The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Everything seemed to her

enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of

things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with soft shrieks such

as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we

give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after

everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every

wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings

on.

As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in

her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair.

Léon reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though

separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of

the house seemed to hold his shadow.

She could not detach her eyes from the carpet where he had walked, from

those empty chairs where he had sat. The river still flowed on, and

slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks.

They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves over the

moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy afternoons

they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He read

aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh wind

of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nasturtiums

of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life, the only

possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it came

to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees,

when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not

having loved Léon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession

of her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms and

say to him, “It is I; I am yours.” But Emma recoiled beforehand at the

difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires, increased by regret,

became only the more acute.

Henceforth the memory of Léon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt

there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of

a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she

stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything

that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most

immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined,

her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness

that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her

lost hopes, the domestic _tête-à-tête_--she gathered it all up, took

everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.

The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted

itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by

little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this

incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and

faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her

repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the

burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still

raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no help

came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in the

terrible cold that pierced her.

Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herself now far

more unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty

that it would not end.

A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself

certain whims. She bought a Gothic prie-dieu, and in a month spent

fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen

for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux’s finest scarves,

and wore it knotted around her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with

closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on a couch

in this garb.

She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair a la Chinoise, in

flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted in on one side and rolled it

under like a man’s.

She wanted to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and

a supply of white paper. She tried serious reading, history, and

philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start,

thinking he was being called to a patient. “I’m coming,” he stammered;

and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the lamp. But

her reading fared like her piece of embroidery, all of which, only just

begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other

books.

She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any

folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she

could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid

enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.

In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called

them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the

corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of

old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all

over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils,

her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on

her temples, she talked much of her old age.

She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed

around her showing his anxiety--

“Bah!” she answered, “what does it matter?”

Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table,

sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head.

Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long

consultations together on the subject of Emma.

What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all

medical treatment? “Do you know what your wife wants?” replied Madame

Bovary senior.

“She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she

were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn’t have

these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her

head, and from the idleness in which she lives.”

“Yet she is always busy,” said Charles.

“Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against

religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from

Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Anyone who

has no religion always ends by turning out badly.”

So it was decided to stop Emma reading novels. The enterprise did not

seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through

Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had

discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply

to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous

trade? The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During

the three weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged

half-a-dozen words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at

table and in the evening before going to bed.

Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville.

The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on

end and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses

from the church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths,

where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold,

together with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends

fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground

between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky straw

stuck out.

Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks through the bars

of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same place and unwilling

to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the shop front of the

chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and the people pushed

in less to buy drugs than for consultations. So great was Homais’

reputation in the neighbouring villages. His robust aplomb had

fascinated the rustics. They considered him a greater doctor than all

the doctors.

Emma was leaning out at the window; she was often there. The window in

the provinces replaces the theatre and the promenade, she was amusing

herself with watching the crowd of boors when she saw a gentleman in

a green velvet coat. He had on yellow gloves, although he wore heavy

gaiters; he was coming towards the doctor’s house, followed by a peasant

walking with a bent head and quite a thoughtful air.

“Can I see the doctor?” he asked Justin, who was talking on the

doorsteps with Félicité, and, taking him for a servant of the

house--“Tell him that Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette is

here.”

It was not from territorial vanity that the new arrival added “of La

Huchette” to his name, but to make himself the better known.

La Huchette, in fact, was an estate near Yonville, where he had just

bought the château and two farms that he cultivated himself, without,

however, troubling very much about them. He lived as a bachelor, and was

supposed to have “at least fifteen thousand francs a year.”

Charles came into the room. Monsieur Boulanger introduced his man, who

wanted to be bled because he felt “a tingling all over.”

“That’ll purge me,” he urged as an objection to all reasoning.

So Bovary ordered a bandage and a basin, and asked Justin to hold it.

Then addressing the peasant, who was already pale--

“Don’t be afraid, my lad.”

“No, no, sir,” said the other; “get on.”

And with an air of bravado he held out his great arm. At the prick of

the lancet the blood spurted out, splashing against the looking-glass.

“Hold the basin nearer,” exclaimed Charles.

“Lor!” said the peasant, “one would swear it was a little fountain

flowing. How red my blood is! That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” answered the doctor, “one feels nothing at first, and then

syncope sets in, and more especially with people of strong constitution

like this man.”

At these words the rustic let go the lancet-case he was twisting between

his fingers. A shudder of his shoulders made the chair-back creak. His

hat fell off.

“I thought as much,” said Bovary, pressing his finger on the vein.

The basin was beginning to tremble in Justin’s hands; his knees shook,

he turned pale.

“Emma! Emma!” called Charles.

With one bound she came down the staircase.

“Some vinegar,” he cried. “O dear! two at once!”

And in his emotion he could hardly put on the compress.

“It is nothing,” said Monsieur Boulanger quietly, taking Justin in his

arms. He seated him on the table with his back resting against the wall.

Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat. The strings of his shirt had

got into a knot, and she was for some minutes moving her light fingers

about the young fellow’s neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her

cambric handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and

then blew upon them softly. The ploughman revived, but Justin’s syncope

still lasted, and his eyeballs disappeared in the pale sclerotics like

blue flowers in milk.

“We must hide this from him,” said Charles.

Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the

movement she made in bending down, her dress (it was a summer dress with

four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread

out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma stooping, staggered

a little as she stretched out her arms.

The stuff here and there gave with the inflections of her bust.

Then she went to fetch a bottle of water, and she was melting some

pieces of sugar when the chemist arrived. The servant had been to

fetch him in the tumult. Seeing his pupil’s eyes staring he drew a long

breath; then going around him he looked at him from head to foot.

“Fool!” he said, “really a little fool! A fool in four letters! A

phlebotomy’s a big affair, isn’t it! And a fellow who isn’t afraid of

anything; a kind of squirrel, just as he is who climbs to vertiginous

heights to shake down nuts. Oh, yes! you just talk to me, boast about

yourself! Here’s a fine fitness for practising pharmacy later on; for

under serious circumstances you may be called before the tribunals in

order to enlighten the minds of the magistrates, and you would have to

keep your head then, to reason, show yourself a man, or else pass for an

imbecile.”

Justin did not answer. The chemist went on--

“Who asked you to come? You are always pestering the doctor and madame.

On Wednesday, moreover, your presence is indispensable to me. There are

now twenty people in the shop. I left everything because of the interest

I take in you. Come, get along! Sharp! Wait for me, and keep an eye on

the jars.”

When Justin, who was rearranging his dress, had gone, they talked for a

little while about fainting-fits. Madame Bovary had never fainted.

“That is extraordinary for a lady,” said Monsieur Boulanger; “but some

people are very susceptible. Thus in a duel, I have seen a second lose

consciousness at the mere sound of the loading of pistols.”

“For my part,” said the chemist, “the sight of other people’s blood

doesn’t affect me at all, but the mere thought of my own flowing would

make me faint if I reflected upon it too much.”

Monsieur Boulanger, however, dismissed his servant, advising him to calm

himself, since his fancy was over.

“It procured me the advantage of making your acquaintance,” he added,

and he looked at Emma as he said this. Then he put three francs on the

corner of the table, bowed negligently, and went out.

