Madame Bovary

  It turned back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, at random, it wandered. It was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont Gargan, at the Rouge-Mare, and in the place du Gaillardbois; in the rue Maladrerie, the rue Dinanderie, in front of Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise—in front of the Customs House—at the Basse Vieille-Tour, at Trois-Pipes, and at the Cimetière Monumental. From his seat the coachman now and again glanced at a tavern with a despairing eye. He could not understand what mania for locomotion was compelling these individuals to refuse to stop. He would sometimes try, and he would immediately hear exclamations of rage behind him. Then he would lash his two sweating nags all the harder, but with no regard for bumps, catching a wheel on one side or the other, not caring, demoralized, and almost weeping from thirst, fatigue, and gloom.

  And at the harbor, among the drays and great barrels, and in the streets, at the corners by the guard stones, the townspeople would stare wide-eyed in amazement at this thing so unheard of in the provinces, a carriage with drawn blinds that kept appearing and reappearing, sealed tighter than a tomb and tossed about like a ship at sea.

  Once, at midday, out in the countryside, when the sun was beating down most fiercely against the old silver-plated lamps, a bare hand passed under the little blinds of yellow canvas and threw out some torn scraps of paper, which scattered in the wind and alighted, at a distance, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover all in bloom.

  Then, toward six o’clock, the carriage stopped in a lane in the Beauvoisine district, and a woman stepped down from it and walked away, her veil lowered, without turning her head.

  [2]

  When she reached the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the stagecoach. Hivert, after waiting fifty-three minutes for her, had in the end driven away.

  Nothing really obliged her to leave; but she had given her word that she would return that evening. Besides, Charles was waiting for her; and already she felt in her heart that craven docility that is, for many women, at once the punishment for their adultery, and the price they pay to redeem it.

  Quickly she packed her bag, paid the bill, hired a gig in the courtyard, and, urging on the driver, encouraging him, asking him every minute what time it was and how many kilometers they had gone, managed to overtake the Hirondelle near the first houses of Quincampoix.

  Scarcely seated in her corner, she closed her eyes, opening them again at the bottom of the hill, where from a distance she recognized Félicité, watching for her in front of the blacksmith’s. Hivert reined in his horses, and the cook, stretching up to the carriage window, said mysteriously:

  “Madame, you must go to Monsieur Homais’s house right away. It’s urgent.”

  The village was silent as usual. At the street corners, little pink mounds were steaming in the air, for it was jam time, and everyone in Yonville was confecting his own provision on the same day. But in front of the pharmacist’s shop, people were admiring a much larger mound, and one that surpassed the others with the superiority that a chemist’s dispensary is bound to have over ordinary stoves, a general need over individual whims.

  She went in. The large armchair was overturned, and even Le Fanal de Rouen was on the floor, lying between the two pestles. She pushed open the hall door; and in the middle of the kitchen, among the brown jars full of loose currants, grated sugar, lump sugar, scales on the table, pans on the fire, she saw the entire Homais family, big and little, wearing aprons that rose up to their chins and holding forks in their hands. Justin was standing with bowed head, and the pharmacist was shouting:

  “Who told you to go get it from the capharnaum?”

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter?” answered the apothecary. “We’re making jam; it’s cooking; but it was about to overflow because it was boiling too fast, and I called for another pan. Then, because he’s slothful, because he’s lazy, he goes to my laboratory and takes, from the nail where it hangs—the key to the capharnaum!”

  This was the apothecary’s name for a small room under the eaves filled with the utensils and supplies of his profession. Often he would spend long hours there alone, labeling, decanting, repackaging; and he considered it not a mere storeroom, but a veritable sanctuary, from which would then issue, transformed by his own hands, all kinds of pills, boluses, infusions, lotions, and potions, which were destined to spread his renown through the surrounding area. Not another soul ever set foot in there; and he had such a high regard for it that he would sweep it out himself. If the pharmacy, open to all comers, was the spot where he proudly exhibited his skill, the capharnaum was the refuge where, selfishly withdrawing from the world, Homais would rapturously indulge his predilections; thus, Justin’s thoughtlessness seemed to him monstrously irreverent; and, redder than the currants, he said again:

  “Yes, the key to the capharnaum! The key for locking away the acids and the caustic alkalis! To go and take one of the spare pans!—a pan with a lid!—one I may never use! Each thing has its own importance in the delicate operations of our art! What the devil! One must make distinctions, one mustn’t employ for quasi-domestic purposes something intended for pharmaceuticals! It’s as if one were to cut up a chicken with a scalpel, as if a magistrate …”

  “There, now, calm down, dear!” Madame Homais was saying.

  And Athalie, pulling him by his frock coat:

  “Papa! Papa!”

  “No! Leave me alone!” the apothecary went on. “Leave me alone! Blast! I might as well go into business as a grocer, upon my word of honor! Go on! Respect nothing! Break it all! Shatter it all! Let the leeches out! Burn the mallow! Marinate pickles in the apothecary jars! Cut up the bandages!”

  “But you had …,” said Emma.

  “In a minute!— Do you know the risk you were taking? … Didn’t you notice something in the corner, on the left, on the third shelf? Speak, answer, articulate something!”

