of his helmet, that fell down on his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of Monsieur Tuvache, had a bigger one, for his was enormous, and shook on his head, and from it an end of his cotton scarf peeped out. He smiled beneath it with a perfectly infantine sweetness, and his pale little face, whence drops were running, wore an expression of enjoyment and sleepiness.
The square as far as the houses was crowded with people. One saw folk leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others standing at doors, and Justin, in front of the chemist’s shop, seemed quite transfixed by the sight of what he was looking at. In spite of the silence Monsieur Lieuvain’s voice was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments of phrases, and interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the crowd; then you suddenly heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the bleating of the lambs, who answered one another at street corners. In fact, the cowherds and shepherds had driven their beasts thus far, and these lowed from time to time, while with their tongues they tore down some scrap of foliage that hung above their mouths.
Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice, speaking rapidly—
“Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do meet, all is so organised that they cannot blend together. Yet they will make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will call upon each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten years, they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they are born one for the other.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 130 | His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face towards Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelt the perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy.
Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But in making this movement, as she leant back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on the line of the horizon, the old diligence, the “Hirondelle,” that was slowly descending the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in this yellow carriage that Léon had so often come back to her, and by this route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him opposite at his windows; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it seemed to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of the lustres on the arm of the Viscount, and that Léon was not far away, that he was coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent of Rodolphe’s head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which suffused her soul. She opened wide her nostrils several times to drink in the freshness of the ivy round the capitals. She took off her gloves, she wiped her hands, then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while athwart the throbbing of her temples she heard the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the councillor intoning his phrases. He said—“Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of routine, nor to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 131 | “Apply yourselves, above all, to the amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races. Let these shows be to you pacific arenas, where the victor in leaving it will hold forth a hand to the vanquished, and will fraternise with him in the hope of better success. And you, aged servants, humble domestics, whose hard labour no Government up to this day has taken into consideration, come hither to receive the reward of your silent virtues, and be assured that the state henceforward has its eye upon you; that it encourages you, protects you; that it will accede to your just demands, and alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful sacrifices.”
Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councillor, but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had always contributed to civilisation. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns in the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had put on cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and in this discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur Derozerays set himself this problem. From magnetism little by little Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian, planting his cabbages, and the Emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.
“Thus we,” he said, “why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite; our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other.”
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
“For good farming generally!” cried the president.
“Just now, for example, when I went to your house.”
“To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix.”
“Did I know I should accompany you?”
“Seventy francs.”
“A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you—I remained.”
“Manures!”
“And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 132 | “Just now, for example, when I went to your house.”
“To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix.”
“Did I know I should accompany you?”
“Seventy francs.”
“A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you—I remained.”
“Manures!”
“And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!”
“To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!”
“For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a charm.”
“To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin.”
“And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you.”
“For a merino ram!”
“But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow.”
“To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame.”
“Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I not?”
“Porcine race; prizes—equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg, sixty francs!”
Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering like a captive dove that wants to fly away; but, whether she was trying to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure; she made a movement with her fingers. He exclaimed—
“Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!”
A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering.
“Use of oil-cakes,” continued the president. He was hurrying on: “Flemish manure-flax-growing-drainage-long leases-domestic service.”
Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and wearily, without an effort, their fingers intertwined.
“Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerriere, for fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal—value, twenty-five francs!”
“Where is Catherine Leroux?” repeated the councillor.
She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering—
“Go up!”
“Don’t be afraid!”
“Oh, how stupid she is!”
“Well, is she there?” cried Tuvache.
“Yes; here she is.”
“Then let her come up!” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 133 | “Where is Catherine Leroux?” repeated the councillor.
She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering—
“Go up!”
“Don’t be afraid!”
“Oh, how stupid she is!”
“Well, is she there?” cried Tuvache.
“Yes; here she is.”
“Then let her come up!”
Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked out two large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of washing the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and by dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at her.
Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of servitude.
“Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux!” said the councillor, who had taken the list of prize-winners from the president; and, looking at the piece of paper and the old woman by turns, he repeated in a fatherly tone—“Approach! approach!”
“Are you deaf?” said Tuvache, fidgeting in his armchair; and he began shouting in her ear, “Fifty-four years of service. A silver medal! Twenty-five francs! For you!”
Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her muttering “I’ll give it to our cure up home, to say some masses for me!”
“What fanaticism!” exclaimed the chemist, leaning across to the notary.
The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed, and now that the speeches had been read, each one fell back into his place again, and everything into the old grooves; the masters bullied the servants, and these struck the animals, indolent victors, going back to the stalls, a green-crown on their horns. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 134 | The National Guards, however, had gone up to the first floor of the town hall with buns spitted on their bayonets, and the drummer of the battalion carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe’s arm; he saw her home; they separated at her door; then he walked about alone in the meadow while he waited for the time of the banquet.
The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the guests were so crowded that they could hardly move their elbows; and the narrow planks used for forms almost broke down under their weight. They ate hugely. Each one stuffed himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every brow, and a whitish steam, like the vapour of a stream on an autumn morning, floated above the table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against the calico of the tent was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard nothing. Behind him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty plates, his neighbours were talking; he did not answer them; they filled his glass, and there was silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing noise. He was dreaming of what she had said, of the line of her lips; her face, as in a magic mirror, shone on the plates of the shakos, the folds of her gown fell along the walls, and days of love unrolled to all infinity before him in the vistas of the future.
He saw her again in the evening during the fireworks, but she was with her husband, Madame Homais, and the druggist, who was worrying about the danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left the company to go and give some advice to Binet.
The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache had, through an excess of caution, been shut up in his cellar, and so the damp powder would not light, and the principal set piece, that was to represent a dragon biting his tail, failed completely. Now and then a meagre Roman-candle went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma silently nestled against Charles’s shoulder; then, raising her chin, she watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe gazed at her in the light of the burning lanterns.
They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few crops of rain began to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head.
At this moment the councillor’s carriage came out from the inn. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 135 | They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few crops of rain began to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head.
At this moment the councillor’s carriage came out from the inn.
His coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed off, and one could see from the distance, above the hood, between the two lanterns, the mass of his body, that swayed from right to left with the giving of the traces.
“Truly,” said the druggist, “one ought to proceed most rigorously against drunkenness! I should like to see written up weekly at the door of the town hall on a board ad hoc the names of all those who during the week got intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard to statistics, one would thus have, as it were, public records that one could refer to in case of need. But excuse me!”
And he once more ran off to the captain. The latter was going back to see his lathe again.
“Perhaps you would not do ill,” Homais said to him, “to send one of your men, or to go yourself—”
“Leave me alone!” answered the tax-collector. “It’s all right!”
“Do not be uneasy,” said the druggist, when he returned to his friends. “Monsieur Binet has assured me that all precautions have been taken. No sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let us go to rest.”
“Ma foi! I want it,” said Madame Homais, yawning at large. “But never mind; we’ve had a beautiful day for our fete.”
Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with a tender look, “Oh, yes! very beautiful!”
And having bowed to one another, they separated.
Two days later, in the “Final de Rouen,” there was a long article on the show. Homais had composed it with verve the very next morning.
“Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical sun pouring its heat upon our heads?” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 136 | “Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical sun pouring its heat upon our heads?”
Then he spoke of the condition of the peasants. Certainly the Government was doing much, but not enough. “Courage!” he cried to it; “a thousand reforms are indispensable; let us accomplish them!” Then touching on the entry of the councillor, he did not forget “the martial air of our militia;” nor “our most merry village maidens;” nor the “bald-headed old men like patriarchs who were there, and of whom some, the remnants of our phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at the manly sound of the drums.” He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury, and he even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais, chemist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society.
