heard at the Lion d’Or.
One evening on coming home Leon found in his room a rug in velvet and
wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur
Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief;
every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the doctor’s wife give the
clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his
lover.
He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and
of her wit; so much so, that Binet once roughly answered him--
"What does it matter to me since I’m not in her set?"
He tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to
her, and always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the
shame of being such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire.
Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put
it off to times that he again deferred.
Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but this resolution
soon deserted him in Emma’s presence, and when Charles, dropping in,
invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some patient
in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and went
out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her? As to Emma,
she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come
suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings--a hurricane of the skies,
which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf,
and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on
the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she
would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a
rent in the wall of it.
Chapter Five
It was a Sunday in February, an afternoon when the snow was falling.
They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and Monsieur Leon,
gone to see a yarn-mill that was being built in the valley a mile and a
half from Yonville. The druggist had taken Napoleon and Athalie to give
them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them, carrying the umbrellas
on his shoulder.
Nothing, however, could be less curious than this curiosity. A great
piece of waste ground, on which pell-mell, amid a mass of sand and
stones, were a few break-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a
quadrangular building pierced by a number of little windows. The
building was unfinished; the sky could be seen through the joists of the
roofing. Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of straw mixed
with corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured ribbons in the wind.
Homais was talking. He explained to the company the future importance
of this establishment, computed the strength of the floorings, the
thickness of the walls, and regretted extremely not having a yard-stick
such as Monsieur Binet possessed for his own special use.
Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and
she looked at the sun’s disc shedding afar through the mist his pale
splendour. She turned. Charles was there. His cap was drawn down over
his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look
of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating
to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of the
bearer.
While she was considering him thus, tasting in her irritation a sort of
depraved pleasure, Leon made a step forward. The cold that made him pale
seemed to add a more gentle languor to his face; between his cravat and
his neck the somewhat loose collar of his shirt showed the skin; the
lobe of his ear looked out from beneath a lock of hair, and his large
blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more
beautiful than those mountain-lakes where the heavens are mirrored.
"Wretched boy!" suddenly cried the chemist.
And he ran to his son, who had just precipitated himself into a heap of
lime in order to whiten his boots. At the reproaches with which he was
being overwhelmed Napoleon began to roar, while Justin dried his shoes
with a wisp of straw. But a knife was wanted; Charles offered his.
"Ah!" she said to herself, "he carried a knife in his pocket like a
peasant."
The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yonville.
In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbour’s, and when
Charles had left and she felt herself alone, the comparison re-began
with the clearness of a sensation almost actual, and with that
lengthening of perspective which memory gives to things. Looking from
her bed at the clean fire that was burning, she still saw, as she had
down there, Leon standing up with one hand behind his cane, and with
the other holding Athalie, who was quietly sucking a piece of ice. She
thought him charming; she could not tear herself away from him; she
recalled his other attitudes on other days, the words he had spoken, the
sound of his voice, his whole person; and she repeated, pouting out her
lips as if for a kiss--
"Yes, charming! charming! Is he not in love?" she asked herself; "but
with whom? With me?"
All the proofs arose before her at once; her heart leapt. The flame of
the fire threw a joyous light upon the ceiling; she turned on her back,
stretching out her arms.
Then began the eternal lamentation: "Oh, if Heaven had not willed it!
And why not? What prevented it?"
When Charles came home at midnight, she seemed to have just awakened,
and as he made a noise undressing, she complained of a headache, then
asked carelessly what had happened that evening.
"Monsieur Leon," he said, "went to his room early."
She could not help smiling, and she fell asleep, her soul filled with a
new delight.
The next day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lherueux, the
draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but
bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of
the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a
decoction of liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the
keen brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had been
formerly; a pedlar said some, a banker at Routot according to others.
What was certain was that he made complex calculations in his head that
would have frightened Binet himself. Polite to obsequiousness, he always
held himself with his back bent in the position of one who bows or who
invites.
After leaving at the door his hat surrounded with crape, he put down
a green bandbox on the table, and began by complaining to madame, with
many civilities, that he should have remained till that day without
gaining her confidence. A poor shop like his was not made to attract
a "fashionable lady"; he emphasized the words; yet she had only to
command, and he would undertake to provide her with anything she might
wish, either in haberdashery or linen, millinery or fancy goods, for
he went to town regularly four times a month. He was connected with the
best houses. You could speak of him at the "Trois Freres," at the "Barbe
d’Or," or at the "Grand Sauvage"; all these gentlemen knew him as
well as the insides of their pockets. To-day, then he had come to show
madame, in passing, various articles he happened to have, thanks to
the most rare opportunity. And he pulled out half-a-dozen embroidered
collars from the box.