  “I don’t … know,” stammered the boy.

  “Ah! You don’t know! Well, I do know! You saw a bottle, a blue glass bottle, sealed with yellow wax, with white powder in it, on which I have in fact written: Dangerous! And do you know what’s in it? Arsenic! —and you were going to touch that? Take a pan that’s right next to it!”

  “Right next to it!” exclaimed Madame Homais, joining her hands. “Arsenic? You could poison us all!”

  And the children began to cry out, as though they were already feeling atrocious pains in their bowels.

  “Or poison a patient!” continued the apothecary. “So you wanted me to appear on the criminals’ bench, in the court of assizes? See me dragged to the gallows? Don’t you know the care I take in handling everything, even though I’m so utterly practiced in it? I even frighten myself, often, when I think of my responsibility! —for the government persecutes us, and the absurd legislation that restricts us hangs like a veritable sword of Damocles over our heads!”

  Emma was no longer thinking of asking what they wanted from her, and the pharmacist continued breathlessly:

  “This is how you acknowledge the kindness I’ve shown you! This is how you repay me for the completely fatherly care I lavish on you! For without me, where would you be? What would you be doing? Who provides you with your food, your education, your clothes, all the means by which you may one day enter with honor the ranks of society! But for that you have to pull hard on the oar, you have to get calluses on your hands, as they say. Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.”

  He was so angry he was quoting Latin. He would have quoted Chinese or Greenlandic, had he known those languages; for he was in the throes of the sort of crisis in which one’s entire soul shows indiscriminately what it contains, just as the Ocean, during a storm, gapes open from the seaweed on its shore to the sand in its abysses.

  And he went on:

  “I’m beginning to repent terribly having taken you into my care! I’d certainly have done bette
r to leave you to squat in your misery, back then, in the filth you were born in! You’ll never be good for anything but looking after horned animals! You have no aptitude for the sciences! You barely know how to glue on a label! And you live here, in my house, gorging yourself like a monk or a fighting cock!”

  But Emma, turning toward Madame Homais:

  “They told me to come …”

  “Oh! My Lord!” interrupted the good lady with a sad look; “how can I possibly tell you? … It’s a dreadful thing!”

  She broke off. The apothecary was thundering on:

  “Empty it! Scour it! Take it back! Hurry up, can’t you!

  And as he shook Justin by the collar of his smock, a book fell out of the pocket.

  The boy bent down. Homais was quicker, and, having picked up the volume, he studied it, his eyes wide, his jaw gaping.

  “Conjugal … Love!” he said slowly, separating the two words. “Oh! Very good! Very good! Very nice! With engravings, too! … Ah! this is too much!”

  Madame Homais stepped forward.

  “No, don’t touch it!”

  The children wanted to see the pictures.

  “Leave the room!” he said imperiously.

  And they left.

  At first he paced back and forth with long strides, keeping the volume open between his fingers, rolling his eyes, breathless, swollen, apoplectic. Then he walked straight over to his pupil, and, planting himself before him with his arms crossed:

  “Well, so you have all the vices, do you, you little wretch? … Watch out, you’re on a downward slope! … I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that this sordid book of yours might fall into the hands of my children, strike a spark in their minds, tarnish Athalie’s purity, corrupt Napoléon! Physically, he’s already a man. Are you quite sure, at least, that they haven’t read it? Can you guarantee me … ?”

  “Now, really, monsieur,” Emma said. “Didn’t you have something to tell me … ?”

  “Yes, I did, madame … Your father-in-law is dead!”

  Indeed, the elder Monsieur Bovary had died two days before, suddenly, from an attack of apoplexy, as he was leaving the table; and out of an excessive concern for Emma’s sensibility, Charles had asked Monsieur Homais to inform her with the greatest tact of this horrible news.

  The pharmacist had pondered his announcement, he had rounded it, polished it, cadenced it; it was a masterpiece of discretion and transitions, of subtle phrasing and delicacy; but rage had swept away rhetoric.

  Emma, despairing of hearing any details, therefore left the pharmacy; for Monsieur Homais had resumed the trend of his vituperations. He was calming down, however, and was now grumbling in a fatherly tone, all the while fanning himself with his fez:

  “It’s not that I disapprove of the book altogether! The author was a doctor. There are certain scientific aspects of it that are not bad for a man to know, that, indeed, I would venture to say, a man should know. But later, later! At least wait till you’re a man yourself and your character’s formed.”

  At the sound of the door knocker, Charles, who was waiting for her, came forward with his arms open and said with tears in his voice:

  “Oh, my dearest! …”

  And he leaned over gently to kiss her. But at the touch of his lips, the memory of the other one seized her, and she passed her hand over her face, shuddering.

  Yet she answered:

  “Yes, I know … I know …”

  He showed her the letter in which his mother described the event without any sentimental hypocrisy. She was only sorry that her husband had not received the succor of religion, since he had died at Doudeville, in the street, on the doorsill of a café, after a patriotic meal with former officers.

  Emma gave him back the letter; then, at dinner, for the sake of form, she affected some reluctance. But since he urged her several times, she began resolutely to eat, while Charles, opposite her, remained motionless in a posture of dejection.

