Madame Bovary

  They returned to Yonville by the same path. They saw the prints of their horses in the mud, side by side, and the same bushes, the same stones in the grass. Nothing around them had changed; and yet, for her, something had happened that was more momentous than if mountains had moved. Rodolphe would lean over, from time to time, and take up her hand to kiss it.

  She was charming, on horseback! Upright, with her slender waist, her knee bent against her horse’s mane, and a little rosy from the fresh air, in the ruddy light of the evening.

  As she entered Yonville, she pranced on the paving stones. People were watching her from the windows.

  Her husband, at dinner, thought she looked well; but she seemed not to hear him when he asked about her outing; and she sat still with her elbow at the edge of her plate, between the two burning candles.

  “Emma!” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I spent this afternoon with Monsieur Alexandre; he has an old filly that’s still quite fine, only a little broken in the knees; she could be had, I’m sure, for about a hundred ecus …”

  He added:

  “In fact, thinking you would be pleased, I secured her … I bought her … Did I do right? Now tell me.”

  She nodded her head in agreement; then, a quarter of an hour later:

  “Are you going out this evening?” she asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing! Nothing, dear.”

  And as soon as she was rid of Charles, she went upstairs and shut herself in her room.

  At first, it was like a kind of dizziness; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she could still feel his arms holding her while the leaves quivered and the rushes whistled.

  But catching sight of herself in the mirror, she was surprised by her face. Her eyes had never been so large, so dark, or so deep. Something subtle had spread through her body and was transfiguring her.

  She said to herself again and again: “I have a lover! A lover!” reveling in the thought as though she had come into a second puberty. At last she would possess those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired. She was entering something marvelous in which all was passion, ecstasy, delirium; a blue-tinged immensity surrounded her, heights of feeling sparkled under her thoughts, and ordinary life appeared only in the distance, far below, in shadow, in the spaces between those peaks.

  Then she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and this lyrical throng of adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. She herself was in some way becoming an actual part of those imaginings and was fulfilling the long daydream of her youth, by seeing herself as this type of amorous woman she had so much envied. Besides, Emma was experiencing the satisfaction of revenge. Hadn’t she suffered enough? But now she was triumphing, and love, so long contained, was springing forth whole, with joyful effervescence. She savored it without remorse, without uneasiness, without distress.

  The next day passed in a new sweetness. They exchanged vows. She confided her sorrows. Rodolphe kept interrupting her with his kisses; and she, gazing at him with her eyes half closed, would ask him to call her by her name again and tell her again that he loved her. They were in the forest, as on the day before, in a hut used by sabot makers. Its walls were of straw, and its roof came down so low that one had to stoop. They sat close together, on a bed of dry leaves.

  From that day on, they wrote to each other regularly every evening. Emma would take her letter to the bottom of the garden, by the stream, to a crack in the terrace wall. Rodolphe would come look for it there and in its place put another, which she would always complain was too short.

  One morning, when Charles had gone out before dawn, she was seized by the urge to see Rodolphe that very instant. She could get to La Huchette quickly, stay there one hour, and be back in Yonville while everyone was still asleep. The thought made her breathe hard with longing, and she soon found herself in the middle of the meadow, walking with quick steps, not looking behind her.

  Day was breaking. From far away, Emma recognized her lover’s house, with its two swallow-tailed weather vanes standing out black against the pale twilight.

  Beyond the farmyard was a main building that had to be the château. She entered it as if the walls, at her approach, had parted of their own accord. A broad straight staircase rose to a hallway. Emma turned the latch of a door, and at once, at the far end of the bedroom, she saw a man asleep. It was Rodolphe. She cried out.

  “It’s you! You’re here!” he said again and again. “How did you manage to get here? … Oh, your dress is wet!”

  “I love you!” she answered, putting her arms around his neck.

  This first bold venture having been a success, now each time Charles went out early, Emma would dress quickly and steal down the short flight of steps that led to the edge of the water.

  But when the plank bridge for the cows had been raised, she would have to follow the walls that lined the stream; the bank was slippery; to keep from falling, she would cling to the clumps of faded wallflowers. Then she would strike out across the plowed fields, sinking down, stumbling, and catching her thin little boots. Her scarf, tied over her head, would flutter in the wind in the pastures; she was afraid of the cattle, she would start running; she would arrive out of breath, her cheeks pink, her whole body exhaling a cool fragrance of sap, leaves, and fresh air. Rodolphe, at that hour, was still asleep. She was like a spring morning coming into his bedroom.

  The yellow curtains, over the windows, gently let in a heavy flaxen light. Emma would grope her way forward, blinking, while the dewdrops suspended in her bands of hair made a sort of halo of topazes all around her face. Rodolphe, laughing, would draw her to him and hold her against his heart.

  Afterward, she would examine the room, she would open the drawers of the furniture, she would comb her hair with his comb and look at herself in the shaving mirror. Often, she would even place between her teeth the stem of a large pipe that lay on the night table among the lemons and sugar lumps, next to a carafe of water.