When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. “The father embraced the son, the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one showed his humble medal with pride; and no doubt when he got home to his good housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot.
“About six o’clock a banquet prepared in the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard brought together the principal personages of the fete. The greatest cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed: Monsieur Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays, Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of a dream of the ‘Thousand and One Nights.’ Let us state that no untoward event disturbed this family meeting.” And he added “Only the absence of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the priests understand progress in another fashion. Just as you please, messieurs the followers of Loyola!”
Six weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last one evening he appeared.
The day after the show he had said to himself—“We mustn’t go back too soon; that would be a mistake.”
And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. After the hunting he had thought it was too late, and then he reasoned thus—
“If from the first day she loved me, she must from impatience to see me again love me more. Let’s go on with it!” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 137 | “If from the first day she loved me, she must from impatience to see me again love me more. Let’s go on with it!”
And he knew that his calculation had been right when, on entering the room, he saw Emma turn pale.
She was alone. The day was drawing in. The small muslin curtain along the windows deepened the twilight, and the gilding of the barometer, on which the rays of the sun fell, shone in the looking-glass between the meshes of the coral.
Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly answered his first conventional phrases.
“I,” he said, “have been busy. I have been ill.”
“Seriously?” she cried.
“Well,” said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a footstool, “no; it was because I did not want to come back.”
“Why?”
“Can you not guess?”
He looked at her again, but so hard that she lowered her head, blushing. He went on—
“Emma!”
“Sir,” she said, drawing back a little.
“Ah! you see,” replied he in a melancholy voice, “that I was right not to come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! why all the world calls you thus! Besides, it is not your name; it is the name of another!”
He repeated, “of another!” And he hid his face in his hands.
“Yes, I think of you constantly. The memory of you drives me to despair. Ah! forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell! I will go far away, so far that you will never hear of me again; and yet—to-day—I know not what force impelled me towards you. For one does not struggle against Heaven; one cannot resist the smile of angels; one is carried away by that which is beautiful, charming, adorable.”
It was the first time that Emma had heard such words spoken to herself, and her pride, like one who reposes bathed in warmth, expanded softly and fully at this glowing language.
“But if I did not come,” he continued, “if I could not see you, at least I have gazed long on all that surrounds you. At night-every night-I arose; I came hither; I watched your house, its glimmering in the moon, the trees in the garden swaying before your window, and the little lamp, a gleam shining through the window-panes in the darkness. Ah! you never knew that there, so near you, so far from you, was a poor wretch!”
She turned towards him with a sob.
“Oh, you are good!” she said.
“No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt that! Tell me—one word—only one word!” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 138 | She turned towards him with a sob.
“Oh, you are good!” she said.
“No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt that! Tell me—one word—only one word!”
And Rodolphe imperceptibly glided from the footstool to the ground; but a sound of wooden shoes was heard in the kitchen, and he noticed the door of the room was not closed.
“How kind it would be of you,” he went on, rising, “if you would humour a whim of mine.” It was to go over her house; he wanted to know it; and Madame Bovary seeing no objection to this, they both rose, when Charles came in.
“Good morning, doctor,” Rodolphe said to him.
The doctor, flattered at this unexpected title, launched out into obsequious phrases. Of this the other took advantage to pull himself together a little.
“Madame was speaking to me,” he then said, “about her health.”
Charles interrupted him; he had indeed a thousand anxieties; his wife’s palpitations of the heart were beginning again. Then Rodolphe asked if riding would not be good.
“Certainly! excellent! just the thing! There’s an idea! You ought to follow it up.”
And as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered one. She refused his offer; he did not insist. Then to explain his visit he said that his ploughman, the man of the blood-letting, still suffered from giddiness.
“I’ll call around,” said Bovary.
“No, no! I’ll send him to you; we’ll come; that will be more convenient for you.”
“Ah! very good! I thank you.”
And as soon as they were alone, “Why don’t you accept Monsieur Boulanger’s kind offer?”
