Madame Bovary

  The pharmacist, at the sound of the commotion, rushed to the house. The table, along with all the plates, had been overturned; the sauce, the meat, the knives, the saltcellar, and the oil cruet lay strewn about the room; Charles was calling for help; Berthe, frightened, was shrieking; and Félicité, her hands shaking, was unlacing Madame, whose entire body was racked with convulsions.

  “I’ll just run,” said the apothecary, “to my laboratory for some aromatic vinegar.”

  Then, when she opened her eyes, breathing from the flask:

  “I was sure of it,” he said; “this stuff would wake a dead man.”

  “Speak to us!” Charles was saying. “Speak to us! Wake up! It’s me, your Charles, who loves you! Do you recognize me? Here now, here’s your little girl: now give her a kiss, won’t you!”

  The child held out her arms toward her mother to clasp them around her neck. But Emma, turning her head away, said brokenly:

  “No, no … no one!”

  She fainted again. They carried her to her bed.

  She remained lying there, her mouth open, her eyelids closed, her hands flat beside her, motionless, and as white as a wax statue. From her eyes trickled two streams of tears onto the pillow.

  Charles, standing, stayed at the back of the alcove, and the pharmacist, next to him, maintained that meditative silence suitable for the more serious occasions of life.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, pressing his elbow, “I think the paroxysm has passed.”

  “Yes, she’s resting a little now!” answered Charles, who was watching her sleep. “Poor woman! … Poor woman! … She’s had a relapse!”

  Then Homais asked how this accident had happened. Charles answered that she had been stricken suddenly while eating apricots.

  “Extraordinary! …” said the pharmacist. “Why, it’s quite possible that the apricots brought on the syncope! Some people are so naturally impressionable when coming into contact with certain odors! And this would actually be a nice topic to study, from the point of view of both its pathology and its physiology. The priests recognize its importance; they’ve always brought aromatics into their ceremonies. They do it to stupefy the understanding and provoke a state of ecstasy, which, of course, is easy enough to achieve in persons of the female sex, who are more delicate than the others. Cases have been cited of women fainting at the smell of burned horn, fresh bread …”

  “Take care not to wake her!” said Bovary softly.

  “And,” continued the apothecary, “it’s not only humans who are vulnerable to these anomalies, but animals, too. For instance, you’re surely aware of the singular aphrodisiac effect produced by Nepeta cataria, vulgarly known as catnip, on the feline tribe; and again, to mention an example I guarantee to be authentic, Bridoux (one of my old schoolmates, presently established in the rue Malpalu) has a dog that falls into convulsions if one offers it a snuffbox. He frequently performs the experiment in front of his friends, at his summerhouse in Bois-Guillaume. Who would ever think that a simple sternutative could work such havoc in a quadruped’s organism? It’s extremely curious, don’t you find?”

  “Yes,” said Charles, who was not listening.

  “This just proves to us,” the other went on, smiling with an air of benign complacency, “how innumerable are the irregularities of the nervous system. As regards Madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, a genuinely sensitive case. Thus, I would not recommend, my good friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretext of attacking the symptoms, attack the constitution. No, no idle medication! A regimen, and nothing else! Sedatives, emollients, dulcifiers. And also, don’t you think it might be a good thing to rouse her imagination?”

  “In what way? How?” asked Bovary.

  “Ah! That’s the problem! Such, indeed, is the problem: That is the question!” he quoted in English—“as I was reading in the paper the other day.”

  But Emma, waking, cried out:

  “The letter! The letter!”

  They thought she was delirious; and she was, from midnight on: a brain fever had set in.

  For forty-three days, Charles did not leave her side. He abandoned all his patients; he no longer went to bed; he was continually taking her pulse, applying mustard plasters, cold-water compresses. He sent Justin to Neufchâtel to get ice; the ice melted on the way home; he sent him back. He called in Monsieur Canivet for a consultation; he had Doctor Larivière, his old teacher, come from Rouen; he was in despair. What frightened him the most was Emma’s prostration; for she did not speak, heard nothing, and even seemed not to be in pain—as if both her body and her soul were resting from all their suffering.

