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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flaubert, Gustave, 1821–1880.

[Madame Bovary. English]

Madame Bovary : provincial lives / Gustave Flaubert; translated with introduction and notes by Raymond N. MacKenzie.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60384-123-8 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-60384-124-5 (cloth)
1. Physicians’ spouses—Fiction. 2. Married women—Fiction. 3. Adultery—
Fiction. 4. Middle class—Fiction. 5. France—Fiction. I. MacKenzie, Raymond
N. II. Title.

  PQ2246.M2E5 2009

  843'.8—dc22                           2009012039

PRC ISBN: 978-1-60384-257-0

CONTENTS

Introduction

Note on the Translation

Gustave Flaubert (1821–80): A Chronology

Madame Bovary

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part II

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part III

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Flaubert composed his great novel, Madame Bovary, over a five-year period, from 1851 to 1856. Early in the process, he wrote the following in a letter to his sometime-lover, the poet Louise Colet:

There are, literally speaking, two distinct people within me. The one is in love with bombast, lyricism, great eagle-like flights, sonorities of phrasing and the grandest of ideas; the other scratches and digs down into the truth as far as he can, loves acknowledging a humble fact just as much as a large one, wants to make you almost physically feel the things he shows you; this latter one loves to laugh, and delights in the animality of the human being.¹

The contradictions or paradoxes Flaubert found within himself are also to be found within his novel, within its main characters, even within the author’s attitudes toward his material. The Romantic eagle and the Realist mole, and the wildly differing world views those symbolic creatures imply, struggle for dominance in the novel. To trace some of these paradoxes is to come close to the sources of the novel’s enduring power, though it is also to discover that a definitive interpretation—that is, to be able to answer with certainty basic questions like, what is Madame Bovary actually saying about Emma, or Charles, or life?—will always remain just beyond our grasp.

It seems a shock at first to learn that Madame Bovary, so polished and accomplished a novel, was Flaubert’s first real publication. But in fact he had been writing, and writing a great deal, for many years.

Before Madame Bovary

Born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a distinguished physician and surgeon, Flaubert enjoyed a materially comfortable childhood. He developed a literary bent by the age of ten, when he began composing plays and stories. By the time he was fifteen, these stories were becoming sophisticated enough that we can now see them prefiguring the great works of his maturity. Not surprisingly for so creative a boy, he was also rebellious, and in 1839 he was expelled from school for leading a student revolt against a substitute teacher. But Flaubert continued to study on his own and passed his baccalaureate exams the following year. He had developed a profound contempt for the species he called the bourgeois—the smug, unthinking, unfeeling, respectable citizen. And literature had become a kind of rebellion against exactly that: to write was to follow the path of art not commerce, of struggle not comfort, of perfection not mediocrity.

But Flaubert’s father felt his boy needed some kind of profession, and if Gustave would not follow in his father’s footsteps and study medicine (as his older brother had done), then the logical alternative was law. Flaubert dutifully, if unhappily, went to law school in Paris in 1841, but his legal studies suffered, for he spent his time writing: in these years he began work on an early version of the novel L’Education sentimentale (Sentimental Education), and he completed a superb autobiographical novella, Novembre.² Not surprisingly, he failed his law exams in 1843; he retook them the following term, and failed them again. In fact, he detested the study of law and loathed the prospect of becoming a practicing lawyer. Moreover, he had recently met and become close friends with the Baron Maxime Du Camp, a kindred spirit who had convinced his guardian to allow him to pursue a career in writing. Du Camp had similar tastes and values, but he also had a title, money, and his freedom; the two bonded quickly, but the friendship in some ways only increased Flaubert’s desperation over his own future.

The situation all changed abruptly in January 1844: driving in a cabriolet with his brother, Flaubert abruptly fell, the victim of a severe and entirely unexpected epileptic attack. The attacks continued, at first almost every day and then slowly abated. There was no longer any question of returning to Paris and law school: Flaubert was now a kind of invalid, who dared not be left alone for any length of time. The attacks themselves were terrifying to him, and though they lessened over the years, the fear of them remained with him always. He described them variously as including a stream of remembered images pouring out before him; as being caught up in a torrent of fire; and as seeing shooting lights all around him. Epilepsy, moreover, carried such dreadful, even shameful connotations in the period³ that the term was never used by or around Flaubert; he used euphemisms like “my nervous condition.” In any case, his life would henceforth be defined by the malady. In some ways it was as much blessing as curse, for the illness was a means of escaping from the study and profession of law—but it also caused him much suffering and much anxiety.

If he had now been freed from law studies, it was only to become isolated with the family in Rouen and in Croisset, the suburb where they had recently purchased a home; he would not have to become a lawyer, but it was not at all clear what he would become. He read widely—from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to Voltaire—and he made plans for books of all sorts that he hoped to write. When his sister married, he and the family accompanied her part way on her honeymoon trip, and in Genoa, in 1845, Flaubert saw the painting that would haunt him for the rest of his life: The Temptation of Saint Anthony, attributed to Pieter Breughel the Younger. The hallucinatory nature of the work touched him, perhaps recalling for him some of the sensations he felt during his epileptic attacks, and perhaps also recalling the temptation scene that was often played out in puppet theaters in his childhood. He began research on the subject, conceiving of Anthony’s temptations as coming from every possible theological corner of the early Christian world. And he began writing his own Temptation, a wild, romantic work, part novel and part play, reminiscent of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, and perhaps even more ambitious. He poured into the work not only all the learning he had been acquiring, but also all the lyricism of his own youthful heart. The language of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) was lofty, elaborate, allegorical, and the plot little more than a succession of tempters appearing before the ascetic saint—everyone from the sphinx to the Queen of Sheba to the devil, who disguises himself as Anthony’s one-time disciple. The theme, like Goethe’s, involves the search for absolute truth and for transcendence of the self.

In September 1849 Flaubert had finished his Temptation, and he invited two friends to Croisset to hear him read it aloud and to give him their reactions. The friends were Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet. Bouilhet had been a schoolfellow of Flaubert’s, but it was only in 1846 that the two connected and became close. Bouilhet supported himself in Rouen by giving lessons in Latin and French composition, but his passion was writing poetry. Flaubert and Bouilhet now became the closest of friends and would remain so for the next twenty-five years, until Bouilhet’s death.

The reading that September has taken on the status of literary myth, largely due to Du Camp’s memoirs, published after Flaubert’s death.⁴ Du Camp undoubtedly overstated his own role in what happened, but the general outline of events as he tells them seems to be correct. Flaubert had arranged the reading with the greatest excitement; he believed deeply in the beauty and value of his book and was eager to share it with his friends. He said of it, “I experienced only pleasure in writing my Saint Anthony, and the eighteen months I spent on writing those 500 pages were the most deeply voluptuous of my whole life.”⁵ The reading was to take place following a careful procedure: Flaubert would read the entire work to Bouilhet and Du Camp, who were to make no comments whatsoever until it was finished. It took four days, with four hours of reading each afternoon and another four each evening. (Flaubert’s mother was not part of the reading, but she was aware of its importance to her son, and she anxiously hovered outside the door of his study as the marathon reading progressed.) The two friends followed their instructions and made no comments until the end, though Du Camp’s memoir reveals that they talked to each other privately before then. When the reading was finally over, at midnight on the fourth day, Bouilhet was the first to speak up: he said the book was worthless and that Flaubert should throw it in the fire. It was vague, pompous, overblown, too personal. The discussion, Du Camp tells us, went on all night with Flaubert deeply hurt by their reactions but taking them very seriously. They suggested that he should deliberately try to restrain his lyrical, romantic side, and that in order to do so, he should pick a subject that would absolutely forbid such excesses. He should pick a solidly real-world, bourgeois subject, the friends told him—like the story of Delphine Delamare, a recent suicide in a nearby town. She had been married to a low-level medical man, had had affairs that turned out badly, and had killed herself.⁶ And thus—at least as Du Camp tells it—was the idea for Madame Bovary born.

But Flaubert did not accept the advice at once. Moreover, he did not throw The Temptation of Saint Anthony into the fire; he continued to return to it throughout his life, finally publishing a third, highly revised version in 1874, toward the end of his life (at which point the reaction of the public and the critics was not unlike that of Bouilhet and Du Camp). Flaubert loved the subject matter, loved the extravagant lyricism it called out of him, loved the sheer excess of the piece. The fact that Saint Anthony had nothing whatever in common with some nearby bourgeois adulteress was certainly another point in the saint’s favor.

In the meantime, Flaubert’s taste for the exotic was to be thoroughly indulged, for that October he and Du Camp set off for a trip through the Middle East—one that took them to Egypt, Palestine, and Greece and that helped Flaubert meditate a great deal on his literary aspirations.⁷ The trip, like the Saint Anthony reading, has become semimythical in part due to Du Camp’s memoir, but it does seem that Flaubert slowly came to accept his friends’ advice during this immersion in the sensual, exotic “Orient” and slowly came to see the possibilities in a novel such as they had suggested. But this was not a sudden revelation, as Du Camp and the myths have it.⁸ Instead, he wrote to Bouilhet from Constantinople about three subjects for books that he was considering: one on Don Juan, one on Anubis, and one on a mystically oriented virgin living in a small town in Flanders.⁹ The latter is, no doubt, a concept that would merge with that of the Delphine Delamare subject—the virgin with mystical visions metamorphoses into the adulteress with her own haunting visions; the Flanders story involved a concept that allowed Flaubert to see what depths there might be in a contemporary, bourgeois tragedy.

He returned home in the summer of 1851, and we know that shortly thereafter he spoke to Du Camp about trying to work with the Delamare story.¹⁰ By early August he had settled on the topic and chosen a name: his heroine would be named Bovary.¹¹ He continued thinking for another month and finally began writing on September 19, 1851: he carefully dated his manuscript, perhaps aware that he had begun something momentous. It would occupy him for the next five years, until April 30, 1856.

The subject of his book, however, did not come simply from the Delamare story. Indeed, the writings from his adolescence reveal many hints of the novel to come. The most striking of these is Passion et vertu (Passion and Virtue), finished in December 1837, just short of his sixteenth birthday. In this tale, a married woman named Mazza Willers has an affair with a heartless seducer named Ernest, an early version of Rodolphe. Mazza’s passion is far greater than Ernest expects, and he, as Rodolphe does later, breaks off the affair with a coldly calculated, highly rhetorical letter. Ultimately, Mazza’s passion leads her to ever-deepening emotional abysses, until she murders her husband and children and finally kills herself. Deducting some of the melodrama from the adolescent story of Passion and Virtue, the connections with Madame Bovary are numerous and often profound: for example, after her first sexual encounter with Ernest, Flaubert tells us she felt saddened:

… she felt she had fallen very far, and that love was something larger than what she had just experienced, and she asked herself if there weren’t some greater voluptuousness beyond this one, and if there weren’t some greater peak of pleasure than this. For she had an unquenchable thirst for infinite loves, for limitless passions.

But when she saw that love was only a kiss, a caress, a moment of delirium in which the lover and his mistress roll locked close together with cries of joy, and that when it was over the man gets up, the woman goes on her way, that satisfying and intoxicating their passion depended upon a bit of flesh and a convulsion—a sense of ennui overwhelmed her soul—like those starving people who cannot find nourishment anywhere.¹²

Passages like this show that Flaubert conceived Mazza—as he would later conceive Emma Bovary—as far more than an unfaithful wife. She is a romantic idealist, as much a seeker of the absolute as Faust. The character of Mazza is nearly as complex as that of Emma, and in both cases the reader is drawn into sympathy with her, despite—or perhaps because of—her excesses. Mazza does not just posture; she actually feels, and we cannot help but respond to her genuineness in a world depicted as false and shallow. Passion and Virtue suggests, in other words, that Flaubert did not need the Delamare story to write Madame Bovary, that he had, in a sense, been living with the characters and themes for a long time already.¹³ Other early writings suggest this as well: the autobiographical, male characters in Les Mémoires d’un fou (Memoirs of a Madman) and Novembre, for example, have a great deal in common with Emma. Her character, and her tragedy, had been foreseen long before Du Camp and Bouilhet suggested the Delamare story. Perhaps the most surprising thing is how long it took Flaubert to realize this.

Writing Madame Bovary: Style as a Way of Seeing

Once he started, he began with an elaborate outline or set of “scenarios,” and his task then became filling in the scenario.¹⁴ Naturally, this became a recursive process, for as he progressed with the writing, he came to change and rewrite the scenario. He wrote much of each afternoon and late into each night, with breaks on the weekends when Bouilhet would visit and Flaubert would read him the week’s drafts. The intensity of his concentration on his task has become legendary; he would draft and redraft repeatedly, often throwing aside entirely what he had written and beginning all over again. He devoted himself so entirely to his task that he has become known as the hermit of Croisset (where the family home was), refusing visitors and social engagements with very few exceptions. He was obsessed—as we shall see—with style, and he would walk up and down shouting out his sentences to be sure their rhythm was strong enough for him. He spoke of his writing as an agony of endless revision, as an atrocious task that often left him physically exhausted and emotionally distraught.

But exhausting as the writing process was, he would, on many nights, end his work with more writing—letters to friends and, most importantly, to his lover in Paris, Louise Colet. These letters comprise a remarkable document of a great writer’s daily struggles and frustrations, his joys and ecstasies, and they also provided a means for Flaubert to develop a theory of the novel and of the artist. One of the more famous and fascinating ideas occurs in a letter early on, from January 1852. Here, writing to Colet, he says:

What seems beautiful to me, what I would most like to write, is a book about nothing, a book that is connected to nothing outside itself, one that would be held together strictly by the strength of its style, just like the earth which, hanging suspended in space, depends on nothing external to support it; a book that would have almost no subject, or at least one where the subject would be nearly invisible, if it could be done. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer that the expression comes to the thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and blending into it, the more beautiful. I believe that the future of Art lies in this direction. I see it as having developed this way, becoming as ethereal as it can, from the Egyptian pylons to the Gothic lancets, from the twenty-thousand-line poems of the Indians to the abrupt outpourings of Byron. Form, as it becomes more skillful, becomes attenuated; it leaves behind all liturgy, all rules, all measures; it abandons the epic for the novel, verse for prose; it no longer recognizes any orthodoxy, and is as free as the will of each artist who produces it… .