He was soon on the other side of the river (this was his way back to La

Huchette), and Emma saw him in the meadow, walking under the poplars,

slackening his pace now and then as one who reflects.

“She is very pretty,” he said to himself; “she is very pretty, this

doctor’s wife. Fine teeth, black eyes, a dainty foot, a figure like a

Parisienne’s. Where the devil does she come from? Wherever did that fat

fellow pick her up?”

Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was thirty-four; he was of brutal

temperament and intelligent perspicacity, having, moreover, had much to

do with women, and knowing them well. This one had seemed pretty to him;

so he was thinking about her and her husband.

“I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty

nails, and hasn’t shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his

patients, she sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would

like to live in town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman!

She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table.

With three words of gallantry she’d adore one, I’m sure of it. She’d be

tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?”

Then the difficulties of love-making seen in the distance made him by

contrast think of his mistress. She was an actress at Rouen, whom he

kept; and when he had pondered over this image, with which, even in

remembrance, he was satiated--

“Ah! Madame Bovary,” he thought, “is much prettier, especially fresher.

Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat. She is so finiky about her

pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for prawns.”

The fields were empty, and around him Rodolphe only heard the regular

beating of the grass striking against his boots, with a cry of the

grasshopper hidden at a distance among the oats. He again saw Emma in

her room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her.

“Oh, I will have her,” he cried, striking a blow with his stick at a

clod in front of him. And he at once began to consider the political

part of the enterprise. He asked himself--

“Where shall we meet? By what means? We shall always be having the brat

on our hands, and the servant, the neighbours, and husband, all sorts of

worries. Pshaw! one would lose too much time over it.”

Then he resumed, “She really has eyes that pierce one’s heart like a

gimlet. And that pale complexion! I adore pale women!”

When he reached the top of the Arguiel hills he had made up his mind.

“It’s only finding the opportunities. Well, I will call in now and then.

I’ll send them venison, poultry; I’ll have myself bled, if need be. We

shall become friends; I’ll invite them to my place. By Jove!” added he,

“there’s the agricultural show coming on. She’ll be there. I shall see

her. We’ll begin boldly, for that’s the surest way.”

Chapter Eight

At last it came, the famous agricultural show. On the morning of the

solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors were chatting over the

preparations. The pediment of the town hall had been hung with garlands

of ivy; a tent had been erected in a meadow for the banquet; and in the

middle of the Place, in front of the church, a kind of bombarde was

to announce the arrival of the prefect and the names of the successful

farmers who had obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy (there was

none at Yonville) had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom Binet

was captain. On that day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and,

tightly buttoned in his tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless

that the whole vital portion of his person seemed to have descended into

his legs, which rose in a cadence of set steps with a single movement.

As there was some rivalry between the tax-collector and the colonel,

both, to show off their talents, drilled their men separately. One

saw the red epaulettes and the black breastplates pass and re-pass

alternately; there was no end to it, and it constantly began again.

There had never been such a display of pomp. Several citizens had

scoured their houses the evening before; tri-coloured flags hung from

half-open windows; all the public-houses were full; and in the lovely

weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the coloured

neckerchiefs seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and relieved

with the motley colours the sombre monotony of the frock-coats and blue

smocks. The neighbouring farmers’ wives, when they got off their horses,

pulled out the long pins that fastened around them their dresses, turned

up for fear of mud; and the husbands, for their part, in order to save

their hats, kept their handkerchiefs around them, holding one corner

between their teeth.

The crowd came into the main street from both ends of the village.

People poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the houses; and from time

to time one heard knockers banging against doors closing behind women

with their gloves, who were going out to see the fete. What was most

admired were two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that flanked a

platform on which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there were

against the four columns of the town hall four kinds of poles,

each bearing a small standard of greenish cloth, embellished with

inscriptions in gold letters.

On one was written, “To Commerce”; on the other, “To Agriculture”; on

the third, “To Industry”; and on the fourth, “To the Fine Arts.”

But the jubilation that brightened all faces seemed to darken that of

Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen-steps she

muttered to herself, “What rubbish! what rubbish! With their canvas

booth! Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down there under

a tent like a gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to the place!

Then it wasn’t worth while sending to Neufchâtel for the keeper of a

cookshop! And for whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!”

The druggist was passing. He had on a frock-coat, nankeen trousers,

beaver shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a low crown.

“Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry.” And as the fat widow asked

where he was going--

“It seems odd to you, doesn’t it, I who am always more cooped up in my

laboratory than the man’s rat in his cheese.”

“What cheese?” asked the landlady.

“Oh, nothing! nothing!” Homais continued. “I merely wished to convey

to you, Madame Lefrancois, that I usually live at home like a recluse.

To-day, however, considering the circumstances, it is necessary--”

“Oh, you’re going down there!” she said contemptuously.

“Yes, I am going,” replied the druggist, astonished. “Am I not a member

of the consulting commission?”

Mere Lefrancois looked at him for a few moments, and ended by saying

with a smile--

“That’s another pair of shoes! But what does agriculture matter to you?

Do you understand anything about it?”

“Certainly I understand it, since I am a druggist--that is to say,

a chemist. And the object of chemistry, Madame Lefrancois, being the

knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of all natural bodies,

it follows that agriculture is comprised within its domain. And, in

fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the

analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is

all this, if it isn’t chemistry, pure and simple?”

The landlady did not answer. Homais went on--

“Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled

the earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is necessary rather to know the

composition of the substances in question--the geological strata, the

atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the minerals, the waters,

the density of the different bodies, their capillarity, and what not.

And one must be master of all the principles of hygiene in order to

direct, criticize the construction of buildings, the feeding of animals,

the diet of domestics. And, moreover, Madame Lefrancois, one must know

botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand, which are

the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are unproductive

and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and re-sow them

there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must keep pace

with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be always on the

alert to find out improvements.”

The landlady never took her eyes off the “Cafe Francois” and the chemist

went on--

“Would to God our agriculturists were chemists, or that at least they

would pay more attention to the counsels of science. Thus lately I

myself wrote a considerable tract, a memoir of over seventy-two pages,

entitled, ‘Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects, together with some

New Reflections on the Subject,’ that I sent to the Agricultural Society

of Rouen, and which even procured me the honour of being received among

its members--Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological. Well, if my

work had been given to the public--” But the druggist stopped, Madame

Lefrancois seemed so preoccupied.

“Just look at them!” she said. “It’s past comprehension! Such a cookshop

as that!” And with a shrug of the shoulders that stretched out over her

breast the stitches of her knitted bodice, she pointed with both hands

at her rival’s inn, whence songs were heard issuing. “Well, it won’t

last long,” she added. “It’ll be over before a week.”

Homais drew back with stupefaction. She came down three steps and

whispered in his ear--

“What! you didn’t know it? There is to be an execution in next week.

It’s Lheureux who is selling him out; he has killed him with bills.”

“What a terrible catastrophe!” cried the druggist, who always found

expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances.

Then the landlady began telling him the story that she had heard from

Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, and although she detested

Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was “a wheedler, a sneak.”

“There!” she said. “Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to

Madame Bovary, who’s got on a green bonnet. Why, she’s taking Monsieur

Boulanger’s arm.”

