1856
MADAME BOVARY
by Gustave Flaubert
translated by J. Lewis May
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
DEDICATED TO
MARIE-ANTOINE-JULES SENARD
MEMBER OF THE PARIS BAR
EX-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
FORMERLY MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR
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Dear and Illustrious Friend,
PERMIT me to inscribe your name at the head of this book, and
above its dedication; for it is mainly to you that I owe its
publication. Handled by your magnificent pleading, my work seems in my
own eyes to have acquired, as it were, an unlooked-for authority. So
accept here the tribute of my gratitude, which, however great it may
be, will never reach the heights of your own eloquence and devotion.
-
Paris, April 12th, 1857 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
1
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The uncouth schoolboy: The Bovary household
A mother's ambitions: Studies with the cure: Training
for medicine: Student life in Rouen: Failure
and success: A Practice in Normandy:
The bailiff's widow: The first
Madame Bovary.
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WE were in the prep.-room when the Head came in, followed by a new
boy in 'mufti' and a beadle carrying a big desk. The sleepers
aroused themselves, and we all stood up, putting on a startled look,
as if we had been buried in our work.
The Head motioned to us to sit down.
'Monsieur Roger,' said he in a quiet tone to the prep. master, 'I've
brought you a new boy. He's going into the second. If his conduct
and progress are satisfactory, he will be put up with the boys of
his own age.'
The new boy had kept in the background, in the corner behind the
door, almost out of sight. He was a country lad of about fifteen,
and taller than any of us. His hair was clipped straight across the
forehead, like a village choir-boy's. He seemed a decent fellow
enough, but horribly nervous. Although he was not broad across the
shoulders, his green cloth jacket, with its black buttons, looked as
if it pinched him under the arms. Protruding well beyond the cuffs, he
displayed a pair of raw, bony wrists, obviously not unaccustomed to
exposure. His legs, encased in blue stockings, issued from a pair of
drab-coloured breeches, very tightly braced. He had on a pair of thick
clumsy shoes, not particularly well cleaned and plentifully
fortified with nails.
The master began to hear the boys their work. The newcomer
listened with all his ears, drinking it in as attentively as if he had
been in church, not daring to cross his legs or to lean his elbows
on the desk, and when two o'clock came and the bell rang for
dismissal, the master had to call him back to earth and tell him to
line up with the rest of us.
It was our custom, when we came in to class, to throw our caps on
the floor, in order to have our hands free. As soon as ever we got
inside the door, we 'buzzed' them under the form, against the wall, so
as to kick up plenty of dust. That was supposed to be 'the thing'.
Whether he failed to notice this manoeuvre or whether he was too shy
to join in it, it is impossible to say, but when prayers were over
he was still nursing his cap. That cap belonged to the composite order
of head-gear, and in it the heterogeneous characteristics of the
busby, the Polish shapska, the bowler, the otterskin toque and the
cotton nightcap were simultaneously represented. It was, in short, one
of those pathetic objects whose mute unloveliness conveys the
infinitely wistful expression we may sometimes note on the face of
an idiot. Ovoid in form and stiffened with whalebone, it began with
a sort of triple line of sausage-shaped rolls running all round its
circumference; next, separated by a red band, came alternate patches
of velvet and rabbit-skin; then a kind of bag or sack which culminated
in a stiffened polygon elaborately embroidered, whence, at the end
of a long, thin cord, hung a ball made out of gold wire, by way of a
tassel. The cap was brand new, and the peak of it all shiny.
'Stand up,' said the master.
He stood up; and down went his cap. The whole class began to laugh.
He bent down to recover it. One of the boys next him jogged him with
his elbow and knocked it down again. Again he stooped to pick it up.
'You may discard your helmet,' said the master, who had a pretty
wit.
A shout of laughter from the rest of the class quite put the poor
fellow out of countenance, and so flustered was he that he didn't know
whether to keep it in his hand, put it on the floor or stick it on his
head. He sat down, and deposited it on his knees.
'Stand up,' said the master again, 'and tell me your name.'
In mumbling tones the new boy stammered out something quite
unintelligible.
'Again!'
Again came the inarticulate mumble, drowned by the shouts of the
class.
'Louder!' rapped out the master sharply; 'speak up!'
Whereupon the boy, in desperation, opened his jaws as wide as they
would go and, with the full force of his lungs, as though he were
hailing somebody at a distance, fired off the word: Charbovari.
In an instant the class was in an uproar. The din grew louder and
louder, a ceaseless crescendo crested with piercing yells- they
shrieked, they howled, they stamped their feet, bellowing at the top
of their voices: Charbovari! Charbovari! Then, after a while, the
storm began to subside. There would be sporadic outbreaks from time to
time, smothered by a terrific effort, or perhaps a titter would fizz
along a whole row, or a stifled explosion sputter out here and
there, like a half-extinguished fuse.
However, beneath a hail of 'impots', order was gradually restored.
The master- who had had it dictated, spelled out and read over to him-
had at length succeeded in getting hold of the name of Charles Bovary,
and forthwith he ordered the hapless wretch to go and sit on the
dunce's stool, immediately below the seat of authority. He started
to obey, stopped short and stood hesitating.
'What are you looking for?' said the master.
'My ca-' began the new boy timidly, casting an anxious glance around
him.
An angry shout of 'Five hundred lines for the whole class,' checked,
like the Quos ego, a fresh outburst. 'Stop your noise, then, will
you?' continued the master indignantly, mopping his brow with a
handkerchief which he had produced from the interior of his cap.
'And you, new boy there, just copy out twenty times the words
ridiculus sum!'
'There,' he went on in a milder tone, 'you'll get your cap back
all right; no one has stolen it.'
Calm reigned once more, and again the heads were bent over their
books. For two hours the new boy maintained an exemplary attitude,
despite that, every now and again, a paper pellet flicked from the
point of a pen would flatten itself against his cheek. He just wiped
the place with his hand, sitting stock-still, his eyes riveted to
the ground.
At night, in the schoolroom, he took his cuff-protectors out of
his desk, put his belongings in order, and ruled up his paper with
meticulous exactitude. We watched him pursuing his conscientious task,
looking up every word in the dictionary and taking tremendous pains.
He doubtless owed it to this anxiety to get on that he was not put
down into a lower class; for, although he knew his grammar fairly
well, his composition was not exactly a model of elegance. It was
the village cure who had started him in Latin, his parents, to
save expense, having put off sending him to school till the last
possible moment.
His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Bartholome Bovary,
ex-deputy-surgeon-major, who, somewhere about the year 1812, had
been mixed up in some more or less shady conscription affair which had
involved his resignation from the service, did, at this crisis in
his fate, make such good use of his personal attractions as to net a
dowry of sixty thousand francs, and with it a haberdasher's
daughter, who had fallen in love with his manly bearing. A fine figure
of a man, a braggart and a bully, with mustachios that made common
cause with his side-whiskers, fingers laden with rings, and clothes
you could see a mile off, he combined the dash of the military man
with the insinuating aplomb of the commercial traveller. Once safely
married, he lived for two or three years on his wife's money,
feeding like a fighting-cock, lying in bed till noon, smoking great
porcelain pipes, never coming home till the theatres closed, a great
frequenter of cafes. His father-in-law died, leaving but little behind
him, whereat he waxed indignant, started a cloth workers' business,
dropped a good deal of money and finally retired into the country
resolved to show them a thing or two in farming. But as he knew as
much about agriculture as he did about textiles, rode his horses
instead of working them, drank his cider instead of selling it, ate
the fattest chicken in his yard and greased his shooting-boots with
his own prime bacon-fat, it was soon borne in upon him that he might
as well dismiss the idea of making a fortune. At this juncture he came
across a place on the borders of Caux and Picardy, a sort of
half-farm, half-villa, which was to be had for two hundred francs a
year. He took it, and there, a disgruntled, disappointed man,
cursing his luck, at daggers drawn with the world, he shut himself
up at the age of forty-five, disgusted, as he said, with his fellow
men and determined to live to himself.
Time was when his wife had doted on him. The slavishness of her
adoration had but served to complete his estrangement from her. Once
cheerful kind-hearted and wholly affectionate, she became, as she grew
older (as wine left uncorked will turn into vinegar), morose,
shrewish, and irritable. It had given her a lot of pain, though, for a
time, she bore it uncomplainingly, when she saw him running after
all the drabs of the village and coming home night after night,
blear-eyed and smelling of drink. Finally her pride revolted. She
ceased to upbraid, smothering her rage in a stoical silence which
she maintained to the end of her days. She was always on her feet,
always busy, hurrying off to see the lawyers or to interview the
chairman of the bench, knew exactly when the bills fell due and got
them renewed. Indoors she was for ever at work, ironing, sewing,
washing, keeping an eye on the men, paying them their wages, while her
lord and master, blissfully regardless of everything and perpetually
plunged in a sort of ill-humoured torpor from which he only roused
himself to give her the rough side of his tongue, sat smoking by the
fire and spitting into the grate.
When she had a child, it must needs be put out to nurse, and when
the time came for it to be restored to the parental roof, the brat was
doted upon as if he had been a prince. His mother fed him on sweets;
his father let him run about without shoes or stockings, saying, to
show what a philosopher he was, that it would be a good thing to let
him go naked, as the animals did their offspring. In contrast to the
mother's ideas, he entertained certain manly notions regarding the
upbringing of children. He believed in hardening them off, like the
Spartans, so as to make them tough and wiry. He made his son undress
in the cold, taught him to drink neat rum and to jeer at church
processions. But the child, being a harmless little urchin, made no
great progress in these truculent accomplishments. His mother always
kept him tied up to her apron-strings; she cut out scraps for him,
told him stories, and made up countless tales full of wistful gaiety
and playful prattle. She sought solace for the loneliness of her
life by lavishing on her child all her own shattered and forsaken
ambitions. She dreamed of making a celebrity of him. She pictured
him a tall, handsome, clever man, high up in the Civil Service or
holding an important magisterial position. She taught him to read, and
even made him sing- while she accompanied him on her own old, worn-out
piano- one or two little drawing-room ballads. But this sort of
thing Monsieur Bovary, who held culture in small esteem, pronounced so
much waste of time. How were they ever going to afford to educate
him for a Government job, buy him a practice or set him up in
business? But there! a man could always make his way in the world,
if he had cheek enough. Madame Bovary bit her lip, and the child was
allowed to run wild about the village.
He went about with the farm labourers, scared the rooks by heaving
clods at them, searched the hedges for blackberries, kept the
turkeys in order with a switch, helped in the hay-field, roamed
about the woods, played hop-scotch in the church porch on rainy
days, and on Saints' days coaxed the beadle into letting him ring
the bells so that he might hang on bodily to the big rope and feel
himself borne up with it as it rose aloft. And he grew up as sturdy as
a young oak tree, developing big hands and ruddy cheeks.
When he reached the age of twelve his mother managed to arrange
for him to begin his studies. The cure was pressed into the service.
But the lessons were so short and so disconnected that they could
not be productive of much good. They were given at odd moments, in the
sacristy, standing up, hugger-mugger, between a christening and a
funeral, or the cure would send for his pupil to come to him after
the Angelus, whenever he was not obliged to go out. He would go up
into the priest's room, and they would settle themselves down to work.