  Toward the middle of October, she was able to sit up in bed with some pillows behind her. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first slice of bread and jam. Her strength returned to her; she would get up for a few hours during the afternoon, and one day when she was feeling better, he tried to induce her to go out, leaning on his arm, for a stroll in the garden. The sand on the paths was disappearing under the dead leaves; she walked one step at a time, dragging her slippers; and, leaning her shoulder against Charles, she smiled the whole time.

  In this way they went to the far end, close to the terrace. She straightened up slowly, put her hand above her eyes, in order to look out; she looked into the distance, the far distance; but there was nothing on the horizon except great grass fires, smoking on the hills.

  “You’re going to tire yourself out, dear,” said Bovary.

  And, nudging her gently, to induce her to go into the arbor:

  “Sit down on the bench: you’ll be all right here.”

  “Oh, no! Not there, not there!” she said in a faltering voice.

  She was overcome by dizziness, and that evening, her illness returned, though in a more uncertain guise and with more complex characteristics. Sometimes she felt a pain in her heart, sometimes in her chest, then in her head, then in her arms and legs; she had fits of vomiting in which Charles believed he saw the first symptoms of cancer.

  And on top of this, poor man, he had money worries!

  [14]

  First of all, he did not know how he was going to compensate Monsieur Homais for all the medicaments that had come from his pharmacy; and although, as a doctor, he could have chosen not to pay, nevertheless he felt a little ashamed at incurring that obligation. Then the household expenses, now that the servant was in charge, were becoming frightening; the notes were raining down on the house; the tradespeople were complaining; Monsieur Lheureux, above all, was harassing him. Indeed, at the height of Emma’s illness, Lheureux, profiting from the circumstances to pad his bill, had promptly brought over the coat, the overnight bag, two trunks instead of one, an abundance of other things as well. It was in vain that Charles said he did not need them; the merchant answered arrogantly that all these articles had been ordered from him and that he would not take them back; besides, it would be upsetting to Madame during her convalescence; Monsieur should think it over; in short, he was resolved to pursue him in a court of law rather than give up his rights and take back his merchandise. Charles afterward ordered everything to be sent back to the shop; Félicité forgot; he had other worries; it was not thought of again; Monsieur Lheureux returned to the attack and, by turns threatening and complaining, maneuvered in such a way that in the end Bovary signed a note payable in six months. But scarcely had he signed this note, than a bold idea struck him: to borrow 1,000 francs from Monsieur Lheureux. And so he asked, with a look of embarrassment, if there was not some means of obtaining this amount, adding that it would be for one year and at any rate of interest he liked. Lheureux hurried to his shop, brought back the ecus, and dictated another note, whereby Bovary undertook to pay to his order, on September 1 next, the sum of 1,070 francs; which, with the 180 already stipulated, came to exactly 1,250. Thus, lending at 6 percent, augmented by a quarter’s commission and a profit of a good third at least on t
he goods, the whole thing should, in twelve months, yield a profit of 130 francs; and he hoped the matter would not end there, that the notes would not be paid, that they would be renewed, and that his meager capital, having been well nourished in the doctor’s home as though in a private sanatorium, would return to him, one day, considerably plumper, large enough to split open the bag.

  Everything, moreover, was going well for him. He was the contracting party for supplying cider to the Neufchâtel hospital; Monsieur Guillaumin had promised him some shares in the Grumesnil peat bogs; and he was thinking of setting up a new coach service between Argueil and Rouen, which would soon, no doubt, spell the end of that old rattletrap at the Lion d’Or and, being faster, costing less, and carrying larger loads, would thus put all the Yonville trade into his hands.

