As she listened, Madame Bovary marveled at how old she was; all these things as they reappeared seemed to extend her life; it was as though immense expanses of feeling were opened up, upon which she could look back; and from time to time, she would say softly, her eyes half closed:
“Yes, it’s true! … It’s true! … It’s true …”
They heard eight o’clock strike from the different clocks in the Beauvoisine district, which is full of boarding schools, churches, and large mansions now abandoned. They were no longer talking; but as they stared at each other, they felt a murmuring in their heads, as if something audible were escaping from one to the other through their steady gazes. They had just taken each other by the hand; and the past, the future, their reminiscences, and their dreams were all now merged in the sweetness of their ecstasy. The darkness was growing denser along the walls; still gleaming, half lost in shadow, were the garish colors of four prints representing four scenes from The Tower of Nesle, with legends below in Spanish and French. Through the sash window, one could see a patch of dark sky between peaked roofs.
She stood up to light two candles on the dresser, then came and sat down again.
“Well …,” Léon said.
“Well?” she answered.
And he was trying to think how to resume the interrupted conversation, when she said:
“Why is it that no one, before now, has ever expressed such feelings to me?”
The clerk exclaimed that idealistic natures were difficult to understand. He had loved her the moment he first saw her; and he was filled with despair when he thought what happiness might have been theirs if, by good fortune, meeting earlier, they had been joined together by an indissoluble bond.
“I’ve sometimes thought about that,” she answered.
“What a dream!” murmured Léon.
And, delicately fingering the blue border of her long white belt, he added:
“What’s to prevent us from beginning again now? …”
“No, my dear,” she answered. “I’m too old … you’re too young … forget me! Others will love you … and you’ll love them.”
“Not as I love you!” he cried.
“You child! Come now, let’s be sensible! That’s what I want!”
She pointed out to him all the reasons their love was impossible, and why they would have to remain, as they used to be, merely friends, like brother and sister.
Did she mean it when she said this? Probably Emma herself did not know, completely occupied as she was by the charm of the seduction and the need to resist it; and, contemplating the young man with a fond gaze, she gently pushed away the timid caresses his trembling hands were attempting.
“Oh, forgive me,” he said, drawing back.
And Emma was seized by a vague alarm in the face of this timidity, which was more dangerous to her than Rodolphe’s boldness when he came up to her with open arms. Never had any man seemed to her so handsome. His whole bearing radiated an exquisite candor. He had lowered his long, fine, curving eyelashes. The smooth skin of his cheek was flushed, with desire—she thought—for her, and Emma felt an irresistible longing to put her lips to it. Then, leaning toward the clock as though to see the time:
“Heavens, how late it is!” she said; “how we’ve talked!”
He understood the hint and picked up his hat.
“I even forgot the opera! Poor Bovary—and he left me here just for that! Monsieur Lormeaux, in the rue Grand-Pont, was supposed to take me with his wife.”
And the opportunity was lost, for she was leaving the next day.
“Really?” said Léon.
“Yes.”
“But I must see you again,” he went on; “I wanted to tell you …”
“What?”
“Something … important, something serious. Oh, no! You mustn’t go, you can’t! If you knew … Listen … Didn’t you understand what I was saying? Couldn’t you guess? …”
“And yet you express yourself very clearly,” said Emma.
“Ah! Now you’re joking with me! Please don’t! Take pity on me, let me see you again … once … just once.”
“Well …”
She stopped; then, as though thinking better of it:
“Oh, not here!”
“Wherever you like.”
“Do you want to …”
She seemed to think it over; then, tersely:
“Tomorrow, at eleven o’clock, in the cathedral.”
“I’ll be there!” he exclaimed, seizing her hands, which she disengaged.
And as they were now both standing, he behind her and Emma bowing her head, he leaned over and gave her a long kiss on the nape of her neck.
“You’re crazy! Ah!—you’re quite crazy!” she said with little peals of laughter as he kissed her again and again.
Then, leaning his face forward over her shoulder, he seemed to be searching her eyes for her consent. They looked at him full of an icy majesty.
Léon took a few steps back, preparing to leave. He stopped on the doorsill. Then he whispered in a tremulous voice:
“Till tomorrow.”
She answered with a nod and vanished like a bird into the next room.
Emma, that evening, wrote the clerk an endless letter canceling their appointment: it was all over now, and for the sake of their own happiness, they must never meet again. But when the letter was finished, since she did not have Léon’s address, she found herself quite perplexed.
“I’ll give it to him myself,” she said; “he’s sure to come.”
The next day, Léon, his window open, singing softly on his balcony, polished his dress shoes himself with several layers of polish. He drew on a pair of white pants, some thin socks, a green coat, poured into his handkerchief everything he owned in the way of scent, then, having had his hair curled, took the curl out of it again, so as to give his hair a more natural elegance.
“It’s still too early!” he thought, looking at the barber’s cuckoo clock, which pointed to nine.
He read an old fashion magazine, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three streets, imagined it was time, and headed briskly toward the parvis of Notre-Dame.