“Madame Bovary!” exclaimed Homais. “I must go at once and pay her my

respects. Perhaps she’ll be very glad to have a seat in the enclosure

under the peristyle.” And, without heeding Madame Lefrancois, who was

calling him back to tell him more about it, the druggist walked off

rapidly with a smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing copiously

to right and left, and taking up much room with the large tails of his

frock-coat that fluttered behind him in the wind.

Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from afar, hurried on, but Madame

Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more slowly, and, smiling at her,

said in a rough tone--

“It’s only to get away from that fat fellow, you know, the druggist.”

She pressed his elbow.

“What’s the meaning of that?” he asked himself. And he looked at her out

of the corner of his eyes.

Her profile was so calm that one could guess nothing from it. It stood

out in the light from the oval of her bonnet, with pale ribbons on it

like the leaves of weeds. Her eyes with their long curved lashes looked

straight before her, and though wide open, they seemed slightly puckered

by the cheek-bones, because of the blood pulsing gently under the

delicate skin. A pink line ran along the partition between her nostrils.

Her head was bent upon her shoulder, and the pearl tips of her white

teeth were seen between her lips.

“Is she making fun of me?” thought Rodolphe.

Emma’s gesture, however, had only been meant for a warning; for Monsieur

Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke now and again as if to enter

into the conversation.

“What a superb day! Everybody is out! The wind is east!”

And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe answered him, whilst at the

slightest movement made by them he drew near, saying, “I beg your

pardon!” and raised his hat.

When they reached the farrier’s house, instead of following the road

up to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him

Madame Bovary. He called out--

“Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently.”

“How you got rid of him!” she said, laughing.

“Why,” he went on, “allow oneself to be intruded upon by others? And as

to-day I have the happiness of being with you--”

Emma blushed. He did not finish his sentence. Then he talked of the fine

weather and of the pleasure of walking on the grass. A few daisies had

sprung up again.

“Here are some pretty Easter daisies,” he said, “and enough of them to

furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the place.”

He added, “Shall I pick some? What do you think?”

“Are you in love?” she asked, coughing a little.

“H’m, h’m! who knows?” answered Rodolphe.

The meadow began to fill, and the housewives hustled you with their

great umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. One had often to get

out of the way of a long file of country folk, servant-maids with blue

stockings, flat shoes, silver rings, and who smelt of milk, when one

passed close to them. They walked along holding one another by the hand,

and thus they spread over the whole field from the row of open trees to

the banquet tent.

But this was the examination time, and the farmers one after the other

entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long cord supported on sticks.

The beasts were there, their noses towards the cord, and making a

confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in

the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the

cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass,

slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats

that buzzed round them. Plough-men with bare arms were holding by the

halter prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils looking

towards the mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and

flowing manes, while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then

came and sucked them. And above the long undulation of these crowded

animals one saw some white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some

sharp horns sticking out, and the heads of men running about. Apart,

outside the enclosure, a hundred paces off, was a large black bull,

muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, and who moved no more than

if he had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding him by a rope.

Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps,

examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One

who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he

walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de

la Panville. As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he came forward quickly,

and smiling amiably, said--

“What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?”

Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had

disappeared--

“_Ma foi!_”[12] said he, “I shall not go. Your company is better than

his.”

[12] Upon my word!

And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily,

showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in

front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire.

He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their

dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that

incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think

they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations

of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for

social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric

shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his

waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at

the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters.

These were so polished that they reflected the grass. He trampled on

horses’s dung with them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his

straw hat on one side.

“Besides,” added he, “when one lives in the country--”

“It’s waste of time,” said Emma.

“That is true,” replied Rodolphe. “To think that not one of these people

is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!”

Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed,

the illusions lost there.

“And I too,” said Rodolphe, “am drifting into depression.”

“You!” she said in astonishment; “I thought you very light-hearted.”

“Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to

wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the

sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were

not better to join those sleeping there!”

“Oh! and your friends?” she said. “You do not think of them.”

“My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?” And he

accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips.

But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great

pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them. He was so overladen

with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the

ends of his two outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger,

who was carrying the church chairs about amongst the people. Alive to

all that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of turning

the show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew

which way to turn. In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for

these seats, whose straw smelt of incense, and they leant against the

thick backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration.

Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe’s arm; he went on as if speaking to

himself--

“Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! if I had some aim

in life, if I had met some love, if I had found someone! Oh, how I would

have spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted everything,

overcome everything!”

“Yet it seems to me,” said Emma, “that you are not to be pitied.”

“Ah! you think so?” said Rodolphe.

“For, after all,” she went on, “you are free--” she hesitated, “rich--”

“Do not mock me,” he replied.

And she protested that she was not mocking him, when the report of a

cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling one another pell-mell

towards the village.

It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed not to be coming, and the

members of the jury felt much embarrassed, not knowing if they ought to

begin the meeting or still wait.

At last at the end of the Place a large hired landau appeared, drawn by

two thin horses, which a coachman in a white hat was whipping lustily.

Binet had only just time to shout, “Present arms!” and the colonel to

imitate him. All ran towards the enclosure; everyone pushed forward. A

few even forgot their collars; but the equipage of the prefect seemed

to anticipate the crowd, and the two yoked jades, trapesing in their

harness, came up at a little trot in front of the peristyle of the town

hall at the very moment when the National Guard and firemen deployed,

beating drums and marking time.

“Present!” shouted Binet.

“Halt!” shouted the colonel. “Left about, march.”

And after presenting arms, during which the clang of the band, letting

loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns

were lowered. Then was seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman

in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft

of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most

benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were

half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he raised his

sharp nose, and forced a smile upon his sunken mouth. He recognised the

mayor by his scarf, and explained to him that the prefect was not able

to come. He himself was a councillor at the prefecture; then he added

a few apologies. Monsieur Tuvache answered them with compliments; the

other confessed himself nervous; and they remained thus, face to face,

their foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all round,

the municipal council, the notable personages, the National Guard and

the crowd. The councillor pressing his little cocked hat to his

breast repeated his bows, while Tuvache, bent like a bow, also smiled,

stammered, tried to say something, protested his devotion to the

monarchy and the honour that was being done to Yonville.

Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the head of the horses from the

coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot, led them to the door

of the “Lion d’Or”, where a number of peasants collected to look at the

carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen one

by one mounted the platform, where they sat down in red utrecht velvet

arm-chairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache.

All these people looked alike. Their fair flabby faces, somewhat tanned

by the sun, were the colour of sweet cider, and their puffy whiskers

emerged from stiff collars, kept up by white cravats with broad bows.

All the waist-coats were of velvet, double-breasted; all the watches

had, at the end of a long ribbon, an oval cornelian seal; everyone

rested his two hands on his thighs, carefully stretching the stride of

their trousers, whose unsponged glossy cloth shone more brilliantly than

the leather of their heavy boots.

The ladies of the company stood at the back under the vestibule between

the pillars while the common herd was opposite, standing up or sitting

on chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had brought thither all

those that he had moved from the field, and he even kept running back

every minute to fetch others from the church. He caused such confusion

with this piece of business that one had great difficulty in getting to

the small steps of the platform.

“I think,” said Monsieur Lheureux to the chemist, who was passing to his

place, “that they ought to have put up two Venetian masts with something

rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would have been a very pretty

effect.”