This is why there is no such thing as an elevated or a degraded subject, and why one could almost set it up as an axiom that from the point of view of pure Art, there is no subject, style being in itself an absolute way of seeing things.¹⁵

Flaubert’s emphasis on style over subject is, to some extent, a response to the debates of the time regarding realism; in painting, especially, realism was more controversial with regard to the subject it chose—the ordinary, prosaic subject—than with regard to its style. Hence, to argue against the importance of the subject in the 1850s connoted an avant-garde approach to art.¹⁶ The new approach, both in painting and in literature, was realism, which set itself up in opposition to romantic art’s tendency to idealize; the realist would instead show things as they really are. But Flaubert’s letter goes well beyond any simple alliance with realism. As Roland Barthes argued in an influential essay that referred, significantly, not to realism but to “the reality effect,” Flaubert uses the real only as a starting point: in the novel’s long description of Rouen, for instance, Flaubert’s description “at first glance seems to grant a major importance … to the object Rouen,” but in fact Rouen is “only a sort of setting meant to receive the jewels of a number of rare metaphors …”¹⁷ So in this letter to Colet, Flaubert is claiming for the novelist the same privilege that had been given to the poet: what matters is not some external truth value, but rather the artist’s “absolute way of seeing things.” Style is this way of seeing.¹⁸

Flaubert’s aesthetics are not confined, then, to the work of art itself; art, instead, furnishes an approach—perhaps the only viable approach—to life. Mark Greif summarizes Flaubert’s views concisely: “Life’s worthwhile portion is in feeling. Art is a prosthesis by which one feels, and learns what to feel. Genuine life can therefore be said to exist … only as a consequence of art.”¹⁹ Realism is important to Flaubert not as some system or credo but as the approach that allows anything in life, from the noblest to the most mundane, to be the potential source of such feeling.²⁰ One feature of systematic realism is its tendency to suggest a world that is entirely indifferent to human desires and wishes. This theme is present in Madame Bovary, but with an important distinction: the world may be indifferent to the characters, but it is meaningful to us readers. For us, details that could be merely gruesome— the flies dying in the dregs of cider at Les Bertaux, or the sores on the blind beggar’s face—become somehow transmuted both by Flaubert’s brilliant style and by the implication that style allows us truly to see and more genuinely to respond to that world, which somehow renders it less indifferent, or at least allows us to feel ourselves in some authentic relationship with it.²¹

Flaubert’s emphasis on style as “an absolute way of seeing things,” therefore, does not entail his writing, as we might at first suppose, a highly personal, utterly subjective novel, a novel such as a romantic poet would have given us; rather, Flaubert insists on exactly the opposite. He saw Madame Bovary as being radically different from Saint Anthony in this respect, as he wrote to Colet:

Now I am in an entirely different world, one where I am observing the most ordinary details with careful attention. I am gazing deep into the damp, moldy places of the soul. It is a long way from the mythological and theological flamboyances of Saint Anthony. And, since the subject is different, I am writing with an entirely different method. I don’t want my book to have one single emotion or one single opinion of its author.²²

And the most famous formulation of this objective approach came in a letter to Colet in December 1852: “The author in his work should be like God in the universe: present everywhere, and visible nowhere. Art being a second nature, the creator of that nature must proceed via analogous methods: let the reader sense in every detail, every element, a hidden, infinite impassibility.”²³ The author must never intrude and tell us how to see things or characters, how to interpret or evaluate; we readers, just as in the life we live outside the covers of a book, are presented with phenomena to which we must respond, without some authority telling us how to do so. The novel thus becomes more intensely dramatic, and the reader’s role becomes more like that of a spectator at a play. But the novelist is not reduced to being simply a kind of camera; as Flaubert says, he is “present everywhere.” The novelist is still creating and selecting events and details and is still guiding our response, though as subtly as possible, leaving us as free as possible. As Erich Auerbach put it in his classic study Mimesis, the author’s “role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language, and this is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do. Upon this conviction … Flaubert’s artistic practice rests.”²⁴

But absolute objectivity, a true, complete absence of the shaping and guiding author, is as impossible as it would be undesirable, and Flaubert does violate his own rule a number of times in the novel by making comments that we can only attribute to the author. In fact, Mario Vargas Llosa counted fifty such violations,²⁵ but most of them are minor, and all of them are so artful that the reader welcomes the intrusion. An early example comes during the sequence involving Charles’ education in Rouen:

He took up the café habit, along with a passion for dominoes. Shutting himself up in a dirty public room and clicking little sheep bones with black dots on the marble tables seemed to him to be a significant act of freedom, something that heightened his sense of self-esteem. (I, p. 9)

Flaubert cannot contain his contempt for the vacuous nature of the game, and we are seemingly being warned away from too much identification with, or sympathy for, young Charles. Likewise, in the chapter on Emma’s education, Flaubert’s objectivity deserts him as he describes the books she read:

It was always nothing but love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in deserted pavilions, postilions killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, somber forests, troubled hearts, oaths, sighs, tears, and kisses, gondolas in the moonlight, nightingales in groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous like nobody really is, always well dressed, pouring out tears like so many water jars. For six months, at the age of fifteen, Emma fouled her hands with this dust from old reading rooms. (I, pp. 32–3)

Here, the objectivity strains, and finally breaks down altogether with the phrase “fouled her hands.”

A final example of Flaubert’s own voice intruding on the otherwise objective landscape of his novel occurs when Rodolphe is breaking off his affair with Emma. He has been thinking of the various endearments she is in the habit of saying to him, and because he has heard the same kinds of things from other mistresses, he cannot believe that she means them.

He did not distinguish—this man of so much experience—the difference of feeling beneath the sameness of expression. Because libertine or mercenary lips had murmured similar phrases to him, he believed very little in the sincerity of Emma’s; it seemed to him that one had to discount such exaggerated discourse that masked mediocre feelings: as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever state the exact measure of his needs, nor his ideas nor his sorrows, and since human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to, when what we want is to bring the stars themselves to tears. (II, p. 166)

This passage moves from barely concealed sarcasm about Rodolphe as a “man of so much experience” to an implicit sympathy with Emma’s “fullness of the soul,” to a universalizing of the sorrow of human existence and the inadequacy of language—all this while moving from straightforward, almost banal narration to the heights of lyricism. It would be very hard to argue that the author is “invisible” in this passage.

But Flaubert’s doctrine of authorial impersonalism is nonetheless very important for the novel as a whole, even if it is violated in places; indeed, those violations might be seen to serve the larger purpose. One of the chief, much-discussed aspects of Flaubert’s style that works to this end is a narrative device called free indirect discourse (style indirect libre in French). In free indirect discourse, the line between narrator and character is blurred, or even erased. A simple passage that exemplifies both methods concerns Charles’ first wife, Héloise, and her growing jealousy:

During those early times when Charles frequented Les Bertaux, Madame Bovary did not fail to inform herself about the patient and, in her double-columned account book, she had even set aside a fine white page for Monsieur Rouault. But when she learned that he had a daughter, she made inquiries; and she learned that Mademoiselle Rouault had been a student at the Ursuline convent and had received what is called a fine education, which meant that she had learned dancing, geography, drawing, embroidery, and how to play the piano. This was the limit!

So that’s why, she said to herself, he lights up like that when he goes to see her, and why he wears his new waistcoat, even at the risk of getting it soaked in the rain? Oh, that woman! That woman! … (I, pp. 15–16)

The first two sentences are traditional narration, but the last in that paragraph—“This was the limit!”—shades into Héloise’s own voice. But the device is more complicated than it might seem: the use of the past tense marks the sentence as spoken by the narrator, but there is no “she thought” or similar tag. The second paragraph is likewise a mixture of the two modes.

The novel is so rich in instances of free indirect discourse that it is arguably the stylistic hallmark of Madame Bovary. One more example, this time a longer one, will draw attention to the complexity and power of the device in Flaubert’s hands. In Part III of the novel, during the period of Emma’s regular meetings with Léon in Rouen, Flaubert gives us this scene:

One day when they had parted early, and she was walking back alone on the boulevard, she saw the outer walls of her old convent school; she sat down on a bench, in the shade of the elm trees. How peaceful those days were! How she missed those ineffable feelings about love that she had tried to imagine from books! …

What does it matter! She was not happy, had never been. Where did it come from, this insufficiency in life, this immediate corruption of everything she tried to lean on? …

A metallic groan sounded through the air, and the convent clock rang out four strokes. Four o’clock! And she felt that she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. But we can feel an infinity of passions in a moment, like a crowd in a little space. (III, p. 246–47)

The passage masterfully blends traditional narrative methods (“she saw the outer walls of her old convent school”) with free indirect discourse (“She was not happy, had never been”). The reader is privy to Emma’s thoughts— perhaps even, as Benjamin Bart puts it, “is completely at one with her because of the presentation.”²⁶ But we must also sense Flaubert’s presence in the passage, if only because the prose is far more eloquent than it would have been if it were a literal representation of Emma’s thoughts. Gilbert Chaitin notes that the unique quality of free indirect discourse is its “capacity to capture the individuality of the character’s speech and thought, while at the same time allowing the narrator to express his/her interpretation and evaluation of that speech.”²⁷

This brings us back to the topic of authorial impersonalism: the author is very much present in this passage, but if not quite invisible, he is nearly so. Free indirect discourse allows Flaubert—and the reader—to come as close as possible to the character, even if upon reflection and analysis we feel that closeness has been an illusion and that we have been listening to the author all along. The device allows for a nearly infinite flexibility; in the above passage, among many remarkable moments, we might notice how the convent clock sounds like a “groan.” The poetic, metaphorical touch is smooth and natural: if this is the poet/novelist speaking, he is using a term that helps us enter into Emma’s state of consciousness. Style, indeed, is a “way of seeing things”: what and how the author sees, and what and how we readers see.

Never before had these been such important issues in a novel. Flaubert did not invent free indirect discourse; it had occasionally been used before, most notably by Jane Austen. But he deployed it more widely, and found in it more profundity, than had any novelist before him. Style is so pronounced, so accomplished in Madame Bovary that some critics have asserted that it is indeed a book “about nothing,” or as James Wood put it, Flaubert’s “style refuses the pull of matter, asserts itself over matter. The prose becomes the matter.”²⁸

A related aspect of style is Flaubert’s use of italics to denote a phrase used by the character, but without quite quoting the character, as on the very first page, where the young Charles is repeatedly called the new boy—the term that the other boys would have used. Flaubert found that italics have a number of tonal possibilities, as in this passage:

Charles hauled himself upstairs by the banister; his legs wouldn’t hold him up another minute. He had been standing up for five hours in a row around the tables watching people play whist without understanding a bit of it. And so he heaved a great, satisfied sigh when he had pulled off his boots. (I, p. 46)

The effect is one of pointing out a cliché, thus distancing us further from the character as the kind of person who expresses himself in readymade banalities. Shoshana Felman has called the italics device a “typographic and metalinguistic signposting,” a “marking of the commonplace with signal beacons.”²⁹ Another passage from early in the novel shows that these italics beacons.”can have varied uses:

[Charles’ mother] taught him to read and even, with the aid of an old piano she owned, to sing two or three little ballads. But all that, said Monsieur Bovary, who cared nothing for education, was not worth the trouble. Would they ever have the money to send him to government schools, buy him a position, or get him set up in a business? Anyway, with enough nerve, a man will always get ahead in the world. Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child ran about the village freely. (I, p. 6)

Here, the italics again call attention to cliché, but they also suggest an ongoing sequence of events: Charles’ father repeatedly said such things weren’t worth the trouble, and he repeatedly insisted on the need for “nerve.” By using italics in this way, Flaubert can swiftly sketch the nature of something that goes on over a lengthy period.

Felman’s term “metalinguistic” suggests another important quality of Madame Bovary, its self-referentiality. Is it an exaggeration to suggest that the novel’s main subject is in fact language? The questions of style we have examined draw attention to language, but beyond them we are consistently invited to judge a character by his or her style, his or her use or misuse of language. The love of empty, deceitful rhetoric is widespread in the society Flaubert depicts, from Homais’ platitudes to Rodolphe’s letter, from the officials at the agricultural show to the false, harmful novels Emma reads as a girl. Clichés, prefabricated phrases, imitative rhetoric: Flaubert had long detested such misuses of language, and even on his 1849–50 trip to Egypt with Du Camp he had begun to plan what much later would become his Dictionnaire des idées recues (Dictionary of Received Ideas), a compendium of the unthinking phrases the modern bourgeois inevitably spouts on a given topic. Evidence, the Dictionary tells us, is “always ‘plain’ when not ‘overwhelming,’” and a navigator is “always ‘bold.’”³⁰ Such clichés are not just comical; they result from the failure to think, or rather they are a kind of willed blindness to the reality in front of one’s nose: they are the fruits of the failure to look. In this sense, cliché is the opposite of style, that absolute way of seeing things. And Madame Bovary demonstrates that cliché is dominant in the modern world.

Emma Bovary and Her World

The use of cliché is a symptom of the wider problem of relying on preconceptions rather than actually seeing: Rodolphe’s inability to see the sincerity behind Emma’s threadbare phrases is a case in point. Emma’s interview with the Abbé Bournisien (Part II, Chapter 6) is also a good example of this failure to see, this reliance on the readymade phrase and the readymade thought which, Flaubert seems to suggest, is the modern state of consciousness. Emma comes to Bournisien, the one man in Yonville who ought to be sensitive to spiritual crises, in a state of desperation. The result is some of Flaubert’s darkest comedy, almost entirely structured as dramatic dialogue:

“ … And Monsieur Bovary, how is he doing?”

She seemed not to hear. He continued: “

Always busy, I suppose? Because he and I are the two busiest people in the parish. But he, he’s the doctor of the body,” he added with a thick laugh, “and me, I’m in charge of the souls!”

She fixed her pleading eyes on the priest.

“Yes …, ” she said, “you ease every pain.”

“Oh, don’t even talk about it, Madame Bovary! Just this morning, I had to go into Bas-Diauville to see about a cow that was all swollen up; they thought it was some witchcraft. All their cows, I don’t know how …” (II, p. 99)

At which point the priest is distracted from his distraction by the misbehaving children at their catechism lesson. He never even sees Emma’s “pleading eyes.” The dialogue of mutual incomprehension continues, coming to its climax with the priest’s relentlessly physical approach to everything in life. She eventually gives up, looking “like someone who had just awakened from a dream” (II, p. 100). Emma’s “dream” in this case was the belief that the man in charge of the spiritual side of life might actually have some spiritual insights. As James Hamilton puts it, Bournisien “makes no contact with her inner world, for she remains for him a persona, the social alter ego of Charles, Madame Bovary.”³¹ Seeing only surfaces—this is all we can expect, Flaubert implies, from the modern world. Bournisien is part of the modern world, though by no means the worst part of it, for he does seem to have some genuine concern for the poor. But a true Yonvillian simply cannot see what Emma is, or guess what she might be feeling or lacking.

The Abbé’s rival is of course Homais, the pharmacist—or at least this is how they see each other. Flaubert suggests in a number of spots that they aretwo sides of the same coin, as in the scene where the two watch over the body after Emma’s death, when “Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled the room with holy water and Homais threw some chlorine on the floor” (III, p. 289). But Homais is by far the more dominant character, and it is clear that Flaubert wants us to focus on him as a kind of center point of Yonville and bourgeois modernity. Homais is one of the first characters we meet in Yonville; we first hear his sense of social superiority in the way he dismisses Binet as having “no imagination, no little bursts of wit, no social graces” (II, p. 66), and lest the reader assume that Homais is in fact intended as a superior type, there is a kind of verbal pratfall immediately following this, when he launches into the kind of slightly disguised self-aggrandizing speech we will come to find typical of him:

“Ah, if a businessman with important connections, a magistrate, a doctor, a pharmacist were to become so absorbed that they became eccentric or even gruff, I would understand that; history gives us examples! But at least it’s because they’re thinking about something. Take me for example: how many times have I looked all over my desk for a pen to write out a label, only to find that I’d put it behind my ear!”

But Madame Lefrançois went to the door to see if the Hi-rondelle had come. (II, p. 66)

Likewise, a little later Homais goes into a tirade against religion (but only after the priest has left), and just when he has worked himself up to his highest pitch, he “stopped, and looked around for an audience” (II, p. 68). Removing Homais’ audience is a swift and effective means of characterizing him and the emptiness of his talk. And Homais is preeminently a talker. Throughout the novel, we will find his talk to be little more than subtle or not so subtle self-promotion. He wraps himself in the flag of science, enlightenment, progress, and while he is a fully individualized character, we start to suspect that Homais is being used as something of a symbol of the contemporary man on the rise. The story takes place in the 1830s and 1840s, under the reign of King Louis Philippe (1830–48, a reign almost exactly coinciding with the events in the story, so that a reader can choose to see the story as a kind of satiric commentary on the era).³² After the tumultuous times of the French Revolution and of Napoleon, Louis Philippe was an advocate for peace and prosperity rather than glory or greatness, a friend to the middle classes and to business and industry—he was called the “citizen king.” He set something of a tone for the era, one reflected in this novel, and was widely detested and satirized by intellectuals and artists. Homais fits in the era perfectly, as we see most vividly during the agricultural show: the obsequious yet self-serving speeches of the officials are all delivered in Homais-style rhetoric.

