Madame Bovary

  The boy from the relay post, who came to groom the mare each morning, would cross the hallway in his thick sabots; his smock had holes in it; his feet, in his slippers, were bare. This was the groom in knee breeches with whom she had to be content! When his task was finished, he would not return that day; for Charles, when he came home, would lead his horse into the stable himself, take off the saddle, and put on the halter, while the maid would bring a truss of straw and heave it, as best she could, into the manger.

  To replace Nastasie (who finally left Tostes, shedding streams of tears), Emma took into her service a girl of fourteen, an orphan with a sweet face. She forbade her to wear cotton caps, taught her she must address one in the third person, bring a glass of water on a plate, knock on doors before entering, and showed her how to iron, starch, dress her, attempting to turn her into her own lady’s maid. The new servant obeyed without a murmur so as not to be dismissed; and since Madame usually left the key in the sideboard, every evening Félicité would help herself to a small supply of sugar and eat it alone, in bed, after saying her prayers.

  In the afternoon, sometimes, she would cross the street to go talk to the postilions. Madame would stay upstairs in her room.

  She would wear a wide-open dressing gown that revealed, between the shawl collars of the bodice, a pleated shift with three gold buttons. Her belt was a cord with heavy tassels, and her little garnet-colored slippers bore a cluster of broad ribbons that fell over the instep. She had bought herself a blotter, stationery, a pen holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she would dust her shelves, look at herself in the mirror, pick up a book, then, dreaming between the lines, let it fall on her knees. She longed to travel or to return to her convent. She wanted both to die and to live in Paris.

  Charles would ride his horse through snow, through rain, along the little byways. He ate omelets at farmhouse tables, thrust his arm into damp beds, received the warm spurts of blood from bloodlettings in his face, listened to death rattles, examined basins, folded back plenty of dirty underclothes; but every evening, he would return to a blazing fire, a set table, a soft chair, and a woman dressed with elegance, charming, and smelling so fresh that one did not even know where the fragrance came from, or if it was not her skin perfuming her shift.

  She would delight him with countless niceties; it was sometimes a new way of fashioning paper sconces for the candles, a flounce she would change on her dress, or the extraordinary name for a perfectly simple dish that the servant had spoiled, but every last bit of which Charles would swallow with pleasure. In Rouen she saw some ladies wearing clusters of charms on their watches; she bought some watch charms. She wanted two large vases of blue glass on her mantelpiece and, sometime after, an ivory sewing box, with a silver-gilt thimble. The less Charles understood these refinements, the more captivating he found them. They added something to the pleasure of his senses and to the sweetness of his home. They were like gold dust sprinkled all along the little path of his life.

  He was healthy, he looked well; his reputation was firmly established. The countrypeople loved him dearly because he was not proud. He patted the children, never went into taverns, and, on top of that, inspired confidence by his morality. He was particularly successful with catarrhs and ailments of the chest. Very fearful of killing his patients, Charles, in fact, scarcely prescribed anything but sedative potions, from time to time an emetic, a footbath, or leeches. Not that surgery frightened him; he would bleed people heavily, like horses, and when it came to extracting teeth, he had a fist of iron.

  Finally, in order to keep up to date, he took out a subscription to La Ruche Médicale, a new journal whose prospectus he had received. He would read a little of it after dinner, but the warmth of the room, in combination with his digestion, would put him to sleep after five minutes; and he would stay there, his chin on his hands and his hair spread out like a mane as far as the base of the lamp. Emma would look at him and shrug her shoulders. What if, at least, her husband had been one of those ardent and taciturn men who work at night over their books, and at last, at sixty, when rheumatism sets in, wear a row of decorations on their black, ill-made coats? She would have liked the name Bovary, which was hers, to be famous, she would have liked to see it displayed in book-stores, repeated in newspapers, known to all of France. But Charles had no ambition! A doctor from Yvetot, with whom he had recently found himself in consultation, had humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, in front of the assembled relatives. When Charles told her the story, that evening, Emma flew into a rage against his colleague. Charles was moved. He kissed her on the forehead with a tear. But she was fuming with shame; she wanted to strike him, she went into the hallway to open the window, and breathed in the cool air to calm herself.

  “What a pathetic man! What a pathetic man!” she said softly, biting her lips.

  She was feeling more irritated by him anyway. With age, he was developing coarse habits; at dessert, he would cut up the corks of the empty bottles; after eating, he would run his tongue over his teeth; when swallowing his soup, he would make a gurgling sound with each mouthful; and because he was beginning to grow stout, his eyes, already small, seemed to have been pushed up toward his temples by the swelling of his cheeks.