“To be sure,” replied Homais; “but what can you expect? The mayor took

everything on his own shoulders. He hasn’t much taste. Poor Tuvache! and

he is even completely destitute of what is called the genius of art.”

Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary, had gone up to the first

floor of the town hall, to the “council-room,” and, as it was empty,

he declared that they could enjoy the sight there more comfortably. He

fetched three stools from the round table under the bust of the monarch,

and having carried them to one of the windows, they sat down by each

other.

There was commotion on the platform, long whisperings, much parleying.

At last the councillor got up. They knew now that his name was Lieuvain,

and in the crowd the name was passed from one to the other. After he had

collated a few pages, and bent over them to see better, he began--

“Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on

the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment will, I am sure, be

shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the

higher administration, to the government to the monarch, gentle men, our

sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private

prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at

once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils

of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well

as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts?”

“I ought,” said Rodolphe, “to get back a little further.”

“Why?” said Emma.

But at this moment the voice of the councillor rose to an extraordinary

pitch. He declaimed--

“This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined

our public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man

himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled

lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins,

when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations.”

“Well, someone down there might see me,” Rodolphe resumed, “then

I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad

reputation--”

“Oh, you are slandering yourself,” said Emma.

“No! It is dreadful, I assure you.”

“But, gentlemen,” continued the councillor, “if, banishing from my

memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back

to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there?

Everywhere commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means

of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state,

establish within it new relations. Our great industrial centres have

recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in

all hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France

breathes once more!”

“Besides,” added Rodolphe, “perhaps from the world’s point of view they

are right.”

“How so?” she asked.

“What!” said he. “Do you not know that there are souls constantly

tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions

and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all

sorts of fantasies, of follies.”

Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveller who has voyaged over

strange lands, and went on--

“We have not even this distraction, we poor women!”

“A sad distraction, for happiness isn’t found in it.”

“But is it ever found?” she asked.

“Yes; one day it comes,” he answered.

“And this is what you have understood,” said the councillor.

“You, farmers, agricultural labourers! you pacific pioneers of a work

that belongs wholly to civilization! you, men of progress and morality,

you have understood, I say, that political storms are even more

redoubtable than atmospheric disturbances!”

“It comes one day,” repeated Rodolphe, “one day suddenly, and when

one is despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice

cried, ‘It is here!’ You feel the need of confiding the whole of your

life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this being. There

is no need for explanations; they understand one another. They have seen

each other in dreams!”

(And he looked at her.) “In fine, here it is, this treasure so sought

after, here before you. It glitters, it flashes; yet one still doubts,

one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if one went out from

darkness into light.”

And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word. He passed his

hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness. Then he let it

fall on Emma’s. She took hers away.

“And who would be surprised at it, gentlemen? He only who is so blind,

so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so plunged in the prejudices

of another age as still to misunderstand the spirit of agricultural

populations. Where, indeed, is to be found more patriotism than in the

country, greater devotion to the public welfare, more intelligence, in a

word? And, gentlemen, I do not mean that superficial intelligence,

vain ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and balanced

intelligence that applies itself above all else to useful objects, thus

contributing to the good of all, to the common amelioration and to

the support of the state, born of respect for law and the practice of

duty--”

“Ah! again!” said Rodolphe. “Always ‘duty.’ I am sick of the word.

They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with

foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears ‘Duty,

duty!’ Ah! by Jove! one’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the

beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the

ignominy that it imposes upon us.”

“Yet--yet--” objected Madame Bovary.

“No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one

beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of

poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?”

“But one must,” said Emma, “to some extent bow to the opinion of the

world and accept its moral code.”

“Ah! but there are two,” he replied. “The small, the conventional, that

of men, that which constantly changes, that brays out so loudly, that

makes such a commotion here below, of the earth earthly, like the mass

of imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the eternal, that is

about us and above, like the landscape that surrounds us, and the blue

heavens that give us light.”

Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief.

He continued--

“And what should I do here gentlemen, pointing out to you the uses

of agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who provides our means of

subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The agriculturist, gentlemen,

who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the country,

brings forth the corn, which, being ground, is made into a powder by

means of ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the name of flour,

and from there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered at the

baker’s, who makes it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it

not the agriculturist who fattens, for our clothes, his abundant

flocks in the pastures? For how should we clothe ourselves, how nourish

ourselves, without the agriculturist? And, gentlemen, is it even

necessary to go so far for examples? Who has not frequently reflected

on all the momentous things that we get out of that modest animal, the

ornament of poultry-yards, that provides us at once with a soft pillow

for our bed, with succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I should

never end if I were to enumerate one after the other all the different

products which the earth, well cultivated, like a generous mother,

lavishes upon her children. Here it is the vine, elsewhere the apple

tree for cider, there colza, farther on cheeses and flax. Gentlemen, let

us not forget flax, which has made such great strides of late years, and

to which I will more particularly call your attention.”

He had no need to call it, for all the mouths of the multitude were wide

open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache by his side listened to him

with staring eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time to time softly closed

his eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son Napoleon between

his knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose a syllable.

The chins of the other members of the jury went slowly up and down in

their waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the

platform rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with

out-turned elbows, the point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could

hear, but certainly he could see nothing, because of the visor of his

helmet, that fell down on his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of

Monsieur Tuvache, had a bigger one, for his was enormous, and shook on

his head, and from it an end of his cotton scarf peeped out. He smiled

beneath it with a perfectly infantine sweetness, and his pale little

face, whence drops were running, wore an expression of enjoyment and

sleepiness.

The square as far as the houses was crowded with people. One saw folk

leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others standing at doors,

and Justin, in front of the chemist’s shop, seemed quite transfixed by

the sight of what he was looking at. In spite of the silence Monsieur

Lieuvain’s voice was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments of

phrases, and interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the

crowd; then you suddenly heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the

bleating of the lambs, who answered one another at street corners. In

fact, the cowherds and shepherds had driven their beasts thus far, and

these lowed from time to time, while with their tongues they tore down

some scrap of foliage that hung above their mouths.

Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice,

speaking rapidly--

“Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single

sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest

sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do

meet, all is so organised that they cannot blend together. Yet they will

make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will call upon

each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten years,

they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they

are born one for the other.”

His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face towards

Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes

small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelt the

perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy.

Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had

waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an

odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes

the better to breathe it in. But in making this movement, as she leant

back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on the line of the

horizon, the old diligence, the “Hirondelle,” that was slowly descending

the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in this

yellow carriage that Léon had so often come back to her, and by this

route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him

opposite at his windows; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it

seemed to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of

the lustres on the arm of the Viscount, and that Léon was not far away,

that he was coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent

of Rodolphe’s head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced

through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust

of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which

suffused her soul. She opened wide her nostrils several times to drink

in the freshness of the ivy round the capitals. She took off her gloves,

she wiped her hands, then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while

athwart the throbbing of her temples she heard the murmur of the

crowd and the voice of the councillor intoning his phrases. He

said--“Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of

routine, nor to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism.