It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver gleamed in the windows of the gold- and silversmiths, and the light that fell obliquely on the cathedral shimmered in the cracks of the gray stones; a flock of birds circled in the blue sky around the trefoiled pinnacle turrets; the square, echoing with cries, smelled of the flowers that bordered its pavement—roses, jasmine, carnations, narcissus, and tuberoses unevenly interspersed with damp greenery, catnip, and chickweed; the fountain, in the middle, was gurgling; and under broad umbrellas, among pyramids of cantaloupes, bareheaded flower-women were twisting bunches of violets in paper.
The young man took one. It was the first time he had bought flowers for a woman; and as he inhaled their fragrance, his chest swelled with pride, as though this homage, which he intended for someone else, had been redirected toward him.
Yet he was afraid of being seen; he went resolutely into the church.
The verger, just then, was standing on the threshold, in the center of the left-hand portal, under the Marianne Dancing, a plume on his head, a rapier by his calf, a staff in his fist, more majestic than a cardinal and gleaming like a sacred ciborium.
He advanced toward Léon, and with that smile of unctuous benignity assumed by ecclesiastics when questioning children:
“Monsieur is perhaps from out of town? Monsieur would like to be shown the special features of the church?”
“No,” said the other.
And first he walked all the way around the side aisles. Then he came and looked out at the square. Emma was not in sight. He walked back as far as the choir.
The nave was mirrored in the brimming holy-water basins, along with the lower parts of the ogives and some portions of the stained glass. But the reflecti
ons of the images, breaking at the marble rims, continued beyond, over the flagstones, like a gaudy carpet. The broad daylight of the outdoors extended into the church in three enormous beams through the three open portals. Now and then, deep inside the church, a sacristan would pass the altar, making that oblique genuflection practiced by the devout when in a hurry. The crystal chandeliers hung motionless. In the choir, a silver lamp was burning; and from the side chapels, from the darker parts of the church, there sometimes issued a sort of effluence of sighs, along with the sound of a grille closing, sending its echo up under the lofty vaults.
Léon, with a sober step, was walking close to the walls. Never had life seemed so good to him. Any minute now she would appear, charming, agitated, glancing behind her at the eyes that were following her,—in her flounced dress, her gold lorgnette, her thin little boots, all kinds of elegant refinements he had never had a taste of before, and with all the ineffable seductiveness of virtue yielding. The church, like a gigantic boudoir, was arranging itself around her; the vaults were leaning down to gather up, in the shadows, the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent to illuminate her face; and the censers burned so that she might appear like an angel, amid clouds of perfume.
Yet still she did not come. He took a seat, and his eyes happened upon a blue window that shows boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at it for a long time, attentively, and he counted the scales on the fish and the buttonholes on the doublets, while his thoughts wandered in search of Emma.
The verger, standing to one side, was raging inwardly at this person who permitted himself to admire the cathedral on his own. He was behaving monstrously, he felt, stealing from him, in a way, and almost committing a sacrilege.
But a rustling of silk on the flagstones, the brim of a hat, a black hooded cloak … It was she! Léon stood up and hurried to meet her.
Emma was pale. She was walking quickly.
“Read this!” she said, handing him a piece of paper … “No, no!”
And abruptly she drew back her hand and went into the Lady Chapel, where, kneeling against a chair, she began to pray.
The young man was irritated by this overly pious whim; but then he found a certain charm in seeing her thus, in the middle of an assignation, lost in prayer like some Andalusian marquise; then he quickly grew bored, for she was going on and on.
Emma was praying, or rather endeavoring to pray, in the hope that some sudden resolution would descend upon her from heaven; and in order to attract divine assistance, she was filling her eyes with the splendors of the tabernacle, breathing in the fragrance of the white stock in full bloom in their tall vases, and listening to the silence of the church, which only increased the tumult in her heart.
She was standing up again, and they were about to leave, when the verger approached them smartly, saying:
“Madame is perhaps from out of town? Madame would like to be shown the special features of the church?”
“No, no!” exclaimed the clerk.
“Why not?” she said.
For with her wavering virtue she was clinging to the Virgin, to the sculptures, to the tombs, to every chance opportunity.
Then, so that they might proceed in the right order, the verger led them to the entrance close to the square, where, pointing with his staff to a great circle of black paving stones without inscription or engraving:
“That,” he declared majestically, “is the circumference of the beautiful Amboise bell. It weighed forty thousand pounds. There was not its like in all of Europe. The workman who cast it died of joy …”
“Let’s go,” said Léon.
The fellow walked on; then, having returned to the Lady Chapel, he stretched out his arms in an all-embracing gesture of revelation, and, prouder than a country landowner showing you his espaliered trees:
“Under this simple stone lies Pierre de Brézé, Lord of the Varenne and of Brissac, Grand Marshal of Poitou, and Governor of Normandy, who died in the battle of Montlhéry, July sixteenth, 1465.”
Léon, biting his lips, tapped his feet impatiently.
