Madame Bovary

  In the beginning, he had gone to her house several times in the company of the pharmacist. Charles had not seemed extremely interested in receiving him; and Léon did not know what course to take, between his fear of being indiscreet and his desire for an intimacy that he believed was almost impossible.

  [4]

  With the coming of the first cold weather, Emma left her bedroom and moved into the parlor, a long, low-ceilinged room with a piece of coral on the mantel spreading its many branches before the mirror. Sitting in her armchair, beside the window, she could watch the villagers go past on the sidewalk.

  Twice a day, Léon went from his study to the Lion d’Or. Emma, from a distance, would hear him coming; she would lean forward, listening; and the young man would glide past behind the curtain, always dressed the same, without turning his head. But at dusk, when, her chin in her left hand, she had abandoned in her lap the tapestry work she had begun, she would often start at the appearance of that shadow suddenly slipping past. She would stand up and order the table to be set.

  Monsieur Homais would arrive during dinner. His fez in hand, he would enter with silent steps so as not to disturb anyone and would always repeat the same phrase: “Good evening, all!” Then, when he had settled in his place, close to the table, between husband and wife, he would ask the doctor for news of his patients, and the doctor would consult him on the likelihood of his being paid. Then they would talk about what was in the newspaper. Homais, by that time of day, knew it almost by heart; and he would relay it in its entirety, including the editorials and the stories of each and every catastrophe that had occurred in France or abroad. But, the subject being exhausted, he would soon venture some observations on the dishes he saw before him. Sometimes, half rising, he would even delicately point out to Madame the tenderest morsel or, turning to the servant, give her some advice about the manipulation of stews or the hygiene of seasonings; his manner of talking about aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatin was dazzling. As his head was in fact more crowded with recipes than his pharmacy with jars, Homais excelled at making any number of jams, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs, and he was also familiar with the latest inventions in economical calefactors, along with the art of preserving cheeses and healing sick wines.

  At eight o’clock, Justin would come get him so that he could close the pharmacy. Monsieur would look at him with a cunning eye, especially if Félicité happened to be present, because he had noticed that his pupil was fond of the doctor’s house.

  “My young lad,” he would say, “is beginning to get ideas, and I believe, devil take me, that he’s in love with your maid!”

  But a more serious fault, and one with which he reproached him, was that he persisted in listening to their conversations. On Sundays, for instance, they could not get him to leave the parlor, where Madame Homais had summoned him to take the children away, for they were falling asleep in the armchairs, their backs dragging down the loose calico slipcovers.

  Not many people came to the pharmacist’s soirées, since his scandal-mongering and political opinions had alienated one after another a variety of respectable people. The clerk was unfailingly present. As soon as he heard the bell ring, he would hurry to Madame Bovary, take her shawl, and put to one side, under the pharmacist’s desk, the capacious list slippers she wore over her shoes in snowy weather.

  First they would have a few rounds of trente et un; then Monsieur Homais would play écarté with Emma; Léon, behind her, would give advice. Standing with his hands on the back of her chair, he would gaze at the teeth of her comb biting into her chignon. With each movement she made laying down her cards, her dress would lift on the right side. From her pinned-up hair, a brownish shadow descended her back and, paling by degrees, gradually lost itself in the darker shadows. Her skirt lay draped over the chair on both sides, ballooning out in ample folds, and spread down to the floor. When sometimes Léon felt the sole of his boot resting on it, he would draw back, as though he had stepped on someone.

  When the card game was finished, the apothecary and the doctor would play dominoes, and Emma would move to another chair, lean her elbows on the table, and leaf through L’Illustration. She had brought along her fashion magazine. Léon would sit down next to her; they would look at the pictures together and wait for each other at the bottoms of the pages. Often she would ask him to read some poems to her; Léon would declaim them in a languid voice, which he would carefully let die away at the love passages. But the noise of the dominoes interfered; Monsieur Homais was good at the game, he would beat Charles by a full double six. Then, having reached three hundred, the two of them would stretch out in front of the fireplace and soon fall asleep. The fire was dying down in the embers; the teapot was empty; Léon was still reading. Emma would listen to him, absently turning the lampshade, its gauze painted with Pierrots in carriages and tightrope dancers with their balancing poles. Léon would stop, indicating with a gesture his sleeping audience; then they would talk to each other in low voices, and the conversation they had would seem the sweeter to them because it was not overheard.

  And so a kind of partnership was established between them, a continuing commerce in books and love songs; Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, was not surprised by this.

  For his name day, he received a fine phrenological head, all marked out with numbers down to the thorax and painted blue. This thoughtful attention came from the clerk. He paid him many others, even doing his errands for him in Rouen; and when a certain novelist’s latest book inspired a fashionable craze for succulent plants, Léon bought some for Madame and brought them back in the Hirondelle, holding them on his knees and pricking his fingers on their hard spines.

  She had a small raised shelf installed against her casement window to hold her little pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they would see each other tending their flowers at their windows.