She assumed a sulky air, invented a thousand excuses, and finally declared that perhaps it would look odd.
“Well, what the deuce do I care for that?” said Charles, making a pirouette. “Health before everything! You are wrong.”
“And how do you think I can ride when I haven’t got a habit?”
“You must order one,” he answered.
The riding-habit decided her.
When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature.
The next day at noon Rodolphe appeared at Charles’s door with two saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin side-saddle.
Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt she had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with his appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and white corduroy breeches. She was ready; she was waiting for him. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 139 | Justin escaped from the chemist’s to see her start, and the chemist also came out. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger a little good advice.
“An accident happens so easily. Be careful! Your horses perhaps are mettlesome.”
She heard a noise above her; it was Félicité drumming on the windowpanes to amuse little Berthe. The child blew her a kiss; her mother answered with a wave of her whip.
“A pleasant ride!” cried Monsieur Homais. “Prudence! above all, prudence!” And he flourished his newspaper as he saw them disappear.
As soon as he felt the ground, Emma’s horse set off at a gallop.
Rodolphe galloped by her side. Now and then they exchanged a word. Her figure slightly bent, her hand well up, and her right arm stretched out, she gave herself up to the cadence of the movement that rocked her in her saddle. At the bottom of the hill Rodolphe gave his horse its head; they started together at a bound, then at the top suddenly the horses stopped, and her large blue veil fell about her.
It was early in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of Yonville, with the gardens at the water’s edge, the yards, the walls and the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and never had this poor village where she lived appeared so small. From the height on which they were the whole valley seemed an immense pale lake sending off its vapour into the air. Clumps of trees here and there stood out like black rocks, and the tall lines of the poplars that rose above the mist were like a beach stirred by the wind.
By the side, on the turf between the pines, a brown light shimmered in the warm atmosphere. The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco, deadened the noise of their steps, and with the edge of their shoes the horses as they walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front of them.
Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt of the wood. She turned away from time to time to avoid his look, and then she saw only the pine trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her a little giddy. The horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked.
Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out.
“God protects us!” said Rodolphe.
“Do you think so?” she said.
“Forward! forward!” he continued. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 140 | Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out.
“God protects us!” said Rodolphe.
“Do you think so?” she said.
“Forward! forward!” he continued.
He “tchk’d” with his tongue. The two beasts set off at a trot.
Long ferns by the roadside caught in Emma’s stirrup.
Rodolphe leant forward and removed them as they rode along. At other times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves. Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the hoarse, soft cry of the ravens flying off amidst the oaks.
They dismounted. Rodolphe fastened up the horses. She walked on in front on the moss between the paths. But her long habit got in her way, although she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe, walking behind her, saw between the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white stocking, that seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness.
She stopped. “I am tired,” she said.
“Come, try again,” he went on. “Courage!”
Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man’s hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves.
“But where are we going?”
He did not answer. She was breathing irregularly. Rodolphe looked round him biting his moustache. They came to a larger space where the coppice had been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe began speaking to her of his love. He did not begin by frightening her with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.
Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the bits of wood on the ground with the tip of her foot. But at the words, “Are not our destinies now one?”
“Oh, no!” she replied. “You know that well. It is impossible!” She rose to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having gazed at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look, she said hurriedly—
“Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let us go back.”
He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated:
“Where are the horses? Where are the horses?” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 141 | “Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let us go back.”
He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated:
“Where are the horses? Where are the horses?”
Then smiling a strange smile, his pupil fixed, his teeth set, he advanced with outstretched arms. She recoiled trembling. She stammered:
“Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let me go!”
“If it must be,” he went on, his face changing; and he again became respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm. They went back. He said—
“What was the matter with you? Why? I do not understand. You were mistaken, no doubt. In my soul you are as a Madonna on a pedestal, in a place lofty, secure, immaculate. But I need you to live! I must have your eyes, your voice, your thought! Be my friend, my sister, my angel!”