“And to the right, this gentleman, clad in steel, on the rearing horse, is his grandson Louis de Brézé, Lord of Breval and of Montchauvet, Count of Maulevrier, Baron of Mauny, Chamberlain to the King, Knight of the Order, and likewise Governor of Normandy, who died on July twenty-third, 1531, a Sunday, as the inscription tells us; and below him, that man about to descend into the grave shows you the very same person. It is not possible to imagine, don’t you agree, a more perfect representation of the void?”
Madame Bovary raised her lorgnette. Léon, motionless, was looking at her, no longer even trying to say a single word, or make a single motion, so discouraged did he feel in the face of this twofold persistence of volubility and indifference.
Their eternal guide was continuing:
“This woman on her knees at his side and weeping is his wife, Diane de Poitiers, Countess of Brézé, Duchess of Valentinois, born in 1499, died in 1566; and to the left, the one carrying a child, the Holy Virgin. Now, turn this way: here are the tombs of the Amboises. They were both cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one over there was a minister to King Louis XII. He was a great benefactor to the Cathedral. They found that in his will he had left thirty thousand gold ecus to the poor.”
And without pausing, still continuing to talk, he urged them into a chapel cluttered with balustrades, moved some of them aside, and revealed a sort of block, which could well have been a poorly made statue.
“At one time,” he said with a deep sigh, “this used to adorn the tomb of Richard the Lionhearted, King of England and Duke of Normandy. It was the Calvinists, monsieur, who reduced it to its present condition. They buried it, for spite, in the ground under Monseigneur’s episcopal throne. Look—here’s the door by which Monseigneur reaches his residence. Now let us go on and see the Gargoyle windows.”
But Léon quickly drew a silver coin from his pocket and seized Emma by the arm. The verger was quite stupefied, puzzled by this untimely munificence when there remained so many things for the stranger still to see. And so, calling him back:
“Eh, monsieur! The steeple! The steeple! …”
“Thank you, no,” said Léon.
“Monsieur is making a mistake! You’ll see that it’s four hundred and forty feet high, nine feet less than the great pyramid of Egypt. It’s made entirely of cast iron, it …”
Léon was fleeing; for it seemed to him that his love, which for nearly two hours now had been immobilized inside the church like the very stones, was about to evaporate, like a puff of smoke, up that sort of truncated pipe, that oblong cage, that openwork chimney, which perches so perilously and so grotesquely on top of the cathedral, like the extravagant experiment of some whimsical metalworker.
“Where are we going?” she said.
Without answering, he was walking on at a rapid pace, and Madame Bovary was already dipping her finger in the holy water, when they heard behind them the sound of heavy panting regularly punctuated by the tapping of a stick. Léon turned around.
“Monsieur!”
“What?”
And he recognized the verger, carrying under his arm and balancing against his stomach about twenty stout paperbound volumes. They were books dealing with the cathedral.
“Fool!” muttered Léon, dashing out of the church.
A street urchin was loitering about on the parvis:
“Go get me a cab!”
The child set off like a shot up the rue des Quatre-Vents; now they were left alone for a few minutes, face-to-face and a little embarrassed.
“Oh, Léon! … Really … I don’t know … if I should … !”
She was simpering. Then, in a serious tone:
“It’s quite improper, you know.”
“In what way?” replied the clerk. “They do it in Paris!”
And that remark, like an irresistible argu
ment, decided her.
Yet the cab was nowhere in sight. Léon was afraid she would go back inside the church. At last the cab appeared.
“Go out by the north door, at least!” cried the verger, who had remained on the threshold. “So that you can see the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the Souls of the Damned burning in the flames of hell!”
“Where does Monsieur wish to go?” asked the coachman.
“Wherever you like!” said Léon, thrusting Emma into the carriage.
And the heavy vehicle started off.
It went down the rue Grand-Pont, crossed the place des Arts, the quai Napoléon, and the Pont Neuf, and stopped short in front of the statue of Pierre Corneille.
“Keep going!” said a voice issuing from the interior.
The carriage set off again and, gathering speed on the downward slope from the carrefour La Fayette, came up to the railway station at a fast gallop.
“No! Straight on!” cried the same voice.
The cab went out through the gates and soon, having reached the promenade, trotted quietly between the lines of tall elms. The coachman wiped his forehead, put his leather hat between his legs, and urged the carriage on beyond the side avenues to the water’s edge, by the grass.
It went along the river, on the towpath with its surface of dry pebbles, and, for a long time, toward Oyssel, beyond the islands.
But all of a sudden, it dashed in one leap across Quatremares, Sotteville, the Grande-Chaussée, the rue d’Elbeuf, and made its third stop in front of the Jardin des Plantes.
“Keep going!” shouted the voice more furiously.
And immediately starting off again, it went past Saint-Sever, along the quai des Curandiers, along the quai aux Meules, once again over the bridge, by the place du Champ-de-Mars, and behind the gardens of the home for the elderly, where old men in black jackets walk in the sun along a terrace all green with ivy. It went back up the boulevard Bouvreuil, along the boulevard Cauchoise, then down the entire length of Mont-Riboudet as far as the Deville hill.