  Of the windows in the village, there was one even more frequently occupied; for on Sundays, from morning till night, and every afternoon, if the weather was bright, one could see at an attic dormer the lean profile of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous whirring was audible as far as the Lion d’Or.

  One evening, when he returned home, Léon found in his room a coverlet of velvet and wool with foliage designs on a pale background. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin, the children, the cook, he spoke of it to his employer; everyone wanted to see the coverlet; why was the doctor’s wife being so generous to the clerk? It seemed odd, and they formed the definite opinion that she must be his sweetheart.

  He implied as much, since he would talk to you incessantly about her loveliness and her wit, so much so that Binet answered him once quite savagely:

  “What does it matter to me, since I don’t belong to her circle!”

  He tormented himself searching for some means of making his declaration to her; and, always torn between a fear of displeasing her and the shame of being such a coward, he would cry with discouragement and desire. Then he would act with energy and decision; he would write letters, which he would tear up, give himself deadlines, which he would then extend. Often he would set off with the intention of risking everything; but that resolution would quickly desert him in Emma’s presence, and when Charles, arriving unexpectedly, invited him to climb into the boc and go along with him on a visit to some patient in the environs, he would immediately accept, bid Madame goodbye, and leave. Wasn’t her husband, after all, a part of her?

  As for Emma, she never questioned herself to find out if she loved him. Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning,—a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss. She did not know that the rain forms lakes on the terraces of houses when the drainpipes are blocked, and thus she would have lived on feeling quite safe, had she not suddenly discovered a crack in the w
all.

  [5]

  It was a Sunday afternoon in February, when the snow was falling.

  They had all gone off, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais and Monsieur Léon, to see a flax mill that was being built in the valley, half a league from Yonville. The apothecary had taken along Napoléon and Athalie, to give them some exercise, and Justin was with them, carrying some umbrellas over his shoulder.

  Nothing, however, could have been less interesting than this point of interest. A great expanse of empty land, on which lay, here and there, among the heaps of sand and stones, a few already rusty cogwheels, surrounded a long rectangular building pierced with numbers of little windows. It was not yet finished, and the sky could be seen through the joists of the roofing. Attached to the beam of the gable end, a bouquet of straw mingled with ears of wheat was snapping its red, white, and blue ribbons in the wind.

  Homais was talking. He was explaining to the party how important this establishment would be in the future, computing the strength of the floors, the thickness of the walls, and regretting keenly that he did not have a measuring stick, such as Monsieur Binet possessed for his personal use.

  Emma, who had given him her arm, was leaning lightly against his shoulder, and she was watching the far-off disk of the sun suffusing the mist with its dazzling pallor; but then she turned her head: there was Charles. He had his cap pulled down over his eyebrows, and his thick lips were quivering, which gave a stupid look to his face; even his back, his placid back, was irritating to look at, and she found displayed there, on his coat, all the man’s dullness.

  As she was contemplating him, deriving a sort of depraved sensual pleasure from her irritation, Léon took a step closer. The cold that was turning him pale seemed to add something softer and more languorous to his face; between his cravat and his neck, the loose collar of his shirt revealed his skin; an earlobe showed below a lock of hair, and his large blue eyes, lifted toward the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and lovely than mountain lakes mirroring the sky.

  “Naughty boy!” the apothecary shouted suddenly.

  And he ran over to his son, who had just plunged into a heap of lime to coat his shoes with white. At the scoldings that rained down on him, Napoléon began to howl, while Justin wiped off his feet with a twist of straw. But a knife was needed; Charles offered his.

  “Ah!” she said to herself; “he carries a knife in his pocket, like a peasant!”

  The frost was descending, and they turned back toward Yonville.

  That evening, Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbors’ house, and when Charles had gone, when she was alone, the comparison returned with the sharpness of an almost immediate sensation and with the lengthening of perspective that memory gives to objects. Gazing from her bed at the bright fire that was burning, she once again saw Léon standing, as she had seen him out there, flexing his cane with one hand and with the other holding Athalie, who was sucking peacefully on a bit of ice. She found him charming; she could not stop thinking about him; she recalled other things he had done on other days, words he had spoken, the sound of his voice, his whole person; and she said again, thrusting her lips out as though for a kiss:

  “Yes. Charming! Charming! … Is he in love?” she asked herself. “Who is he in love with? … Why … it’s me!”

  All the evidence arose before her at once, her heart leaped. The flame in the fireplace cast a joyful, tremulous light on the ceiling; she turned onto her back, stretching her arms.

  Then began the eternal lament: “Oh, if only heaven had willed it! Why can’t it be? What kept it from happening? …”

  When Charles returned home at midnight, she appeared to wake up, and when he made some noise getting undressed, she complained of a migraine; then asked casually what had happened during the evening.

  “Monsieur Léon,” he said, “went upstairs early.”

  She could not help smiling, and she fell asleep with her soul full of a new enchantment.

  The next day, at nightfall, she had a visit from Monsieur Lheureux, the dry-goods merchant. He was a clever man, this shopkeeper.