And he put out his arm round her waist. She feebly tried to disengage herself. He supported her thus as they walked along.
But they heard the two horses browsing on the leaves.
“Oh! one moment!” said Rodolphe. “Do not let us go! Stay!”
He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness on the water. Faded water lilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide themselves.
“I am wrong! I am wrong!” she said. “I am mad to listen to you!”
“Why? Emma! Emma!”
“Oh, Rodolphe!” said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder.
The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him—
The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as it hummingbirds flying about had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his penknife one of the two broken bridles. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 142 | They returned to Yonville by the same road. On the mud they saw again the traces of their horses side by side, the same thickets, the same stones to the grass; nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places. Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her hand to kiss it.
She was charming on horseback—upright, with her slender waist, her knee bent on the mane of her horse, her face somewhat flushed by the fresh air in the red of the evening.
On entering Yonville she made her horse prance in the road. People looked at her from the windows.
At dinner her husband thought she looked well, but she pretended not to hear him when he inquired about her ride, and she remained sitting there with her elbow at the side of her plate between the two lighted candles.
“Emma!” he said.
“What?”
“Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre’s. He has an old cob, still very fine, only a little broken-kneed, and that could be bought; I am sure, for a hundred crowns.” He added, “And thinking it might please you, I have bespoken it—bought it. Have I done right? Do tell me?”
She nodded her head in assent; then a quarter of an hour later—
“Are you going out to-night?” she asked.
“Yes. Why?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!”
And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up in her room.
At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she again felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves rustled and the reeds whistled.
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 143 | Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the love-dream of her youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse, without anxiety, without trouble.
The day following passed with a new sweetness. They made vows to one another She told him of her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with kisses; and she looking at him through half-closed eyes, asked him to call her again by her name—to say that he loved her They were in the forest, as yesterday, in the shed of some woodenshoe maker. The walls were of straw, and the roof so low they had to stoop. They were seated side by side on a bed of dry leaves.
From that day forth they wrote to one another regularly every evening. Emma placed her letter at the end of the garden, by the river, in a fissure of the wall. Rodolphe came to fetch it, and put another there, that she always found fault with as too short.
One morning, when Charles had gone out before day break, she was seized with the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. She would go quickly to La Huchette, stay there an hour, and be back again at Yonville while everyone was still asleep. This idea made her pant with desire, and she soon found herself in the middle of the field, walking with rapid steps, without looking behind her.
Day was just breaking. Emma from afar recognised her lover’s house. Its two dove-tailed weathercocks stood out black against the pale dawn.
Beyond the farmyard there was a detached building that she thought must be the château She entered—it was if the doors at her approach had opened wide of their own accord. A large straight staircase led up to the corridor. Emma raised the latch of a door, and suddenly at the end of the room she saw a man sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She uttered a cry.
“You here? You here?” he repeated. “How did you manage to come? Ah! your dress is damp.”
“I love you,” she answered, throwing her arms about his neck. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 144 | “You here? You here?” he repeated. “How did you manage to come? Ah! your dress is damp.”
“I love you,” she answered, throwing her arms about his neck.
This first piece of daring successful, now every time Charles went out early Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe down the steps that led to the waterside.
But when the plank for the cows was taken up, she had to go by the walls alongside of the river; the bank was slippery; in order not to fall she caught hold of the tufts of faded wallflowers. Then she went across ploughed fields, in which she sank, stumbling; and clogging her thin shoes. Her scarf, knotted round her head, fluttered to the wind in the meadows. She was afraid of the oxen; she began to run; she arrived out of breath, with rosy cheeks, and breathing out from her whole person a fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. At this hour Rodolphe still slept. It was like a spring morning coming into his room.
The yellow curtains along the windows let a heavy, whitish light enter softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her eyes, while the drops of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him, and pressed her to his breast.
Then she examined the apartment, opened the drawers of the tables, combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself in his shaving-glass. Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that lay on the table by the bed, amongst lemons and pieces of sugar near a bottle of water.