The gnats and the moths would go flitting in and out of the candle
flame. Perhaps it would be hot and the child would grow sleepy, and
before long the old man, dropping off into a doze with his hands
folded over his stomach, would be snoring steadily, with his mouth
wide open. At other times, when his reverence, returning home after
giving the sacraments to some sick parishioner, saw Charles
helter-skeltering about the woods and fields, he would call him,
lecture him for a quarter of an hour, and seize the opportunity of
making him conjugate 'his verb' at the foot of a tree. Then,
perhaps, it would begin to rain, or someone they knew would come
along, and lessons would be over for that day. Howbeit, the cure
always had a good word for his pupil, and even went the length of
saying that the young man had a remarkable memory.
But things couldn't go on like that. Madame bestirred herself, and
Monsieur was shamed, or more probably wearied, into capitulating.
All the same they decided to wait another year, till the youngster had
made his first communion.
After that, yet another six months went by; but the following year
Charles was definitely entered at the College at Rouen, whither his
father took him in person towards the end of October, about the time
when Saint Romain's Fair was on.
It would be impossible for any of us to recall exactly what he was
like in those days. He was of the 'middling' kind; he played during
recreation, stuck at his homework, paid attention in class, slept
soundly in the dormitory, and ate well in the refectory. He was
under the tutelage of a wholesale ironmonger in the Rue de la
Ganterie, who had him out once a month, of a Sunday, after he had shut
up shop. He would send him down to the harbour to look at the shipping
and get him back to the College again by seven, in good time for
supper. Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother in
red ink, and stuck it down with three seals. Then he rubbed up his
history notes, or read some Anacharsis, a volume of which was
kicking about in the schoolroom. When we went out walking he used to
talk to the servant, who, like him, came from the country.
By dint of diligent plodding, he always managed to keep about the
middle of the class. Once, indeed, he scored a proxime accessit in
Natural History. But when he had done his third year his people took
him away from the College, so that he might devote himself to his
medical studies, for they were convinced he could get his 'prelim.'
without any special coaching.
His mother got him a room on the fourth floor of a house overlooking
the Eau de Robec, the owner of which, a dyer by trade, she happened to
know. She made arrangements for his board, got together some odds
and ends of furniture, a table and a couple of chairs or so, sent
him an old cherry-wood bedstead from home, and bought a little
cast-iron stove and plenty of wood, to keep her poor boy warm. Then,
when the week was up, she took her departure, having begged and prayed
him over and over again to behave himself and go straight, now that
she would no longer be there to look after him.
The Syllabus of Lectures which he read on the notice-board put his
head in a whirl. There were lectures on Anatomy, lectures on
Pathology, lectures on Physiology, lectures on Dispensing, on
Chemistry, Botany, Clinics and Therapeutics, to say nothing of Hygiene
and Materia Medica, names of whose etymology he was completely
ignorant and which seemed to him like so many mysterious portals
leading to sanctuaries peopled with august shadows.
He could make nothing of it. He listened as hard as he could, but he
couldn't get hold of it at all. However, he persevered, had
notebooks specially bound, attended every lecture, never missed a
demonstration. He got through his little daily task like a mill
horse that plods round and round in the same place with his eyes
blindfolded, never knowing in the least what it is he is grinding at.
To save expense, his mother sent him every week, by the carrier, a
piece of baked veal, off which he would make his lunch of a morning
when he got back from the hospital. Then away he would rush to work,
to the operating theatre or the infirmary, and then back home again
through all the maze of streets. Of an evening, after a modest
dinner with his landlord, he would go up to his room and set to work
again in his damp clothes, which would steam on his body as he sat
close up to the little glowing stove.
Of a fine summer evening, when the warm streets are deserted and the
servant-girls play battledore and shuttlecock outside the houses, he
would open his window and sit gazing out with his head on his hand.
The river, which makes this part of Rouen look like a little
workaday Venice, flowed on beneath him, yellow, violet or blue,
between its bridges and its barriers. He would watch the workmen
stooping down at the water's edge and letting the current flow over
their arms. On poles on the warehouse roofs, skeins of cotton hung
drying in the air. In front of him, beyond the housetops, was a
great expanse of clear sky, with the red sun sinking slowly to its
rest. How good it must be out yonder! How cool in the shadows of the
beechwoods. And then he dilated his nostrils to breathe in the
fragrant scents of the country which died away before they reached
him.
He lost flesh, grew tall and lanky, and his face took on a sort of
wistful look that made it almost interesting.
It was natural that from mere heedlessness he should sooner or later
discard all the good resolutions he had taken upon himself. One day he
missed going round the ward, the day after, his lecture, and,
gradually acquiring a taste for doing nothing, he ended by not turning
up at all.
He became a habitue of the cabaret, and a domino enthusiast. To go
and shut himself up, night after night, in a dingy public room and
rattle about little black-spotted bone cubes on a marble-topped table,
seemed to him a precious symbol of freedom and raised him in his own
esteem.
It was something like an initiation into the social world, a taste
of forbidden fruit. And as he put his hand on the door-knob to go
in, he experienced an almost voluptuous pleasure. And thus many things
which had been repressed within him began to expand and blossom forth.
He learnt by heart some popular songs, with which he would greet his
boon companions, went mad over Beranger, acquired the secret of making
punch, and at length became acquainted with the mysteries of Love.
As a result of these preparatory activities, he failed completely in
his examination. His parents were expecting him home that same night
to celebrate his success.
He set off on foot and halted at the entrance to the village,
where he sent for his mother and made a clean breast of it. She made
excuses for him; said it wasn't his fault, the examiners had treated
him unfairly. She managed to put a little heart into him and said
she would make matters all right at home. Not until five years later
did Monsieur Bovary learn the truth. It was ancient history by that
time, and he took it calmly. Besides he could not bring himself to
believe that any child of his could be lacking in brains.
Charles got down to work again. This time he permitted himself no
interruptions and, having ground up all his answers by heart, he got
through- and pretty creditably. What a red-letter day for his
mother! They gave a big dinner.
And now where was he to practise? At Tostes, because at Tostes there
was only one doctor, and he a very old man. For a long time past
Madame Bovary had been waiting for him to die, and now, before the old
fellow had packed up his traps for the next world, Charles came and
set up opposite, as his accredited successor.
But rearing her son, making a doctor of him and setting him up in
practice at Tostes was not the whole of the business. He must have a
wife. She found him one, the forty-five-year-old widow of a Dieppe
bailiff, with an income of twelve hundred a year.
Though she was plain, as dry as a chip and as spotty as a
fig-pudding, Madame Dubuc was decidedly not lacking in suitors. In
order to gain her end, Madame Bovary was obliged to oust them all, and
she displayed especial skill in checkmating the manoeuvres of a
pork-butcher rival who was strongly backed by the clergy.
Charles looked on matrimony as a means of bettering his lot; he
thought it would give him a free hand to do as he liked, and spend his
money as he thought fit. He was wrong. His wife wore the breeches. She
told him what to say, and what not to say, in company. She made him
keep the Friday abstinence, wear the clothes she approved of, and
worry the patients when they did not pay up. She opened his letters,
watched his movements and, when he had any women patients in the
surgery, she would listen, through the partition, to all that went on.
Every morning she must have her cup of chocolate, and be waited on
hand and foot. She was always complaining about her nerves, her
chest and her spirits. The sound of footsteps made her feel ill. If
they left her alone, the solitude was hateful; if they came back, it
was doubtless to see the last of her. At night, when Charles came
in, she drew her long bony arms from under the bedclothes, put them
round his neck and, making him sit down on the edge of the bed,
began to tell him all her troubles;- he was beginning to forget
about her, he loved someone else. Yes, they had told her she was fated
to be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for something to make her
better, and for a little more love.
2
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Night call: Monsieur Rouault's broken leg:
A Norman farm: Mademoiselle Emma: Visits to
les Bertaux: Heloise is jealous:
Love in absence: The defaulting lawyer:
The doctor is widowed.
-
ONE night about eleven they were aroused by the clatter of hoofs
that came to a standstill outside their house. The servant pushed open
the attic window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street
below. He had come for the doctor and had a letter with him.
Nastasie went down shivering with cold, proceeded to unlock the door
and drew back the bolts one by one. The man left his horse standing,
and, following close on the servant's heels, came right into the
bedroom. From his grey woollen cap he extracted a letter wrapped up in
a piece of cloth and delivered it carefully into the doctor's hands.
Charles raised himself on his elbow to read it. Nastasie stood close
up to the bed holding the light. Madame, being bashful, kept her
face to the wall.
The letter, sealed with a little blue seal, begged Monsieur Bovary
to come at once to a farm at les Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now from
Tostes to les Bertaux is a good eighteen miles across country, by
way of Longueville and Saint Victor. The night was dark. Madame Bovary
was afraid some accident would befall her husband, so it was decided
that the farmer's man should go on ahead and that the Doctor should
follow on, three hours later, when the moon got up. They were to
send a boy to meet him to show him the way to the farm and open the
gates.
About four o'clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his
cloak, set out for les Bertaux. He was still drowsy with the warmth of
the slumbers from which he had been aroused, and the steady jog-trot
of his nag lulled him off into a doze. Once, when the animal pulled up
of its own accord in front of one of those holes surrounded with furze
which are dug alongside the furrows, Charles woke with a start,
remembered about the broken leg and tried to call to mind everything
he knew about fractures. The rain had ceased; day was beginning to
break and, on the boughs of the leafless apple-trees, the birds sat
quite still, puffing out their little feathers against the chill
morning air. The level country stretched away into the distance, far
as the eye could see, and the clumps of trees round the farm-houses
made, here and there, at distant intervals, a splash of dark violet on
the wide grey surface, which melted away on the horizon into the wan
spaces of the sky. Charles, from time to time, would open his eyes,
then, his senses growing weary and sleepiness coming over him again,
he would soon relapse into a kind of torpor, in which his recent
sensations mingled with memories of the past, and he saw himself in
a sort of double vision, at once a student and a married man, lying in
his bed, as he was an hour or so ago, and somehow, at the same time,
walking through the ward of a hospital as in days gone by. The warm
smell of surgical dressings blended with the fragrance of the
morning dew; he heard the iron rings running along the curtain rods of
the beds and the breathing of his wife as she lay asleep.... As he was
riding through Vassonville he noticed a boy sitting on the turf at the
edge of a ditch.
'Are you the doctor?' asked the child.
And when Charles said yes, he picked up his sabots and ran
barefoot on in front.
The doctor, as he rode along, gathered from his guide's discourse
that Monsieur Rouault was a very well-to-do farmer. He had broken
his leg the night before, coming back from a neighbour's where he
had been celebrating Twelfth Night. He had lost his wife two years
ago, and had no one with him now but his daughter, who helped keep
house for him.
The ruts in the road grew deeper. Les Bertaux was close at hand. The
small boy, slipping through a gap in the hedge, vanished from sight,
reappearing at the entrance to a paddock in time to open the gate. The
horse slithered on the wet grass. Charles bent his head to clear the
branches. The dogs in their kennels barked as they tugged at their
chains. As he rode into the yard his horse took fright and shied.