It is important to stress that what is most detestable for Flaubert in all this—in the apotheosis of the bourgeois under Louis Philippe, and in its embodiment in Homais—is the sheer falseness at its base. His energetic offers of friendly help to the newly arrived Bovarys, we learn, are likewise self-serving: he has been warned of severe legal consequences if he continues overreaching his standing as a pharmacist; befriending the naïve health officer is a good cover for him (II, pp. 75–76). Homais is the object of much satire in the novel, and the source of a great deal of its comedy, but the comedy is greatly darkened when we consider the book’s conclusion, with the Bovarys wiped out and the pharmacist on the rise: he has “a hell of a practice,” Flaubert tells us (“une clientèle d’enfer” in French), and the word “hell” is deliberately chosen. Homais is, perhaps, the closest the modern world will come to a Satan.³³ And in modernity, even the Satanic is degraded.

If Homais has an opposite, it is not the Abbé Bournisien—rather, it is Charles. As the local health officer, he is theoretically a step up the social ladder from Homais, but in fact, the pharmacist dominates him continually (in the friendliest manner, of course). By comparison, Charles is inarticulate; he is not exactly selfless, but his ego is restrained, and he seems not to put much effort into his self-interest. What keeps Charles from being the novel’s hero or its moral center—though some readers may argue he is exactly that—is his relentless mediocrity. The novel begins with him, and we meet him first as the stuttering new boy in school made to write “ridiculus sum” twenty times; his one saving grace is that he is so dim that he doesn’t seem to feel the humiliation the others heap upon him. His later adolescence, his medical studies, the wife his mother finds for him—we learn about all this, but without ever feeling we have got inside Charles, that we have understood anything about him, until he meets Emma.

Flaubert’s contemporaries criticized him, as have some of his later readers, for being cold, and these early chapters on Charles seem to substantiate the charge. We might agree with a later reader such as Jean Rousset, who argues that Charles is little more than a narrative device for Flaubert, a kind of “reflector” for our introduction to Emma. Rousset says Charles in these opening chapters “is never absent, and Emma is only seen through his eyes. All we know about her is what he finds out.”³⁴ Thus, a character with a mediocre mind is best for Flaubert’s intended effect of only slowly bringing Emma into focus. And indeed, this is very artfully managed: when Charles first meets her, he only notices a “young woman, in a blue wool dress adorned with three flounces” (I, p. 12)—as would be natural for the half-asleep young man who is far more interested in how bad the father’s injury is than in anyone who might be living at the farm with him. Slowly, other details catch his eye: her father sets Emma to sewing bandages, and “as she sewed, she would prick her fingers, and then put them in her mouth to suck them” (I, p. 13). He then notices her hands and her fingernails, then her eyes. Detail by detail, we see that Charles is fascinated by her long before he himself knows it.

In the opening chapters, we only see Emma from the outside, through these physical details, and we are carefully denied hearing anything she might be thinking; even her acceptance of Charles’ proposal is handled offstage, and we can only guess whether she was enthusiastic, or whether her father had to talk her into it. Flaubert is stage-managing some suspense here, making us wait to find out more about our heroine. Rousset says that we will soon discover a great deal about Emma’s inner life, but Charles never will: “to him, she will always remain that unknowable quantity that she will soon cease to be for us. He will never find out what hides behind this veil, for he totally lacks the novelist’s power to penetrate into her inner self.”³⁵ At first, Rousset’s observation sounds unfair to Charles, but no matter how much we come to sympathize with him or pity him later in the story, it is true that he cannot see deeply enough into the woman he loves so much. Ironically, this is one trait he shares with Yonvillians like Rodolphe or Homais—a failure to see beneath the surface. Their failures seem willed, however, whereas Charles is simply too trusting to suspect that the world is anything but surface. This might have made him a comic figure, but the contrast between the world he thinks he inhabits and the world Flaubert lets us see is simply too sad for that. An early passage on his happiness, using free indirect discourse, exemplifies the point:

Where had been the good in his life before now? Was it during his time in school, when he stayed shut up inside the high walls, alone amidst companions richer than him, or better than him at their schoolwork, who made fun of his clothes, who were amused by his accent, whose mothers came to the visitors’ parlor with cakes in their muffs? … And then he had lived fourteen months with the widow whose feet in bed were cold as icicles. But now, he possessed for life this pretty woman whom he adored. The universe, for him, was bounded by the silky flounces of her petticoat; he reproached himself for not loving her enough; he wanted to see her again; he would hurry back home, climb the staircase with his heart pounding. Emma, in her room, was dressing; he would come up behind her silently and kiss her back, and she would cry out. (I, pp. 29–30)

This passage on Charles’ happiness—the closest we come to seeing the inner man—is the very last passage before the book turns exclusively to Emma. And that turn occurs with the final paragraph of Chapter 5, which tells us that she was not feeling what he felt. The one defining characteristic of Charles’ inner life is his absolute love for his wife; his tragedy is that he does not, or cannot, see the person she really is. And when he does come to see it, at the novel’s end, he withers away.

The novel’s subtitle, Provincial Lives (Moeurs de Province), seems to describe these first five chapters in which we examine, almost anthropologically, the education, courtship, and wedding rituals of the characters. But with Chapter 6, we see that all this has merely been prologue, for now Flaubert turns to Emma herself and begins to deepen and enrich our sense of her inner life. We learn here about her convent school upbringing, and the emphasis is on her reading, especially, as noted earlier, those romantic novels about “gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous like nobody really is, always well dressed, pouring out tears like so many water jars” (I, p. 33). Flaubert’s mockery here targets such novels’ romanticism, their lack of realism, as well as their placement of love at the center of life. His description of the novels’ illustrations adds another important element: after describing some of the depicted scenes, he adds a generalization, couched in the form of an apostrophe—suggesting that the narrator too has intimate acquaintance with such books and illustrations:

And you were there also, you sultans with your long pipes, swooning under arbors in the arms of dancing girls, giaours, Turkish sabers, Greek caps, and above all you pallid landscapes of extravagant lands, which often present to us all at once palm trees and pines, tigers on the right with a lion on the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon, Roman ruins in the foreground, and then crouching camels; the whole framed by a well-tended virgin forest, with a great perpendicular sunbeam flickering onthe water where, standing out in white scratches on a steel-gray background, swans are swimming. (I, p. 34)

Here the target is the meaningless accumulation in the illustrations; the artist, and the viewer, can’t be content with a simple scene and must have all the coded markers of romantic fantasy in every picture. We have seen meaningless accumulation already in the novel—first in the description of Charles’ hat (I, pp. 3–4) and later in the description of the couple’s wedding cake, featuring porticoes, a dungeon, and a Cupid on a chocolate swing (I, p. 25). All these—the cap, the cake, the illustrations—emphasize an absurdity, driven by a manic lack of proportion, taste, or control: things proliferate without restraint. This, Flaubert suggests, is somewhere near the root of Emma’s character.

The books and illustrations nurture this aspect of her character. As Vargas Llosa puts it, “Emma’s inability to adapt to life can be traced in large part to the books she reads, to the romantic fictions that have shaped in her mind an ideal reality that does not coincide with the real one….”³⁶ A novelist’s attack on the unreality of other novels: the tradition goes back at least to Don Quixote, the knight with whom Emma has much in common. Twisted by their reading, they sally out into the world confusing ideals with realities. No doubt Flaubert had exactly that comparison in mind as he developed his character. But we should note that Emma’s idealizing is not solely the product of romantic novels: it comes out of religious worship too.

… she drowsed softly in the mystic languor exhaled by the scents of the altar, the coolness of the holy water fonts, and the glow of the candles. Instead of following the Mass, she would gaze upon the pious little illustrations, with azure borders, in her missal, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced by sharp arrows, and poor Jesus, who stumbled as He carried His cross… .

When she went to confession, she would make up little sins in order to stay there as long as she could, on her knees in the darkness, hands joined together, her face close to the grill, below the priest’s whispers. The analogies of fiancé, spouse, heavenly lover, and eternal marriage that recurred in the sermons aroused an unexpected sweetness in the depths of her soul. (I, pp. 31–32)

The tendency to eroticize, the daydreaming, the embrace of the false if it can lead to an erotic or emotional high—all these qualities seem to have been present in Emma naturally; the novels and illustrations simply provided the imagery, the forms her tendencies would fix upon.

But then, who is Emma, really? Is it enough to say that she is a romantic? What really explains her character, her values, her decisions, the misery she makes of her own life and those of others? Readers and critics have been divided about her from the very beginning. Some have found her repulsive: Nabokov, for instance, compares her to Homais:

She lives among philistines, and she is a philistine herself. Her mental vulgarity is not so obvious as that of Homais. It might be too hard on her to say that the trite, ready-made pseudopro-gressive aspects of Homais’ nature are duplicated in a feminine pseudoromantic way in Emma; but one cannot help feeling that Homais and Emma not only phonetically echo each other but do have something in common—and that something is the vulgar cruelty of their natures.³⁷

Such a harsh attack is logically quite justifiable, and other critics see her in similar terms. Leo Bersani, for example, refers to “her general mediocrity…. She thinks in clichés, and as far as her moral awareness goes, she is hardly less self-centered or more scrupulous than Homais …”³⁸ Emma’s faults are many, the harm she does very great, and Flaubert shrinks at none of it.

But at the same time he makes us care, and care very deeply, about her. This is in part, no doubt, because he cared about her himself. In a letter to Colet, he remarked on the way life eerily confirms fiction:

Everything one invents is true, rest assured. Poetry is just as precise as geometry. Induction is just as sound as deduction, and then, after a certain point, one can’t mistake the matters of the soul. My poor Bovary, no doubt, is suffering and weeping in twenty villages in France right now, at this very hour.³⁹

Pitiless as Flaubert was about dissecting Emma’s self-deceptions and cruel egotism, he also evidently identifies with her. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” may be an apocryphal comment, but Flaubert certainly sees more value in her than in any of the others and indeed explicitly, powerfully, contrasts her with the others. Her death scene is one of the most powerful in literature, not because of any Dickensian sentimentalism but because of Flaubert’s combination of remorseless, realist physical detail with an implication that someone or something unique and irreplaceable is passing away. The language Flaubert uses for the extreme unction rite brings this out, language as somber as a liturgy, as the priest

dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions: first upon the eyes, which had so lusted after earthly luxuries; then upon the nostrils, so fond of warm breezes and amorous scents; then upon the mouth, which had opened to lie, which had moaned with pride and cried out in sensuality; then upon the hands, which had delighted in lustful contact; and finally upon the soles of the feet, so swift in the past when she had run to satisfy her desires, and which now would never walk again. (III, p. 280)

Victor Brombert’s classic study of the novel notes that “sympathy, warmth, and compassion emerge at every point behind the apparently detached diagnosis,”⁴⁰ which does not mean that Emma is presented as any kind of model. Rather, the world in which she lives is so degraded, so devoid of spirituality, integrity, or beauty, that a character who seeks out those things with intensity and passion, without compromise, becomes a tragic figure. Ideals— no matter how twisted or confused—are what lend grandeur to the human person; the modern world, the world of Homais and of crass materialism, will inevitably destroy the idealist, an end as inevitable as the fates that pursued the ancient tragic heroes. Emma attains, in Brombert’s words, “dignity and even majesty” by the end.⁴¹ Flaubert’s sympathy with her is perhaps most powerful in an often-praised passage using the extended metaphor of a fire on the steppes. The passage occurs after Léon has left Yonville, and Emma remains alone: she tends his memory the way one would tend a fire, looking for anything that might provide fuel; but eventually, the passion weakens:

But the flame did die down, whether because she exhausted the fuel or because she had built the fire too high. Absence snuffed out her love bit by bit, and her regret was stifled by daily routine; and the burning gleam that had made her pale sky purple was increasingly covered over by shadow, and it faded out by degrees. In the numbness of her consciousness, she even took her repugnance toward her husband as a yearning for her lover, the fires of hatred for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest outside went on raging, and as passion was burned down to cinders, and no help came, no sun appeared, darkness fell on all sides, and she remained lost within a terrible cold that pierced her through and through. (II, p. 109)

Again, the subtle relationship between author and character is important here. The fire imagery, the tragic beauty of the language cannot be attributed to Emma herself; but the author has taken us inside her consciousness with him and given her feeling of desolation a poetic and haunting expression. The image also stresses her absolute isolation in Yonville and suggests for us that she is the only living thing there—which, in a sense, is accurate.

Imagery like this contributes to what Brombert called Emma’s majesty, her tragic grandeur. Though the author may sometimes mock her, and though he will be pitiless in exposing her weakness and pettiness, he will not condemn her—far from it. He does mock her adolescent love of unrealistic, romantic fiction, and does suggest that this is a key to her character; but this key is ambiguous, for that fiction also undoubtedly depicts a better life than the one reality offers. As Jacqueline Paskow puts it in an analysis of Emma’s psychology, “Emma, from our first acquaintance with her, has always been disposed to prefer the coherence, meaning-giving quality, and completeness of fictional narratives to the contingent, uncompliant, and ambiguous aspects of her own life and world, which are at the source of her ‘ennui. ’”⁴²

Emma prefers fiction, yes, and she also prefers the “meaning-giving” aspects of religion—though it is in precious little supply for her in the world of Yonville. When she finally chooses suicide, the death scene Flaubert creates is one of the least romantic, least redemptive in all of literature. Does the sheer horror of her death scene function as a kind of expiation? If so, an important aspect of that expiation resides in her perception—tragically too late—of the worth in her detested husband, Charles, as Flaubert allows them a moment of mutual tenderness:

… she ran her hand through his hair, slowly. The sweetness of that sensation redoubled his grief; he felt his entire being crumbling in despair at the thought that he was going to have to lose her, just when she had avowed more love for him than she ever had before; and he couldn’t think of anything to do…. (III, p. 275)

Following Emma’s death, the novel, in a kind of coda, returns us to Charles, the subject of its opening chapters. Frederick Brown says the novel forms a “circle of incomprehension,” beginning with Charles being mocked by his schoolfellows and ending with him “bereft of a wife he had never known, whose infidelities, once revealed to him, make her at once more inaccessible and more desirable.”⁴³ His death follows swiftly, and by the novel’s end the family has been erased from Yonville. All that remains is Homais, and nothing stands in the way of his ascent.

Madame Bovary’s Publication—and After

During the years that Flaubert worked slowly and painstakingly on the novel, Du Camp wrote to him frequently, urging him—almost badgering him— to publish something, to establish himself in the literary world, and not to remain buried in Croisset. Du Camp had taken over La Revue de Paris and was seeking the kind of contributors who would make the magazine a greater success. Flaubert’s replies were sometimes defensive and almost angry. In one, he told Du Camp that he was not interested in fame or celebrity: “I’m aiming at something better: to please myself. Success, in my view, is the result, not the aim.”⁴⁴ The friendship between the two men became strained, as Flaubert saw Du Camp becoming a shallow publicity-seeker, someone ready to turn the purity of art into mere commodity. But at the same time, he undoubtedly worried that all this devotion to art would be meaningless if he didn’t publish something sometime; he was nearing thirty-five when he completed Madame Bovary, and he decided that now was the time. He agreed to let Du Camp publish the novel serially in La Revue de Paris. There were some struggles: Du Camp insisted on some changes and deletions, some of which Flaubert agreed to, some of which rankled with him. But at last the novel appeared in six installments, beginning on October 1, 1856.