  It took them a good quarter of an hour to say goodbye. Then Emma would weep; she wished she never had to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than she was kept impelling her to go to him, until one day, seeing her come unexpectedly, he frowned as though annoyed.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Are you in pain? Speak to me!”

  At last he declared gravely that her visits were becoming reckless and that she was compromising herself.

  [10]

  Little by little, these fears of Rodolphe’s took possession of her. Love had intoxicated her at first, and she had thought of nothing beyond it. But now that it was indispensable to her life, she was afraid of losing some part of it, or even of disturbing it. As she was returning from his house, she would glance uneasily all around, observing every figure that passed on the horizon and every dormer in the village from which she could be seen. She would listen to the footsteps, the shouts, the sound of the plows; and she would stop short, paler and more tremulous than the leaves of the poplars swaying over her head.

  One morning, as she was coming back in this state of mind, she suddenly thought she saw the long bore of a rifle pointing at her. It was sticking out at an angle above the rim of a small barrel half buried in the grass, by the edge of a ditch. Emma, though nearly fainting from terror, continued to walk on forward, and a man emerged from the barrel like a jack-in-the-box. He wore gaiters buckled up to the knees, a cap pulled down as far as his eyes, his lips were trembling, and his nose was red. It was Captain Binet, lying in wait for wild duck.

  “You should have called out, from a good distance!” he cried. “When you see a gun, you should always give warning.”

  The tax collector, in saying this, was trying to conceal the fright he had just suffered: Because a prefectural decree prohibited duck hunting except from a boat, Monsieur Binet, despite his
respect for the law, found himself in violation. And so, from one minute to the next, he would believe he heard the gamekeeper approaching. But this worry only sharpened his pleasure, and, alone in his barrel, he would congratulate himself on his good luck and his cunning.

  At the sight of Emma, he seemed relieved of a great weight, and immediately opened a conversation:

  “Not very warm, is it—quite nippy!”

  Emma did not answer. He went on:

  “And you’re out good and early, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, stammering; “I’m coming from the wet nurse, where my child is.”

  “Ah, very good, very good! As for me, here I’ve been where you see me now, ever since daybreak; but the weather is so foul that unless you have the bird right at the end of your …”

  “Good day, Monsieur Binet,” she broke in, turning away from him.

  “Your servant, madame,” he answered dryly.

  And he went back inside his barrel.

  Emma regretted having left the tax collector so abruptly. He was probably going to make unfavorable conjectures. The story of the nurse was the worst excuse, since everyone in Yonville knew perfectly well that the Bovary child had been back in her parents’ home for the past year. What was more, no one lived near there; the path led only to La Huchette; Binet had therefore guessed where she was coming from, and he would not keep quiet, he would talk, that was certain! All day long she racked her brains devising every imaginable lie, with the image constantly before her of that imbecile with his game bag.

  After dinner, Charles, seeing that she was anxious, tried to distract her by taking her to the pharmacist’s house; and the first person she saw in the pharmacy was him again—the tax collector! He was standing at the counter, in the glow of the red glass jar, and he was saying:

  “Please be so good as to give me half an ounce of vitriol.”

  “Justin,” shouted the apothecary, “bring us the sulfuric acid.”

  Then, to Emma, who was about to go up to Madame Homais’s room:

  “No, stay here, don’t bother, she’ll be coming down. Go warm yourself at the stove while you’re waiting … Excuse me … Hello, Doctor” (for the pharmacist took great pleasure in pronouncing that word, “doctor,” as though in addressing someone else by the title, he caused some of the glory it held for him to be reflected on himself) … “Justin, be careful not to upset the mortars! No, no—get the chairs from the little parlor instead; you know very well we never move the drawing-room armchairs.”

  And Homais was hurrying out from behind the counter to put his armchair back in its place, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.

  “Sugar acid?” asked the pharmacist scornfully. “I don’t know what that is—no idea! Maybe what you want is oxalic acid? You mean oxalic acid, don’t you?”

  Binet explained that he needed a corrosive in order to make up some metal polish to take the rust off parts of his hunting gear. Emma gave a start. The pharmacist began to say:

  “Indeed, the weather is not very propitious, because of the damp.”

  “Nevertheless,” the tax collector went on with a sly look, “some people don’t seem to mind it.”

  She felt she was suffocating.

  “And could you also give me …”

  “He’s never going to leave!” she was thinking.

  “A half ounce of rosin and the same of turpentine, four ounces of beeswax, and three half ounces of bone black, please, to clean the patent leather on my gear.”

  The apothecary was beginning to carve the wax when Madame Homais appeared with Irma in her arms, Napoléon by her side, and Athalie following her. She went and sat down on the velvet bench by the window, and the boy crouched on a stool, while his older sister prowled around the jujube box near her little papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking bottles, gluing labels, tying up parcels. Everyone around him was silent; and one could hear only, from time to time, the clink of the weights in the scale, along with a few quiet words from the pharmacist as he gave advice to his pupil.