  Charles often asked himself how he was going to be able to pay back so much money the following year; and he would search his mind, imagine various expedients, such as appealing to his father or selling something. But his father would have turned a deaf ear, and he himself had nothing he could sell. And he encountered so many difficulties that he would quickly put such unpleasant reflections out of his mind. He would reproach himself for forgetting Emma; as if all his thoughts belonged to her and he was stealing from her if he failed to think about her all the time.

  The winter was harsh. Madame’s convalescence was a long one. When the weather was fine, they would push her in her armchair up to the window, the one that looked out over the square; for she now had an aversion to the garden, and the shutters on that side always remained closed. She wanted the horse to be sold; what she had once loved, she no longer liked. All her thoughts seemed to be confined to looking after herself. She would stay in bed eating light meals, ring for the servant to ask about her tisanes or to chat with her. Meanwhile, the snow on the roof of the covered market would cast its motionless white reflection into the room; then, later in the season, the rain would fall. And every day Emma would wait, with a kind of anxiety, for the unfailing recurrence of trivial events, little though they mattered to her. The most important of these was the arrival, in the evening, of the Hirondelle. Then the innkeeper would shout and other voices would reply, while Hippolyte’s lantern, as he lifted the trunks down from the roof of the coach, was like a star in the darkness. At noon, Charles would return home; then he would go out; later, she would have some broth; and toward five o’clock, at the end of the day, the children, on their way home from school, dragging their wooden shoes along the sidewalk, would strike the hooks of the shutters, one after the other, with their rulers.

  It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien would come to see her. He would inquire about her health, bring her news, and urge her to piety in a coaxing little conversation that was not without charm. The very sight of his cassock would comfort her.

  One day at the height of her illness, when she believed she was dying, she had asked to be given Communion; and as her room was prepared for the sacrament, as the chest of drawers crowded with syrups was transformed into an altar and Félicité scattered dahlia flowers over the floor, Emma felt some powerful force pass over her that rid her of all her suffering, of all perception, of all feeling. Her flesh, relieved, no longer weighed her down; a new life was beginning; it seemed to her that her whole being, ascending toward God, would dissolve in that love as burning incense dissipates into smoke. Holy water was sprinkled over the sheets of the bed; the priest withdrew the white host from the holy ciborium; and, fainting with heavenly joy, she put her lips forward to receive the proffered body of the Savior. The curtains of her alcove swelled out softly around her, like clouds, and the rays from the two wax tapers burning on the chest seemed to her like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back, thinking she could hear, through the vastnesses of space, the music of seraphic harps, and could see in an azure sky, on a throne of gold, surrounded by the saints holding fronds of green palm, God the Father in all His brilliant majesty, who with a sign sent angels with flaming wings down to the earth to carry her away in their arms.

  This splendid vision lingered in her memory as the most beautiful thing she could ever have dreamed; so that now she kept striving to recapture the sensation of it, which persisted in a less all-encompassing manner but with a sweetness as profound. Her soul, exhausted by pride, was at last reposing in Christian humility; and, savoring the pleasure of being weak, Emma watched within herself the destruction of her will, which was to open wide the way for incursions of grace. So there existed greater delights in place of mere happiness, a love above all other loves, without interruption and without end, one that would continue to increase through all eternity! She could glimpse, among the illusions born of her hopes, a state of purity floating above the earth, merging with heaven, and this was where she aspired to be. She wanted to become a saint. She bought rosaries, she carried amulets; she wished she had a reliquary studded with emeralds in her room, by the head of her bed, so that she could kiss it every night.

  The curé marveled at these tendencies, although he felt that Emma’s piety might in the end, because of its fervor, verge on heresy and even nonsense. But not being very well versed in these matters once they went beyond certain bounds, he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, Monseigneur’s bookseller, to send him something particularly good, for a female of high intelligence. The bookseller, with as much indifference as if he were dispatching cheap trinkets to black Africans, packaged up a hodgepodge of everything then current in the religious book trade. Included were slim handbooks in the form of questions and answers, haughty-toned pamphlets in the manner of Monsieur de Maistre, and novels of a certain sort in pink paperboards and a sickly-sweet style fabricated by troubadour seminarists or repentant bluestockings. There was Think On It Well; The Man of the World at Mary’s Feet, by Monsieur de ***, decorated with many orders; The Errors of Voltaire, Intended for the Young, etc.