  Born a Gascon, but now a Norman, he combined his southern volubility with a Cauchois cunning. His soft, fat, beardless face looked as though it had been dyed with a decoction of clear licorice, and his white hair intensified the harsh brilliance of his little black eyes. No one knew what he had been before: peddler, said some; banker at Routot, according to others. What is certain is that he could do complicated calculations in his head that dismayed even Binet. Polite to the point of obsequiousness, he stood with his back always half inclined, in the position of someone making a bow or extending an invitation.

  After leaving his hat with its band of crepe by the door, he placed a green box on the table and began by complaining to Madame, with a profusion of compliments, that he had failed to gain her confidence before now. A poor shop like his was not destined to attract so elegant a lady; he stressed the word. However, she had only to place an order, and he would take it upon himself to provide her with whatever she might want, whether in the way of haberdashery, linens, knitwear, or fancy goods; for he went to the city four times a month, regularly. He dealt with the best houses. She could mention his name at the Trois Frères, the Barbe d’Or, or the Grand Sauvage; all the gentlemen there knew him as well as their own brothers! Today, he had come to show Madame, as he was passing by, a few articles he happened to have, thanks to a very rare opportunity. And he withdrew from the box half a dozen embroidered collars.

  Madame Bovary examined them.

  “I don’t need anything,” she said.

  Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited three Algerian scarves, several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and, lastly, four eggcups made of coconut shell with openwork carving done by convicts. Then, both hands on the table, his neck outstretched, his upper body leaning forward, his mouth open, he followed Emma’s gaze as it roamed indecisively over these goods. From time to time, as if to remove some dust, he would give a flick of a fingernail to the silk of the scarves, which were unfolded at full length; and they would ripple with a soft sound, the gold spangles in their fabric sparkling like little stars in the greenish light of the dusk.

  “How much are they?”

  “A trifle,” he answered, “a mere trifle; but there’s no hurry; whenever you like; we’re not Jews!”

  She thought for a few moments, and ended by again thanking Monsieur Lheureux, who replied without emotion:

  “Very well, we’ll come to an understanding later on; I’ve always gotten along with the ladies—except in the case of my own wife, that is!”

  Emma smiled.

  “What I wanted to tell you,” he went on with a simple, good-natured air, after his joke, “was that I’m not worried about the money … I could give you some, if need be.”

  She made a gesture of surprise.

  “Ah!” he said quickly, in a low voice; “I wouldn’t have to go far to find it for you; you can count on that!”

  And he began asking after Père Tellier, the proprietor of the Café Français, whom Monsieur Bovary was treating at the time.

  “What’s the matter with him, anyway, old Père Tellier? … He coughs hard enough to shake the whole house, and I’m afraid he’ll soon be needing a wooden overcoat more than a flannel undershirt. He was such a wild one when he was young! The sort, madame, that doesn’t have the least self-discipline! He burned himself to a crisp with eau-de-vie! But all the same, it’s distressing to see an old acquaintance go.”

  And while he was buckling up his box, he talked on in this way about the doctor’s patients.

  “It’s the weather, no doubt,” he said, looking at the windowpanes with a glum expression, “that’s causing all this illness! I myself don’t feel altogether up to the mark; in fact, one of these days I should come and consult Monsieur about a pain I have in my back. Well, goodbye, Madame Bovary; at your disposal; y
our very humble servant!”

  And he closed the door gently behind him.

  Emma had dinner brought to her in her bedroom, by the fireside, on a tray; she took a long time eating; everything seemed good to her.

  “How sensible I was!” she said to herself, thinking about the scarves.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs: it was Léon. She rose, and, from the top of the chest of drawers, took the uppermost dishcloth from a pile to be hemmed. She appeared very busy when he came in.

  The conversation languished, Madame Bovary abandoning it every minute, while he himself remained quite ill at ease. Sitting in a low chair, next to the fire, he was turning the ivory needle case in his fingers; she was plying her needle, or, from time to time, gathering the folds of the cloth with her nail. She did not speak; he said nothing, captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her words.

  “Poor boy!” she was thinking.

  “What doesn’t she like about me?” he was wondering.

  At last, however, Léon said that one of these days he would have to go to Rouen, on business connected with his practice.

  “Your music subscription has run out—should I renew it?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “Why?”

  “Because …”

  And, pursing her lips, she slowly drew out a long needleful of gray thread.

  This work irritated Léon. It seemed to be roughening the tips of Emma’s fingers; a compliment occurred to him, but he did not risk it.

  “Then you’re giving it up?” he went on.

  “What?” she said quickly. “Music? Oh, heavens, yes! Haven’t I my house to look after, my husband to care for, a thousand things, really, so many duties that are more important!”

  She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then she pretended to be worried. Two or three times she even repeated:

  “He’s so good!”

  The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this affection of hers surprised him unpleasantly; nevertheless, he joined in praising him, as he had heard everyone else do, he said, especially the pharmacist.