It was a prosperous-looking farm. In the stables, over the lower
half of the doors, you could see great cart-horses pulling quietly
at their hay. A big, steaming manure-heap was piled up along by the
wall of the buildings, and among the fowls and the turkeys strutted
five or six peacocks, the pride and glory of every Caux farmyard.
The sheep-fold was long and the barn was lofty, and the walls of it
were as smooth as the palm of your hand. In the shed were two big
carts and four ploughs, complete with whips, collars and harness,
the blue cloth coverings of which were getting coated with the fine
dust that fell from the granaries. The yard sloped upwards, and was
planted with trees spaced at regular intervals, and the cheery clamour
of a flock of geese came clanging back from the neighbourhood of the
pond.
A young woman wearing a dress of blue merino adorned with a triple
row of flounces came to the threshold to receive Monsieur Bovary.
She showed him into the kitchen, where a big fire was blazing, round
which the men's dinner was cooking in pots and pans of various
dimensions. Some damp clothes were drying in the great open chimney.
The shovel, the tongs and the nose of the bellows, all of colossal
size, shone like burnished steel, and all along the walls hung an
array of kitchen utensils in whose polished surface was reflected
the flickering light of the fire and the first gleams of the sun
that now came stealing through the windows.
Charles went upstairs to see the patient. He found him in bed
sweating under the blankets. He had flung his cotton night-cap to
the other end of the room. He was a fat little man of somewhere
about fifty, fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, and bald in front. And he
was wearing ear-rings. Beside him, on a chair, was a big decanter of
spirits, from which he would pour himself out a tot every now and
again to warm up his stomach a little. But as soon as he set eyes on
the doctor, he drew a dismal face, and instead of cursing, as he had
been doing for twelve hours past, fell to moaning feebly.
The fracture was a simple one, without any sort of complication.
Charles could not have wished for a more straightforward job. He
remembered the bedside manner of the hospital doctors, and fell to
comforting his patient with all manner of facetious remarks,
chirurgeonly caresses, which are like oil on a bistoury. In order to
improvise some splints, someone was sent to fetch a bundle of laths
from the cartshed. Charles selected one, cut it into sections and
rubbed it smooth with a piece of broken glass, while the servant
girl tore some linen into strips for bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma
did her best to sew some wads. As she was a long time finding her
needle-case, her father lost patience. She said nothing, but all the
time she was sewing she kept pricking her fingers, which she forthwith
put in her mouth to suck.
Charles was surprised to see how white her nails were. They were
brilliant and tapering, polished like bits of Dieppe ivory and trimmed
like almonds. Her hands, however, were not beautiful- perhaps a
shade too red and a little hard in the fingers. She herself was too
tall, and her figure lacked the soft, caressing outline. Her good
point was her eyes. They were dark, but her long lashes made them seem
black, and she looked at you frankly, with a sort of fearless candour.
As soon as the leg was set, the doctor was invited by Monsieur
Rouault himself to 'have a bite' before he left.
Charles went down into the room below. Two places, gleaming with
silver plate, had been laid on a small table at the foot of a great
four-poster hung with chintz with pictures of Turks on it. From an
oaken press, opposite the window, came a smell of iris and damp
sheets. On the floor, in the corner, stood a few sacks of corn. They
represented the overflow from the barn hard by, which was reached up
three stone steps. By way of ornament there hung from a nail in the
middle of the wall, the green paint of which was coming off in scales,
a head of Minerva in black crayon. It was in a gilt frame, and
inscribed at the bottom, in Gothic characters, 'To my dear Papa'.
They began by talking about the patient, and, from that, went on
to the weather and the severe cold, and the wolves that roamed the
country by night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not care much for the
country, especially now she had almost all the responsibility of the
farm on her shoulders. The room was chilly, and she shivered all the
time she was eating. This helped to display her full lips, which she
had a trick of biting whenever there was a lull in the conversation.
Her neck was encircled by a white, turned-down collar. Her hair,
which was so smooth that the two dark strands seemed to be all of a
piece, was parted in the middle by a thin line that dipped slightly
with the curve of her skull and, almost hiding her ears, was
gathered together behind in a copious chignon. Her hair was waved
about the temples, a thing which our country doctor had never seen
in his life before. She had plenty of colour in her cheeks, and wore a
pair of tortoiseshell eye-glasses, man-fashion, on a cord attached
to a button of her bodice.
When Charles, who had been upstairs to say good-bye to the farmer,
came back into the parlour before leaving he found her standing by the
window looking out into the garden at the bean-sticks that had been
blown down by the wind. She turned round.
'Are you looking for anything?' she asked.
'Thanks, I'm trying to find my riding-whip,' he replied. And he
began to grope about on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs.
It had slipped down between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle
Emma caught sight of it, and began to reach down over the sacks.
Charles gallantly hastened to her assistance, and as he too extended
his arm in the same direction, he felt the young woman's back, as
she bent down, rubbing against his chest. She got up, red all over,
and, looking at him over her shoulder, handed him his whip.
Instead of returning to les Bertaux three days later, as he said
he would, he came back the very next day, and thereafter he put in
an appearance regularly twice a week, over and above the extra
visits he made every now and again as if by accident.
Meanwhile the case went on satisfactorily; the patient's progress
was quite normal, and when, after forty-six days, Monsieur Rouault
started to try and get about without assistance, Monsieur Bovary began
to be regarded as a highly capable practitioner. Pere Rouault said the
very best doctors in Yvetot or Rouen itself could not have treated him
better.
As for Charles, he did not ask himself how it was he liked going
to les Bertaux. If he had thought about it he would have, no doubt,
put it down to its being a serious case, or to the fees he expected to
get. But was that really the reason that made these visits to the farm
so pleasant an interlude in the dull monotony of his daily life? On
those days he would get up betimes, start off at the gallop and ride
hard all the way, dismounting to wipe his boots on the grass and to
put on his black gloves before going into the house. He liked to
find himself riding into the yard, he liked the pressure of the gate
against his shoulder as he pushed it open, the cock crowing on the
wall, the farm lads as they came forward to meet him. He liked the
barn, and the stables, and Pere Rouault, who patted the palm of his
hand and said he had saved his life; he liked the sound of
Mademoiselle Emma's little clogs on the clean stone floor of the
kitchen. Her high heels made her seem a little taller as she walked in
front of him, and the wooden soles made a little sharp tapping sound
as they clicked against the leather of her boots.
When he took his departure, she always came with him to the top of
the steps, and if his horse had not been brought round, she would wait
there with him. There was no talking to be done, however, because they
had already said good-bye. And as she stood there, out in the open,
the wind would flurry the little ringlets at the back of her neck,
or set the strings of her apron dancing and twisting like streamers
about her hips. Once it happened to be thawing- the trees were all
running with water and the melting snow was dripping from the roofs.
She was on the doorstep, and she ran back for a parasol and put it up.
The parasol was a silk one, iridescent as a pigeon's breast, and the
sun shining through it cast little coloured flecks of dancing light on
the whiteness of her skin. She smiled beneath it at the gentle warmth,
and you could hear the sound of the drops as they fell, one by one, on
the taut surface of the silk.
When Charles first began his visits to les Bertaux, Madame Bovary
junior never omitted to inquire for the patient, and she even went the
length of opening Monsieur Rouault's account on a nice clean page in
her double-entry ledger. But when she discovered that he had a
daughter, she made further investigations, and learned that
Mademoiselle Rouault had been to school at an Ursuline convent, that
she had been well 'finished' as the saying goes, and that in
consequence she had learnt dancing, geography, drawing, embroidery and
the piano. This was unendurable.
'So that is why he always looks so pleased when he is going to see
her. That is why he puts on his best waistcoat and risks spoiling it
in the rain. Horrid woman!'
And she took an instinctive dislike to her. At first she relieved
her feelings by delivering herself of little veiled allusions. Charles
did not take them in. Then she indulged in more pointed remarks, which
he ignored for fear of a scene. At last she told him to his face
what she thought of him, and he didn't know what to reply. What did he
want to keep on going to les Bertaux for? Monsieur Rouault was all
right again now, and besides that, he hadn't paid his bill. Ah, she
knew all about it! There was someone else there, someone who was a
good talker, someone who was accomplished and clever. That's what he
was so fond of. He liked young, town-bred ladies! And then she would
start off again:
'Old Rouault's daughter town-bred! Go along with you! Why, the
grandfather was a shepherd, and a cousin of theirs nearly found
himself in court for a piece of sharp practice in some dispute or
other. She's a nice one to put on airs and to go flaunting it in a
silk dress at church on Sunday, as though she fancied herself a
countess. Why, if it hadn't been that he did pretty well on his
colza crop last year, the poor man would have been hard put to it to
keep his head above water.'
Charles yielded from very weariness, and gave up his visits to les
Bertaux. Heloise, after much weeping and a great outburst of
affection, had made him take his Bible oath not to go there any
more. And so he knuckled under. Nevertheless, his eagerness to go made
him ashamed of the servility of his conduct, and, with a sort of
childish hypocrisy, he persuaded himself that because he was forbidden
to see her, it was lawful for him to love her. And then, the widow was
lean and long in the tooth. All the year round she wore a little black
shawl with the point between her shoulder-blades. Her lank, hard
figure was encased in sheath-like dresses that, being always too short
for her, showed off her feet and the ribands of her broad shoes
criss-crossed over her grey worsted stockings.
Every now and again Charles's mother would come to stay, but after a
few days the daughter-in-law seemed to sharpen her on her own file,
and then they would be at him like a couple of razors, scarifying
him with all manner of criticism and fault-finding. He oughtn't to eat
so much. What did he want to go and offer wine for to every chance
comer? What stupid obstinacy not to wear woollen underclothes!
It came to pass that one fine day in the early spring a notary of
Ingouville who had charge of the widow Dubuc's investments sailed away
and took with him all his clients' money. Heloise, it is true, still
had a share in a ship valued at six thousand francs and her house in
the Rue Saint-Francois; nevertheless, of all that fortune of hers
she had made such a song about, nothing save a few bits of furniture
and some odds and ends of wearing apparel had made its appearance in
the household. The thing had to be looked into thoroughly. The house
in Dieppe was mortgaged up to the hilt; what she had had with the
notary God only knew, and her share in the vessel was not more than
two hundred pounds. So she had lied, the good lady! Monsieur Bovary,
senior, flew into such a rage that he took up a chair and smashed it
on the stone floor, and told his wife she had been the ruin of her
son, yoking him to a jade like that, whose harness wasn't worth as
much as her skin. They came to Tostes and insisted on having things
out. There was a scene. Heloise in tears threw herself into her
husband's arms and implored him to defend her against his parents.
Charles tried to stand up for her. The old people were indignant and
left the house.
But the blow had struck home. A week later, as she was hanging out
the washing in the yard, she was seized with an attack of
bloodspitting, and the next day, while Charles had his back to her,
drawing the window curtain, she exclaimed, 'Ah! mon Dieu!' heaved a
sigh and went off unconscious.
She was dead! What an astounding thing!
When all was over at the cemetery Charles returned to the house.