  Emma would sometimes tuck the red edge of his sweater back inside his vest, straighten his cravat, or toss aside the faded gloves he was preparing to put on; and this was not, as he thought, for his sake; it was for herself, in an expansion of egotism, a nervous vexation. Sometimes, too, she would talk to him about the things she had read, such as a passage from a novel, a new play, or the high society anecdote being recounted in the paper; for, after all, Charles was someone, always an open ear, always a ready approbation. She confided many secrets to her greyhound! She would have done the same to the logs in the fireplace and the pendulum of the clock.

  Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it did not come; then, at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.

  Spring returned. She had fits of breathlessness with the arrival of the first warm days, when the pear trees flowered.

  From early in July, she began to count on her fingers how many weeks remained to her before October, thinking the Marquis d’Andervilliers would perhaps give another ball at La Vaubyessard. But all of September went by without letters or visitors.

  After the weariness of this disappointment, her heart remained empty, and then the succession of identical days began again.

  So now they were going to continue one after another like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing! Other people’s lives, however dull they were, had at least the possibility that something would happen. A chance occurrence would sometimes lead to an infinite number of sudden shifts, and the setting would change. But for her, nothing happened, God had willed it! The future was a dark corridor, with the door at its end firmly closed.

  She gave up music. Why play? Who would hear her? Since she would never be able to play in a concert, in a short-sleeved velvet dress, on an Érard piano, striking the ivory keys with her light fingers and feeling a murmur of ecstasy circulate around her like a breeze, it was not worth the trouble of boring herself with studying. She left her drawing portfolios and her tapestry work in the cupboard. What was the use? What was the use? Sewing irritated her.

  “I’ve read everything,” she would say to herself.

  And she would hold the tongs in the fire
till they turned red, or watch the rain fall.

  How sad she was, on Sundays, when they rang vespers! She would listen, with dazed attention, as the cracked chimes of the bell sounded one by one. A cat on the rooftops, walking slowly, would arch its back to the pale rays of the sun. The wind, on the big road, would blow trails of dust. In the distance, now and then, a dog would howl; and the bell, at equal intervals, would continue its monotonous tolling, which vanished into the countryside.

  Meanwhile, they were coming out of church. The women in waxed clogs, the farmers in new smocks, the little children skipping about bareheaded in front of them—they would all return home. And until nightfall, five or six men, always the same ones, would stay behind playing cork-penny in front of the main door to the inn.

  The winter was cold. The panes, every morning, were thick with frost, and the light, falling dull white through them as if through ground glass, sometimes did not vary all day long. At four o’clock in the afternoon, the lamp had to be lit.

  On days when it was nice out, she would go down into the garden. The dew had left a silvery lace on the cabbages, with long bright threads stretching from one to the next. No birds could be heard, everything seemed to be sleeping, the espalier covered with straw and the vine like a great ailing serpent under the coping of the wall, on which, as one went up close, one could see wood lice creeping about on their many legs. Among the spruces, near the hedge, the curé in the three-cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right foot, and the plaster, flaking off in the frost, had left white scabs on his face.

  Then she would go back up, close the door, spread apart the coals, and, faint from the heat of the fire, feel the heavier weight of the boredom that was descending on her again. She would have gone down to chat with the maid, but a certain reticence held her back.

  Every day, at the same hour, the schoolmaster, in a black silk cap, would open the shutters of his house, and the village policeman would pass, wearing his sword over his smock. Evenings and mornings, the post-horses, three by three, would cross the street to go drink from the pond. Now and then, the door of a tavern would set its bell tinkling; and when the wind was blowing, one could hear creaking on their two rods the hairdresser’s little copper basins, which served as the sign for his shop. For decoration it had an old fashion-plate glued to a windowpane and a wax bust of a woman with yellow hair. The hairdresser, too, lamented the vocation that had never come to pass, his ruined future, and, dreaming of a shop in a large city, such as Rouen, for example, on the harbor, near the theater, he would spend all day walking back and forth from the village hall to the church, gloomily waiting for customers. When Madame Bovary raised her eyes, she would see him always there, like a sentinel on guard duty, in his worsted cloth jacket with his fez over one ear.

  In the afternoon, sometimes, a man’s head would appear outside the parlor windows, a sunburned head with black side-whiskers, slowly smiling a broad, gentle, white-toothed smile. A waltz would immediately begin, and in a little salon on top of the organ, dancers as tall as one’s finger—women in pink turbans, Tyrolean men in cutaways, monkeys in black suits, gentlemen in knee breeches—would circle round and round among the armchairs, sofas, console tables, replicated in fragments of mirror whose corners were joined together by a net of gold paper. The man would turn his crank, looking to the right, to the left, and toward the windows. Now and then, at the same time that he shot a long stream of brown saliva against the guard stone, he would lift the instrument with his knee, for its hard strap tired his shoulder; and the music, sometimes plaintive and droning, sometimes joyful and headlong, would issue from the box buzzing through a curtain of pink taffeta, from behind a grid of brass arabesque. They were tunes that people played elsewhere in theaters, that people sang in salons, that people danced to at night under illuminated chandeliers, echoes of the world coming all the way to Emma. Endless sarabandes unfurled in her head, and, like a dancing girl on a flowered carpet, her thoughts would leap with the notes, sway from dream to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had received the alms in his cap, he would pull down an old blue wool cover, shift his organ onto his back, and move off with a heavy step. She would watch him go.