Madame Bovary examined them. "I do not require anything," she said.
Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited three Algerian scarves,
several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and
finally, four eggcups in cocoanut wood, carved in open work by convicts.
Then, with both hands on the table, his neck stretched out, his figure
bent forward, open-mouthed, he watched Emma’s look, who was walking up
and down undecided amid these goods. From time to time, as if to remove
some dust, he filliped with his nail the silk of the scarves spread
out at full length, and they rustled with a little noise, making in the
green twilight the gold spangles of their tissue scintillate like little
stars.
"How much are they?"
"A mere nothing," he replied, "a mere nothing. But there’s no hurry;
whenever it’s convenient. We are not Jews."
She reflected for a few moments, and ended by again declining Monsieur
Lheureux’s offer. He replied quite unconcernedly--
"Very well. We shall understand one another by and by. I have always got
on with ladies--if I didn’t with my own!"
Emma smiled.
"I wanted to tell you," he went on good-naturedly, after his joke, "that
it isn’t the money I should trouble about. Why, I could give you some,
if need be."
She made a gesture of surprise.
"Ah!" said he quickly and in a low voice, "I shouldn’t have to go far to
find you some, rely on that."
And he began asking after Pere Tellier, the proprietor of the "Cafe
Francais," whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending.
"What’s the matter with Pere Tellier? He coughs so that he shakes his
whole house, and I’m afraid he’ll soon want a deal covering rather than
a flannel vest. He was such a rake as a young man! Those sort of people,
madame, have not the least regularity; he’s burnt up with brandy. Still
it’s sad, all the same, to see an acquaintance go off."
And while he fastened up his box he discoursed about the doctor’s
patients.
"It’s the weather, no doubt," he said, looking frowningly at the floor,
"that causes these illnesses. I, too, don’t feel the thing. One of these
days I shall even have to consult the doctor for a pain I have in my
back. Well, good-bye, Madame Bovary. At your service; your very humble
servant." And he closed the door gently.
Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray by the fireside; she
was a long time over it; everything was well with her.
"How good I was!" she said to herself, thinking of the scarves.
She heard some steps on the stairs. It was Leon. She got up and took
from the chest of drawers the first pile of dusters to be hemmed. When
he came in she seemed very busy.
The conversation languished; Madame Bovary gave it up every few minutes,
whilst he himself seemed quite embarrassed. Seated on a low chair near
the fire, he turned round in his fingers the ivory thimble-case. She
stitched on, or from time to time turned down the hem of the cloth with
her nail. She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence,
as he would have been by her speech.
"Poor fellow!" she thought.
"How have I displeased her?" he asked himself.
At last, however, Leon said that he should have, one of these days, to
go to Rouen on some office business.
"Your music subscription is out; am I to renew it?"
"No," she replied.
"Why?"
"Because--"
And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of grey thread.
This work irritated Leon. It seemed to roughen the ends of her fingers.
A gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it.
"Then you are giving it up?" he went on.
"What?" she asked hurriedly. "Music? Ah! yes! Have I not my house to
look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, in fact, many
duties that must be considered first?"
She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then, she affected anxiety.
Two or three times she even repeated, "He is so good!"
The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this tenderness on his behalf
astonished him unpleasantly; nevertheless he took up on his praises,
which he said everyone was singing, especially the chemist.
"Ah! he is a good fellow," continued Emma.
"Certainly," replied the clerk.
And he began talking of Madame Homais, whose very untidy appearance
generally made them laugh.
"What does it matter?" interrupted Emma. "A good housewife does not
trouble about her appearance."
Then she relapsed into silence.
It was the same on the following days; her talks, her manners,
everything changed. She took interest in the housework, went to church
regularly, and looked after her servant with more severity.
She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called, Felicite brought her
in, and Madame Bovary undressed her to show off her limbs. She declared
she adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion,
and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outburst which would have
reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette in "Notre Dame de
Paris."
When Charles came home he found his slippers put to warm near the fire.
His waistcoat now never wanted lining, nor his shirt buttons, and it was
quite a pleasure to see in the cupboard the night-caps arranged in piles
of the same height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking a turn
in the garden; what he proposed was always done, although she did not
understand the wishes to which she submitted without a murmur; and when
Leon saw him by his fireside after dinner, his two hands on his stomach,
his two feet on the fender, his two cheeks red with feeding, his eyes
moist with happiness, the child crawling along the carpet, and this
woman with the slender waist who came behind his arm-chair to kiss his
forehead: "What madness!" he said to himself. "And how to reach her!"