There was no one downstairs. He went up into the bedroom and saw her
dress hanging up at the foot of the bed. Then, leaning against the
secretaire, he remained there till it was dark, lost in sorrowful
meditation. After all, she had loved him.
3
-
The bill is paid: Pull yourself together:
Advantages of independence: A visit to Emma:
What will become of her?: Father and
daughter: The opened shutter:
Preparations for marriage.
-
ONE morning Pere Rouault came to pay Charles for setting his
broken leg: seventy-five francs in forty-sou pieces, and a turkey.
He had heard of his loss and consoled him as best he could.
'I know what it is,' said he, clapping him on the shoulder. 'I've
been through the same thing myself. When I lost my poor wife I went
wandering about the fields in order to be alone. I chucked myself down
under a tree, called on God to hear me and told Him all kinds of silly
things. I wished I had been like the moles that I saw on the
branches with maggots swarming in their bellies- I wished myself dead,
in a word. And when I thought that other men, at that very moment, had
nice little wives to cuddle, I began to bang at the ground with my
stick. I was nearly mad, and went right off my food. The very
thought of going into a cafe turned me sick. You wouldn't believe.
Well, slowly and surely, as one day sent another day packing, spring
following on winter and autumn on summer, it began to ebb away bit
by bit, crumb by crumb. It went, it departed- it went under, I
should say, for you've always got something of it deep down inside,
a weight on your chest, as you might say. But because we've all got to
face it, there's no call for a man to fret himself into the grave
before his time or to want to die himself, because other folks be
dead. Pull yourself together, Monsieur Bovary; you'll get over it.
Come and see us; my daughter thinks a deal about you, you know, and
she says you would forget things that way. Spring will soon be here.
Come and knock over a rabbit or two in our warrens; it will be a
change for you.'
Charles took his advice. He revisited les Bertaux, and found
everything there just the same as last time, that is to say just as it
was five months previously. The pear trees were already in bloom,
and Farmer Rouault, now firmly established on his legs again, was
always in and out, and that made things more lively.
Deeming that it behoved him to lavish every possible attention on
the doctor, in view of the bereavement he had sustained, he begged him
not to remove his hat, spoke to him in a subdued voice as though he
were talking to an invalid, and went the length of pretending to be
annoyed that they had not got some special delicacy for him such as
a little jug or two of cream, or some stewed pears. He told him a
few stories; Charles was surprised to find himself laughing; but
suddenly he would remember his wife and grow grave again. Then the
coffee came in, and he thought about her no more.
He thought of her less and less as he got used to living alone.
The unaccustomed sweets of independence soon made his solitude more
bearable. He was free now to have his meals when he liked, he could go
out and come in without having to give explanations, and when he was
very tired he could stretch out his arms and legs in bed as far as
he liked. And then he pampered himself, indulged in self-pity, and let
people console him to the top of their bent. Moreover his wife's death
had been rather an advantage to him professionally, because, for a
whole month, people had said nothing else but 'Poor young fellow! What
a dreadful blow for him!' So his name had got about and his practice
had increased; and then again, he could go to les Bertaux just when he
thought he would. He was vaguely optimistic and indefinably happy; and
surveying himself in the glass as he brushed his whiskers, he
thought he had got better looking.
He arrived at the farm one day about three o'clock; everyone was out
in the fields. He went into the kitchen, but did not see Emma at
first; the jalousies were closed. Through the slits in the wood, the
sunlight fell on the flagstones in long, slender rays, which were
broken into various angles by the furniture, and shone tremulously
on the ceiling. Flies on the table crawled up the glasses that had not
been cleared away and buzzed as they fell drowning in the dregs of the
cider. The daylight which shone down the chimney imparted a velvety
look to the soot in the fireplace and gave a bluish tinge to the
cold ashes. Between the window and the hearth sat Emma at her
needlework. She had no scarf about her neck, and tiny drops of
perspiration were visible on her shoulders.
Like all country people, she asked him to have something to drink.
He said no, but she pressed him, and at last, with a laugh, invited
him to take a glass of liqueur with her. She went to the cupboard
and brought out a bottle of curacoa, reached down two small glasses,
filled one up to the brim, poured two or three drops into the other
and, clinking it with the doctor's, put it to her lips. As it was
nearly empty, she leaned back to drink, and with her head flung
back, her lips pouted and her neck thrust forward she began to laugh
because she could not taste anything, and at the same time, the tip of
her tongue, peeping out between her dainty teeth, made little darts at
the bottom of the glass.
Then she sat down and took up her work again- a white cotton
stocking which she was darning. She worked with her head bent forward.
She did not talk, nor did Charles. The breeze stealing in under the
door blew a little dust along the stone floor. He watched it as it
eddied about, and the only sound he could hear was a buzzing in his
head and the cackling of a hen that had laid an egg in the yard
outside. From time to time Emma would freshen her cheeks with the
palms of her hands, which she cooled again by laying them on the
knob of the great andirons.
She had been complaining ever since the spring began of fits of
deafness; she wondered whether sea-bathing would do her any good.
She began to talk about her convent, and Charles about his college
days; the words began to flow. They went upstairs to her room. She
showed him her old music-books, the little volumes she had had given
her as prizes, and the oak-leaf crowns lying neglected on the floor of
a cupboard. And she went on to speak of her mother, of the cemetery,
and even pointed out the bed in the garden where she gathered
flowers the first Friday in every month, to lay on her mother's grave.
But the gardener they had now didn't know his work; servants were so
unsatisfactory. She would have liked to live in town, at all events
during the winter months, although perhaps the long days made the
country still more boring in the summer; and according to the kind
of thing she was saying, her voice would be clear, shrill, or,
suddenly sinking into languor, linger in modulations which ended
almost in a whisper, as if she were speaking to herself- now joyfully,
with wide-open, innocent eyes, now with lids half-closed, and a look
of boredom, as her thoughts wandered aimlessly.
That night, as he was riding home, Charles recalled, one by one, the
various things she had said, trying to remember them exactly, to
discover their implications, so as to give himself an idea of the sort
of existence that had been hers in the times before he knew her. But
he was never able to visualize her in his thoughts as any different
from what she was when he saw her for the first time, or, just now,
when he had left her. Then he began to wonder what she would grow like
if she married- and whom she would marry. Alas! old Rouault was very
well off, and she herself... so beautiful! But Emma's countenance
would persist in coming back before his eyes, and a monotonous
something, like the buzzing of a gnat, kept sounding in his ears:
'Suppose you got married; suppose you got married'. That night he
could not sleep: something seemed to grip his throat, he felt thirsty.
He got up, took a drink from the water-jug and opened his window.
The sky was filled with stars, a warm breeze was blowing, and a long
way off, some dogs were barking. He turned his head towards les
Bertaux.
Thinking that, after all, he had nothing to lose by it, Charles made
up his mind to take the fatal step when occasion offered. But every
time occasion did offer, the fear of being unable to express himself
suitably, sealed his lips.
Farmer Rouault would not in the least have minded getting his
daughter off his hands, for she was very little use in the house.
Inwardly he made excuses for her, telling himself that she had too
much brains for farming, a calling on which a curse must rest, since
no one ever met a farmer who was really rich. So far from making a
fortune, the worthy man made a loss every year, for, if he excelled in
doing a deal, where he was up in all the tricks of the trade, for
farming in the strict sense of the word, and the internal management
of the place, you couldn't have found a man more thoroughly
unsuited. He always had his hand in his pocket, and spared no
expense in the matter of living, for he liked good food, a good fire
and a good bed. His tastes ran to rich cider, underdone legs of
mutton, coffee with a generous 'dash'. He always took his meals alone,
in the kitchen, by the fire, on a little table that was brought to him
already laid, as they do on the stage.
When, therefore, he noticed that Charles's cheeks flushed when he
was near his daughter, an indication that one of these days he would
be asking to marry her, he pondered the whole matter over in his mind.
He certainly thought him a little bit of a muff and not exactly the
sort of fellow he would have chosen for a son-in-law; but he was
said to be steady, thrifty and well educated, and doubtless he would
not be too exacting about the dowry. And seeing that Farmer Rouault
had been obliged to sell twenty-two acres of land, that he owed
substantial sums to the mason and the harness-maker, and that the
shaft of the cider-press was in need of repair, he concluded by saying
to himself:
'If he asks me, I shall let him have her.'
At Michaelmas Charles came to spend three days at les Bertaux. The
last of them had gone by like the other two, and he had put off
speaking from one quarter of an hour to another. Farmer Rouault had
come out to set him on his homeward way. They had reached a dip in the
road and were about to say good-bye. It was now or never. Charles gave
himself to the turn of the hedge, and at last, when they had passed
it, he said, almost inaudibly:
'Maitre Rouault, I've something I want to say to you.'
They stopped short. Charles held his peace.
'Come now, out with it! What, d'you think I don't know what it's all
about?' said the farmer, laughing quietly.
'Pere Rouault... pere Rouault...' stammered Charles.
'Why, for my part,' the farmer went on, 'there's nothing I should
like better. But, though the little maid is no doubt of the same
mind as I be, we must put the question to her, all the same. You go
on, then; I'll go back to the farm. If it's "yes", you understand
there'll be no need for you to come back, because of the people about.
Besides, it would be too much of a shock for her. But to put your mind
at rest, I'll push the shutter right back against the wall. You'll
be able to see it from the back there, by leaning over the hedge.'
So saying, he took his departure.
Charles tied his horse to a tree. He hurried back to take up his
position, and waited. Half an hour went by, then nineteen more
minutes, which he timed by his watch. Suddenly something clattered
against the wall. The shutter was right back and the catch still
rattling.
Next day, by nine o'clock, he was at the farm. Emma blushed when
he came in, trying to laugh a little, too, to carry it off. Farmer
Rouault embraced his son-in-law elect. Then they began to talk about
the arrangements. They had plenty of time before them, since the
wedding could not take place with any decency till Charles was out
of mourning, and that meant about the spring of the following year.
They went through the winter with this plan in view. Mademoiselle
Rouault was busy with her trousseau. Part of it was ordered from
Rouen; her night-dresses and night-caps she made herself, from
patterns lent her by friends. Whenever Charles visited the farm, the
wedding was the one topic of conversation. They discussed in what room
they should have the wedding breakfast; they wondered how many
plates would be wanted and what eatables they should have.
Emma, for her part, would have liked a torchlight wedding; but
Farmer Rouault couldn't understand that at all. So they had a great
party where they sat down forty-three to table and remained there
sixteen hours, a party which started again next day, and went on, more
or less, for several days following.
4
-
Wedding guests: Country finery:
The procession from the church: A rural banquet:
Confectioner's masterpiece: After the
feast: The bride's parents:
An old man's memories.
-
THE guests arrived betimes, in all sorts of conveyances- one-horse
tilt-carts, waggonettes, old cabriolets minus their hoods, carriers'
vans with leather curtains. The young folk from the villages close
by drove up in farm carts, standing up in rows, holding on to the side
rails to prevent themselves from falling, jolting along at a short,
sharp trot. Some of the people came from thirty miles away, from
such places as Goderville, Normanville and Cany. All the relations
on both sides had been invited. Old quarrels had been patched up,
and letters sent to friends they had not heard of for ages.