“Apply yourselves, above all, to the amelioration of the soil, to good

manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine

races. Let these shows be to you pacific arenas, where the victor in

leaving it will hold forth a hand to the vanquished, and will fraternise

with him in the hope of better success. And you, aged servants, humble

domestics, whose hard labour no Government up to this day has taken into

consideration, come hither to receive the reward of your silent virtues,

and be assured that the state henceforward has its eye upon you; that it

encourages you, protects you; that it will accede to your just

demands, and alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful

sacrifices.”

Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning

another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councillor,

but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by

more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise

of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture

more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had

always contributed to civilisation. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was

talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of

society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns

in the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had

put on cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and

in this discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur

Derozerays set himself this problem. From magnetism little by little

Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing

Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian, planting his cabbages, and the

Emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the

young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible

attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.

“Thus we,” he said, “why did we come to know one another? What chance

willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that

flow but to unite; our special bents of mind had driven us towards each

other.”

And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.

“For good farming generally!” cried the president.

“Just now, for example, when I went to your house.”

“To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix.”

“Did I know I should accompany you?”

“Seventy francs.”

“A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you--I remained.”

“Manures!”

“And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!”

“To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!”

“For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a

charm.”

“To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin.”

“And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you.”

“For a merino ram!”

“But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow.”

“To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame.”

“Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I

not?”

“Porcine race; prizes--equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg,

sixty francs!”

Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering

like a captive dove that wants to fly away; but, whether she was trying

to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure; she made a

movement with her fingers. He exclaimed--

“Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand

that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!”

A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the

table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women

were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering.

“Use of oil-cakes,” continued the president. He was hurrying on:

“Flemish manure-flax-growing-drainage-long leases-domestic service.”

Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme

desire made their dry lips tremble, and wearily, without an effort,

their fingers intertwined.

“Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerriere, for

fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal--value,

twenty-five francs!”

“Where is Catherine Leroux?” repeated the councillor.

She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering--

“Go up!”

“Don’t be afraid!”

“Oh, how stupid she is!”

“Well, is she there?” cried Tuvache.

“Yes; here she is.”

“Then let her come up!”

Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid

bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she

wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her

pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered

russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked out two

large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of washing

the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that

they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and

by dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble

witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of

monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion

weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had

caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she

found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by

the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the

councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run

away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at

her.

Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of

servitude.

“Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux!” said the

councillor, who had taken the list of prize-winners from the president;

and, looking at the piece of paper and the old woman by turns, he

repeated in a fatherly tone--“Approach! approach!”

“Are you deaf?” said Tuvache, fidgeting in his armchair; and he began

shouting in her ear, “Fifty-four years of service. A silver medal!

Twenty-five francs! For you!”

Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude

spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her

muttering “I’ll give it to our cure up home, to say some masses for me!”

“What fanaticism!” exclaimed the chemist, leaning across to the notary.

The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed, and now that the speeches had

been read, each one fell back into his place again, and everything into

the old grooves; the masters bullied the servants, and these struck the

animals, indolent victors, going back to the stalls, a green-crown on

their horns.

The National Guards, however, had gone up to the first floor of the

town hall with buns spitted on their bayonets, and the drummer of the

battalion carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe’s

arm; he saw her home; they separated at her door; then he walked about

alone in the meadow while he waited for the time of the banquet.

The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the guests were so crowded that

they could hardly move their elbows; and the narrow planks used for

forms almost broke down under their weight. They ate hugely. Each one

stuffed himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every brow, and a

whitish steam, like the vapour of a stream on an autumn morning, floated

above the table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against

the calico of the tent was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard

nothing. Behind him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty

plates, his neighbours were talking; he did not answer them; they filled

his glass, and there was silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing

noise. He was dreaming of what she had said, of the line of her lips;

her face, as in a magic mirror, shone on the plates of the shakos, the

folds of her gown fell along the walls, and days of love unrolled to all

infinity before him in the vistas of the future.

He saw her again in the evening during the fireworks, but she was with

her husband, Madame Homais, and the druggist, who was worrying about the

danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left the company to go and

give some advice to Binet.

The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache had, through an excess

of caution, been shut up in his cellar, and so the damp powder would

not light, and the principal set piece, that was to represent a dragon

biting his tail, failed completely. Now and then a meagre Roman-candle

went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the

cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma

silently nestled against Charles’s shoulder; then, raising her chin, she

watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe

gazed at her in the light of the burning lanterns.

They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few crops of rain began

to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head.

At this moment the councillor’s carriage came out from the inn.

His coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed off, and one could see from

the distance, above the hood, between the two lanterns, the mass of his

body, that swayed from right to left with the giving of the traces.

“Truly,” said the druggist, “one ought to proceed most rigorously

against drunkenness! I should like to see written up weekly at the door

of the town hall on a board _ad hoc_[13] the names of all those who

during the week got intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard to

statistics, one would thus have, as it were, public records that one

could refer to in case of need. But excuse me!”

[13] Specifically for that.

And he once more ran off to the captain. The latter was going back to

see his lathe again.

“Perhaps you would not do ill,” Homais said to him, “to send one of your

men, or to go yourself--”

“Leave me alone!” answered the tax-collector. “It’s all right!”

“Do not be uneasy,” said the druggist, when he returned to his friends.

“Monsieur Binet has assured me that all precautions have been taken. No

sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let us go to rest.”

“Ma foi! I want it,” said Madame Homais, yawning at large. “But never

mind; we’ve had a beautiful day for our fete.”

Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with a tender look, “Oh, yes! very

beautiful!”

And having bowed to one another, they separated.

Two days later, in the “Final de Rouen,” there was a long article on the

show. Homais had composed it with verve the very next morning.

“Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this

crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical

sun pouring its heat upon our heads?”

Then he spoke of the condition of the peasants. Certainly the Government

was doing much, but not enough. “Courage!” he cried to it; “a thousand

reforms are indispensable; let us accomplish them!” Then touching on

the entry of the councillor, he did not forget “the martial air of our

militia;” nor “our most merry village maidens;” nor the “bald-headed old

men like patriarchs who were there, and of whom some, the remnants of

our phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at the manly sound of the

drums.” He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury,

and he even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais,

chemist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society.

When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of

the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. “The father embraced the son,

the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one showed

his humble medal with pride; and no doubt when he got home to his good

housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot.

“About six o’clock a banquet prepared in the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard

brought together the principal personages of the fete. The greatest

cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed: Monsieur

Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays,

Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin

sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant

fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a

veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our

little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of

a dream of the ‘Thousand and One Nights.’ Let us state that no untoward

event disturbed this family meeting.” And he added “Only the absence

of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the priests understand progress in

another fashion. Just as you please, messieurs the followers of Loyola!”

Chapter Nine

Six weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last one evening he

appeared.

The day after the show he had said to himself--“We mustn’t go back too

soon; that would be a mistake.”

And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. After the hunting he

had thought it was too late, and then he reasoned thus--

“If from the first day she loved me, she must from impatience to see me

again love me more. Let’s go on with it!”

And he knew that his calculation had been right when, on entering the

room, he saw Emma turn pale.

She was alone. The day was drawing in. The small muslin curtain along

the windows deepened the twilight, and the gilding of the barometer, on

which the rays of the sun fell, shone in the looking-glass between the

meshes of the coral.

Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly answered his first

conventional phrases.

“I,” he said, “have been busy. I have been ill.”

“Seriously?” she cried.