And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him that he lost all
hope, even the faintest. But by this renunciation he placed her on
an extraordinary pinnacle. To him she stood outside those fleshly
attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she
rose ever, and became farther removed from him after the magnificent
manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of those pure
feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because
they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their passion
rejoices.
Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black
hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always
silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely
touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine
destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved,
that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder
in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the
marble. The others even did not escape from this seduction. The chemist
said--
"She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn’t be misplaced in a
sub-prefecture."
The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the
poor her charity.
But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. That dress with
the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of whose torment those chaste
lips said nothing. She was in love with Leon, and sought solitude that
she might with the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his
form troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation. Emma thrilled at
the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and
afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment that ended
in sorrow.
Leon did not know that when he left her in despair she rose after he had
gone to see him in the street. She concerned herself about his comings
and goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history to find
an excuse for going to his room. The chemist’s wife seemed happy to her
to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centered upon
this house, like the "Lion d’Or" pigeons, who came there to dip their
red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more Emma recognised
her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident,
that she might make it less. She would have liked Leon to guess it, and
she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this.
What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of
shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was
past, that all was lost. Then, pride, and joy of being able to say to
herself, "I am virtuous," and to look at herself in the glass taking
resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she
was making.
Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy
of passion all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of
turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself
to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it. She was irritated by
an ill-served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had
not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow
home.
What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her
anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an
imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose
sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all
felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of
that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.
On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that
resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented
it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair,
and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own
gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity
drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires.
She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better
right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised
sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and
she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she
was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.
Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the
temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a new life; but at once a
vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul.
"Besides, he no longer loves me," she thought. "What is to become of me?
What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?"
She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with
flowing tears.
"Why don’t you tell master?" the servant asked her when she came in
during these crises.
"It is the nerves," said Emma. "Do not speak to him of it; it would
worry him."
"Ah! yes," Felicite went on, "you are just like La Guerine, Pere
Guerin’s daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at
Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, to see her
standing upright on the threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a
winding-sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears, was
a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could not do
anything, nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went
off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his
rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle.
Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say."
"But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began."
Chapter Six
One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been
watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard
the Angelus ringing.
It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a
warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like
women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fetes. Through the bars
of the arbour and away beyond the river seen in the fields, meandering
through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between
the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler
and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches.
In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing
could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its
peaceful lamentation.
With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost
themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered
the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the
altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked
to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here
and there by the stuff black hoods of the good sisters bending over
their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the
gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense.
Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the
down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she
went towards the church, included to no matter what devotions, so that
her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it.
On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his way back, for, in order not
to shorten his day’s labour, he preferred interrupting his work,
then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own
convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads
of catechism hour.
Already a few who had arrived were playing marbles on the stones of the
cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their legs, kicking with their
clogs the large nettles growing between the little enclosure and the
newest graves. This was the only green spot. All the rest was but
stones, always covered with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom.
The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure
made for them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the
humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the
great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on
the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the
air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow
nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp was
burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a
distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of
the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and
the corners.
"Where is the cure?" asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was
amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it.
"He is just coming," he answered.
And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbe Bournisien appeared;
the children, pell-mell, fled into the church.
"These young scamps!" murmured the priest, "always the same!"
Then, picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with is
foot, "They respect nothing!" But as soon as he caught sight of Madame
Bovary, "Excuse me," he said; "I did not recognise you."
He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing
the heavy vestry key between his two fingers.
The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the
lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows, unravelled at the hem.
Grease and tobacco stains followed along his broad chest the lines
of the buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were from his
neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this was
dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of
his greyish beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily.
"How are you?" he added.
"Not well," replied Emma; "I am ill."
"Well, and so am I," answered the priest. "These first warm days weaken
one most remarkably, don’t they? But, after all, we are born to suffer,
as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?"
"He!" she said with a gesture of contempt.
"What!" replied the good fellow, quite astonished, "doesn’t he prescribe
something for you?"
"Ah!" said Emma, "it is no earthly remedy I need."
But the cure from time to time looked into the church, where the
kneeling boys were shouldering one another, and tumbling over like packs
of cards.
"I should like to know--" she went on.
"You look out, Riboudet," cried the priest in an angry voice; "I’ll warm
your ears, you imp!" Then turning to Emma, "He’s Boudet the carpenter’s
son; his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he
could learn quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. And so sometimes
for a joke I call him Riboudet (like the road one takes to go to
Maromme) and I even say ‘Mon Riboudet.’ Ha! Ha! ‘Mont Riboudet.’ The
other day I repeated that just to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he
condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?"
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