Du Camp and his coeditors grew nervous about certain sexual scenes in the book, including the scene with Emma and Léon in the coach in Rouen. They insisted on cutting these from the published text. For the December 15, 1856 issue, Flaubert had them insert the following author’s note:

Certain considerations have forced the Revue de Paris to suppress a passage in the December 1 issue. Its scruples having reasserted themselves for the present issue, it has judged it best to excise several further passages. As a consequence, I therefore declarethat I am denying responsibility for the lines that follow; the reader is thus asked to see them as mere fragments, and not as the whole.⁴⁵

But even with the cuts, there was trouble ahead. The liberal Revue de Paris was considered a hostile publication by the government of Napoleon III, a fact that certainly motivated it to bring charges against Flaubert and the magazine. The charge, made in January 1857, was that Madame Bovary was an offense to both religion and public morality. There is no small irony in the charge when we recall that Flaubert had himself indicted romantic novels for their pernicious effects in the formation of Emma Bovary’s character; a similar accusation was now being leveled against him.

Flaubert was by no means certain to win the case, and he was extremely nervous about the situation, regretting now that he had let himself be lured into publishing. His letters from the period show his anxiety, and sometimes his pride as well. When the critic and novelist Champfleury wrote him a letter of support, he replied:

Your letter only reached me yesterday … Let me know a day and a time when I can come to shake your hand and tell you personally how much I appreciate your taking an interest. You understand that my case is that of all contemporary literature. It isn’t my novel that they’re attacking, but all novels, and our right to create them.⁴⁶

He hired a well-known Rouen attorney, Jules Sénard, to defend his book. Prosecution and defense both centered on the issue of the book’s morality: was it endorsing adultery, or condemning it? Was it encouraging female immorality? The prosecution, unwisely, chose to fight on specific passages and phrases; Sénard was able to put these back into their context and demonstrate that no immoral intention attached to them. But Madame Bovary does indeed challenge many cherished assumptions regarding public and religious morality, and the prosecution might have made a better case if it had been more adept in terms of literary interpretation.⁴⁷ Be that as it may, the judge ruled in the book’s favor on February 9, 1857, and Flaubert’s gratitude to Sé-nard is demonstrated in the novel’s dedication. Flaubert was now free to publish Madame Bovary in book form—without cutting any of the “offensive” segments. It appeared that April, in a two-volume edition.

The scandal of the trial no doubt helped sales, and certainly assured the book instant fame. The reviews, however, were often either lukewarm or downright negative. While some conservative readers inevitably took offense at either the book’s treatment of sexual morality or its depiction of the church, others were bothered by the very impersonalism Flaubert had worked so hard to attain. A famous review by the novelist Barbey d’Aurevilly noted what he called a “dryness” in the book and added, “we are aware of no literary composition which reveals a truer talent which is at the same time more devoid of enthusiasm, emptier of heart; of a crueler cold-bloodedness.”⁴⁸ Sainte-Beuve, the most eminent and influential critic of the era, likewise saw great art in the book but was troubled by its lack of moral engagement, specifically by its lack of any moral touchstone, any character who clearly stood for the good and the right. Flaubert was happy enough with Sainte-Beuve’s review and wrote him a letter expressing his gratitude— adding that Madame Bovary had been “literally painful to write. I am now going to live, or rather to go back to living, in less nauseating settings.”⁴⁹

But if Flaubert had not been troubled by the implications of Sainte-Beuve’s review, another writer was: Charles Baudelaire, the great poet, would have his own masterpiece, Les Fleurs du Mal, hauled into court that same year; unlike the Madame Bovary case, here the government’s charges of obscenity would stick, and six of Baudelaire’s poems would be condemned, remaining legally unpublishable in France until the 1940s. Flaubert, perhaps exhausted by the trial and its anxieties, may have been willing to accept Sainte-Beuve’s criticism, but Baudelaire vigorously defended the novel, and on exactly the terms it deserved: as a powerful poetic achievement, one that needed no moral preaching for its artistic effectiveness and perfection. He also pointed out that Emma Bovary was, despite Flaubert’s artfulness, essentially male—that the author had poured so much of himself into her that the reader encounters a masculine soul within a feminine body.⁵⁰ Baudelaire went on to make another, more important point: “The true work of art needs no moral pleadings. The logic of the work suffices for any moral implication, and it is up to the reader to draw any conclusions from its outcome.”⁵¹ Flaubert was delighted with the review and wrote Baudelaire to tell him that he had penetrated into the very depths of the book, “as if my brain had been yours.”⁵²

Madame Bovary remains controversial to this day. Readers continue to disagree on all the same points raised in the first year of its publication: Is there a hero, or a moral touchstone? Is it Emma? And if so, is the novel nihilistic in implication? Flaubert’s style also remains controversial, with some modern readers (such as James Wood) uncomfortable with what Barbey d’Aurevilly had called its dryness. But that style has influenced nearly every great novelist since—Zola, Maupassant, Turgenev, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov …

Flaubert at times thought of his novel as a kind of exercise to purify his own style, or even as a kind of punishment—a “pensum,” he called it, using a term for an academic exercise (perhaps somewhat like Charles’ own assignment, the teacher ordering him to write over and over, “ridiculus sum”). And as soon as he could, he did indeed set out for less “nauseating” subject matter, retreating to the exoticism he had had to abandon after The Temptation of Saint Anthony: his next novel, which would consume the next five years of his life, was Salammbô (1863). His heroine now, a priestess of ancient Carthage, was as far from Emma Bovary and from Yonville as Flaubert could go. He returned to his realist vein with a new version of Sentimental Education (1869), a semiautobiographical novel that aimed to tell the story of his generation. After that, he returned to the exotic with yet another revision of Saint Anthony (1874)—and so he went on, moving back and forth between the poles of the fantasist and the realist. It is the realist Flaubert who has continued to be influential, though, almost to the point of worship among later novelists—as the high priest of utter dedication to his art, and absolute repression of the merely personal. He has become mythic, and it becomesincreasingly difficult for the modern reader to let him remain invisible, to avoid seeing his shadow cast behind Emma.

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

This translation of Madame Bovary is based on the 1873 version, usually considered the definitive one. The novel was originally published in six installments from October to December 1856 in La Revue de Paris, with many omissions, most notably the entire carriage scene in Part III, Chapter 1. In April 1857 the novel was first printed in book form, with many—but not all—of the omissions restored and hundreds of changes in punctuation. It was reprinted twice more by the same publisher (Michel Lévy), in 1862 and 1869, each time with many minor changes and revisions. When Flaubert quarreled with Lévy and changed to the publisher Charpentier in 1873, he made another ninety or so revisions, and in this edition the book achieved its final form. Nearly all modern editions of the novel use this 1873 version.

I have relied principally on three modern editions: A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil, in Flaubert: Oeuvres, Tome I (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); Bernard Ajac (Paris: Flammarion, 1986); and Thierry Laget (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Several of my annotations are indebted to those of Laget, as I have indicated in the notes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am very grateful to Brian Daniels for his exceptionally thoughtful and highly specific advice on this translation. Any weaknesses that remain are entirely my responsibility.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (1821–80):
A CHRONOLOGY

1821
Gustave Flaubert born in Rouen, December 12, the fifth child of Achille-Cleophas and Anne Justine-Caroline Flaubert. His older brother, Achille, was born in 1813; three other children born between Achille and Gustave would die in childhood. His father was head (“chief surgeon”) of the hospital, Hôtel-Dieu.

1824
Birth of his sister Caroline, who became his beloved childhood playmate and friend.

1831
Begins writing stories and plays, some of which he and Caroline performed for the family. He befriends another boy, Ernest Chevalier, the first of several close male friendships in his life; as with his later friends, he wrote many letters to Chevalier about his literary plans and ambitions.

1832
Begins school as a boarder at the Collège Royalin Rouen.

1834
Begins a close friendship with Alfred Le Poittevin, four years his senior. Le Poittevin becomes a mentor to Flaubert, an important influence on his literary ideals, weaning him away from romanticism and toward valuing impersonalism in literature. Le Poittevin’s sister, Laure, also becomes Flaubert’s friend (in 1850 Laure would give birth to Guy de Maupassant).

1836
On a family vacation in Trouville, he meets and falls in love with Élisa Schlesinger, married and ten years his senior. While this love was probably never consummated, she remained a feminine ideal for the rest of his life; she is the model for the character Madame Arnoux in L’Education sentimentale.

1837
Writes a number of stories, including Passion and Virtue,the main character of which is an early version of Emma Bovary. Publishes his first story, “Bibliomanie,” in a Rouen review, Le Calibri.With Le Poittevin, he develops a satiric character they called “Le Garçon,” a conventional-minded, cliché-spouting, buffoonish bourgeois, who is something of an antecedent to later characters like Homais.

1839
Expelled from school for leading a student revolt against a substitute teacher. Passes his baccalaureate exams on his own.

1840
Trip to the Pyrenees, Marseilles, and Corsica with a friend of his father; in Marseilles, has first affair with a thirty-five year old woman named Eulalie, who becomes the model for a major character in Novembre.

1841
Goes to Paris to begin a three-year law degree, but has already made up his mind to be a writer instead.

1842
In October, completes Novembre,his first novel, not published until after his death.

1843
Fails law exams. Begins writing first version of L’Education senti-mentale.Meets Maxime Du Camp in Paris; Flaubert cements their friendship by reading Novembrealoud to him. Studying in Paris to retake his exams, he begins frequenting the salon of Louise Pradier, wife of a sculptor; there he meets Victor Hugo. Some of Louise Pradier’s character traits would find their way into the character of Emma Bovary.

1844
On January 1, has first attack of epilepsy; many seizures follow in the next months. His illness means he can withdraw from his hated legal studies. In June, his father buys a home in nearby Croisset, three miles from the Rouen hospital; here, Flaubert will do most of his mature writing.

1845
The Flaubert family accompanies Gustave’s sister Caroline on her wedding trip to Italy; Gustave now develops an interest in painting. In Genoa, he sees The Temptation of Saint Anthony,a painting attributed to Pieter Breughel the younger. Suffers epileptic attacks during the trip. Completes the first version of L’Education sentimentale.

1846
In January, his father dies from an infection in his thigh; the shops in Rouen are closed in his honor on the day of his funeral. In March, his sister Caroline dies of an infection following childbirth. Gustave agrees to take on the education of Caroline’s infant, also named Caroline. Gustave is now writing eight to ten hours a day. In summer, at the Pradier salon, he meets Louise Colet, an established poet, married and eleven years his senior; they become lovers the very next day. Begins frequent trips to Paris to see her but will not allow her to visit him in Rouen, in part because of his dedication to his mother.

1848
Begins writing La Tentation de Saint Antoine.In April, death of his dear friend and mentor, Alfred Le Poittevin.

1849
Reads the completed Saint Antoineto Du Camp and Louis Bouil-het, who advise him to burn it. In October, sets out with Du Camp on an extended trip to Egypt and the Middle East, during which he ponders the idea of a “bourgeois tragedy.” Also develops the idea for a Dictionnaire des idées reçues,a satire on conventional thinking.

1851
In June, returns to France. Louise Colet, desperate to see him, shows up uninvited at Croisset, but he refuses her entrance. Begins Madame Bovaryon September 19. Du Camp launches his literary magazine, La Revue de Paris,and presses Flaubert for material. In the fall, he visits London with his mother.

1852
In July, completes his draft of the first part of Madame Bovary.His affair with Louise Colet continues, largely via correspondence; he writes her some 160 letters during the composition of the novel. They occasionally meet either in Paris or in the village of Mantes.

1854
Breaks with Louise Colet, in April.

1856
In March, finishes Madame Bovary;Flaubert sends his manuscript off to Du Camp in April. On October 1, the six-part serialization of the novel in Du Camp’s Revue de Parisbegins; Flaubert’s fee is 2,000 francs. Due to threats of prosecution, Du Camp omits the “offensive” parts of the novel. Louise Colet publishes the first of two novels about her affair with Flaubert (Une Histoire du Soldat,then Luiin 1859).

1857
The trial of Madame Bovary,from January 24 to February 7. After acquittal, Flaubert publishes the novel in book form in April; the publisher, Michel Lévy, pays him 800 francs outright for the book (with no royalties). Some of the cuts Du Camp had made are restored in the book version, but not all.

1858
Travels to Carthage to do research for his exotic historical romance, Salammbô.

1862
Salammbôpublished in November; because of the huge sales of Madame Bovary,Flaubert receives 10,000 francs for this book and an advance of 10,000 on his next. Flaubert now turns to rewriting L’Education sentimentale.

1863
George Sand publishes a favorable article on Salammbô,initiating a warm friendship between the two very different novelists; the Flaubert-Sand correspondence begins. Meets the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who will go on to translate some of Flaubert’s work into Russian.

1866
Now a famous literary figure, Flaubert receives the Legion of Honor, largely due to lobbying by Princesse Mathilde, who becomes a close friend and something of a maternal figure to him. 1869 In July, the death of his best friend, Louis Bouilhet. L’Education sentimentaleis published in November to neither critical nor popular success. He begins research for a third version of Saint Antoine.

1872
In April, the death of his mother. In June he finishes La Tentation de Saint Antoine.

1874
Flaubert’s comic play, Le Candidat,is staged, to mediocre response. Saint Antoineis finally published in April, to mostly negative reviews. In August, begins writing the satiric novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet.

1875
The financial ruin of his niece Caroline’s husband puts Flaubert in increasingly desperate straits. He begins writing his story of Saint Julien, the first of the Trois Contes.

1876
In March, the death of Louise Colet; in June, the death of George Sand. He had written “Un Coeur Simple,” the second of the Trois Contes,with Sand’s approval in mind. In the fall, writes the third story, “Hérodias.”

1877
In April Trois Contesis published. Flaubert enjoys friendships with a number of male writers, notably Turgenev and the young Guy de Maupassant, to whom he becomes a sort of father figure. Mau-passant, nephew of Alfred Le Poittevin and a protégé of the deceased Louis Bouilhet, is naturally dear to Flaubert.

1880
In February Flaubert helps prepare the defense of Guy de Maupas-sant for his obscenity trial; the charges are dropped. On May 8 Flaubert has a stroke and dies that day. His last novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet,remains unfinished.

1881
The unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchetis published along with the Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

1. January 16, 1852, in Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. II, 1851–58, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 31. Unless noted otherwise, all Flaubert’s letters cited here were composed in Croisset, outside Rouen.

2. Flaubert never published Novembre, but he kept the manuscript and returned to it from time to time, reading it aloud to friends, sometimes mocking it as pretentious and stilted, but obviously thinking it good enough to preserve.

3. Frederick Brown points out that epilepsy was widely believed to be the result of masturbation, and that Flaubert may have half-believed it. Flaubert: A Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 146.

4. Maxime Du Camp, Souvenirs littéraires, tome 1, chapter XII(Paris: Hachette, 1882).

5. Letter to Louise Colet, April 6, 1853, in Correspondance, vol. II:297.

6. In his memoirs, Du Camp gives the name not as Delamare but as Delaunay— perhaps an instance of faulty memory, or perhaps an attempt to be discreet. The details about the Delamare case, and how the story narrated by Du Camp may or may not be true, are carefully examined in Claudine Gothot-Mersch, La Genèse de Madame Bovary (Paris: José Corti, 1966).