“Well,” said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a footstool, “no; it

was because I did not want to come back.”

“Why?”

“Can you not guess?”

He looked at her again, but so hard that she lowered her head, blushing.

He went on--

“Emma!”

“Sir,” she said, drawing back a little.

“Ah! you see,” replied he in a melancholy voice, “that I was right not

to come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and

that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! why all the

world calls you thus! Besides, it is not your name; it is the name of

another!”

He repeated, “of another!” And he hid his face in his hands.

“Yes, I think of you constantly. The memory of you drives me to despair.

Ah! forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell! I will go far away, so far

that you will never hear of me again; and yet--to-day--I know not what

force impelled me towards you. For one does not struggle against Heaven;

one cannot resist the smile of angels; one is carried away by that which

is beautiful, charming, adorable.”

It was the first time that Emma had heard such words spoken to herself,

and her pride, like one who reposes bathed in warmth, expanded softly

and fully at this glowing language.

“But if I did not come,” he continued, “if I could not see you, at least

I have gazed long on all that surrounds you. At night-every night-I

arose; I came hither; I watched your house, its glimmering in the moon,

the trees in the garden swaying before your window, and the little lamp,

a gleam shining through the window-panes in the darkness. Ah! you never

knew that there, so near you, so far from you, was a poor wretch!”

She turned towards him with a sob.

“Oh, you are good!” she said.

“No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt that! Tell me--one

word--only one word!”

And Rodolphe imperceptibly glided from the footstool to the ground; but

a sound of wooden shoes was heard in the kitchen, and he noticed the

door of the room was not closed.

“How kind it would be of you,” he went on, rising, “if you would humour

a whim of mine.” It was to go over her house; he wanted to know it; and

Madame Bovary seeing no objection to this, they both rose, when Charles

came in.

“Good morning, doctor,” Rodolphe said to him.

The doctor, flattered at this unexpected title, launched out into

obsequious phrases. Of this the other took advantage to pull himself

together a little.

“Madame was speaking to me,” he then said, “about her health.”

Charles interrupted him; he had indeed a thousand anxieties; his wife’s

palpitations of the heart were beginning again. Then Rodolphe asked if

riding would not be good.

“Certainly! excellent! just the thing! There’s an idea! You ought to

follow it up.”

And as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered

one. She refused his offer; he did not insist. Then to explain his visit

he said that his ploughman, the man of the blood-letting, still suffered

from giddiness.

“I’ll call around,” said Bovary.

“No, no! I’ll send him to you; we’ll come; that will be more convenient

for you.”

“Ah! very good! I thank you.”

And as soon as they were alone, “Why don’t you accept Monsieur

Boulanger’s kind offer?”

She assumed a sulky air, invented a thousand excuses, and finally

declared that perhaps it would look odd.

“Well, what the deuce do I care for that?” said Charles, making a

pirouette. “Health before everything! You are wrong.”

“And how do you think I can ride when I haven’t got a habit?”

“You must order one,” he answered.

The riding-habit decided her.

When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his

wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature.

The next day at noon Rodolphe appeared at Charles’s door with two

saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin

side-saddle.

Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt she

had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with his

appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and white

corduroy breeches. She was ready; she was waiting for him.

Justin escaped from the chemist’s to see her start, and the chemist also

came out. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger a little good advice.

“An accident happens so easily. Be careful! Your horses perhaps are

mettlesome.”

She heard a noise above her; it was Félicité drumming on the windowpanes

to amuse little Berthe. The child blew her a kiss; her mother answered

with a wave of her whip.

“A pleasant ride!” cried Monsieur Homais. “Prudence! above all,

prudence!” And he flourished his newspaper as he saw them disappear.

As soon as he felt the ground, Emma’s horse set off at a gallop.

Rodolphe galloped by her side. Now and then they exchanged a word. Her

figure slightly bent, her hand well up, and her right arm stretched out,

she gave herself up to the cadence of the movement that rocked her in

her saddle. At the bottom of the hill Rodolphe gave his horse its head;

they started together at a bound, then at the top suddenly the horses

stopped, and her large blue veil fell about her.

It was early in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds

hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent

asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the

clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of

Yonville, with the gardens at the water’s edge, the yards, the walls and

the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and

never had this poor village where she lived appeared so small. From the

height on which they were the whole valley seemed an immense pale lake

sending off its vapour into the air. Clumps of trees here and there

stood out like black rocks, and the tall lines of the poplars that rose

above the mist were like a beach stirred by the wind.

By the side, on the turf between the pines, a brown light shimmered

in the warm atmosphere. The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco,

deadened the noise of their steps, and with the edge of their shoes the

horses as they walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front of them.

Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt of the wood. She turned

away from time to time to avoid his look, and then she saw only the pine

trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her a little giddy.

The horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked.

Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out.

“God protects us!” said Rodolphe.

“Do you think so?” she said.

“Forward! forward!” he continued.

He “tchk’d” with his tongue. The two beasts set off at a trot.

Long ferns by the roadside caught in Emma’s stirrup.

Rodolphe leant forward and removed them as they rode along. At other

times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt

his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no

longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots

of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were

grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves.

Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the

hoarse, soft cry of the ravens flying off amidst the oaks.

They dismounted. Rodolphe fastened up the horses. She walked on in

front on the moss between the paths. But her long habit got in her way,

although she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe, walking behind her,

saw between the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white

stocking, that seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness.

She stopped. “I am tired,” she said.

“Come, try again,” he went on. “Courage!”

Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her

veil, that fell sideways from her man’s hat over her hips, her face

appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure

waves.

“But where are we going?”

He did not answer. She was breathing irregularly. Rodolphe looked round

him biting his moustache. They came to a larger space where the coppice

had been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe

began speaking to her of his love. He did not begin by frightening her

with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.

Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the bits of wood on

the ground with the tip of her foot. But at the words, “Are not our

destinies now one?”

“Oh, no!” she replied. “You know that well. It is impossible!” She rose

to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having gazed

at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look, she said

hurriedly--

“Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let us go back.”

He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated:

“Where are the horses? Where are the horses?”

Then smiling a strange smile, his pupil fixed, his teeth set, he

advanced with outstretched arms. She recoiled trembling. She stammered:

“Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let me go!”

“If it must be,” he went on, his face changing; and he again became

respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm. They went back. He

said--

“What was the matter with you? Why? I do not understand. You were

mistaken, no doubt. In my soul you are as a Madonna on a pedestal, in

a place lofty, secure, immaculate. But I need you to live! I must have

your eyes, your voice, your thought! Be my friend, my sister, my angel!”

And he put out his arm round her waist. She feebly tried to disengage

herself. He supported her thus as they walked along.

But they heard the two horses browsing on the leaves.

“Oh! one moment!” said Rodolphe. “Do not let us go! Stay!”

He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness

on the water. Faded water lilies lay motionless between the reeds.

At the noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide

themselves.

“I am wrong! I am wrong!” she said. “I am mad to listen to you!”

“Why? Emma! Emma!”

“Oh, Rodolphe!” said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder.

The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw

back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with

a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him--

The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the

branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves

or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if hummingbirds flying

about had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something

sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose

beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a

stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she

heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she

heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing

nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his

penknife one of the two broken bridles.