From time to time the crack of a whip was heard the other side of
the hedge. Then the gate would swing open, and a cart would enter.
It would drive at a canter right up to the doorstep, pull up with a
jerk and discharge its occupants, who would clamber down on either
side, rubbing the stiffness out of their knees and stretching their
arms. The ladies, in their best bonnets, wore town-made costumes, gold
watch-chains, tippets with ends crossing over at the waist, or
little coloured kerchiefs fastened behind with a pin and showing a
little bit of neck at the back. The little boys, dressed like their
papas, seemed rather ill at ease in their new clothes (a good few of
them were sporting the first pair of boots they had ever had in
their lives), and alongside of them, not daring to utter a word, and
wearing her white first communion dress lengthened for the occasion,
you might see a gawky girl of anything from fourteen to sixteen- a
sister or a cousin, no doubt- all red and flustered, her hair
plastered down with strong-smelling pomade and terribly afraid of
soiling her gloves. As there were not enough stable-boys to
unharness all the horses, the gentlemen rolled up their sleeves and
turned-to themselves. According to their different social grades
they wore dress-coats, frock-coats, jackets, and cardigans- fine black
suits, venerable symbols of family respectability which only issued
from the press on occasions of special solemnity; frock-coats with
voluminous skirts floating in the wind, collars like cylinders and
pockets as big as sacks; coats of coarse homespun, of the sort usually
worn with a cap with a band of copper round the peak; very short
jackets with two buttons in the small of the back, close together like
a pair of eyes, the abbreviated tails of which looked as if they had
been cut out of a single block with a carpenter's chisel. Yet others
(but they, for sure, would have to sit below the salt) were wearing
their party smocks, that is to say, smocks with the collar turned down
over the shoulder, the back gathered in with little puckers, and
encircled, very low down, by an embroidered belt.
And the shirts bulged out on the chests like breastplates. All the
gentlemen had had their hair cut, their ears were sticking out from
their heads, and they had all shaved especially close for the
occasion. Some of them who had got up before it was light, when it was
really too dark to shave, had gashes running crosswise under the nose,
or pieces as big as shillings taken out of their cheeks. The cold
air blowing against them on the journey had inflamed them so that
their broad, highly polished countenances were diversified like marble
with pink patches.
The Mairie being but a mile or so from the farm they went on foot,
and as soon as the ceremony at the church was over they trudged back
again. The procession, at first keeping well together, resembled a
coloured scarf as it undulated through the countryside, winding slowly
along the narrow footpath through the green cornfields. But before
long it began to straggle, and broke up into separate groups that
loitered on the way to gossip. The fiddler went on ahead, the top of
his fiddle all bedecked with streamers; after him walked the
bridegroom and his bride, the relations and friends following in
what order they pleased. Last of all came the children, who amused
themselves by plucking little sprays of oats, or had a little game all
to themselves, when no one was looking. Emma's dress, which was too
long for her, dragged a little behind. Every now and again she would
stop to gather it up and, delicately, with her gloved hand, pick off
the blades of rough grass and bits of briar, while Charles stood
sheepishly by, waiting till she had finished. Farmer Rouault,
resplendent in a new silk hat, the cuffs of his best coat covering his
hands as far as his fingertips, had given his arm to the dowager
Madame Bovary. Monsieur Bovary senior, who in his heart thought all
these people very small beer indeed, had come in an austere frock-coat
of military cut with a single row of buttons. He was delivering
himself of some rather dubious jocularities to a fair-haired country
wench, who curtseyed, and blushed, and didn't know what to say. The
rest of the party talked business or indulged in a little skylarking
by way of warming themselves up for the gaiety to come; and whenever
you cared to listen, you could hear the scrape-scrape of the fiddler
who pranced on ahead, fiddling over hill and dale. When he noticed
that the party had fallen a good way behind, he stopped to take breath
and applied the rosin with vigour to his bow, so that the strings
should squeak the louder. Then he marched on again, swaying the top of
his instrument alternately up and down, the better to mark the time.
The sound of the fiddle startled the birds far and wide.
The table had been laid under the roof of the cartshed. Upon it
there stood four sirloins, six dishes of hashed chicken, stewed
veal, three legs of mutton and, in the centre, a comely roast
sucking-pig flanked with four hogs-puddings garnished with sorrel.
At each corner was a decanter filled with spirits. Sweet cider in
bottles was fizzling out round the corks, and every glass had
already been charged with wine to the brim. Yellow custard in great
dishes, which would undulate at the slightest jog of the table,
displayed on its smooth surface the initials of the wedded pair in
arabesques of candied peel. They had had recourse to a confectioner at
Yvetot for the tarts and the iced cakes. As he was just starting
business in the district, he had given a special eye to things; and
when the dessert was brought on, he himself, personally, carried in
a set piece which drew cries of admiration from the assembled company.
At the base of this erection was a rectangular piece of blue
cardboard, representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and
stucco statuettes all around in little niches embellished with
gilt-paper stars. Above it, on the second storey, stood a
castle-keep or donjon wrought in Savoy cake, surrounded with
diminutive fortifications in angelica, almonds, raisins, and bits of
orange; and finally, on the topmost level of all, which was nothing
less than a verdant meadow where there were rocks with pools of jam
and boats made out of nut-shells, was seen a little Cupid balancing
himself on a chocolate swing, the posts of which were tipped with
two real rosebuds.
The feasting went on till evening. When they grew tired of
sitting, the gentlemen got up and strolled about the yard or played
a game of pitch-and-toss in the barn, after which they came back again
to the table. A few of them at the finish fell asleep and snored.
But when the coffee arrived, everything brightened up again. Songs
were struck up, feats of strength performed. They did some
weight-lifting, tried to raise the carts with their shoulders, made
risky jokes, embraced the ladies. At night, when it was time to go,
the horses, stuffed to the teeth with oats, could hardly be got into
the shafts. They plunged, they reared, they snapped their harness,
their masters cursed or laughed, and all night long, far and wide,
by the light of the moon, there were runaway vehicles going
hard-a-gallop, careering into ditches, bounding over stone-heaps,
dashing up embankments, with women-folk leaning out of the carriage
windows frantically trying to clutch the reins. Those who stayed on at
les Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen. The children
dropped off to sleep on the floor under the benches.
The bride had implored her father that the customary practical jokes
might be dispensed with. However, one of their cousins, a fish tranter
(who by the same token had brought a couple of soles as a wedding
present), was preparing to squirt water out of his mouth through the
keyhole, when Farmer Rouault came up just in time to stop him, and
explained that, his son-in-law being a professional man, such
buffoonery was out of place.
However, it was difficult to make the cousin see things in this
light. In his own mind he accused Farmer Rouault of being stuck-up,
and went and made an alliance with four or five other guests sitting
apart in a corner who had happened to get inferior cuts of meat
several times running at dinner, and who, consequently, said they
had been shabbily treated, muttered unflattering things about their
host and secretly wished him no good.
Madame Bovary senior had sat glum the whole day. No one had ever
consulted her about the bride's dress, or the arrangements for the
party. She went to bed early. Her husband did not follow her, but sent
into Saint Victor for some cigars and smoked away till daybreak,
wetting his gullet with kirschwasser toddy, which, being a mixture
hitherto unknown to the company, augmented still further the
consideration with which they regarded him.
Charles was by no means of a facetious disposition, and he made
rather a poor show during the festivity. He retorted with only
qualified success to the quips, puns, innuendoes, compliments and
ribald jests with which they made it their business to assail him as
soon as the soup was on the table.
Next day, however, he seemed a different man. He was the one you
would have taken for the virgin of the pair, whereas the bride never
let fall anything that would give you the faintest hint of what she
thought about it all. Even the most knowing ones could make nothing of
her, though whenever she passed by they scrutinized her with the
most searching curiosity. But there was no reserve about Charles. He
called her his wife, his dear, kept asking where she was, looked about
for her everywhere and frequently took her out into the yard, where he
was seen away up among the trees with his arm round her waist, walking
along bending over her, and rumpling the front of her bodice with
his head.
Two days after the wedding, the newly married couple departed.
Charles could not be away from his practice any longer. Farmer Rouault
sent them home in his carriage, and went with them himself as far as
Vassonville. There he kissed his daughter 'good-bye', stepped down
from the carriage and started for home again. When he had gone about a
hundred paces he halted, and gazing at the carriage vanishing into the
distance, its wheels turning in the dust, he heaved a profound sigh.
Then he thought of his own wedding, of the days gone by, of his wife's
first pregnancy. He, too, was very happy when he took her from her
father's, back to his own house; when she rode behind him on the
crupper, trotting through the snow; for the season was near
Christmas and the country all white. One of her arms was holding on to
him, and on the other she carried her basket. The wind fluttered the
long lace strings of her Caux head-dress and sometimes blew them
across her mouth, and when he turned his head he saw close by him,
just above his shoulder, her little rosy mouth smiling silently
beneath the gold rim of her bonnet. To warm her fingers she would
thrust them, every now and again, into his bosom. How far away it
seemed now, all that! Their son would have been thirty by this time if
he had lived. He looked back again, and there was nothing to be seen
along the road. He felt as gloomy as an empty house. And as these
tender memories and sombre reflections blended together in his
brain, a little clouded with the vapours of the merrymaking, he felt a
momentary desire to take a walk round by the churchyard. As,
however, he was afraid that the sight of it would only depress him
still more, he went straight home.
Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived at Tostes about six o'clock. The
neighbours hastened to their windows to take a look at the doctor's
new wife.
The old servant came to pay her respects and made excuses for the
dinner not being ready, and suggested that, in the meantime, Madame
should come and see over her house.
5
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Madame Bovary's new home: Bridal bouquets:
Changes in the house: A new trap: Charles finds happiness:
Blowing kisses: The devoted husband:
Life and the books.
-
THE brick front looked straight on to the street, or rather road.
Hanging up behind the front door were a cloak with a narrow collar,
a bridle, a black leather cap, and, in the corner, on the floor, a
pair of leggings covered with stale mud. To the right was the parlour,
that is to say, the room where they lived and had their meals. The
canary-yellow wallpaper, relieved by a frieze of pallid flowers, shook
all over the badly hung canvas. White calico curtains with a red
border were hung crosswise along the windows and on the narrow
chimneypiece there stood, in all its glory, a clock adorned with a
bust of Hippocrates, between two plated candlesticks under a pair of
oval shades. On the other side of the passage was Charles's
consulting-room, a little box of a place about six feet wide,
furnished with a table, three upright chairs and one arm-chair. A
set of the Dictionary of Medical Science, the leaves of which were
uncut, but which bore evidence of the number of times it had changed
hands, took up almost all the six rows of the deal bookcase. The smell
of cooking would come in through the partition during consultations,
and if you were in the kitchen you could hear the patients coughing
and telling the doctor all about their ailments as plainly as if you
were in the room. Next, opening straight on to the yard, was a great
ramshackle room, fitted with a cooking range, which was used as a
place for storing wood and general lumber. It was full of old iron,
empty casks, worn-out gardening tools and all manner of other dusty
objects the use of which it was impossible to determine. The garden,
which was a good deal longer than it was broad, was flanked by two cob
walls covered with espaliered apricot trees, and extended as far as
the thorn hedge at the bottom, which divided it from the open
fields. In the middle there was a sundial made of slate standing on
a plaster pedestal. Four beds, planted with feeble-looking rose-trees,
were ranged symmetrically around a square plot that was devoted to the
rearing of more serviceable vegetation. At the far end, under some
spruce trees, a plaster cure was poring over his breviary.