It took them a good quarter of an hour to say goodbye. Then Emma cried. She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day, seeing her come unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out.
“What is the matter with you?” she said. “Are you ill? Tell me!”
At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming imprudent—that she was compromising herself. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 145 | “What is the matter with you?” she said. “Are you ill? Tell me!”
At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming imprudent—that she was compromising herself.
Gradually Rodolphe’s fears took possession of her. At first, love had intoxicated her; and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house she looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead.
One morning as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be aimed at her. It stuck out sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes, trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for wild ducks.
“You ought to have called out long ago!” he exclaimed; “When one sees a gun, one should always give warning.”
The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for a prefectorial order having prohibited duckhunting except in boats, Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them, and so he every moment expected to see the rural guard turn up. But this anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he congratulated himself on his luck and on his cuteness. At sight of Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once entered upon a conversation.
“It isn’t warm; it’s nipping.”
Emma answered nothing. He went on—
“And you’re out so early?”
“Yes,” she said stammering; “I am just coming from the nurse where my child is.”
“Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am here, just as you see me, since break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless one had the bird at the mouth of the gun—”
“Good evening, Monsieur Binet,” she interrupted him, turning on her heel.
“Your servant, madame,” he replied drily; and he went back into his tub. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 146 | “Good evening, Monsieur Binet,” she interrupted him, turning on her heel.
“Your servant, madame,” he replied drily; and he went back into his tub.
Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he would form unfavourable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the worst possible excuse, everyone at Yonville knowing that the little Bovary had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one was living in this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet, then, would guess whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening racking her brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly before her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag.
Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of distraction, to take her to the chemist’s, and the first person she caught sight of in the shop was the taxcollector again. He was standing in front of the counter, lit up by the gleams of the red bottle, and was saying—
“Please give me half an ounce of vitriol.”
“Justin,” cried the druggist, “bring us the sulphuric acid.” Then to Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais’ room, “No, stay here; it isn’t worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor,” (for the chemist much enjoyed pronouncing the word “doctor,” as if addressing another by it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). “Now, take care not to upset the mortars! You’d better fetch some chairs from the little room; you know very well that the arm-chairs are not to be taken out of the drawing-room.”
And to put his arm-chair back in its place he was darting away from the counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.
“Sugar acid!” said the chemist contemptuously, “don’t know it; I’m ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid, isn’t it?”
Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some copperwater with which to remove rust from his hunting things.
Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying—
“Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp.”
“Nevertheless,” replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, “there are people who like it.”
She was stifling.
“And give me—”
“Will he never go?” thought she.
“Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the varnished leather of my togs.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 147 | She was stifling.
“And give me—”
“Will he never go?” thought she.
“Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the varnished leather of my togs.”
The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared, Irma in her arms, Napoleon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near her papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time to time, were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.
“And how’s the little woman?” suddenly asked Madame Homais.
“Silence!” exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in his waste-book.
“Why didn’t you bring her?” she went on in a low voice.
“Hush! hush!” said Emma, pointing with her finger to the druggist.
But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh.
“How hard you are breathing!” said Madame Homais.
“Well, you see, it’s rather warm,” she replied.
So the next day they talked over how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.
All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the gate, which Charles thought lost.
To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.
“Come, now, Emma,” he said, “it is time.”
“Yes, I am coming,” she answered. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 148 | “Come, now, Emma,” he said, “it is time.”
“Yes, I am coming,” she answered.
Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned to the wall and fell asleep. She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed. Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden.
It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Léon had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought of him now.
The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations.
When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not refrain from making jokes about Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma. She would have liked to see him more serious, and even on occasions more dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of approaching steps in the alley.
“Someone is coming!” she said.
He blew out the light.
“Have you your pistols?”
“Why?”
“Why, to defend yourself,” replied Emma.
“From your husband? Oh, poor devil!” And Rodolphe finished his sentence with a gesture that said, “I could crush him with a flip of my finger.”