They returned to Yonville by the same road. On the mud they saw again

the traces of their horses side by side, the same thickets, the same

stones to the grass; nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her

something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved

in their places. Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her hand

to kiss it.

She was charming on horseback--upright, with her slender waist, her knee

bent on the mane of her horse, her face somewhat flushed by the fresh

air in the red of the evening.

On entering Yonville she made her horse prance in the road. People

looked at her from the windows.

At dinner her husband thought she looked well, but she pretended not to

hear him when he inquired about her ride, and she remained sitting there

with her elbow at the side of her plate between the two lighted candles.

“Emma!” he said.

“What?”

“Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre’s. He has an old cob,

still very fine, only a little broken-kneed, and that could be bought; I

am sure, for a hundred crowns.” He added, “And thinking it might please

you, I have bespoken it--bought it. Have I done right? Do tell me?”

She nodded her head in assent; then a quarter of an hour later--

“Are you going out to-night?” she asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!”

And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up

in her room.

At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches,

Rodolphe, and she again felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves

rustled and the reeds whistled.

But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never

had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something

subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover!

a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her.

So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness

of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all

would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed

her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary

existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the

interspaces of these heights.

Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the

lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with

the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were,

an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the love-dream of her

youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had

so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not

suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up

burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse,

without anxiety, without trouble.

The day following passed with a new sweetness. They made vows to one

another. She told him of her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with

kisses; and she looking at him through half-closed eyes, asked him to

call her again by her name--to say that he loved her. They were in the

forest, as yesterday, in the shed of some woodenshoe maker. The walls

were of straw, and the roof so low they had to stoop. They were seated

side by side on a bed of dry leaves.

From that day forth they wrote to one another regularly every evening.

Emma placed her letter at the end of the garden, by the river, in a

fissure of the wall. Rodolphe came to fetch it, and put another there,

that she always found fault with as too short.

One morning, when Charles had gone out before day break, she was seized

with the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. She would go quickly to La

Huchette, stay there an hour, and be back again at Yonville while

everyone was still asleep. This idea made her pant with desire, and she

soon found herself in the middle of the field, walking with rapid steps,

without looking behind her.

Day was just breaking. Emma from afar recognised her lover’s house. Its

two dove-tailed weathercocks stood out black against the pale dawn.

Beyond the farmyard there was a detached building that she thought must

be the château. She entered--it was if the doors at her approach had

opened wide of their own accord. A large straight staircase led up to

the corridor. Emma raised the latch of a door, and suddenly at the end

of the room she saw a man sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She uttered a cry.

“You here? You here?” he repeated. “How did you manage to come? Ah! your

dress is damp.”

“I love you,” she answered, throwing her arms about his neck.

This first piece of daring successful, now every time Charles went out

early Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe down the steps that led

to the waterside.

But when the plank for the cows was taken up, she had to go by the walls

alongside of the river; the bank was slippery; in order not to fall

she caught hold of the tufts of faded wallflowers. Then she went across

ploughed fields, in which she sank, stumbling; and clogging her thin

shoes. Her scarf, knotted round her head, fluttered to the wind in the

meadows. She was afraid of the oxen; she began to run; she arrived out

of breath, with rosy cheeks, and breathing out from her whole person a

fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. At this hour Rodolphe

still slept. It was like a spring morning coming into his room.

The yellow curtains along the windows let a heavy, whitish light enter

softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her eyes, while the drops

of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around

her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him, and pressed her to his

breast.

Then she examined the apartment, opened the drawers of the tables,

combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself in his

shaving-glass. Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that

lay on the table by the bed, amongst lemons and pieces of sugar near a

bottle of water.

It took them a good quarter of an hour to say goodbye. Then Emma cried.

She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than

herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day, seeing her come

unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out.

“What is the matter with you?” she said. “Are you ill? Tell me!”

At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming

imprudent--that she was compromising herself.

Chapter Ten

Gradually Rodolphe’s fears took possession of her. At first, love had

intoxicated her; and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he

was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or

even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house she

looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the

horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She

listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped

short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead.

One morning as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the

long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be aimed at her. It stuck out

sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the

edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked

on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had

gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes,

trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for

wild ducks.

“You ought to have called out long ago!” he exclaimed; “When one sees a

gun, one should always give warning.”

The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for

a prefectorial order having prohibited duckhunting except in boats,

Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them,

and so he every moment expected to see the rural guard turn up. But

this anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he

congratulated himself on his luck and on his cuteness. At sight of

Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once entered upon a

conversation.

“It isn’t warm; it’s nipping.”

Emma answered nothing. He went on--

“And you’re out so early?”

“Yes,” she said stammering; “I am just coming from the nurse where my

child is.”

“Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am here, just as you see me,

since break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless one had the

bird at the mouth of the gun--”

“Good evening, Monsieur Binet,” she interrupted him, turning on her

heel.

“Your servant, madame,” he replied drily; and he went back into his tub.

Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he

would form unfavourable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the

worst possible excuse, everyone at Yonville knowing that the little

Bovary had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one

was living in this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet,

then, would guess whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he

would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening racking her

brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly before

her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag.

Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of

distraction, to take her to the chemist’s, and the first person she

caught sight of in the shop was the taxcollector again. He was standing

in front of the counter, lit up by the gleams of the red bottle, and was

saying--

“Please give me half an ounce of vitriol.”

“Justin,” cried the druggist, “bring us the sulphuric acid.” Then to

Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais’ room, “No, stay here; it isn’t

worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the

stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor,” (for the chemist

much enjoyed pronouncing the word “doctor,” as if addressing another by

it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). “Now,

take care not to upset the mortars! You’d better fetch some chairs from

the little room; you know very well that the arm-chairs are not to be

taken out of the drawing-room.”

And to put his arm-chair back in its place he was darting away from the

counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.

“Sugar acid!” said the chemist contemptuously, “don’t know it; I’m

ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid,

isn’t it?”

Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some

copperwater with which to remove rust from his hunting things.

Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying--

“Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp.”

“Nevertheless,” replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, “there are

people who like it.”

She was stifling.

“And give me--”

“Will he never go?” thought she.

“Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax,

and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the

varnished leather of my togs.”

The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared,

Irma in her arms, Napoleon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat

down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a

footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near

her papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on

labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time

to time, were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low

words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.

“And how’s the little woman?” suddenly asked Madame Homais.

“Silence!” exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in

his waste-book.

“Why didn’t you bring her?” she went on in a low voice.

“Hush! hush!” said Emma, pointing with her finger to the druggist.

But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard

nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh.

“How hard you are breathing!” said Madame Homais.

“Well, you see, it’s rather warm,” she replied.

So the next day they talked over how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma

wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to

find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.

All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night

he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the

gate, which Charles thought lost.

To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She

jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a

mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild

with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled

him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up

a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But

Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.

“Come, now, Emma,” he said, “it is time.”

“Yes, I am coming,” she answered.

Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned to the wall and fell asleep.

She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed. Rodolphe had a large

cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round her waist, he

drew her without a word to the end of the garden.

It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Léon

had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought

of him now.

The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they

heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling

of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the

darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and

swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The

cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips

seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see, larger;

and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on

their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied

vibrations.

When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room

between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen

candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down

there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the

whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not

refrain from making jokes about Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma.