  But it was most of all at mealtimes that she could not bear it any longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the stove that smoked, the door that squeaked, the walls that seeped, the damp flagstones; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served up on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled meat, there rose from the depths of her soul other gusts of revulsion. Charles took a long time eating; she would nibble a few nuts, or, leaning on her elbow, amuse herself drawing lines on the oilcloth with the tip of her knife.

  Now she let everything in the house go, and the elder Madame Bovary, when she came to spend part of Lent at Tostes, was very surprised at the change. Indeed, she, once so neat and refined, would now go whole days without dressing, wear stockings of gray cotton, and use a candle for light. She would repeat that they had to economize, since they were not rich, adding that she was very content, very happy, that she liked Tostes very much, and other novel remarks that closed the mother-in-law’s mouth. Moreover, Emma no longer seemed inclined to follow her advice; once, even, when Madame Bovary took it upon herself to maintain that employers ought to oversee their servants’ religious life, she had answered her with an eye so angry and a smile so cold that the good woman did not meddle again.

  Emma was becoming difficult, capricious. She would order dishes for herself and not touch them, would one day drink only pure milk and, the next, cups of tea by the dozen. Often she would stubbornly refuse to go out, then she would feel stifled, open the windows, put on a thin dress. After she had browbeaten her maid, she would present her with gifts or send her for a stroll to visit the neighbors, just as she would sometimes throw the poor all the silver coins in her purse, though she was scarcely tenderhearted or easily touched by another’s emotion, like most people born of countryfolk, whose souls always retain something of the hardness of their fathers’ hands.

  Toward the end of February, Père Rouault, in memory of his recovery, came in person with a superb turkey for his son-in-law, and he stayed at Tostes for three days. Since Charles was seeing patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the bedroom, spat on the andirons, chatted about crops, calves, cows, chickens, and the town council; so that she closed the door behind him, when he left, with a feeling of relief that surprised even her. What was more, she no longer hid her scorn for anything, or anyone; and she would sometimes express singular opinions, condemning what was generally approved, and commending perverse or immoral things: which made her husband stare at her wide-eyed.

  Would this misery last forever? Would she never find a way out of it? And yet she was certainly just as good as all those women who lived happy lives! She had seen duchesses at La Vaubyessard with heavier figures and more vulgar manners, and she cursed God’s injustice; she would lean her head against the walls and cry; she would think with envy of tumultuous lives, nights at masked balls, outrageous pleasures, and all the wild emotions, unknown to her, that they must inspire.

  She grew pale and had palpitations of the heart. Charles administered valerian and camphor baths. Everything he tried seemed to irritate her further.

  On certain days, she would chatter with feverish abandon; these states of excitement would be followed suddenly by periods of torpor in which she would stop speaking, stop moving. What would revive her at these times was for her to douse her arms with a bottle of eau de Cologne.

  Because she complained constantly about Tostes, Charles imagined that the cause of her illness undoubtedly lay in some local influence, and, fixing on that idea, he thought seriously of setting up his practice elsewhere.

  At that, she began drinking vinegar to lose weight, contracted a dry little cough, and completely lost her appetite.

  It cost Charles to leave Tostes after four years and at a time when he was beginning
to establish himself. Still, if it had to be … ! He drove her to Rouen to see his old teacher. It was a nervous disease: she should have a change of air.

  After looking here and there, Charles learned that in the region of Neufchâtel, there was a sizable market town called Yonville-l’Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had just decamped the week before. And so he wrote to the local pharmacist to find out the size of the population, how far away his closest colleague would be, how much per year his predecessor had earned, and so forth; and, the replies being satisfactory, he resolved to move in the spring, if Emma’s health did not improve.

  One day while tidying a drawer in anticipation of her departure, she pricked her fingers on something. It was a piece of wire in her wedding bouquet. The orange-blossom buds were yellow with dust, and the satin ribbons, with their silver piping, were fraying at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it lay like a red bush on the embers, slowly being consumed. She watched it burn. The little cardboard berries burst open, the binding wire twisted, the braid melted; and the shriveled paper petals, hovering along the fireback like black butterflies, at last flew away up the chimney.