7.The best treatment of this extraordinary trip is Francis Steegmuller’s classic Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).

8. Du Camp claimed that Flaubert had a sudden epiphany while gazing at the second cataract of the Nile at Djebel-Aboucir, and the name “Bovary” suddenly came to him then. Gothot-Mersch demonstrates that this was not the case, but the myth had long taken on a life of its own. For instance, in Robert Penn Warren’s poem, “Flaubert in Egypt,” the imagined Flaubert “cried out, ‘Eureka—the name it is Emma.’ / And added ‘Bovary’” (Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, ed. John Burt [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998], 297–98). For other possible sources of the name Bovary, see Mario Vargas Llosa, The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and “Madame Bovary,” trans. Helen Lane (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986), 102–104.

9. November 14, 1850, in Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. I:1830–51, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 705–11.

10. In a letter to Flaubert dated July 23, 1851 Du Camp asks him, “What are you writing? Have you decided? Will it be Don Juan? Is it the story of Madame Delamarre [sic] … ?” Du Camp’s letter is reprinted in Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. I:806.

11. Again, a letter from Du Camp on August 3, 1851 confirms this: Flaubert, Correspondence, vol. II:859.

12.Passion et vertu, in Yvan Leclerc, ed., “Les Mémoires d’un fou,” “Novembre,” et autres texts de jeunesse (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 206. The translation is mine.

13. Flaubert insisted to his friends the Goncourt brothers that the only character in the novel based on a real-life person was that of Charles’ father. He was based on a man who had been a paymaster in Napoleon’s army, “a swaggering, loose-living scoundrel who would threaten his mother with a saber to get money out of her …” Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, trans. and ed. Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2007), 50. The journal entry is dated March 4, 1860.

14. A sample of these scenarios is translated as an appendix to Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 355–62.

15. January 16, 1852, in Correspondance, vol. II:31. This often-quoted passage has been taken as a kind of artistic manifesto, but Geoffrey Wall puts the letter in its immediate context to warn us that it arises in part from “the impatience, the revulsion, that Flaubert felt towards the low subject which he had taken on” (“The Invisible Man: An Essay on Flaubert and Celebrity,” Cambridge Quarterly 35, no. 2 [2006]: 142). Even taking that context into account, however, we never see Flaubert deviating significantly from the ideas expressed in the letter.

16. He makes this point in another letter to Colet: “Let us try, therefore, to see things the way they are, and not try to be better than God. In the past, people believed sugar could only come from sugar cane. Nowadays, we can get it from almost anything; it’s about the same with poetry. We can extract it from anything, because it’s deposited in everything, everywhere: there isn’t a single atom of matter that doesn’t contain thought; let us get used to thinking of the world as a work of art, whose procedures we must replicate in our own works.” March 27, 1853, in Correspondance, vol. II:285.

17. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect” [1968], in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 144.

18. Jacques Rancière defines this “absolute way of seeing things” as “the manner of seeing things when you are no longer a personal subject, pursuing individual aims. Consequently, it is the manner of seeing them when they are released from all the ties that make them useful or desirable objects. It is the manner of enjoying sensations as pure sensations, disconnected from the sensorium of ordinary experience.” “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008): 241. Gilles Philippe’s analysis of Flaubert’s style is more purely linguistic, but like Rancière he sees the origin of modern impressionistic prose in the novel: “La Modernité linguis-tique de Madame Bovary,” Modern Language Notes 122 (2007): 735–45.

19. Mark Greif, “Flaubert’s Aestheticism,” Raritan 24, no. 3 (March 2005): 53.

20. Flaubert was far too independent a thinker to subscribe to any “school” or artistic credo. Indeed, he often spoke of his loathing for “realism,” by which he meant the systematic, schematic realism articulated by many of his contemporaries. He suggested in a letter that perhaps Madame Bovary should even be seen as an attack on realism: “They speak about me as if I’m bound to the real, whereas I detest it. In fact, I started this novel out of a hatred for realism.” Letter to Edma Roger des Genettes, October 30, 1856, in Correspondance, vol. II:643.

21. Jonathan Culler has recently analyzed what he sees as contradictory kinds of realism within the novel, in “The Realism of Madame Bovary,” Modern Language Notes 122 (2007): 683–96.

22. February 8, 1852, in Correspondance, vol. II:43.

23. December 9, 1852, in Correspondance, vol. II:204.

24. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 486.

25.The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and “Madame Bovary,” 194.

26. Benjamin F. Bart, Flaubert (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1967), 344.

27. Gilbert D. Chaitin, “Listening Power: Flaubert, Zola, and the Politics of Style Indirect Libre,” The French Review 72, no. 6 (May 1999): 1027.

28. James Wood, “Half against Flaubert,” in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 62.

29. Shoshana Felman, “Modernity of the Commonplace,” in Critical Essays on Gus-tave Flaubert, ed. Laurence M. Porter, trans. Debra V. Traas (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 35.

30. Flaubert, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, trans. Jacques Barzun (New York: New Directions, 1967).

31. James F. Hamilton, “The Ideology of Place: Flaubert’s Depiction of Yonville-l’Ab-baye,” The French Review 65, no. 2 (December 1991): 212.

32. The novel is set during the era of Louis Philippe, but it was written and published during the succeeding reign of Napoleon III and indirectly satirizes the pretensions of the new reign as well. For one study of this double satire—on the recent past as well as on the present—see Anne Green, “France Exposed: Madame Bovary and the Exposition Universelle,” Modern Language Review 99, no. 4 (October 2004): 915–23.

33. The merchant Lheureux is another good candidate for the title. But Lheureux is little more than a crook, without the larger social significance Homais is seeking.

34. Jean Rousset, “Madame Bovary: Flaubert’s Anti-Novel,” in Critical Essays on Gustave Flaubert, 62.

35. Ibid., 63.

36. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and “Madame Bovary,” 150.

37. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Har-court Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 142.

38. Leo Bersani, “Flaubert and Emma Bovary: The Hazards of Literary Fusion,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 19.

39. August 14, 1853, in Correspondance, vol. II:392.

40. Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 86.

41. Ibid., 87.

42. Jacqueline Merriam Paskow, “Rethinking Madame Bovary’s Motives for Committing Suicide,” Modern Language Review 100, no. 2 (April 2005): 335.

43. Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 321.

44. June 26, 1852, in Correspondance, vol. II:114.

45. The note is reprinted in Correspondance, vol. II:653. The additional cuts were made in the extreme unction scene and in some of the interchanges between Homais and the Abbé Bournisien.

46. Paris, February 4, 1857, in Correspondance, vol. II:678. Champfleury was the pen name of Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson, an art critic and novelist who was editing the avant-garde journal Le Réalisme; he wrote an important realist manifesto in 1857, and he clearly saw Flaubert’s novel as belonging to the realist “side.”

47. Frances Ferguson’s discussion of the trial concludes that the judge’s ruling was in fact based on the need to see the book as a whole, rather than simply to condemn certain passages, and as a result it “established the notion of autonomy for the work of art to a degree previously unimagined.” Pornography: The Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 100.

48. Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, “Monsieur Gustave Flaubert,” trans. Robert Steele, in Critical Essays on Gustave Flaubert, 51.

49. May 5, 1857, in Correspondance, vol. II:710.

50. Charles Baudelaire, “Madame Bovary par Gustave Flaubert,” was first published in L’Artiste in October 1857. John E. Gale has argued convincingly that Baudelaire’s review was inspired by and was an almost point-by-point refutation of Sainte-Beuve’s review: “Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire on Madame Bovary,” The French Review 41, no. 1 (October 1967): 30–37.

51. Baudelaire, OEuvres completes, tome II, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 81–82.

52. October 21, 1857, in Correspondance, vol. II:772.

Madame Bovary

PART I

To Marie-Antoine-Jules Sénard¹
Member of the Bar in Paris
Ex-President of the National Assembly
and Former Minister of the Interior

My Dear and Illustrious Friend,

Permit me to place your name at the beginning of this book, even before the dedication; for I owe its publication to you more than anyone else. As a result of your magnificent defense, my book has given me a kind of authority I had not expected. Accept, therefore, the homage of my gratitude which, great as it might be, can never match the heights of your eloquence and your devotion.

Gustave Flaubert
Paris, April 12, 1857

 _____________________________

To Louis Bouilhet²

1. Sénard (1800–85) was the lawyer who successfully defended Madame Bovaryagainst its prosecution for “outrages against public morality and religion” in January 1857.

2. Bouilhet (1821–69) was a Rouen teacher, poet, and playwright who had become Flaubert’s closest friend. For his role in the genesis of the novel, see the Introduction.

CHAPTER 1

We were at our studies when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy³ still dressed in his street clothes, and a student assistant who was carrying a large desk. Those who were sleeping woke up, and everyone stood up as if interrupted in their work.

The headmaster signaled us to be seated; then, turning to the teacher:

“Monsieur Roger,” he said quietly, “here is a pupil I’m putting in your charge; he’ll start at the fifth level. If his work and his conduct are good, he’ll move into the upper grades,where he belongs at his age.”

Keeping back in the corner behind the door, so well concealed we could hardly see him, the new onewas a country boy, about fifteen, taller than any of us. His hair was cut in a straight line across his forehead, like a village choirboy; he looked both sensible and completely embarrassed. Although his shoulders weren’t especially broad, his green cloth jacket with its black buttons was clearly too tight under the arms, and it revealed, between the slits of the cuffs, a pair of red wrists accustomed to going bare. His legs, with blue socks, stuck out from a pair of yellowish trousers pulled up high by suspenders. He wore big, hobnail shoes, badly polished.

We began our recitation. He listened, all ears, as attentively as if it were a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs or lean on an elbow, and when the clock struck two, the teacher had to tell him to get in line with us.

We had a custom, when entering the classroom, of tossing our caps on the floor in order to have our hands free; what you had to do was stand in the doorway and pitch them under the bench hard enough to make them hit the wall and raise as much dust as possible; this was how it was done.

But, whether he hadn’t observed this maneuver or he hadn’t dared to try it himself, our prayer was over and the new boystill kept his cap held firmly on his two knees. This cap was one of those composite headpieces, in which could be detected elements of a fur cap, a lancer cap, a bowler hat, an otter-skin cap, and a cotton nightcap—in short, one of those poor things whose ugliness, even though voiceless, somehow suggests hidden depths of expression, like the face of an imbecile. Egg-shaped, swollen with whalebone, its base began with three circular sausages; and then, separated by a red band, came alternating diamond-shaped patches of velour and rabbit fur; finally, there was a kind of sack which ended in a cardboard-stiffened polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long, flimsy cord, a clump of golden threads like a tassel. It was quite new; the visor gleamed.

“Stand up,” said the teacher.

He got up; his cap fell to the floor. The whole class burst into laughter.

He bent down to pick it up. The boy next to him poked it with his elbow, making it fall again. He bent down again to pick it up.

“All right, get rid of that helmet!” said the teacher, who was a man of wit.

The students burst out in a roar of laughter, which flustered the poor boy, so that he didn’t know if he should hold the cap in his hands, leave it on the floor, or put it on his head. He sat back down and put it on his knees.

“Stand up,” the teacher went on, “and tell me your name.”

The new boy mumbled an unintelligible name.

“Again!”

The same mumbled syllables came out, this time drowned out by the shouts of the class.

“Louder!” exclaimed the teacher. “Louder!”

The new boy, summoning every ounce of his courage, now opened wide his unusually large mouth, and at the top of his lungs as if he were calling out to someone, hurled out this word: Charbovari.

Now an uproar broke out, a rising crescendo of shrieking voices—they shouted, they howled, they stamped, they repeated: Charbovari!Charbovari!—which eventually diminished into isolated notes, subsiding only with difficulty, and then suddenly starting up all over again along a bench where a stifled burst of laughter shot up here and there, like fireworks that hadn’t quite gone out.

But as threats of extra work rained down, order was bit by bit reestablished in the class, and the teacher, having succeeded in grasping the name Charles Bovary by dint of having had it dictated, spelled out, and read over to him, swiftly ordered the poor devil to go sit in the dunce’s seat at the foot of the lectern. He began to move there, but before starting off, hesitated.

“What are you looking for?” asked the teacher.

“My ha …” said the new boy, looking around anxiously.

“Five hundred lines for the whole class!” came the furious voice which, like Neptune’s “Quos ego”⁴ immediately calmed a new storm. “Keep quiet!” the indignant teacher continued, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief he had pulled out from under his cap. “As for you, the new boy, you’ll write out for me the verb ridiculus sum⁵ twenty times.”

Then, in a gentler voice:

“Come, you’ll find it, your hat; no one’s stolen it!”

Everyone calmed down. Heads bent down over notebooks, and the new boy behaved in exemplary fashion for two hours, despite having his face peppered from time to time by a wad of paper launched from a penholder. But he would wipe them off with his hand and remain immobile, keeping his eyes lowered.

That evening during the study period he pulled the cuff guards from his desk, put all his little belongings in order, and carefully ruled his paper. We saw him working conscientiously, looking up all the words in the dictionary and taking the greatest pains. Thanks, no doubt, to all the good will and effort he showed, he wasn’t made to move down to the lower class; for, though he knew the rules fairly well, he had no elegance at all in his style. He had started Latin with the village priest, his parents having kept him out of school as long as possible in order to save money.

His father, Monsieur Charles-Denis-Bartholome Bovary, the ex-assistant to a surgeon-major, implicated in a conscription scandal around 1812 and then forced to quit the service, had gone on to profit from his looks by getting his hands on a sixty-thousand-franc dowry that a haberdasher provided for his daughter, who had fallen in love with his elegance. A handsome and vain man, walking so as to make his spurs jangle, his sideburns trimmed to meet with his moustache, his fingers garnished with rings, wearing loud colors, he seemed to combine the looks of a warrior with the smooth talk of a traveling salesman. Once married, he lived for two or three years on his wife’s money, dining well and rising late, smoking his porcelain pipes, coming home at night only after the theater, and frequenting the cafés. The father-in-law died, leaving very little; he was indignant about it, took a shot at textile manufacturing, losing money at it, and then returned to the countryside, where he wanted to make it pay off. But because he knew no more about agriculture than he had about calico, because he rode his horses rather than putting them to work, drank his bottled cider rather than selling it, ate the best poultry from his farmyard and used his pigs’ lard to grease his hunting boots, he soon enough perceived that he might as well pack the whole thing in.

For two hundred francs’ rent a year, therefore, he found, in a village on the borders of Caux and Picardy, a sort of half-farm, half-country house; and there, bitter and resentful, blaming fate and envious of everyone else’s lot, he shut himself up at the age of forty-five, disgusted with humankind, as he said, and determined to live in peace.

His wife had been crazy about him in the past; she had shown her love with a thousand servile attentions, which served only to detach him further from her. Playful, generous, and full of love at one time, as she aged she turned (like an uncorked wine that turns to vinegar) difficult, fretful, anxious. She had suffered a great deal without complaining, at first, when she saw him chasing every skirt in the village, and when he had been brought home to her at night from twenty different dives in a stupor, reeking of drunkenness! Then her own pride rose in revolt. But she silenced herself, swallowing her rage in mute stoicism and holding it in until her death. She kept herself constantly busy with errands and business matters. She went to see lawyers or local officials, always remembering when the bills came due, obtaining extensions; and at home she ironed, sewed, laundered, watched over the hired hands, and settled their accounts while Monsieur, entirely untroubled and continually sunk in a sullen lethargy from which he roused himself only to make nasty remarks, sat smoking by the fireside and spitting into the cinders.