She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort of indecency and a naive coarseness that scandalised her.
Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had taken a great vow that he did not think in the best of taste. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 149 | Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on exchanging miniatures; they had cut off handfuls of hair, and now she was asking for a ring—a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then she talked to him of her mother—hers! and of his mother—his! Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled him with caressing words as one would have done a lost child, and she sometimes even said to him, gazing at the moon—
“I am sure that above there together they approve of our love.”
But she was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride and his sensuality. Emma’s enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up appearances, and insensibly his ways changed.
He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry, nor passionate caresses that made her mad, so that their great love, which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it. She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less.
She did not know if she regretted having yielded to him, or whether she did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him.
Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever, Rodolphe having succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own fancy; and at the end of six months, when the spring-time came, they were to one another like a married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame.
It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance of the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter. Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and read the following lines:— |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 150 | It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance of the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter. Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and read the following lines:—
“My Dear Children—I hope this will find you well, and that this one will be as good as the others. For it seems to me a little more tender, if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But next time, for a change, I’ll give you a turkeycock, unless you have a preference for some dabs; and send me back the hamper, if you please, with the two old ones. I have had an accident with my cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one windy night among the trees. The harvest has not been overgood either. Finally, I don’t know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult now to leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma.”
Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped his pen to dream a little while.
“For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught the other day at the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire a shepherd, having turned away mine because he was too dainty. How we are to be pitied with such a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I heard from a pedlar, who, travelling through your part of the country this winter, had a tooth drawn, that Bovary was as usual working hard. That doesn’t surprise me; and he showed me his tooth; we had some coffee together. I asked him if he had seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two horses in the stables, from which I conclude that business is looking up. So much the better, my dear children, and may God send you every imaginable happiness! It grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little grand-daughter, Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for her in the garden under your room, and I won’t have it touched unless it is to have jam made for her by and bye, that I will keep in the cupboard for her when she comes.
“Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best compliments, your loving father.
“Theodore Rouault.” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 151 | “Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best compliments, your loving father.
“Theodore Rouault.”
She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The spelling mistakes were interwoven one with the other, and Emma followed the kindly thought that cackled right through it like a hen half hidden in the hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the hearth, for a little grey powder slipped from the letter on to her dress, and she almost thought she saw her father bending over the hearth to take up the tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting on the footstool in the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of a bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when anyone passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness there had been at that time, what freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul’s life, in all her successive conditions of life, maidenhood, her marriage, and her love—thus constantly losing them all her life through, like a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his road.
But what then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer.
An April ray was dancing on the china of the whatnot; the fire burned; beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was bright, the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter.
In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst of the grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach at the top of a rick. The servant was holding her by her skirt. Lestiboudois was raking by her side, and every time he came near she lent forward, beating the air with both her arms.
“Bring her to me,” said her mother, rushing to embrace her. “How I love you, my poor child! How I love you!” |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 152 | “Bring her to me,” said her mother, rushing to embrace her. “How I love you, my poor child! How I love you!”
Then noticing that the tips of her ears were rather dirty, she rang at once for warm water, and washed her, changed her linen, her stockings, her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as if on the return from a long journey, and finally, kissing her again and crying a little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood quite thunderstricken at this excess of tenderness.
That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.
“That will pass over,” he concluded; “it’s a whim:”
And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did come, she showed herself cold and almost contemptuous.
“Ah! you’re losing your time, my lady!”
And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the handkerchief she took out.
Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she detested Charles; if it had not been better to have been able to love him? But he gave her no opportunities for such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the druggist came just in time to provide her with an opportunity.
He had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing club-foot, and as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations for strephopody or club-foot.
“For,” said he to Emma, “what risk is there? See—” (and he enumerated on his fingers the advantages of the attempt), “success, almost certain relief and beautifying of the patient, celebrity acquired by the operator. Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor Hippolyte of the ‘Lion d’Or’? Note that he would not fail to tell about his cure to all the travellers, and then” (Homais lowered his voice and looked round him) “who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?”