  “And how’s your little one?” Madame Homais asked suddenly.

  “Silence!” exclaimed her husband, who was entering figures in his calculations notebook.

  “Why didn’t you bring her along?” she went on in a low voice.

  “Shh! Shh!” said Emma, pointing to the apothecary.

  But Binet, entirely occupied with reading the column of figures, had probably heard nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, sighed deeply.

  “How hard you’re breathing!” said Madame Homais.

  “Oh! It’s just that it’s a bit warm,” she answered.

  And so, the next day, they talked about how to arrange their meetings; Emma wanted to bribe her maid with a gift; but it would be better to find some out-of-the-way house in Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.

  All winter long, three or four times a week, he would come to the garden in the dead of night. Emma, quite deliberately, had taken the key from the gate, and Charles thought it was lost.

  To signal her, Rodolphe would throw a handful of sand against the shutters. She would rise with a start; but sometimes she had to wait, because Charles had a habit of talking by the fireside, and he would go on and on. She would be consumed with impatience; if her eyes had had the power to do it, they would have flung him out the window. At last she would begin preparing for bed; then she would take up a book and read quite tranquilly, as if this reading entertained her. But Charles, who was in bed, would call out to her.

  “Come, now, Emma,” he would say, “it’s time.”

  “Yes, I’m coming!” she would answer.

  Meanwhile, because the candles dazzled him, he would turn to the wall and fall asleep. She would make her escape holding her breath, smiling, trembling, wearing almost nothing.

  Rodolphe had a large cloak; he would wrap her in it, and, putting his arm around her waist, silently lead her to the bottom of the garden.

  It was to the arbor that they went, to that same bench made of rotten sticks from which Léon had once gazed at her so lovingly on summer evenings. She hardly thought of him now.

  The stars shone through the branches of the leafless jasmine. They could hear the stream flowing behind them, and from time to time, on the bank, the clacking of dry reeds. Mounds of shadow loomed here and there in the darkness, and sometimes they would quiver with a single motion, rise up, and bend over like immense black waves advancing to submerge them. The cold of the night made them clasp each other all the more tightly; the sighs on their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes, which they could barely glimpse, seemed larger; and in the midst of the silence, the words they spoke so quietly dropped into their souls, echoing and reechoing with a crystalline sonority in multiplied vibrations.

  When the night was rainy, they would take refuge in the consulting room, between the shed and the stable. She would light a kitchen candle that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe would settle there as though he were in his own home. The sight of the bookcase and the desk, of the whole room, in fact, aroused his hilarity; and he could not stop himself from making one joke after another about Charles, which embarrassed Emma. She would have liked to see him more serious, and even, on occasion, more dramatic, as when she thought she heard the sound of footsteps approaching in the alley.

  “Someone’s coming!” she said.

  He blew out the light.

  “Do you have your pistols?”

  “What for?”

  “Why … to defend yourself,” said Emma.

  “From your husband? Oh, that poor fellow!”

  And Rodolphe ended his comment with a gesture that meant: “I could annihilate him with a flick of my finger.”

  She was amazed by his fearlessness, even though she sensed in it a coarseness and naïve vulgarity that shocked her.

  Rodolphe thought hard about
that episode involving the pistols. If she had spoken in earnest, it was quite ridiculous, he thought, even abhorrent, for he himself had no reason to hate that good man, Charles, since he was not consumed by jealousy, as people put it; —and indeed, concerning this, Emma had made him a solemn vow that he also found not in the best taste.

  Besides, she was becoming quite sentimental. They had had to exchange miniatures, they had cut off handfuls of their hair, and now she was asking for a ring, a veritable wedding band, as a symbol of everlasting union. She often spoke to him about the evening church bells or the voices of nature; then she would talk about her mother, and his. Rodolphe had lost his mother twenty years before. Nonetheless, Emma would console him in affected language, as one would have consoled a bereaved child, and even said to him sometimes, gazing at the moon:

  “I’m sure that somewhere up there, they are together and they approve of our love.”

  But she was so pretty! And he had possessed few women as ingenuous as she! This love, so free of licentiousness, was a new thing for him and, drawing him out of his easy ways, both flattered his pride and inflamed his sensuality. Emma’s rapturous emotion, which his bourgeois common sense disdained, seemed charming to him in his heart of hearts, since he was the object of it. And so, certain of being loved, he stopped making any effort, and imperceptibly his manner changed.

  He no longer spoke those sweet words to her that had once made her weep, nor did he offer her those fervent caresses that had once driven her wild; so that their great love, in which she lived immersed, seemed to be seeping away under her, like the waters of a river being absorbed into its own bed, and she could see the mud. She did not want to believe it; she redoubled her affection; and Rodolphe made less and less of an effort to hide his indifference.