When she had a child, he had to be put out to a wet nurse. When he returned home, the little brat was as spoiled as a prince. His mother fed him candies; his father let him run about without shoes and, playing the philosopher, even said he ought to go naked, like the offspring of the animals. To counter his wife’s maternal tendencies, he got into his head a certain masculine ideal of childhood according to which he tried to form his son, wanting to see him grow up austerely, in the Spartan way, so he would develop a strong constitution. He sent him off to sleep without a fire, taught him to drink rum in big gulps and to hurl insults at religious processions. But the boy, naturally peace-loving, responded poorly to his efforts. His mother hauled him around with her at all times; she cut out little paper figures for him, told him stories, talked to him in endless monologues full of melancholy humor and baby talk. Isolated within her own life, she projected all her thin, broken fantasies and dreams onto this child. She dreamed of high positions, she pictured him already great, handsome, spiritual, established as a builder of bridges and roads or as a magistrate. She taught him to read and even, with the aid of an old piano she owned, to sing two or three little ballads. But all that, said Monsieur Bovary, who cared nothing for education, was not worth the trouble. Would they ever have the money to send him to government schools, buy him a position, or get him set up in a business? Anyway, with enough nerve, a man will always get ahead in the world. Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child ran about the village freely.

He would follow the farmhands around, and would chase the surrounding crows away by throwing clumps of dirt at them. He ate the blackberries that grew along the ditches, herded the turkeys with a long stick, pitched the hay during harvest, ran around in the woods, played hopscotch under the church porch on rainy days, and on feast days begged the beadle to let him ring the bells so he could let himself hang from the heavy rope and feel himself swung along as the bells sounded.

And so he grew like an oak. His hands grew strong, his complexion ruddy.

When he was twelve, his mother arranged for him to begin his studies. The task of teaching him was given to the priest. But the lessons were so short and so badly done that they could hardly amount to anything. They took place at the odd free moment, in the sacristy, standing up, in haste, between a baptism and a burial; or the priest would send for his pupil after the Angelus, when he didn’t have to go anywhere. They would go up to his room, make themselves comfortable; gnats and moths would circle about the candle. It was warm, and the boy would start to doze; and the good man, folding his hands over his stomach, would soon begin to snore, his mouth open. Other times, when the priest was returning from bringing the sacrament to some sick person in the neighborhood, he would see Charles wandering through the fields and would call to him, sermonize to him for a quarter of an hour, and take advantage of the moment by having him conjugate a verb at the foot of a tree. They would be interrupted by rain, or by some acquaintance passing by. In general he was very pleased with him, even saying that the young man had a fine memory.

But this could not be the end of it. His mother was emphatic about it. Ashamed or, rather, worn down, his father gave in without resistance, and they waited one more year until the little scamp had made his First Communion.

Six more months passed; and the following year, Charles was at last sent off to school in Rouen, brought there personally by his father toward the end of October, around the time of the Saint-Romain fair.

Today, it would be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him. He was an even-tempered boy who played during recess, worked at his studies, listened in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well in the dining hall. His local guardian was a wholesale hardware dealer on the Rue Gan-terie, who came to take him out once a month on a Sunday, after his shop was closed, sent him out to walk by the port to look at the boats, then returned him to the school by seven, in time for supper. Each Thursday night he wrote his mother a long letter in red ink, sealing it with three wafers; then he went back over his history notebooks, or perhaps read an old volume of Anarcharsis⁶ that had been left in the classroom. When he went for walks, he would chat with the servant, who was from the country like him.

By dint of applying himself, he managed to stay about in the middle of the class; once he even won a prize in natural history. But at the end of his third year, his parents took him out of the school to study medicine, convinced that he could obtain his diploma by studying on his own.

His mother found a room for him, on the fourth floor, near the Eau-de-Robec, in the house of a dyer she knew. She made the arrangements for his rent, found furniture for him, a table and two chairs, had an old cherry wood bed of hers sent to him, and also brought a small cast-iron stove with enough wood to keep her poor child warm. Then she left at the end of the week, after exhorting him a thousand times to behave himself now that he was going to be left on his own.

The list of courses affixed to the bulletin board made him dizzy when he read it: anatomy course, pathology course, physiology course, pharmacology course, chemistry course, and botany, clinical, and therapeutic courses, not to mention hygiene and medications, all names whose etymologies he did not know, and which seemed like so many doors leading in to sanctuaries teeming with noble shadows.

He understood none of it; listen as hard as he would, he couldn’t grasp it. But he worked, he got bound notebooks. He attended every class, never missing a single day. He accomplished his little daily tasks like a blinkered horse at a mill, going round and round without any idea of the point of his work.

To save him money, his mother sent him baked veal by messenger each week; he lunched on it every day when he returned from the hospital, kicking his feet against the wall in the cold. Then he had to race off to his lessons in the lecture hall, then to the hospital, and then return home, crisscrossing the town. In the evening, after his landlord’s meager dinner, he went back up to his room and went back to work, his wet clothes smoking on him as he sat before the hot stove.

On fine summer evenings, at the hour when the warm streets are empty and the maids play shuttlecock on doorsteps, he would open his window and lean out on his elbows. The river, which turns this part of Rouen into asort of miserable little Venice, flowed below him, yellow, violet, or blue beneath its bridges and railings. Workingmen, squatting on the banks, washed their arms in the water. Hanks of cotton dried in the air, hanging from poles that projected from the lofts above. Opposite him, over the rooftops, the great, pure sky extended, the red sun setting. How good it would be to be back there! How fine the scents under the beeches! And he opened his nostrils wide, trying to inhale the good scent of the countryside, which did not reach him.

He thinned out, he grew taller, and his face took on a saddened expression that made him look almost interesting.

Inevitably, out of indifference, he came to forget all the resolutions he had made to himself. One day, he missed his hospital visit, the next day his lecture, and, savoring his idleness, he slowly stopped going back at all.

He took up the café habit, along with a passion for dominoes. Shutting himself up in a dirty public room and clicking little sheep bones with black dots on the marble tables seemed to him to be a significant act of freedom, something that heightened his sense of self-esteem. It was like an initiation into the world, an entry into forbidden pleasures; and when he entered, he would squeeze the doorknob with an almost sensual pleasure. Now, so many things that had been suppressed inside him began to expand; he learned by heart little songs that he would sing to women who came in, grew enthusiastic about Béranger,⁷ learned how to make punch, and finally came to find out about lovemaking.

Thanks to this kind of preparatory study, he failed his examination for health officer⁸ completely. They were waiting at home for him that very evening to celebrate his success!

He left on foot and stopped just outside the village, where he sent for his mother and told her everything. She made excuses for him, blaming his failure on the unfairness of the examiners, and, giving him a little encouragement, took it upon herself to arrange things. Monsieur Bovary only learned about it five years later; by then it was old news and he could accept it, incapable of believing that a son of his could be a fool.

So Charles went back to work and prepared nonstop for the examination, memorizing all the questions in advance. He passed with a respectable grade. What a great day for his mother! They gave him a fine dinner in celebration.

Where would he go to practice his art? To Tostes. There was only one old doctor there. Madame Bovary had been watching and waiting for news of his death for a long time, and the good old man had scarcely packed it in when Charles was installed across the street as his successor.

But it was not enough to have raised her son, to have had him learn medicine and to have discovered Tostes as the place he would practice: he needed a wife. She found him one: the widow of a Dieppe bailiff, who was forty-five, with an income of 1,200 livres.⁹

Although she was ugly, as dried out as an old stick, and as pimpled as a budding springtime, Madame Dubuc nevertheless did not lack for suitors. To achieve her ends, Mother Bovary was obliged to oust them all, and she played her hand so well that she outmaneuvered a pork butcher who had had the support of the priests.

Charles had expected that marriage would mean a better kind of life, imagining that he would be more free, that he would be in charge of both himself and his money. But his wife was the master: in company, he had to say this and not say that, to fast every Friday, to dress the way she wanted, to harass, on her orders, clients who had not paid up. She opened his letters, spied on his comings and goings, and listened through the partition when there were women in his consulting room.

She insisted on her chocolate every morning and made endless demands on him. She complained incessantly about her nerves, her chest, her moods. His footsteps annoyed her; he would go out; solitude became horrible for her; when he returned, she would complain that he had only come back to watch her die. In the evenings when Charles came home, she would extend her long skinny arms from beneath the covers, put them around his neck and, having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, would start to tell him about all her sufferings: he had forgotten her, he was in love with someone else! People had always predicted that she would end up unhappy, and they were right; and she concluded by asking him to give her some medicinal syrup for her health, and also a little more love.

3. On Flaubert’s use of italics, see the Introduction, p. xx.

4. “Quos ego … ”: from Virgil’s Aeneid (I:135). The god Neptune sees a sea storm arising without his permission, and he angrily exclaims this incomplete phrase, which might be translated as “I ought to…. ” He goes on to calm the storm.

5.Ridiculus sum: I am ridiculous.

6. Anacharsis was a pre-Socratic Scythian; sayings attributed to him suggest he was a cynical observer of civilization and an early proponent of the idea of the noble savage. In his French edition of Madame Bovary (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), Thierry Laget suggests that Charles might have been reading the Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthelmy’s Le Voyage du Jeune Anarcharsis (1788), a text that had considerable influence on the French Romantics, especially Chateaubriand.

7. Pierre-Jean Béranger (1780–1857) was a hugely popular poet whose simple, mocking songs were often satiric and sometimes ribald.

8. The health officer (officier de santé) was a kind of sub-doctor, a class created in 1803 to improve medical care in the countryside. The health officer took a far less rigorous course of study than did the medical doctor, and upon graduation his practice was limited to a single district. He was limited in the kinds of operations he could perform without the presence of a medical doctor. The health officer classification was finally eliminated in 1892.

9. The livre was a unit of money whose value fluctuated over time, but in this case it is the equivalent of a franc.

CHAPTER  2

One night around eleven o’clock they were awakened by the sound of a horse stopping right outside their door. The maid opened her attic window and spoke for some time with the man down below, in the street. He had come to find the doctor; he had a letter. Nastasie came down the steps shivering, and went to draw all the bolts, one after the other. The man left his horse, and following the maid, came in right behind her. He pulled a letter, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, from his gray, tasseled wool cap; he handed it gingerly to Charles, who propped his elbow up on the pillow to read it. Nas-tasie, standing close to the bed, held the lamp. Madame, out of modesty, remained turned away, with her back toward them.

The letter, sealed with a little blue wax, entreated Monsieur Bovary to come at once to the farm of Les Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now, from Tostes to Les Bertaux is a good six leagues, past Longueville and Saint-Victor. The night was black. The wife was afraid of her husband having an accident. So it was decided that the stable boy would go on ahead. Charles would set out in three hours when the moon had come up. They would send a boy to meet him, show him the way to the farm, and open the fence gates for him.

About four in the morning, Charles, snugly wrapped up in his cloak, set out for Les Bertaux. Still drowsy with the warmth of sleep, he let himself be rocked by the peaceful gait of his horse. When the horse came to a stop on her own in front of the hollows, planted with thorns, that were dug at the ends of the furrows, Charles, abruptly starting awake, quickly remembered the broken leg, and he racked his memory trying to picture all the fractures he had learned. The rain had stopped falling; day began to break and, on the bare branches of apple trees, birds sat motionless, ruffling their little feathers in the cold wind of the morning.

The flat countryside spread out as far as the eye could see, and the clusters of trees around the farms formed, at distant intervals, little blurred patches of purplish black against the great gray surface that faded, at the horizon, into the bleak tone of the sky. Charles from time to time would open his eyes; then, his mind tiring and sleep returning upon him, he soon drifted into a kind of stupor in which recent events mixed with older memories, in which he seemed to be doubled, both student and husband, lying in his bed as he recently had been, passing through an operating room as he had in the past. The warm scent of poultices blended in his mind with the fresh scent of dew; he heard the tinkling of the curtain rings on the hospital beds and his wife sleeping … As he passed Vassonville, he saw a boy sitting on the grass beside a ditch.

“Are you the doctor?” the child asked.

And, upon Charles’ reply, he took his wooden shoes in his hands and began to run ahead of him.

The health officer, as he rode on, gathered from his guide that Monsieur Rouault must be one of the more prosperous farmers. He had broken his leg the previous evening returning from a faire les Rois¹ party at a neighbor’s. His wife had been dead for two years. He had only his young lady living with him, helping him manage the house.

The ruts were becoming deeper. They were nearing Les Bertaux. The little boy, slipping through a hole in the hedges, disappeared, then reappeared at the edge of a courtyard to open the gate. The horse lost its footing and slipped on the wet grass; Charles had to bend down to pass below the branches. The guard dogs in their kennel howled and pulled at their chains. When they entered into Les Bertaux, his horse took fright and shied away powerfully.

It was a good-looking farm. He could see, through the open doors of the stables, huge workhorses eating leisurely from their new mangers. Alongside the buildings extended a large, steaming dunghill, where among the hens and the turkeys, five or six peacocks—considered luxuries in the Caux farmyards—were pecking for food. The sheepfold was long, the barn high, with walls as smooth as a hand. Within the shed were two large carts and four plows with their whips, their collars, and their harnesses whose blue woolen fleeces were growing soiled from the fine dust that came down from the haylofts. The yard sloped upward, planted with symmetrically spaced trees, and the cheerful sounds of a flock of geese came up from the pond.

A young woman, in a blue wool dress adorned with three flounces, came to the doorway to welcome Monsieur Bovary and to show him into the kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The farmhands’ meal was simmering around it, in small pots of different sizes. Some damp clothes were drying inside the chimney. The scoop, the tongs, and the bellows’ nozzle, all of huge proportions, gleamed like polished steel, while all along the walls hung an abundant supply of kitchen utensils, reflecting the fire’s bright flames in different degrees, mingled with the first rays of the sun coming in through the curtains.

Charles went up to the second floor to see the injured man. He found him in his bed, sweating beneath the blankets and having thrown aside his cotton nightcap. He was a fat, small man of fifty with white skin and blue eyes, bald on the front part of his head, and wearing earrings. He had next to him, on a chain, a big bottle of brandy from which he would occasionally pour himself a glass to give himself courage; but the minute he saw the doctor, his feverish intoxication failed him, and instead of cursing—as he had been for the last twelve hours—he began to moan feebly.

The fracture was a simple one with no complications at all. Charles wouldn’t have dared to wish for anything easier. Then, recalling the bedside manners of his teachers, he comforted the patient with all sorts of soothing words, those medical caresses that are like the oil used to grease scalpels. Then, for splints, a bundle of laths was fetched from the shed. Charles chose one, cut it into pieces, and smoothed it with a piece of broken window glass while the servant tore sheets to make a bandage and Mademoiselle Emma set herself to sewing some pads. When she took too long to find her sewing kit, her father became impatient; she said nothing; but, as she sewed, she would prick her fingers, and then put them in her mouth to suck them.

Charles was amazed at how white her fingernails were. They were gleaming, finely tapered, as polished as Dieppe ivory, and almond-shaped. Yet her hands were not beautiful, certainly not white enough, and a bit dry at the knuckles; and they were too long, with no softness in their contours. What was beautiful about her was her eyes; though they were brown, her eyelashes made them seem black, and she would gaze directly at you with a frank boldness.