She would have liked to see him more serious, and even on occasions

more dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of

approaching steps in the alley.

“Someone is coming!” she said.

He blew out the light.

“Have you your pistols?”

“Why?”

“Why, to defend yourself,” replied Emma.

“From your husband? Oh, poor devil!” And Rodolphe finished his sentence

with a gesture that said, “I could crush him with a flip of my finger.”

She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort

of indecency and a naive coarseness that scandalised her.

Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had

spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for

he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called

devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had taken a great vow

that he did not think in the best of taste.

Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on

exchanging miniatures; they had cut off handfuls of hair, and now she

was asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union.

She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature.

Then she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his!

Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled

him with caressing words as one would have done a lost child, and she

sometimes even said to him, gazing at the moon--

“I am sure that above there together they approve of our love.”

But she was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such

ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for

him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride

and his sensuality. Emma’s enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense

disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it

was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up

appearances, and insensibly his ways changed.

He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry,

nor passionate caresses that made her mad, so that their great love,

which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of

a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it.

She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe

concealed his indifference less and less.

She did not know if she regretted having yielded to him, or whether she

did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation

of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their

voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual

seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him.

Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever, Rodolphe having

succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own fancy; and at the

end of six months, when the spring-time came, they were to one another

like a married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame.

It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance

of the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter.

Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and read the following

lines:--

“My Dear Children--I hope this will find you well, and that this one

will be as good as the others. For it seems to me a little more tender,

if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But next time, for a change,

I’ll give you a turkeycock, unless you have a preference for some dabs;

and send me back the hamper, if you please, with the two old ones. I

have had an accident with my cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one

windy night among the trees. The harvest has not been overgood either.

Finally, I don’t know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult

now to leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma.”

Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped

his pen to dream a little while.

“For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught the other day at

the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire a shepherd, having turned

away mine because he was too dainty. How we are to be pitied with such

a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I heard from a pedlar, who,

travelling through your part of the country this winter, had a tooth

drawn, that Bovary was as usual working hard. That doesn’t surprise me;

and he showed me his tooth; we had some coffee together. I asked him if

he had seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two horses in the

stables, from which I conclude that business is looking up. So much

the better, my dear children, and may God send you every imaginable

happiness! It grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little

grand-daughter, Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for

her in the garden under your room, and I won’t have it touched unless it

is to have jam made for her by and bye, that I will keep in the cupboard

for her when she comes.

“Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my

son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best

compliments, your loving father.

“Theodore Rouault.”

She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The spelling

mistakes were interwoven one with the other, and Emma followed the

kindly thought that cackled right through it like a hen half hidden

in the hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from

the hearth, for a little grey powder slipped from the letter on to her

dress, and she almost thought she saw her father bending over the hearth

to take up the tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting on

the footstool in the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of

a bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the

summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when anyone

passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive,

and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her

window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness there had been

at that time, what freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions!

Nothing was left of them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul’s

life, in all her successive conditions of life, maidenhood, her marriage,

and her love--thus constantly losing them all her life through, like

a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his

road.

But what then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary

catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking

round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer.

An April ray was dancing on the china of the whatnot; the fire burned;

beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was

bright, the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter.

In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst

of the grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach

at the top of a rick. The servant was holding her by her skirt.

Lestiboudois was raking by her side, and every time he came near she

lent forward, beating the air with both her arms.

“Bring her to me,” said her mother, rushing to embrace her. “How I love

you, my poor child! How I love you!”

Then noticing that the tips of her ears were rather dirty, she rang at

once for warm water, and washed her, changed her linen, her stockings,

her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as if on the

return from a long journey, and finally, kissing her again and crying

a little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood quite

thunderstricken at this excess of tenderness.

That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.

“That will pass over,” he concluded; “it’s a whim:”

And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did come, she showed

herself cold and almost contemptuous.

“Ah! you’re losing your time, my lady!”

And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the

handkerchief she took out.

Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she detested Charles; if

it had not been better to have been able to love him? But he gave her

no opportunities for such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much

embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the druggist came just in

time to provide her with an opportunity.

Chapter Eleven

He had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing club-foot, and

as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that

Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations

for strephopody or club-foot.

“For,” said he to Emma, “what risk is there? See--” (and he enumerated

on his fingers the advantages of the attempt), “success, almost certain

relief and beautifying of the patient, celebrity acquired by the

operator. Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor

Hippolyte of the ‘Lion d’Or’? Note that he would not fail to tell about

his cure to all the travellers, and then” (Homais lowered his voice and

looked round him) “who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph

on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it

is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?”

In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing proved to Emma that he was not

clever; and what a satisfaction for her to have urged him to a step by

which his reputation and fortune would be increased! She only wished to

lean on something more solid than love.

Charles, urged by the druggist and by her, allowed himself to be

persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval’s volume, and every evening,

holding his head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it.

While he was studying equinus, varus, and valgus, that is to say,

katastrephopody, endostrephopody, and exostrephopody (or better, the

various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and outwards, with the

hypostrephopody and anastrephopody), otherwise torsion downwards and

upwards, Monsier Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was exhorting the

lad at the inn to submit to the operation.

“You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain; it is a simple prick,

like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns.”

Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid eyes.

“However,” continued the chemist, “it doesn’t concern me. It’s for your

sake, for pure humanity! I should like to see you, my friend, rid of

your hideous caudication, together with that waddling of the lumbar

regions which, whatever you say, must considerably interfere with you in

the exercise of your calling.”

Then Homais represented to him how much jollier and brisker he would

feel afterwards, and even gave him to understand that he would be more

likely to please the women; and the stable-boy began to smile heavily.

Then he attacked him through his vanity:

“Aren’t you a man? Hang it! what would you have done if you had had to

go into the army, to go and fight beneath the standard? Ah! Hippolyte!”

And Homais retired, declaring that he could not understand this

obstinacy, this blindness in refusing the benefactions of science.

The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a conspiracy. Binet, who never

interfered with other people’s business, Madame Lefrancois, Artémise,

the neighbours, even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache--everyone persuaded

him, lectured him, shamed him; but what finally decided him was that it

would cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to provide the machine

for the operation. This generosity was an idea of Emma’s, and Charles

consented to it, thinking in his heart of hearts that his wife was an

angel.

So by the advice of the chemist, and after three fresh starts, he had a

kind of box made by the carpenter, with the aid of the locksmith,

that weighed about eight pounds, and in which iron, wood, sheer-iron,

leather, screws, and nuts had not been spared.

But to know which of Hippolyte’s tendons to cut, it was necessary first

of all to find out what kind of club-foot he had.

He had a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which,

however, did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an

equinus together with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with

a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like

a horse’s hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which

the black nails looked as if made of iron, the clubfoot ran about like

a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place,

jumping round the carts, thrusting his limping foot forwards. He seemed

even stronger on that leg than the other. By dint of hard service it had

acquired, as it were, moral qualities of patience and energy; and

when he was given some heavy work, he stood on it in preference to its

fellow.

Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary to cut the tendon of

Achilles, and, if need were, the anterior tibial muscle could be seen to

afterwards for getting rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare to

risk both operations at once; he was even trembling already for fear of

injuring some important region that he did not know.