  From time to time, lifting his head, he would give her a long look of distress. Once, he sighed:

  “I would have liked to see him one more time!”

  She said nothing. Finally, realizing that she ought to say something:

  “How old was he—your father?”

  “Fifty-eight!”

  “Ah!”

  And that was all.

  A quarter of an hour later, he added:

  “My poor mother! … What will become of her now?”

  She conveyed with a gesture that she did not know.

  Seeing her so reserved, Charles supposed that she was grieving, and he forced himself to say nothing so as not to reawaken this sorrow, which moved him. Nevertheless, shaking off his own:

  “Did you have good time yesterday?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  When the tablecloth was removed, Bovary did not get up, nor did Emma; and as she contemplated him, the monotony of the spectacle gradually drove all compassion from her heart. He seemed to her puny, weak, worthless, in fact a poor man in every way. How could she get rid of him? What an interminable evening! She felt numbed, as though by something stupefying like the fumes of opium.

  They heard from the hall the dry sound of a stick striking the floorboards. It was Hippolyte bringing Madame’s bags. In order to set them down, he laboriously described a quarter of a circle with his wooden leg.

  “He doesn’t even think about it anymore!” she said to herself as she looked at the poor devil, whose thick red hair was dripping with sweat.

  Bovary was searching for a small coin in the bottom of his purse; and without appearing to realize how much humiliation there was for him in the very presence of this man, standing there like a living reproach for his incorrigible ineptitude:

  “Oh! what a pretty bouquet you have there!” he said, noticing Léon’s violets on the mantelpiece.

  “Yes,” she said indifferently; “I bought it earlier … from a beggar woman.”

  Charles picked up the violets, and, cooling his tear-reddened eyes against them, he gently inhaled their fragrance. She took them quickly from his hand and went to put them in a glass of water.

  The next day, the elder Madame Bovary arrived. She and her son wept a good deal. Emma, under the pretext of having orders to give, disappeared.

  The day after, they had to decide, together, about their mourning clothes. They went to sit down, with their workbaskets, by the water’s edge, under the arbor.

  Charles was thinking about his father, and he was surprised to feel so much affection for the man, whom up to then he had believed he had loved only halfheartedly. The elder Madame Bovary was thinking about her husband. The worst days of the past as they reappeared to her seemed enviable. Everything was eclipsed by her instinctive grief for the loss of a long-enduring habit; and from time to time, as she worked her needle, a large tear would run down the length of her nose and remain hanging there for a moment. Emma was thinking that scarcely forty-eight hours ago, they had been together, far away from the world, deeply intoxicated, without eyes enough to gaze at each other. She was trying to recapture even the imperceptible details of that vanished day. But the presence of her mother-in-law and her husband interfered. She wished she could hear nothing, see nothing, so as not to disturb the recollection of her love, which was steadily vanishing, no matter what she did, under external sensations.

  She was unstitching the lining of a dress, the scraps of which lay scattered about her; Mère Bovary, without raising her eyes, was plying a pair of squeaky scissors; and Charles, in his list slippers and the old brown frock coat that served him as a dressing gown, had his hands in his pockets and was not speaking either; near them, Berthe, in a little white apron, was scraping the sand in the paths with her spade.

  Suddenly they saw Monsieur Lheureux, the dry-goods merchant, entering by the gate.

  He was coming to offer his services, in view of the me
lancholy circumstances. Emma answered that she believed she could do without them. The merchant did not consider himself defeated.

  “A thousand apologies,” he said; “I would like to have a word in private.”

  Then, in a low voice:

  “It’s about that matter … You know?”

  Charles turned crimson to his ears.

  “Ah! Yes! Of course.”

  And in his disturbance, turning to his wife:

  “My dear … Could you take care of … ?”

  She seemed to understand, for she stood up, and Charles said to his mother:

  “It’s nothing! Probably some household trifle.”

  He did not want her to know about the note, afraid of what she would say.

  As soon as Emma was alone with Monsieur Lheureux, he began by congratulating her, in quite clear terms, on the inheritance, then went on to chat about indifferent things—the espaliers, the harvest, and his own health, which was always so-so, fair to middling. Indeed, he worked like a dog, even though, despite what people said, he did not make enough even to put butter on his bread.

  Emma was letting him talk. She had been so prodigiously bored the last two days!

  “And you’re quite well again now?” he went on. “My faith, I could see that your poor husband was in a real state! He’s a good fellow, though we did have our difficulties, he and I.”

  She asked what they were, for Charles had hidden from her the dispute over her purchases.

  “But you know very well!” retorted Lheureux. “It was over those little whims of yours—the luggage.”

  He had lowered his hat over his eyes, and with both hands behind his back, smiling and whistling under his breath, he was looking her full in the face in an insufferable manner. Did he suspect something? She became lost in apprehension. At last, however, he went on:

  “We’ve made it up now, and I came back to suggest an arrangement to him.”

  It was to renew the note signed by Bovary. Of course, Monsieur should do as he saw fit; he should not let it worry him, especially now that he was going to have a host of other troubles.