The bandages in place, Monsieur Rouault himself invited the doctor to have a bite before leaving.

Charles came down to the dining room on the ground floor. Two place settings, with silver tumblers, had been laid at a small table, at the foot of a large bed whose canopy was decorated with figures representing Turks. The odor of iris and of damp sheets escaped from the high oak armoire that faced the window. On the floor, in the corner, stood upright sacks of wheat. This was the overflow from the granary attached to the house, to which one ascended by three stone steps. For decoration, the room featured a charcoal portrait of Minerva, hanging from a nail in the middle of the wall whose green paint was flaking off from the effects of saltpeter; the portrait, in a gilt frame, had written on it, in Gothic lettering, “To my dear Papa.”

At first they talked about the patient, then the state of the weather, the cold spells, the wolves that ran in the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rouault didn’t much like the country, especially now when she was essentially in sole charge of the farm. Because the room was cold, she shivered as she ate, making her full lips part a little; she had a habit of biting them in moments of silence.

Her neck rose above a white, turned-down collar. Her hair was parted into two black halves so smooth that they each seemed a single piece, the two segments separated by a slender part that followed the curve of her head; and, just barely revealing the tip of her ear, the two bands joined together in the back in a thick chignon, with little waves at the temples, which the country doctor now noticed for the first time in his life. Her cheeks were pink. She wore, as a man would, a pair of tortoise-shell glasses tucked between the buttons of her bodice.

When Charles, after having gone up to say good-bye to the father, came back to the dining room before leaving, he found her standing with her forehead against the window and gazing into the garden where the wind had blown down the bean-props. She turned to him.

“Are you looking for something?” she asked.

“My whip, please,” he replied.

He began to rummage on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs; it had fallen on the floor, between the wheat sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma spotted it; she bent over the sacks. Out of gallantry, Charles rushed to help, and as he extended his own arm to reach for it, he felt his chest brush against the young woman’s back, bent beneath him. She stood up blushing and looked at him over her shoulder as she passed him the riding crop.

Instead of returning to Les Bertaux three days later as he had promised, he came back the very next day, then regularly twice a week, not to mention the unexpected visits he made from time to time, as if by chance.

And everything was going well; the patient had healed according to the rules and when, after a month and a half, people saw the father out trying to walk around his farmyard unaided, they began to think of Monsieur Bovary as a man with great abilities. Rouault said he wouldn’t have had any better treatment from the best doctors in Yvetot or even Rouen.

As for Charles, he never tried to ask himself why it was that he so enjoyed coming to Les Bertaux. If he had, he would no doubt have attributed his zeal to the seriousness of the case, or perhaps to the profit he hoped for from it. But was that the reason that his visits to the farm made such a delightful exception to the boring routines of his life? On those days he would rise early, set off at a gallop, urge his horse on, and then he would get down to wipe his boots on the grass and put on his black gloves before going in. He liked finding himself coming into the courtyard, feeling the gate opening against his shoulder, the rooster crowing on the wall, the farmhands coming to meet him. He liked the barn and the stables; he liked old man Rouault, who patted his hand and called him his savior; he liked the sound of Mademoiselle Emma’s clogs on the scoured kitchen tiles; her heels made her a little taller, and when she walked ahead of him the wooden soles, lifting a bit, clacked with a dry sound against the leather of the ankle boot.

She would always accompany him to the first step of the porch. If his horse was not ready, she would wait there. They had already said good-bye, and now they spoke no more; the fresh air swept around her, lifting up little wisps of hair on the back of her neck, or shaking the apron strings from her hips so that they blew out like streamers. One time, during a thaw, when the bark on the trees was oozing and the snow on the buildings’ roofs was melting, she stood on the threshold; then she went to fetch her umbrella, and she opened it. The umbrella was silk, the color of a pigeon’s breast; when the sun passed through it, it lit up the white skin of her face with flickering glints of light. Beneath it, she smiled at the warm weather; you could hear drops of water, one by one, falling on the taut silk.

During those early times when Charles frequented Les Bertaux, Madame Bovary did not fail to inform herself about the patient and, in her double-columned account book, she had even set aside a fine white page for Monsieur Rouault. But when she learned that he had a daughter, she made inquiries; and she learned that Mademoiselle Rouault had been a student at the Ursuline convent and had received what is called a fine education, which meant that she had learned dancing, geography, drawing, embroidery, and how to play the piano. This was the limit!

So that’s why, she said to herself, he lights up like that when he goes to see her, and why he wears his new waistcoat, even at the risk of getting it soaked in the rain? Oh, that woman! That woman! …

And she detested her instinctively. At first, she unburdened herself by making allusions. Charles didn’t understand them; then she escalated to casual comments, which he ignored for fear of a storm; finally, she let loose with pointblank accusations, which he did not know how to answer. Why was it that he kept going back to Les Bertaux, since Monsieur Rouault was healed and since those people still hadn’t paid up? Ah, it was because there was a certain person there, someone who knew how to make conversation, how to embroider, a clever person! So that was what he liked: he had to have city girls! And she went on:

“Old Rouault’s daughter, a city girl! Come on now! Their grandfather was a shepherd, and they have a cousin who barely escaped being brought up on charges for some criminal act he committed during a quarrel. What’s the point of making such a big display, or showing up on Sunday at church wearing a silk dress like a countess? And anyway, the man is so poor he couldn’t have paid his bills without last year’s rapeseed crop!”

Worn down, Charles ceased returning to Les Bertaux. Héloise had made him swear, his hand on his Sunday missal, that he wouldn’t go back, after countless sighs and tears that ended in a great explosion of love. So he obeyed; but the power of his desire fought against the servility of his behavior, and out of a sort of naïve hypocrisy, he reasoned that this prohibition against seeing her gave him the right to love her. And then, the widow was skinny; her teeth were long; she wore, no matter what the season, a little black shawl that trailed down between her shoulder blades; her bony body was sheathed in too-short dresses that fit her like a scabbard, revealing her ankles and the ribbons of her big shoes crisscrossing her gray stockings.

Charles’ mother came to visit them from time to time, but after a few days the daughter-in-law seemed to whet and hone the mother’s natural sharpness; and then, like a pair of knives, they would set to lacerate him with their comments and observations. He was wrong to eat so much! Why always offer a drink to anyone who stopped by? How pig-headed of him not to wear flannel!

Toward the beginning of spring, it happened that a notary in Ingouville, in charge of the widow Dubuc’s funds, sailed off one fine day with all the money in his custody. True, Héloise retained a share in a boat worth about six thousand francs, as well as her house on the Rue Saint François; but yet, out of all that fortune that had been boasted for so long, nothing had ever turned up in their household beyond a few pieces of furniture and some old clothes. It was time to get things clarified. The Dieppe house turned out to be worm-eaten with mortgages right down to the foundations; as to what she had deposited with her notary, God only knew, and the share in the boat was worth a thousand écus² at most. So, the upstanding lady had lied! Charles’ father, in exasperation, broke a chair against the flagstones, accusing his wife of having brought about their son’s ruin by getting him hitched up with an old nag whose harness wasn’t worth its skin. They came to Tostes. Explanations were made. There were scenes. Héloise, in tears, threw herself into her husband’s arms, begging him to defend her against his parents. Charles tried to take her part. The parents got angry and left.

But the die was cast. One week later, as she was hanging out the laundry in the yard, she abruptly spat up blood, and the next day, while Charles had his back turned to pull the curtain across the window, she said, “Oh! My God!,” let out a sigh, and fell unconscious. She was dead! What a surprise!

When everything at the cemetery was finished, Charles returned home. There was no one on the first floor; he went upstairs to the bedroom, saw her dress still hanging in the alcove; then, leaning against the desk, he remained all evening lost in a sorrowful reverie. She had loved him, after all.

1. The tradition of celebrating the three kings (les Rois) who visited the infant Jesus dates from the sixteenth century; parties sometimes involved three guests dressing up as the three kings (faire les Rois).

2. The écu was an obsolete coin, but the term continued to be used in the nineteenth century for five-franc pieces.

CHAPTER 3

One morning, old Rouault came to bring Charles the payment for setting his leg: seventy-five francs in forty-sou pieces,¹ and a turkey. He had heard of Charles’ misfortune, and he consoled him as best he could.

“I know what it’s like!” he said, clapping him on the shoulder; “I’ve been in your shoes, me too! After I lost my poor wife, I would go out into the fields to be by myself; I would fall at the foot of a tree, I would weep, I would call on the good Lord, I would tell him foolish things. I wanted to be like the moles I saw up in the branches, with worms crawling around in their stomachs, I mean, dead. And when I would think how other men, at that very moment, were together with their fine little wives, holding them tightly up against themselves, I would beat my walking stick against the ground in fury; I was practically mad, I stopped eating; the idea of going to the café by myself was sickening, you wouldn’t believe it. But then, quietly, one day passed and another began, a spring after a winter and an autumn after a summer, and all that flowed away, little by little, crumb by crumb; all that’s gone, it’s all disappeared, or I mean it’s gone down inside, because something always remains deep inside you, so to speak … a weight, here, on the chest! But since we all have the same fate, a person shouldn’t let himself waste away, and want to die just because others have died … You have to shake it off, Monsieur Bovary; it’ll pass! Come see us; my daughter thinks about you now and then, you must know that, and she says that you’re forgetting her. Look, spring is almost here; we’ll get you out and have you shoot a rabbit in our field, to cheer you up a little.”

Charles took his advice. He returned to Les Bertaux. He found everything was just as it had been yesterday, or that is, as it had been five months ago. The pear trees were already in flower, and good old Rouault, fully back on his feet now, was always on the go, making the farm seem even livelier.

Feeling it was his duty to lavish as much kindness on the doctor as possible, because of his sorrowful situation, he begged him not to remove his hat, spoke to him in a low voice as if he had been sick, and even made a show of being angry if the food prepared for him was not lighter than the rest, such as little pots of cream or stewed pears. He told stories. Charles was surprised to find himself laughing; but the memory of his wife, coming over him suddenly, sobered him again. Coffee was served; he thought no more about her.

He thought about her less as he grew used to living alone. The pleasure of independence very soon made solitude more endurable. He could change his meal times, come in or leave with no explanations and, when he was tired, stretch out completely across his bed. And thus he pampered himself, indulged himself, and accepted the consolations people offered him. Moreover, the death of his wife had by no means hurt his practice, as people kept repeating for a month, “The poor young man! What a tragedy!” His reputation spread, and his clientele grew; and then he could go to Les Bertaux whenever he felt like it. He felt a hope without any particular object, a vague happiness; he thought his face looked more pleasing, as he brushed his sideburns before his mirror.

One day he arrived about three o’clock; everyone was out in the fields; he went in the kitchen, but at first failed to see Emma; the shutters were closed. Through the wooden slats, the sun’s long thin rays stretched down to the tiles, broke across the corners of the furniture, and trembled on the ceiling. Some flies on the table crawled up the length of glasses that had been left out, buzzing as they drowned in the leftover cider at the bottom. The light coming in from the chimney turned the soot in the back of the fireplace velvety and gave a slightly blue tint to the cold ashes. Between the window and the hearth, Emma was sewing; she had no shawl on, and he could see tiny drops of sweat on her bare shoulders.

Following the country custom, she offered him something to drink. He refused, she insisted, and finally she suggested with a laugh that he take a glass of liqueur with her. Then she went to find a bottle of curaçao in the cupboard, reached for two small glasses, filled one to the brim, poured scarcely any in the other and, after clinking glasses with him, raised it to her mouth. Because it was nearly empty, she had to lean back in order to drink, and, with her head tilted back, her lips pouted, her neck extended, she laughed at getting nothing, while the tip of her tongue, passing between her small teeth, licked the bottom of the glass in short thrusts.

She sat back down and picked up her work again, which was a white cotton stocking she was darning: she worked with her head lowered; she didn’t talk anymore. Nor did Charles. The breeze, passing below the door, blew a little dust along the tiles; he watched it blow along, and he heard only the pounding within his head and the distant cry of a hen laying an egg in the barnyard. From time to time Emma would cool her cheeks by pressing the palms of her hands against them, and she would cool the palms in turn against the iron knobs of the andirons.

She complained of feeling some dizziness with the onset of the new season; she asked if ocean bathing would be helpful; she began to chat about her convent, Charles about his school; words came easily. They went upstairs to her room. She showed him her old music notebooks, the little books she had been given as prizes, and some oak-leaf wreaths that had been abandoned in the armoire. And she spoke about her mother, about the cemetery, and even showed him the flower bed in the garden from which she gathered flowers, the first Friday of every month, to take to her grave. But their gardener didn’t understand anything; they had such poor servants. She would have liked very much to live in town, if only during the winter, although the long summer days might make the country even more boring then. Her voice changed according to her topic; it would be clear and sharp or, suddenly turning languorous, would trail off into modulations that were almost murmurs when she spoke about herself—sometimes she was joyous, with naïve, wide eyes, and then, with eyelids half closed, her gaze steeped in boredom, her thoughts would wander.

Returning home that night, Charles went over everything she had said, trying to remember, to interpret her meanings, to imagine the life she had lived before he knew her. But he never could visualize her any way other than the way she was when he first saw her, or as she was when he had just left her. Then he asked himself what she would be like if she were to get married, and to whom? Alas, old Rouault was very rich, and she was … so beautiful! But Emma’s face rose continually before his eyes, and a monotonous sound like the humming of a top buzzed in his ears: “But what if you were to marry! If you were to marry!” That night, he couldn’t sleep, his throat was tight, he was thirsty; he got up to drink from his water jug and he opened the window; the sky was covered with stars, a warm wind was blowing; far away, some dogs were barking. He turned his head toward Les Bertaux.

Thinking that, after all, he was risking nothing, Charles resolved to ask the question when the occasion presented itself; but every time it did, the fear of not finding the right words kept his lips shut tight.

Old Rouault would not have minded seeing someone take his daughter off his hands; she was of little use to him in the house. Inwardly, he excused her, feeling she was too intelligent for farming, that occupation cursed by heaven, because it never made anybody a millionaire. Far from having made his fortune in it, the old fellow actually lost money every year: for while he excelled at the market, where the wiliness that was needed suited him, the actual farming, on the other hand, along with the running of the household, agreed with him not at all. He kept his hands stuffed tightly in his pockets, but he spared no expense when it came to his own comforts, desiring to be well fed, to be warm enough, and to have a comfortable bed. He liked his cider strong, his mutton rare, and his glorias² carefully prepared. He liked his meals in the kitchen, alone, facing the fire, on a little table that was brought to him already set, as at a theater.

When he perceived that Charles was blushing around his daughter, which meant that one of these days he would ask for her in marriage, he carefully thought the whole thing out in advance. He found Charles a bit of a runt, and not the kind of man he would have wished for; but people said he conducted himself well, was thrifty, well educated, and there was no doubt he wouldn’t dicker much over the dowry. Now, because Old Rouault was going to be forced to sell twenty-two acres of his place, because he owed a lot to the mason, and a lot to the saddler, because the winepress needed repair:

“If he asks me for her,” he said to himself, “I’ll give her to him.”

At the feast of Saint Michael in September, Charles came to spend three days at Les Bertaux. The third day passed just like the preceding ones, with him putting the matter off from one quarter of an hour to the next. Old Rouault was seeing him off; they were walking down a rutted path, about to say good-bye; it was the moment. Charles gave himself until they reached the corner of the hedgerow, and finally, when they had passed it:

“Monsieur Rouault,” he muttered, “I’d like to tell you something.”