In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing proved to Emma that he was not clever; and what a satisfaction for her to have urged him to a step by which his reputation and fortune would be increased! She only wished to lean on something more solid than love.
Charles, urged by the druggist and by her, allowed himself to be persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval’s volume, and every evening, holding his head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 153 | Charles, urged by the druggist and by her, allowed himself to be persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval’s volume, and every evening, holding his head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it.
While he was studying equinus, varus, and valgus, that is to say, katastrephopody, endostrephopody, and exostrephopody (or better, the various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and outwards, with the hypostrephopody and anastrephopody), otherwise torsion downwards and upwards, Monsier Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was exhorting the lad at the inn to submit to the operation.
“You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain; it is a simple prick, like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns.”
Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid eyes.
“However,” continued the chemist, “it doesn’t concern me. It’s for your sake, for pure humanity! I should like to see you, my friend, rid of your hideous caudication, together with that waddling of the lumbar regions which, whatever you say, must considerably interfere with you in the exercise of your calling.”
Then Homais represented to him how much jollier and brisker he would feel afterwards, and even gave him to understand that he would be more likely to please the women; and the stable-boy began to smile heavily. Then he attacked him through his vanity:
“Aren’t you a man? Hang it! what would you have done if you had had to go into the army, to go and fight beneath the standard? Ah! Hippolyte!”
And Homais retired, declaring that he could not understand this obstinacy, this blindness in refusing the benefactions of science.
The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a conspiracy. Binet, who never interfered with other people’s business, Madame Lefrancois, Artémise, the neighbours, even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache—everyone persuaded him, lectured him, shamed him; but what finally decided him was that it would cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to provide the machine for the operation. This generosity was an idea of Emma’s, and Charles consented to it, thinking in his heart of hearts that his wife was an angel.
So by the advice of the chemist, and after three fresh starts, he had a kind of box made by the carpenter, with the aid of the locksmith, that weighed about eight pounds, and in which iron, wood, sheer-iron, leather, screws, and nuts had not been spared.
But to know which of Hippolyte’s tendons to cut, it was necessary first of all to find out what kind of club-foot he had. |
Madame_Bovary_-_Gustave_Flaubert | 32 | 154 | But to know which of Hippolyte’s tendons to cut, it was necessary first of all to find out what kind of club-foot he had.
He had a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which, however, did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an equinus together with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like a horse’s hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which the black nails looked as if made of iron, the clubfoot ran about like a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place, jumping round the carts, thrusting his limping foot forwards. He seemed even stronger on that leg than the other. By dint of hard service it had acquired, as it were, moral qualities of patience and energy; and when he was given some heavy work, he stood on it in preference to its fellow.
Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary to cut the tendon of Achilles, and, if need were, the anterior tibial muscle could be seen to afterwards for getting rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare to risk both operations at once; he was even trembling already for fear of injuring some important region that he did not know.
Neither Ambrose Pare, applying for the first time since Celsus, after an interval of fifteen centuries, a ligature to an artery, nor Dupuytren, about to open an abscess in the brain, nor Gensoul when he first took away the superior maxilla, had hearts that trembled, hands that shook, minds so strained as Monsieur Bovary when he approached Hippolyte, his tenotome between his fingers. And as at hospitals, near by on a table lay a heap of lint, with waxed thread, many bandages—a pyramid of bandages—every bandage to be found at the druggist’s. It was Monsieur Homais who since morning had been organising all these preparations, as much to dazzle the multitude as to keep up his illusions. Charles pierced the skin; a dry crackling was heard. The tendon was cut, the operation over. Hippolyte could not get over his surprise, but bent over Bovary’s hands to cover them with kisses.
“Come, be calm,” said the druggist; “later on you will show your gratitude to your benefactor.” |
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