Emma went up to see the bedrooms. The first one was not furnished at
all, but the second, the nuptial chamber, had a mahogany bed in an
alcove with red hangings. A box made of cockle-shells adorned the
chest of drawers, and on the secretaire, by the window, stood a
glass bottle with a bunch of orange-blossom in it, tied with white
satin ribbon. It was a bridal bouquet, his first wife's bouquet. Her
eyes fell on it. Charles saw her looking at it, and took it up into
the attic. Sitting back in an arm-chair, while her things were being
unpacked, Emma's thoughts strayed to her own wedding bouquet, which
was stowed away in a bandbox, and she wondered, in a vague sort of
way, what would happen to it, if by chance she came to die.
She at once set about making plans for alterations in her house. She
took the globes off the candlesticks, had the walls repapered, the
staircase painted and seats put in the garden, round the sundial.
She even wondered if it would be possible to have a little pond for
goldfish, with a fountain playing in the centre. And then her husband,
knowing how fond she was of driving, picked up a trap that was going
cheap. With a couple of new lamps and a pair of shiny leather
splashboards, it looked almost as smart as a tilbury.
He was a happy man now, with never a care in the world. A meal, with
her sitting opposite him, a stroll along the highway of an evening,
the gleam of her hand as she set a ringlet straight, the sight of
her straw hat hung up on a window catch, and a host of other things
which Charles had never deemed capable of affording pleasure,
brought him a continuous succession of delights. In bed, of a morning,
with her head on the pillow beside him, he would gaze at the
sunbeams playing on the soft bloom of her cheek, half-hidden by the
scalloped strings of her night-cap. Looked at from so near, he thought
her eyes bigger than ever, especially when she first woke and
blinked them many times in succession. Black in the shade, deep blue
in the daylight, they seemed to be made of flakes of different
colours, dark and shadowy far down, brighter and brighter as they
neared the surface. His gaze would lose itself in their deeps, and
he could see within them a tiny picture of himself, down to the
shoulders, with his silk foulard about his head and the collar of
his night-shirt agape. Then he would get up and dress. She would
post herself at the window to see him start, and sit there leaning her
elbows on the sill between a pair of geraniums, wrapped in a
dressing-gown that hung in soft folds about her. Down in the street
below, Charles would be fixing on his spurs with his foot up on the
kerb, while she went on talking to him from above, pulling off with
her lips a bud or a blade of grass which she blew down to him and
which, eddying, floating, wheeling in the air like a bird, caught, ere
it fell to earth, in the tangled mane of the old white mare,
standing stock-still at the door. Mounted in the saddle, Charles would
blow her a kiss, and she would wave back to him. Then she would shut
the window, and off he would go. And up on the main road which
stretched, an endless riband of white dust, before him; down steep
lanes where the trees hung over like the hood of a cradle; through
bridle-paths where the corn stood as high as his knees, with the sun
on his back, the morning air in his nostrils, and sweet memories of
the night in his heart, he went his way, calm in mind and contented in
body, ruminating on his good fortune, even as men who have well
dined recall the savour of the delicacies they have eaten.
When, until now, had he had a taste of life's good things? Was it in
his schooldays, shut up behind high walls, lonely and friendless,
among boys who were richer or cleverer than he, who mocked his country
speech, who jeered at his clothes and whose mothers came with their
muffs crammed full of pastries and good things? Or later when he was
studying medicine and never had the wherewithal to stand treat to some
little work-girl or other who might have become his mistress. After
that he had had fourteen months of married life with the widow,
whose feet, in bed, were like lumps of ice. But now this pretty little
woman whom he worshipped, was his for life. For him the whole universe
was contained within the silken circumference of her skirt. He
reproached himself for not making enough fuss of her; he was always
longing for the sight of her; he hurried back home, and mounted the
stairs with a beating heart. Emma, in the bedroom, would, perhaps,
be seated at her mirror. He would steal up noiselessly behind her, and
kiss her on the back, and she would give a little scream. He
couldn't help fiddling with her comb, her rings, her pieces of lace.
Sometimes he would give her great big kisses on the cheek, or else a
series of little ones all along her bare arm, from the tips of her
fingers right up to her shoulder. And she would push him away,
half-playful, half-impatient, as you do with a child that will cling
on behind you.
Before she married, she thought she was in love; but the happiness
that should have resulted from that love, somehow had not come. It
seemed to her that she must have made a mistake, have misunderstood in
some way or another. And Emma tried hard to discover what,
precisely, it was in life that was denoted by the words joy, passion,
intoxication, which had always looked so fine to her in books.
6
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Child's imaginings: Convent girlhood:
The sewing woman's lessons: Glimpses of romance:
Ballads and keepsakes: A lost vocation:
The coming of passion.
-
SHE had read Paul and Virginia, she had dreamed and dreamed of the
little bamboo house, of Domingo the nigger, Fidelio the dog, and
especially of some devoted little brother who runs off to find you
nice red fruit in trees as high as church steeples, or races bare-foot
along the sand with a bird's nest for you in his hand.
When she was thirteen, her father came up himself with her to
Rouen to settle her in at the convent. They put up at an inn in the
Saint-Gervais quarter. Their supper was served on coloured plates
depicting the story of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. The wording
underneath, which had been worn away in places by the knives and
forks, spoke of the glories of religion, the delights of true love and
the splendours of Court life.
So far from finding the convent dull in the early days, she loved
being with the kind sisters, who, to keep her amused, took her into
the chapel, reached through a long passage leading from the refectory.
She went in but little for games, acquired a good knowledge of the
catechism, and she it was who always answered the curate when any
knotty question was propounded to the class. Living perpetually in the
warm atmosphere of the classrooms, among these pale-faced women with
their beads and crosses, she insensibly yielded to the mystic
languor that exhales from the perfumes of the altar, the shadowy
coolness of the holy-water stoups, and the soft radiance of the
tapers. Instead of following the Mass, she pored upon the religious
pictures in azure borders that adorned her prayer-book and she loved
the sick lamb, the Sacred Heart pierced with spears, or poor Jesus
falling by the wayside upon His cross. By way of mortifying the
flesh she would try to go all day without food. And she ransacked
her brains to think of some disciplinary obligation she could lay upon
herself.
When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order to
linger in the dim light, kneeling down with her hands clasped before
her face, listening to the murmuring tones of the priest above her.
Similes bringing in such words as 'betrothed', 'spouse', 'heavenly
bridegroom', and 'eternal marriage', which occur again and again in
sermons, awoke unsuspected sensations of pleasure in the hidden depths
of her soul.
At night, before prayers, passages from a religious book would be
read aloud in the schoolroom. On weekdays it would generally be some
manual of Sacred History, or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous; and
on Sundays, as a treat, extracts from the Genie du Christianisme.
With what enchantment she listened, at first, to the sonorous
lamentations of romantic melancholy borne on all the echoes of earth
and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in a shop parlour in
some busy street, she might have been susceptible to the poetic charms
of nature, which, generally speaking, only reach us through the medium
of books. But she knew only too much about the country; she was
familiar with the lowing of cattle, she knew all about milking and
ploughing. With eyes accustomed to look on the tranquil aspects of
nature, she turned for contrast to the wild and precipitous. She
only cared for the sea when it was lashed to fury by the storm, and
for verdure when it served as a background to a ruin. Everything
must needs minister to her personal longings, as it were, and she
thrust aside as of no account whatever everything that did not
immediately contribute to stir the emotions of her heart, for her
temperament was sentimental rather than artistic, seeking, not
pictures, but emotions.
There was a queer old maid at the convent who used to come for a
week every month to see to the linen. Under archiepiscopal protection,
as belonging to a family of gentlefolks that had been brought to
ruin during the Revolution, she took her meals in the refectory with
the sisters, and afterwards had a nice little gossip with them
before going upstairs again to her work. Often the boarders would slip
out of the schoolroom to go and see her. She knew by heart all the
romantic ballads of the last generation, and sang them in a low
voice while she was sewing. She would tell stories, retail the news,
and do little odd jobs for you in the town. She always carried a novel
of some sort or another in her pocket, which she would secretly lend
to some of the big girls, and of which the worthy spinster herself
would devour long passages in the intervals of her labours. It would
be all about love, lovers, fair maidens, persecuted ladies swooning in
lonely bowers, postilions murdered at every stage, horses ridden
till they dropped dead, gloomy forests, sombre forebodings, vows,
sobs, tears and kisses, skiffs gliding on moonlit waters, nightingales
in bosky dells, noble gentlemen as brave as lions and as gentle as
lambs, incredibly virtuous, always dressed in fine raiment and ready
to weep like urns. For six months, Emma, when she was fifteen,
battened on the garbage of these out-of-date 'Libraries of Choice
Fiction'. Later on she came to read Walter Scott and got
enthusiastic about historical things, forever dreaming of coffers,
guardrooms and minstrels. She would have loved to dwell in some old
manor, like those chatelaines with the long bodices who, beneath the
trefoil window with its Gothic arch, spent their days with their elbow
on the parapet and their chin in their hand, gazing far away into
the distance for the coming of a cavalier with a white plume in his
hat, galloping on a black charger. At that time she adored Mary
Queen of Scots and evinced an enthusiastic veneration for
illustrious or ill-fated women. Joan of Arc, Eloise, Agnes Sorel, la
belle Ferronniere and Clemence Isaure shone out, in her eyes, like
comets on the dark immensity of history, where there were still
discernible here and there, but more deeply involved in shadow and
quite disconnected one from another, Saint Louis and his oak, the
dying Bayard, certain cruelties perpetrated by Louis XI, some
fragmentary notions about Saint Bartholomew, the plumed hat of Henri
IV, and, still as distinct as ever, the recollection of that pictorial
dinner service on which the glorious days of King Louis XIV were
held up to admiration.
In the music class, the songs she had to learn were all about little
angels with golden pinions, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers,
compositions in which silly words and shoddy music did not avail to
conceal the attractive phantasmagoria of their sentimental substratum.
Some of her fellow pupils brought with them to the convent autograph
albums they had had given them as New Year's presents. They had to
be kept secret, and it was a terrible business to conceal them. The
girls read them in the dormitory. Delicately handling their
beautiful satin bindings, Emma gazed with wondering admiration on
the names of the authors unknown to literary fame, mostly counts or
viscounts, who had put their signatures to their contributions.