  Madame Bovary’s mind was not yet clear enough for her to apply herself seriously to anything; what was more, she undertook these readings too hastily. She was irritated by the regulations governing worship; the condescension of the polemical writings displeased her by their relentless pursuit of people she had never heard of; and the secular stories spiced with religion seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world that they imperceptibly distanced her from the very truths she was hoping to see confirmed. She persisted nonetheless, and when the volume fell from her hands, she believed she was filled with the most refined Catholic melancholy ever conceived by an ethereal soul.

  As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had thrust it down into the depths of her heart; and there it remained, as solemn and still as a king’s mummy in an underground chamber. From this great embalmed love rose an emanation that permeated everything, imparting a fragrance of tenderness to the atmosphere of spotless purity in which she wanted to live. When she knelt at her Gothic prie-dieu, she would address the Lord with the same sweet words she used to murmur to her lover in the ecstatic transports of her adultery. This she did to induce faith to come to her; but no rapture descended from heaven, and she would get to her feet, her arms and legs tired, with the vague sense that it was all an immense hoax. This quest was, she thought, but an added merit; and in her pride at her devoutness, Emma would compare herself to those great ladies of earlier times over whose glory she had daydreamed before a portrait of La Vallière, and who, trailing behind them so majestically the spangled trains of their long gowns, would withdraw to a lonely spot to shed at Christ’s feet all the tears of a heart wounded by life.

  Then she plunged into excessive acts of charity. She would sew clothing for the poor; she would send firewood to women in childbirth; and Charles, on returning home one day, found three shiftless fellows at the kitchen table eating soup. She arranged for her little girl to be brought back to the house; her husband, during her illness, had sent the child to the nurse. She tried to teach her to read; though Berthe wept, she no longer became annoyed. It was a decision she had
made—to adopt an attitude of resignation, of indulgence toward all. Her language, on all subjects, was full of lofty expressions. She would say to her child:

  “Is your stomachache gone, my angel?”

  The elder Madame Bovary found nothing with which to reproach her, except perhaps this mania for knitting camisoles for orphans instead of mending her dish towels. But, exhausted by the quarrels in her own home, the good woman was happy in this peaceful house, and she even stayed until after Easter to avoid the sarcastic remarks of the elder Bovary, who never failed, on Good Friday, to order himself a chitterling sausage.

  Besides the company of her mother-in-law, who steadied her somewhat because of her rectitude of judgment and her sober ways, Emma also received, nearly every day, other visitors. There was Madame Langlois, Madame Caron, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and, regularly from two to five o’clock, the excellent Madame Homais, who had never wanted to believe any of the ill-natured gossip that people retailed about her neighbor. The Homais children would also come to see her; Justin would bring them. He would accompany them up to the bedroom, and he would remain standing by the door without moving or speaking. Often, indeed, Madame Bovary, taking no notice, would begin to dress. She would start by taking out her comb and shaking her head briskly; and the first time he saw that full mane of hair with its black ringlets tumbling down to her knees, it was for him, poor boy, like suddenly entering something new and extraordinary, something whose splendor frightened him.

  Emma probably did not notice his silent eagerness nor his timidity. She never suspected that love, which had disappeared from her life, was pulsating there, near her, beneath that shirt of coarse linen, in that adolescent heart so open to the emanations of her beauty. Moreover, she now enveloped everything in such indifference, her words were so affectionate and her glances so haughty, her behavior so changeable, that one could no longer distinguish selfishness from charity, nor corruption from virtue. One evening, for instance, she lost her temper with the maid, who, when asking permission to go out, stammered as she tried to think of an excuse; then, all of a sudden: