Madame Bovary

  “Ah! It’s you! Thank you! You’re so kind! But things are going better now. Here, look at her …”

  His colleague was not at all of that opinion, and not beating about the bush, as he put it, he prescribed an emetic to empty the stomach completely.

  She was soon vomiting blood. Her lips pressed together more tightly. Her limbs were contracted, her body was covered with brown spots, and her pulse was slipping under their fingers like a taut thread, like a harp string about to snap.

  Then she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, swore at it, implored it to be quick, and with her stiffened arms pushed away everything that Charles, in greater agony than she, tried to make her drink. He was standing, his handkerchief at his lips, his breath rasping in his throat, weeping and choked by sobs that shook him down to his heels; Félicité was rushing here and there in the room; Homais, motionless, kept sighing heavily; and Monsieur Canivet, though still maintaining his composure, was beginning to feel troubled.

  “The devil! … and yet … she has been purged, and once the cause is removed …”

  “The effect should cease,” said Homais; “it’s self-evident.”

  “Well, save her!” exclaimed Bovary.

  And so, without listening to the pharmacist, who was venturing the hypothesis that “this might be a salutary paroxysm,” Canivet was about to administer some theriaca when they heard the crack of a whip; all the windowpanes rattled, and a berlin drawn by three horses straining against their breast straps and spattered with mud up to their ears emerged in a single bound from the corner of the marketplace. It was Doctor Larivière.

  The sudden appearance of a god would not have aroused more emotion. Bovary raised his hands, Canivet stopped short, and Homais removed his fez well before the doctor came in.

  He belonged to that great school of surgery inspired by Bichat, to that now-vanished generation of philosopher-practitioners who cherished their art with a fanatical love and practiced it with enthusiasm and sagacity! The entire hospital shook when he flew into a rage, and his pupils revered him so deeply that as soon as they established themselves, they would endeavor to imitate him as closely as possible; thus, in the surrounding towns, one would recognize, on their backs, his long quilted merino overcoat and his ample black tailcoat, whose unbuttoned cuffs partly covered his fleshy hands—his very fine hands, always gloveless, as though to be more prepared to plunge into human suffering. Disdainful of medals, titles, and academies, hospitable, generous, fatherly toward the poor, and practicing virtue without believing in it, he would almost have passed for a saint had not the shrewdness of his mind made him feared like a devil. His gaze, keener than his lancet, would descend straight into your soul, past your excuses and your reticence, and disarticulate your every lie. And so he went on from day to day, full of the easy majesty that comes from an awareness of great talent, from wealth, and from forty years of an irreproachable life of hard work.

  He frowned even in the doorway, seeing Emma’s cadaverous face as she lay on her back, her mouth open. Then, while appearing to listen to Canivet, he ran his forefinger under his nostrils and said several times:

  “Good, good.”

  But he gave a slow shrug of his shoulders. Bovary observed it; they looked at each other; and this man, though so used to the sight of grief, could not stop a tear from falling on his ruffled shirtfront.

  He wanted to take Canivet into the next room. Charles followed him.

  “She’s very bad, isn’t she? What if we applied mustard plasters—I don’t know! You must think of something—you who have saved so many lives!”

  Charles put his arms around him and gazed at him in fear and entreaty, nearly fainting against his chest.

  “Come now, my poor fellow, be brave! There’s nothing more to be done.”

  And Doctor Larivière turned away.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I’ll be back.”

  He went out as though to give an order to the postilion, accompanied by Sieur Canivet, who was no more anxious than he was to see Emma die in his hands.

  The pharmacist joined them on the square. He was incapable, by temperament, of staying away from a famous person. And so he beseeched Monsieur Larivière to do him the signal honor of being his guest at lunch.

  They quickly sent for pigeons from the Lion d’Or, whatever the butcher had in the way of cutlets, cream from Tuvache, eggs from Lestiboudois, and the apothecary himself helped with the preparations while Madame Homais, tugging at the laces of her bodice, said:

  “Please forgive us, monsieur; here in this desolate spot, if we don’t have a day’s warning …”

  “The stemmed glasses!!!” hissed Homais.

  “If we lived in the city, at least we’d be able to fall back on stuffed pigs’ feet.”

  “Be quiet! … Please sit down, Doctor!”

  He felt it appropriate, after the first few bites, to provide some details about the catastrophe:

  “First we had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then intolerable pains in the epigastrium, then superpurgation and coma.”

  “How did she poison herself?”

  “I don’t know, Doctor—I’m not even sure where she could have procured the arsenious oxide.”

  Justin, who was just then carrying in a stack of plates, was seized with a fit of trembling.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked the pharmacist.

  At that question, the young man let everything fall to the floor with a great crash.

  “Imbecile!” cried Homais. “Clumsy lout! Pathetic ass!”

  But, abruptly controlling himself:

  “I wanted, Doctor, to attempt an analysis, and primo, I carefully inserted into a tube …”

  “It would have been better,” said the surgeon, “to insert your fingers into her throat.”

  His colleague said nothing, having just a short time before received, in private, a severe rebuke concerning his emetic, so that this worthy Canivet, so arrogant and long-winded in the case of the clubfoot, was today very modest; he smiled without pause, in an approving manner.

  Homais was blossoming with pride in his role as Amphitryon, and the distressing thought of Bovary contributed vaguely to his pleasure, by causing him to reflect selfishly on his own situation. Moreover, the presence of the doctor intoxicated him. He was displaying his erudition, making confused and hasty references to cantharides, the upas tree, the manchineel, the viper.

  “And I’ve even read, Doctor, about certain people who were discovered to have been poisoned—quite struck down—by blood sausages that had been too thoroughly fumigated! At least, so says a very fine report composed by one of our leading pharmaceutists, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de Gassicourt!”

  Madame Homais reappeared, carrying one of those unsteady contrivances heated with spirits of alcohol; for Homais insisted on making his coffee at the table, having, moreover, torrefied it himself, triturated it himself, and compounded it himself.

  “Saccharum, Doctor,” he said, offering some sugar.

  Then he sent for all his children to come downstairs, curious to hear the surgeon’s opinion of their constitutions.

  At last, as Monsieur Larivière was about to leave, Madame Homais asked him for a consultation concerning her husband. His blood was thickening because he fell asleep every evening after dinner.

  “Oh! It isn’t his blood that’s thick.”

  And smiling a little at this joke, which went unnoticed, the doctor opened the door. But the pharmacy was teeming with people; and he had great difficulty managing to free himself of Sieur Tuvache, who was afraid his wife would get an inflammation of the lungs because of her habit of spitting in the ashes; then Monsieur Binet, who sometimes experienced keen hunger pangs, and Madame Caron, who had tingling sensations; Lheureux, who had dizzy spells; Lestiboudois, who had rheumatism; Madame Lefrançois, who had acidity of the stom
ach. At last the three horses dashed away, and it was generally felt that he had not been at all obliging.

  The attention of the public was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur Bournisien, who was crossing the market with the holy oil.

  Homais, in deference to his principles, likened priests to crows attracted by the smell of the dead; the sight of a clergyman was personally unpleasant to him, for a soutane made him think of a shroud, and he detested the one partly out of a horror of the other.

  Nevertheless, not shrinking from what he called his mission, he returned to Bovary’s house in company with Canivet, whom Monsieur Larivière, before leaving, had strongly urged to stay, and had it not been for his wife’s remonstrances, he would even have taken his two sons along with him, in order to accustom them to grave situations, so that they would have a lesson, an example, a solemn tableau that would later remain in their minds.

  The bedroom, when they entered, was full of a melancholy solemnity. On the sewing table, now covered with a white napkin, there were five or six little balls of cotton in a silver dish, near a large crucifix between two lighted candlesticks. Emma’s chin was sunk against her chest, her eyes inordinately wide open; and her poor hands wandered over the sheets with that hideous gentle motion of the dying, who seem already to be trying to cover themselves with their shrouds. Pale as a statue, his eyes red as coals, Charles, no longer weeping, stood facing her at the foot of the bed, while the priest, resting on one knee, was mumbling some words in a low voice.

  She slowly turned her face and seemed overcome with joy at the sudden sight of the violet stole, no doubt reexperiencing, in the midst of this extraordinary feeling of peace, the lost ecstasy of her first mystical yearnings, alongside the first visions of eternal beatitude.

  The priest rose to take up the crucifix; at that, she strained her neck forward like someone who is thirsty, and, pressing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she laid upon it with all her expiring strength the most passionate kiss of love she had ever given. Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions: first on the eyes, which had so coveted all earthly splendors; then on the nostrils, so greedy for mild breezes and the smells of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to utter lies, which had moaned with pride and cried out in lust; then on the hands, which had so delighted in the touch of smooth material; and lastly on the soles of the feet, which had once been so quick when she hastened to satiate her desires and which now would never walk again.

  The curé wiped his fingers, threw the oil-soaked bits of cotton into the fire, and returned to sit down beside the dying woman to tell her that she should now join her sufferings with those of Jesus Christ and give herself up to divine mercy.

  Finishing his exhortations, he tried to put a blessed taper into her hand, symbol of the heavenly glories by which she would soon be surrounded. Emma was too weak and could not close her fingers; had it not been for Monsieur Bournisien, the taper would have fallen to the floor.

  Yet she was no longer as pale, and her face bore an expression of serenity, as if the sacrament had cured her.

  The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord would sometimes prolong people’s lives when He judged it advisable for their salvation; and Charles remembered another day when, as now, she had been close to dying and had received Communion.

  “Perhaps one shouldn’t give up hope,” he thought.

  Indeed, she looked all around her, slowly, like someone waking from a dream; then, in a distinct voice, she asked for her mirror, and she remained bent over it for some time, until large tears ran down from her eyes. Then she tipped her head back with a sigh and sank down onto the pillow.

  At once her chest began rising and falling rapidly. Her tongue protruded at full length from her mouth; her rolling eyes grew paler, like the globes of two lamps about to go out, so that one would have thought she was already dead, except for the frightening, accelerating motion of her ribs, which were shaken by her furious breathing, as if her soul were leaping up to break free. Félicité knelt in front of the crucifix, and even the pharmacist bent a little at the knees, while Monsieur Canivet looked vaguely out at the square. Bournisien had resumed praying, his face leaning against the edge of the bed, his long black soutane trailing out behind him into the room. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms reaching out to Emma. He had taken her hands and he was squeezing them, shuddering at each beat of her heart as at the tremors of a collapsing ruin. As the death rattle grew louder, the clergyman hastened his prayers; they mingled with Bovary’s muffled sobs; and at times everything seemed drowned out by the muted murmur of the Latin syllables, which tolled like a passing bell.

  Suddenly they heard the noise of heavy wooden shoes on the sidewalk below and the scraping of a stick; and a voice rose, a harsh voice, singing:

  How oft the warmth of the sun above

  Makes a pretty young girl dream of love.

  Emma sat up like a corpse galvanized, her hair loose, her eyes fixed and wide open.

  Behind the harvesting scythe,

  Gathering she goes,

  My Nanette bending to the wheat

  Down the generous rows.

  “The Blind Man!” she cried out.

  And Emma began to laugh a horrible, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the wretched man looming like terror itself in the darkness of eternity.

  The wind blew good and hard that day,

  And snatched her petticoat away!

  A convulsion flung her down on the mattress. They all drew near. She had ceased to exist.

  [9]

  After a person dies, a sort of stupefaction settles in, always, so difficult is it to comprehend this sudden advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing in it. But when he saw how still she was, Charles threw himself on her crying:

  “Goodbye! Goodbye!”

  Homais and Canivet took him out of the room.

  “Control yourself!”

  “All right,” he said, struggling, “I’ll be reasonable, I won’t do any harm. But leave me alone! I want to see her! She’s my wife!”

  And he wept.

  “Weep,” said the pharmacist. “Let nature take its course. It will bring you relief!”

  Now weaker than a child, Charles allowed himself be led downstairs, into the parlor, and soon Monsieur Homais returned home.

  On the Square, he was accosted by the Blind Man, who had dragged himself all the way to Yonville in hope of the antiphlogistic salve and was asking each person who passed where the apothecary lived.

  “Come, now! As if I didn’t have other dogs to whip! It’s just too bad—come back another time!”

  And he hurried into the pharmacy.

  He had to write two letters, prepare a calmative potion for Bovary, think of a lie that could hide the poisoning, and compose an article about it for Le Fanal, not to mention the people who were waiting for news from him; and when the Yonvillians had all heard his story, of how she had mistaken arsenic for sugar while making a vanilla custard, Homais returned once more to Bovary’s house.

  He found him alone (Monsieur Canivet had just left), sitting in the armchair by the window and staring with an idiotic gaze at the stone floor of the room.

  “What you’ve got to do now,” said the pharmacist, “is decide on a time for the ceremony.”

  “Why? What ceremony?”

  Then, in a frightened stammer:

  “Oh, no! Really—no! I want to keep her.”

  Homais, to cover his embarrassment, took a carafe from the étagère and began watering the geraniums.

  “Oh, thank you!” said Charles. “You’re so kind!”

  And he broke off, suffocating under the abundance of memories that the pharmacist’s gesture recalled.

  Then, to distract him, Homai
s thought it appropriate to talk a little horticulture; plants needed humidity. Charles bowed his head in agreement.

  “Anyway, the warm weather will be returning now.”

  “Ah!” said Bovary.

  The apothecary, out of ideas, quietly parted the little curtains at the window.

  “Why, there’s Monsieur Tuvache going by.”

  Charles repeated mechanically:

  “Monsieur Tuvache going by.”

  Homais did not dare talk to him again about the funeral arrangements; it was the clergyman who managed to resign him to it.

  He shut himself in his office, took up a pen, and, after having sobbed for some time, he wrote:

  I want her to be buried in her wedding dress, with white shoes on, and a wreath. Her hair is to be spread over her shoulders; three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. No one is to say anything to me, I will be strong enough. Cover her entirely with a large piece of green velvet. This is what I want. Do it.

  The gentlemen were very surprised by Bovary’s romantic ideas, and the pharmacist immediately went to him and said:

  “The velvet seems to me supererogatory. Not to mention the expense …”

  “Is it any concern of yours?” exclaimed Charles. “Leave me alone! You didn’t love her! Get out!”

  The clergyman took him by the arm and led him out for a walk around the garden. He discoursed on the vanity of earthly things. God was great, God was good; one should submit without a murmur to his decrees, one should even thank him.

  Charles burst out in blasphemies.

  “I loathe him—your God!”

  “The spirit of rebellion is still in you,” said the clergyman with a sigh.

  Bovary was far away. He was striding along the wall next to the espalier, and he was grinding his teeth, looking up at heaven with curses in his eyes; but not even a leaf moved.