She felt a thrill as she tried to blow back the tissue paper which
protected the pictures, and which rose in a curling fold at her breath
and then fell back softly on the page. She saw behind the rail of a
balcony a young man in a short cloak clasping in his arms a maiden
in a white dress wearing an alms-bag in her girdle; or else
portraits of anonymous English ladies with golden curls, who gazed
at you with big bright eyes beneath their round straw hats. They
were to be seen lolling in carriages, gliding through stately parks,
with a greyhound bounding on before a team of trotting horses guided
by a pair of diminutive postilions in white breeches. Others lay
dreamily reclining on sofas, an open letter beside them, gazing at the
moon through a half-open window partly veiled by a dark curtain. An
innocent damsel, with a tear on her cheek, was seen giving food to a
dove between the bars of a Gothic cage, or smiling, head on one
side, as, with tapering fingers, she pulled off, one by one, the
petals of a marguerite. And ye too were there, ye sultans with your
long pipes, stretched drowsily in the shade of an arbour in the arms
of Bayaderes, and Giaours, Turkish scimitars, Greek caps, and you,
above all, pale landscapes of dithyrambic regions, which so often
indulge us with a simultaneous display of palms and fir-trees,
tigers on this side and lions on that, Tartar minarets on the horizon,
Roman ruins in the foreground and kneeling camels in the middle
distance- the whole within a framework of virgin forest very neatly
trimmed, with a great perpendicular ray of sunlight trembling on the
water, whereon, in patches of white on a steel-grey surface, swans are
depicted proudly oaring their way far and near.
The shade of the argand lamp fixed in the wall above Emma's head
illumined with its rays all these pictures of a romantic world which
passed one by one before her eyes in the silence of the dormitory, a
silence broken only by the distant sound of some belated fiacre
rolling home along the boulevards.
At first, when her mother died, she wept bitterly. She had a
memorial card made containing the hair of the deceased, and, in a
letter which she wrote home to les Bertaux full of melancholy
reflections on life, she begged that when her time came she herself
might be laid in the same grave. The honest farmer thought she must be
ill, and came post-haste to see her. Emma was inwardly gratified at
the thought that she had risen at a bound to those ethereal heights
which the more commonplace beings of the earth are never permitted
to attain.
And so she suffered herself to glide along in these Lamartinian
meanderings. She listened to the sound of harps upon the waters, the
songs of dying swans, the sigh of falling leaves; she beheld
spotless virgins mounting heavenwards, and heard the voice of the
Eternal speaking in the valleys. And then it began to cloy: she wanted
no more of it; but nevertheless went on from force of habit and
afterwards from vanity, and was surprised in the end to find herself
quite calm, with no more trace of sadness in her heart than of
wrinkles on her brow.
The good nuns, who had felt so sure of her vocation, perceived
with astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping
through their fingers. They had, in fact, lavished upon her so many
offices, retreats, novenas and sermons, so thoroughly inculcated the
respect due to the saints and martyrs, and given her so many good
counsels regarding the modesty of her person and the welfare of her
soul, that she did what horses do when you hold them in too tight. She
pulled up short and jerked the bit from her mouth. Her mind, so
material amidst its enthusiasm- she who had loved the church for its
flowers, music for the words of its songs, and literature for its
passionate excitements- rebelled against the mysteries of faith,
even as she chafed against the restraint of discipline, a thing wholly
repugnant to her disposition. When her father took her away from the
school, the nuns saw her depart without regret. The Mother Superior
was of opinion that of late her conduct had been lacking in
reverence towards the Community.
On her return home, Emma found some distraction in managing the
household, but she soon grew tired of the country and wished herself
back in her convent. When Charles came to les Bertaux for the first
time, she regarded herself as vastly disillusioned, one for whom
life had nothing new to offer, either in knowledge or experience.
But her longing for a change; possibly, too, the unrest caused by
a masculine presence, had sufficed to make her believe that she was at
last possessed of that wonderful passion which, till then, had hovered
like a great bird with roseate wings, floating in the splendour of
poetic skies; and now she could not believe that her present
unemotional state was the bliss whereof she had dreamed.
7
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A commonplace husband:
Emma's accomplishments: Dainty meals and
heavy boots: Mother-in-law: Monotonous affection:
Why did I get married?: The beeches of Banneville:
The Marquis's invitation.
-
NEVERTHELESS she sometimes thought that they were the finest days of
her life, those 'honeymoon days' as people call them. To enjoy their
sweetness to the full it would doubtless have been necessary to go far
away to lands whose names fall like music upon the ear, where the
nuptials of lovers are followed by morrows of soft languor, lands
where, in post-chaises shaded with blue silk hoods, you slowly
mount, by precipitous roads, upward, ever upward, giving ear to the
postilion's song, echoed back from the mountain and blending with
the sound of goat bells and the soft murmur of the waterfall. When the
sun sinks down to rest, you breathe, beside the margin of a bay, the
fragrant odours of the lemon-trees; and then, by night, on the
terrace, alone with each other, with fingers intertwined, you gaze
at the stars and make plans for the future. It seemed to her that
there were certain places on the earth which naturally brought forth
happiness, as though it were a plant native to the soil, which could
not thrive elsewhere. Why could she not lean upon the balcony of
some Alpine chalet, or immure her sadness in a Scottish cottage,
with a husband in a black velvet coat with great flaps to the pockets,
brown boots, a peaked cap and ruffles on his sleeves?
Possibly she would have liked to unburden herself to someone of
all these things; but how was she to describe this vague, elusive
unrest, that changed like the clouds and eddied like the winds? She
could not find the words, nor the occasion, nor the courage.
If Charles had willed it, however; if it had occurred to him; if,
just once, his eyes had read her thoughts, it seemed to her that
abundant riches would have fallen from her heart, even as falls, at
the lightest touch, the ripe fruitage of a wall-tree. But as the
intimacy of their lives increased, so there grew within her a secret
feeling of estrangement from her husband.
Charles's conversation was as flat as a street pavement, and
everyone's ideas but his own promenaded there all in their humdrum
dress, bringing no emotion to his face, no smile, no look of
contemplation. He confessed that when he lived in Rouen he never had
the slightest desire to go to the theatre to see a Paris company. He
couldn't swim, he couldn't fence, he couldn't fire a pistol, and one
day when she came across some term connected with horsemanship in a
novel she was reading, he couldn't tell her what it meant.
But wasn't it a man's business to know about things, to shine in all
sorts of activities, to display the energy of the passionate lover, to
acquaint you with the amenities of life, and to initiate you into
all its mysteries? But he couldn't teach anybody anything, that man.
He knew nothing, and he wanted nothing. He thought she was happy;
and his immovable placidity, his ponderous serenity, the very
contentment of which she herself was the cause, got on her nerves.
Sometimes she would take up drawing. And it was a great thing for
Charles to be there, standing bolt upright, watching her leaning
over her drawing-block, screwing up her eyes to get a better view of
her work, or rolling up little balls of bread between her finger and
thumb. When she played the piano, the faster flashed her fingers the
more he stared in wonderment. She struck the notes with a dashing
air and ran down the whole length of the keyboard without a stop.
Under her rousing touch, the ancient instrument could be heard at
the other end of the village, if she had the window open, and
frequently the bailiffs clerk, walking along the road bare-headed
and in his slippers, would stop and listen, with his papers in his
hand.
Nevertheless, Emma was a first-rate manager. She sent the patients
their accounts in neatly worded letters that had nothing of the
tradesman's invoice about them. When of a Sunday they had a
neighbour in to dinner, she always contrived to put some dainty little
dish on the table. She was an adept at arranging greengages in
pyramids on vine leaves, served her jams and jellies not in their pots
but in little dishes, and even talked about buying some finger-bowls
for dessert. All this had a favourable reaction on Bovary's position
in the place.
Charles came to think himself luckier than ever, to have such a
woman for his wife. He would point with pride to two little pencil
sketches of hers in the dining-room. He had had them put into very
broad frames and hung up on the wall with long green cords. After
church, he was to be seen standing on his doorstep in a pair of
handsome embroidered slippers. It would sometimes be late before he
got in from his rounds- perhaps ten o'clock, occasionally even
midnight. He would want something to eat, and as the maid would have
gone to bed, Emma herself would put the things on the table. He
would take off his frock coat so as to eat in greater comfort. One
after another he would recite to her the names of all the people he
had met, the villages he had been to and the medicines he had
prescribed; and, feeling thoroughly pleased with himself, would polish
off the remains of the hash, pare the rind from his cheese, munch an
apple, empty the decanter and so to bed, where he would turn over on
his back and snore.
As he had always been used to wearing a nightcap, his silk wrap kept
slipping away from his ears, with the result that, in the morning, his
hair was hanging in disorder all over his face, covered with down from
the pillow that had worked out of its pillow-slip during the night. He
always wore heavy boots, which had two deep creases running diagonally
from the top of the upper to the ankle, the rest of the boot being
stretched out in a straight line as though the foot inside it were
made of wood. He said they were quite good enough for the country.
His mother approved of his economy. She came to see him sometimes,
as she used to do during his first marriage when there had been a more
or less serious squabble at home. But Madame Bovary senior seemed
prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She regarded her as too big in
her ideas for their rank in life. They used enough wood, sugar and
candles for a mansion, and the amount of fuel they burnt in the
kitchen would have cooked a dinner for twenty-five people. She
stored away the linen in the cupboards and taught her to see that
she got the right weight when the butcher came with the meat. Emma
interpreted these lessons as Madame Bovary bestowed them- liberally.
All day long it was nothing but 'my dear' here and 'yes mother' there,
accompanied by a little quiver of the lips, each saying nice things to
the other in a voice trembling with anger.
In Madame Dubuc's day, the old lady still regarded herself as the
favourite, but now Charles was so wrapt up in Emma that she felt as if
she had been thrown over, as if she had been robbed of something
that belonged to her. And she contemplated her son's happiness in
gloomy silence, as a ruined man might look through the window and
see strangers sitting at table in his old home. She would tell him, by
way of recalling old times, about the trouble she had taken and the
sacrifices she had made for him, and, comparing all this with the
casual way Emma treated him, wound up by saying it was silly to
worship her as if there were no one else in the world.
Charles did not know what to say; he respected his mother, he
loved his wife, immeasurably. The judgement of the one he deemed
infallible, the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madame
Bovary had gone, he would hazard, very tentatively and in the same
terms, one or two of the more harmless criticisms he had heard his
mother advance. Emma soon showed him his mistake, and packed him off
to his patients.
Nevertheless, in accordance with theories she considered sound,
she tried to physic herself with love. By moonlight, in the garden,
she recited all the love poetry she knew and sighed and sang of love's
sweet melancholy. But afterwards she found herself not a whit less
calm, and Charles not a whit more amorous or emotional.
When she had thus struck the flint upon her heart without
producing a single spark, unable either to understand what she did not
experience or to believe in anything that did not show itself in the
customary forms, it dawned on her that Charles's love had passed
through the passionate stage. His emotional expansions had become
regular; he embraced her at certain fixed periods. It was just another
habit added to the rest, like a humdrum dessert rounding off a humdrum
dinner.
A gamekeeper whom the doctor had pulled through an attack of
congestion of the lungs had presented Madame with a little Italian
greyhound. She took it with her for walks, for she used to go out
sometimes just to get a few moments to herself and to enjoy a change
from the everlasting garden and the dusty highroad.
She would go as far as the beechwoods of Banneville, along by the
deserted summer-house at the turn of the wall, towards the open
country. There, in the ditch, amid the grass, are towering rushes with
leaves as sharp as knives.
First of all she would take a look round, to see if anything had
changed since last she was there. She found the foxgloves and the
wallflowers in their old places, and the clumps of nettles round about
the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows with
their never-opened shutters shedding their dust of dry-rot on the
rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, vagrant at first, strayed hither and
thither, wandering as they listed, like her dog, that careered round
and round about the fields, yapping after yellow butterflies, giving
chase to the field-mice or nibbling at the poppies on the fringe of
a wheat patch. Then, gradually, her thoughts would begin to focus
themselves, and sitting on the grass, giving it little pokes with
the point of her parasol, she would keep saying to herself,
'Mon Dieu, why did I get married!'
She wondered whether, if things had taken a different turn, she
might not have encountered a different sort of man; and she tried to
think what her life might have been if things that hadn't happened had
come to pass, and what manner of man was this husband whom she had
never met. Husbands were not all like him, that was quite certain.
Hers might have been handsome, clever, distinguished, fascinating,
as doubtless were the men who had married the other girls she had
known at the convent. What were they doing now? Enjoying town life,
the stir and bustle of the streets, going to theatres and dances,
the sort of life that enlivens the heart and quickens the senses.
But for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the
north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web
in every cranny of her heart.
She thought of the prize days, when she mounted the platform to
receive her little crowns. With her hair in plaits, her white frock
and her kid shoes, she looked such a nice little girl, and as she made
her way back to her seat, the gentlemen would lean over and pay her
pretty compliments. The courtyard would be thronged with carriages,
and people would smilingly wave her good-bye from the carriage
windows. The music-master, carrying his violin case, would give her
a nod as he passed. How far away it all seemed! How far away! She
called Djali to come to her, took her between her knees, stroked her
long, graceful head and said,
'Come, kiss your mistress; you have no worries, have you?'
Then she would look musingly into the creature's beautiful, sad
eyes. The dog would open her jaws in a leisurely yawn. A feeling of
tenderness would come over her, and, pretending the animal was
herself, she would talk to her aloud as though she were comforting
someone in distress.
Sometimes the wind came in gusts, and, sweeping in from the Channel,
leapt at a bound over all the uplands of Caux, bearing with it, far
inland, the salt, sharp savour of the sea. The bowed reeds whistled
along the ground, and the leaves of the beech-trees sang as they
fluttered wildly in the wind, while their crests, swaying
ceaselessly to and fro, sounded their unending murmur. Emma drew her
shawl closely about her shoulders and rose to go.
In the avenue, a green light, reflected by the foliage, lit up the
mossy carpet which crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was
setting; the sky glowed red between the branches, and the serried
trunks of the trees, planted in regular lines, gloomed like a dark
colonnade against a background of gold. A sense of fear crept over
her, she called Djali and walked quickly back to Tostes, along the
road. Arriving home, she sank exhausted into an easy-chair, and
never uttered a word the evening through.
But towards the end of September, there befell an extraordinary
event in her life: she was invited to the Marquis d'Andervilliers'
at la Vaubyessard. The Marquis, who had held office as Secretary of
State under the Restoration, was anxious to get back into politics,
and was sedulously nursing the constituency with a view to putting
up as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies. During the winter
months he made liberal distributions of fuel, and was always to the
fore in demanding new roads for his district. When the last heat
wave was at its height, he had developed an abscess in the mouth,
which Charles had managed to cure as if by a miracle, lancing it in
the nick of time. The steward who was sent to Tostes to pay for the
operation announced, when he got back, that he had seen some
magnificent cherries in the doctor's little garden. Now cherries did
not thrive at la Vaubyessard, and my lord Marquis asked Bovary to
let him have a few slips. He made a point of tendering his thanks in
person, saw Emma, and noted that she had a pretty figure and good
manners. It was therefore held at the chateau that they would not be
overpassing the limits of condescension, or doing themselves any harm,
if they sent the young people an invitation.
And so it came to pass that one Wednesday, at three o'clock,
Monsieur and Madame Bovary, perched up in their two-wheel trap, set
out for la Vaubyessard, with a big travelling bag tied on behind,
and a hat-box fixed in front of the apron. Charles also had a
bandbox between his legs.
They arrived when it was getting dusk, just as the lamps were
being lit in the park, to show the carriages their way.
8
-
The Chateau de Vaubyessard: Dinner:
A retired courtier: The dance and the guests:
A noble partner: Return to Tostes:
Charles finds a cigar-case:
Nastasie gets notice.
-
THE chateau, an extensive modern building in the Renaissance
style, with two projecting wings and three flights of stone steps, was
situated at the foot of a wide stretch of parkland, on which some
cattle were grazing between groups of tall, umbrageous trees, while
little clumps of flowering shrubs- rhododendrons, syringas and
guelder-roses- clustered, in their varying shades of green, along
the curving line of the gravel drive. A stream flowed on beneath a
bridge, and through the gathering mist were to be seen some thatched
buildings, dotted about in the meadowland, which was bounded on either
side by two gently sloping, wooded hills; and in the rear, in two
parallel lines, were the stables and coach-house, all that was left
standing of the original chateau when it was pulled down.
Charles drew up at the middle flight of steps. The servants appeared
on the scene. The Marquis came forward, and, offering his arm to the
doctor's lady, escorted her into the hall.
It was floored with marble, and very lofty, and the mingled sound of
footsteps and voices awoke the echoes as in a church. Facing the
entrance was a straight staircase, and, to the left, a gallery,
looking on to the garden, led to the billiard-room, in which the click
of the ivory balls was audible as soon as one entered the front
door. As she passed through it on her way to the drawing-room Emma
perceived some dignified-looking men grouped round the table. They
were all wearing high cravats and decorations, and smiled to
themselves as they got their cues into position for a stroke. On the
sombre woodwork of the panelled walls hung great gilt frames with
names lettered in black along the lower border. She read: 'Jean
Antoine d'Andervilliers d'Yverbonvine, Comte de la Vaubyessard and
Baron de la Fresnaye, killed at the battle of Coutras, 20th October
1587', and on another 'Jean Antoine Henry Guy d'Andervilliers de la
Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Knight of the Order of Saint
Michael, wounded at la Hougue Saint Vaast, the 29th May, 1692, died at
la Vaubyessard the 23rd January, 1693'. The other inscriptions were
hardly discernible, for the lampshades which concentrated the light on
the green surface of the billiard-table left the rest of the room in
semi-darkness. Burnishing the dark canvases, the light splintered
itself in little delicate veins as it fell on the cracks in the
varnish, and from all these various dark squares bordered with gold
there stood out, here and there, some brighter portion of the picture-
a pale brow, a pair of eyes that seemed to be gazing at you, wigs that
uncoiled themselves on the powdery shoulders of the scarlet coats, or,
maybe, the buckle of a garter above a well-turned calf.
The Marquis opened the door of the drawing-room. One of the ladies
rose (it was the Marquise herself) and came forward to greet Emma. She
made her sit down beside her on a little sofa, and began to chat
with easy unconstraint, as if she had known her for a long time. She
was a woman of about forty, with fine shoulders, an aquiline nose, and
a languid voice, and that night she was wearing, upon her auburn hair,
a plain lace fichu which fell in a point behind her shoulders. A
fair-complexioned young person sat close by in a high-backed chair,
and some gentlemen, wearing flowers in their button-holes, lounged
about the fireplace talking to the ladies.
At seven o'clock dinner was served. The men, who were in the
majority, were seated at the first table, in the vestibule; the ladies
at the second, in the dining-room, with the Marquis and the Marquise.
Emma felt on entering as though she were swathed about with warm
air, blended of the perfume of flowers and fine linen, the savour of
viands and the delicate odour of truffles. The flambeaux in the
candelabra were mirrored in long tongues of light in the silver
dish-covers. The facets of the cut glass, veiled by a softening
mist, radiated a delicate glimmer; down the whole table's length
were floral bouquets ranged in line, and on the wide-rimmed plates
stood napkins folded like bishops' mitres, each holding in its opening
a little oval roll. Lobsters protruded their red claws over the dish's
edge. There were masses of splendid fruit piled on moss in filigree
baskets; quails decked in their plumage. It was a medley of fragrant
odours. In silk stockings, knee breeches, white stock and frilled
shirt, the major-domo, solemn as a judge, handed the dishes between
the shoulders of the guests, and with a magic twist of his spoon
caused the morsel of your choice to leap on to your plate. On the high
porcelain stove, with its copper rods, stood the statue of a woman
draped to the chin, looking calmly down on the thronged apartment.
Madame Bovary noticed that a number of ladies had not put their
gloves in their glasses.
At the top end of the table, alone among the crowd of women, bending
down over a well-filled plate, with his napkin tied round his neck
like a child's bib, sat an old man, who, as he ate, let little drops
of gravy trickle from his mouth. His eyes were weak and watery, and he
wore a little pigtail tied with a bow of black ribbon. He was the
Marquis's father-in-law, the old Duc de Laverdiere, the quondam
favourite of the Comte d'Artois, in the old hunting days at
Vaudreuil at the Marquis de Conflans's. The gossips said he had been
one of Marie Antoinette's lovers, coming between Messieurs de Coigny
and de Lauzun. He had led a tumultuous and dissolute life, crammed
full of duels and gambling and abductions. He had got through all
his money, and had been the terror of his family. A footman, stationed
behind his chair, would lean down and bawl into his ear the names of
the several dishes, and with stammering tongue and trembling fingers
he would indicate the one he desired.
Try as she would, Emma simply could not keep her eyes off the old
man and his drooping lips. She gazed at him as though he were some
extraordinary phenomenon, something august. He had lived at Court
and shared the couch of Queens!
The glasses were filled with iced champagne. Emma felt a thrill go
through her as she tasted the coldness of it in her mouth. She had
never seen a pomegranate or eaten a pineapple. The very caster sugar
seemed whiter here, and more finely powdered, than elsewhere.
At length the ladies went upstairs to make ready for the ball.
Emma dressed with all the scrupulous care of an actress about to
make her debut. She did her hair as the man at the shop had directed
her, and then she proceeded to array herself in the delicate muslin
frock that had been carefully laid out upon the bed.
Charles's trousers pinched him round the middle. 'And what a
nuisance these foot-straps will be when I'm dancing,' he remarked.
'Dancing?' said Emma.
'Yes!'
'Why, you must be off your head! People would laugh at you. Sit
still and watch the others; it looks better for a doctor.'
Charles held his peace. He kept pacing up and down the room, waiting
for Emma to finish.
He saw her from behind, in the glass, between two candles. Her
eyes seemed darker than ever. Her frontlets, curving softly outwards
near the ears, shone with an azure radiance. In her chignon, a rose
trembled on its fragile stem with artificial dewdrops on the tips of
its petals. Her dress was pale saffron, trimmed with three bunches
of pompon roses mixed with green.
Charles stole up and kissed her on the shoulder.
'Leave me alone,' she said, 'you'll ruin my dress.'
They heard the preluding flourish of the violins and the notes of
a horn. Down the stairs she went, hardly able to keep herself from
running.
The quadrilles had begun, and fresh guests were arriving. People
were thronging into the room. She sat down on a settle, near the door.
The quadrille being over, the floor was free for the groups of men who
were lounging about talking, and for servants in livery who were going
round with large trays. All along the rows of seated women there was a
flutt |