They stopped. Charles froze.

“But tell me what you have to say! As if I didn’t already know it!” said old Rouault, with a gentle laugh.

“Father Rouault … father Rouault,” Charles stammered.

“As for me, I couldn’t ask for anything better,” the farmer continued. “And the little one certainly feels the way I do, but still we have to ask her. You go on; I’ll go back to the house. If it’s yes, now follow me here, you won’t have to come back, because people will see, and anyway she’ll be too stirred up. But so you won’t have to eat your heart out with worry, I’ll push open the window shutter wide against the wall; you’ll be able to see it from the back, if you lean over the hedge.”

And he walked off.

Charles tied his horse to a tree. He ran to take up his place on the path; he waited. A half hour passed, and then he counted nineteen more minutes with his watch. Suddenly there was a noise against the wall; the shutter was opened; its hook was still rattling.

The next day at nine o’clock, he was at the farm. Emma blushed when he came in, but forced a little laughter to keep her composure. The father embraced his future son-in-law. They put off talking about the arrangements; in any case, they had plenty of time, since the wedding could not decently take place before the end of Charles’ mourning period, that is, around the spring of the following year.

The winter passed in waiting. Mademoiselle Rouault busied herself with her trousseau. Part of it was ordered from Rouen, and she made chemises and nightcaps herself from fashion designs she borrowed. During Charles’ visits to the farm, they would talk over the preparations for the wedding, consider what room would be best for the dinner, and think over the number of dishes needed and what entrees they would have.

Emma herself had other ideas: she wanted to get married at midnight with torchlight; but her father couldn’t understand such a notion. And so there was a wedding, one to which forty-three people came, and at which they sat at the table for sixteen hours, the whole process beginning again the next day and to a lesser extent on the days following.

1. The sou, a coin created during the Revolution, was worth 5 centimes, 1/20th of a franc.

2. A gloria is a warm drink, a mix of coffee, sugar, and either brandy or rum.

CHAPTER 4

The guests arrived early in their vehicles—one-horse carts, two-wheeled wagons, old open cabriolets,¹ vans with leather curtains—and the young people from the nearby villages came in wagons, standing upright in rows, hanging on to the railings to keep from falling off, moving along at a trot and thoroughly jolted about. People came from ten leagues off, from Goderville, from Normanville, and from Cany. Relatives of both families had been invited; they had reconciled with estranged friends; they had written to acquaintances long forgotten.

From time to time the crack of whips could be heard from behind the hedge; soon the gate opened; it was a cart coming in. Galloping up to the porch’s first step, it stopped short and emptied its group, who got out from all sides, rubbing knees and stretching arms. The women, bonneted, wore dresses in city fashions, gold watch chains, capes with their ends tucked into their belts, or little colored scarves pinned behind, revealing the backs of their necks. The boys, dressed just like their papas, looked uncomfortable in their new suits (many of them were even breaking in, that very day, the first pair of boots in their lives), and near them could be seen some big girl of fourteen or sixteen, not breathing a word and wearing a white First-Communion dress lengthened for the occasion, a cousin or an older sister no doubt, ruddy, stunned-looking, hair greased with rose-pomade, greatly fearful of soiling her gloves. Since there weren’t enough stable boys to unharness all the vehicles, the gentlemen rolled up their sleeves and took care of it themselves. In accordance with their varying social positions, they wore suits, frock coats, hunting jackets, or waistcoats—good suits, painstakingly cared for by a family, only allowed to leave the armoire for important occasions; frock coats with long tails afloat in the wind, with cylindrical collars and pockets big as sacks; jackets of coarse cloth, usually accompanied by caps with copper-rimmed visors; short waistcoats with two small buttons on the back close together like a pair of eyes, and tails that looked as if they had been cut from a single block by a carpenter’s axe. And some others (but these, to be sure, would be seated at the lower end of the table) wore their better smocks, that is, with the collar turned down over the shoulder, the back gathered in little pleats, and the waistline very low and marked by a sewn-on belt.

And the shirts over the chests swelled like breastplates! Everyone’s hair was freshly cut, ears sticking out of heads, everyone closely shaved; and some who had arisen before dawn, unable to see well enough for shaving, had diagonal gashes under their noses or, along the length of their jaws, scrapes the size of three-franc pieces, which had been inflamed by the fresh air on the way there, pink patches giving a marbled effect to all the fat, white, shining faces.

The mayor’s office being about half a league from the farm, they went there on foot; and they returned the same way after the church service. The procession, united at first like a single, long, colored scarf undulating over the countryside, all along the narrow path winding between green wheat fields, soon stretched out and broke up into different groups, some of which stopped to chat. The village fiddler led the way, his violin decorated with ribbons on its shell; the newlyweds followed, then the relatives, the friends in no particular order, and the children stayed in the rear, amusing themselves by pulling out the ears of young oat shoots, or playing among themselves out of the adults’ sight. Emma’s dress, too long, dragged a little at the bottom; now and then she stopped to lift it, and then, delicately, with her gloved fingers she would pluck off the coarse grass and little burrs of thistle while Charles, his hands empty, would wait until she was done. Her father, a new silk hat on his head and the cuffs of his black suit covering his hands down to the fingernails, gave his arm to Charles’ mother. As for Charles’ father who, contemptuous of all these people, had come dressed simply in a frock coat of military cut with a single row of buttons, he was reeling off roadhouse gallantries to a young blond peasant. She curtsied and blushed, not knowing how to respond. The other wedding guests chatted about business or played practical jokes on each other, working themselves up in advance for the party; and, if they listened carefully, they could still hear the screeching of the village fiddler who continued to play through the countryside. When he realized they were all far behind him, he stopped to catch his breath, waxed his bow carefully with resin so the strings would produce a louder squeak, and then he set himself to walking on, raising and lowering the violin’s neck to keep time for himself. The instrument’s noise frightened off little birds from far away.

The table was set in the cart shed. On it were four sirloins, six chicken fricassees, stewed veal, three legs of lamb, and, in the middle, a fine roast suckling pig, flanked by four sorrel sausages. At the corners stood decanters of brandy. The bottles of sweet cider frothed around their corks, and all the glasses were already filled to the brim with wine. Big plates of yellow custard shuddered at the slightest bump of the table; they had the initials of the newlyweds traced on their smooth surfaces in arabesques of sugared almonds. They had had to go to Yvetot to find a baker for the pies and sweets. Because he was new to the area, he took extra care with things; and he personally delivered, for dessert, a layer cake that elicited cheers. At its base, first, it was a blue cardboard square that represented a temple, with porticoes, colonnades, and little stucco statuettes all around, with constellations of gilt paper stars in the niches; then, on the second stage, there was a dungeon made of Savoy cake entirely surrounded by tiny fortifications of angelica, almonds, raisins, and slices of oranges; and finally, on the topmost platform, which was a green meadow with rocks and lakes of jam and boats made of hazelnut shells, appeared a little Cupid balancing himself on a chocolate swing, whose two posts ended in two real rosebuds for knobs at their tops.

Until night fell, they ate. When they grew tired of sitting, they went for walks in the yard or played a game of bouchon² in the barn, and then returned to the table. Toward the end, some fell asleep and snored. But when the coffee was served, everything came back to life; then they began singing, did feats of strength, lifted heavy weights, played finger games, tried lifting carts on their shoulders, told bawdy jokes, kissed the women. At night when they left, the horses, stuffed to the nostrils with oats, could barely fit into the shafts; they kicked, they reared, their harnesses broke, their masters cursed or laughed; and all night long, by the light of the moon on the country roads, there were runaway carts hurtling along at a gallop, plunging into holes, leaping over the milestones, climbing up embankments, with women leaning out trying to catch hold of the reins.

Those who stayed at Les Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen. The children had fallen asleep under the benches.

The bride had begged her father to be spared the customary wedding-night jokes. But among their cousins was a fishmonger (who had actually brought, as a wedding present, a pair of soles) who was about to spit water from his mouth through the keyhole when Monsieur Rouault came just in time to stop him, explaining that the distinguished position of his son-in-law would not admit of such improprieties. The cousin, all the same, did not readily give in to this reasoning. In his heart he accused the father of being stuck up, and he went off to join four or five other guests in a corner who, by chance, had been served the poorest cuts of meat several times, who also believed they had been ill-used, and who sat muttering about their host and hinting at their hopes for his ruin.

Madame Bovary senior had not opened her mouth all day. No one had consulted her either about her daughter-in-law’s dress or about the arrangements for the feast; she went to bed early. Her husband, instead of following her, sent to Saint-Victor for cigars and stayed up smoking until daybreak, all the while drinking a punch made with kirsch, a mixture unknown to the others, which raised him even higher in their estimation.

Charles was decidedly not a joker, and he did not shine at the wedding.He responded rather weakly to the witty remarks, puns, double-entendres, compliments, and ribaldries that everyone felt obligated to hurl at him as early as the soup course.

The next day, on the other hand, he seemed to be a new man. He was the one who might have been taken for a virgin the night before, whereas the bride let nothing show from which anything could be inferred. Even the cleverest did not know what to think, and they watched her pass near them in utter perplexity. But Charles concealed nothing. He called her his wife, used the familiar tu with her, asked everyone where she was, looked everywhere for her, and often pulled her out into the yard with him, where he could be seen from a distance among the trees, putting his arm around her and walking along half-bent over her, rumpling the front of her bodice with his head.

Two days after the wedding, the new couple left: Charles could not stay away any longer because of his patients. Emma’s father sent them off in his cart and went with them as far as Vassonville. There, he kissed his daughter one last time, got down off the cart and started on his way back home. When he had gone about a hundred paces he stopped, and as he watched the cart moving away, its wheels turning up the dust, he heaved a great sigh. Then he remembered his own wedding, his own younger days, his wife’s first pregnancy; he had been joyful then, he too, on the day he carried her off from her father’s house, her behind him on the horse, trotting through the snow; for it was near Christmas, and the countryside had been all white; she held onto him with one arm, and her basket with the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois bonnet, so that it drifted sometimes across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw close to him, on his shoulder, her little pink face silently smiling under her bonnet’s gold ornament. To warm her fingers, she put them from time to time next to his chest. How long ago all that was! Their son, today, would be thirty.

Then he looked behind him and saw nothing on the road. He felt sad, like an emptied house; and these tender memories mixing with the dark thoughts in his brain, which was befogged by the vapors of the feast, he felt strongly inclined for a moment to take a detour toward the church. But because he feared that seeing it would make him even sadder, he went straight home.

Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived at Tostes about six o’clock. The neighbors stationed themselves at the windows to get a sight of their doctor’s new wife.

The old servant introduced herself, made her greetings to Emma, apologized for not having dinner ready, and suggested that Madame, while she waited, get acquainted with her house.

1. A cabriolet was a light, one-horse carriage, seating only two people.

2. The game of bouchon involves knocking down a board on which pieces of money are balanced.

CHAPTER 5

The house’s brick front was flush with the street, or rather the road. Behind the door hung a narrow-collared coat, a bridle, and a black leather cap, and, in a corner on the ground, a pair of leather leggings covered in dried mud. To the right was a combination dining and sitting room. Canary-yellow wallpaper, set off toward the top by a garland of pale flowers, shook loosely on its poorly hung canvas underlayer, white calico curtains with a red braided border hung open the length of the windows, and on the chimney’s narrow mantle, a clock with a head of Hippocrates gleamed between two silver-plated candlesticks with oval shades. On the other side of the corridor was Charles’ consulting room, a small room about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and a desk chair. The volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Sciences, their pages uncut but their bindings roughened from having suffered through a succession of sales, adorned almost alone the six shelves of a pinewood bookcase. During consultations, the smell of cooking butter penetrated through the wall, just as, in the kitchen, one heard the patients coughing in the consulting room and reciting their life stories. Next, opening directly onto the yard where the stable was, came a large dilapidated room with an oven, serving now as a wood shed, wine cellar, and storeroom, filled with old scrap metal, empty barrels, disused farm tools, and a heap of other dusty items whose purpose was impossible to guess.

The garden, longer than it was wide, ran between two clay walls covered by apricot trees and ended at a thorny hedge that separated it from the fields. In the middle there was a slate-grey sundial on a brick pedestal; four thin wild-rose bushes bounded the more useful vegetable patch. At the very back, beneath the spruce trees, a plaster curé was reading his breviary.

Emma went upstairs to the bedrooms. The first was entirely unfurnished; but the second, which was their nuptial chamber, had a mahogany bedstead set in an alcove with red curtains. A shell box adorned the chest of drawers; and on the writing desk near the window stood a bouquet of orange blossoms in a carafe, tied with white satin ribbons. It was a bridal bouquet, the bouquet of the other woman! She gazed at it. Charles saw this, and he picked it up and carried it to the attic while Emma, seating herself in an armchair (they were setting her things down around her), thought of her own wedding flowers, packed away in a box, and asked herself, in a kind of daydream, what would become of them if by chance she were to die.

She busied herself, those first days, in considering changes to be made to the house. She removed the shades from the candlesticks, had new wallpaper put up, had the staircase repainted, and had benches made for the garden, around the sundial; she even inquired how she could have a pond installed with fish and a fountain. Finally her husband, knowing she liked to go out for drives, found a secondhand cart that, once it was outfitted with new lamps and a mudguard of padded leather, looked almost like a tilbury.¹

He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal alone together, an evening walk along the highway, a gesture she would make in fixing her hair, the sight of her straw hat hung on the window latch, and many other things as well that Charles had never suspected could give him pleasure—these now constituted his continuing happiness. In bed in the morning, side by side on the pillow, he watched the sunlight passing over the blond down on her cheeks, half covered by the scalloped edge of her nightcap. Seen from so close, her eyes looked enlarged to him, especially when she blinked them rapidly several times upon awaking; black in the shade and dark blue in the daylight, they seemed to have successive strata of colors, darker in their depths, becoming lighter closer to the eye’s surface. And his own eyes lost themselves in those depths, and he saw himself there in miniature down to his shoulders, wearing his kerchief, the top of his shirt open. He would get up. She would place herself at the window to watch him leave; and she would stay leaning on the windowsill, between two geranium pots, dressed in the peignoir which hung loosely around her. Charles, in the street, would buckle his spurs, his foot on the mounting-block; and she would continue to talk to him from above while biting off a scrap of flower or leaf and blowing it toward him; fluttering, floating, it would make semicircles in the air like a bird until it caught in the poorly-groomed mane of the old white horse standing motionless before the door. Charles, on horseback, would blow her a kiss; she would answer with a wave, close the window, and he would ride off. And then, along the highway stretching out its long ribbon of dust endlessly, along the empty roads beneath the bending tree branches, along the paths where the wheat rose up almost to his knees, with the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart filled with the joys of the night before, his spirit at rest, his flesh contented, he would ride on, ruminating his happiness like those who, after dinner, continue to taste the truffles they are digesting.

Where had been the good in his life before now? Was it during his time in school, when he stayed shut up inside the high walls, alone amidst companions richer than him, or better than him at their schoolwork, who made fun of his clothes, who were amused by his accent, whose mothers came to the visitors’ parlor with cakes in their muffs? Or was it later, when he was studying medicine, and never had a wallet fat enough to pay for a dance with some little working girl who might have become his mistress? And then he had lived fourteen months with the widow whose feet in bed were cold as icicles. But now, he possessed for life this pretty woman whom he adored. The universe, for him, was bounded by the silky flounces of her petticoat; he reproached himself for not loving her enough; he wanted to see her again; he would hurry back home, climb the staircase with his heart pounding. Emma, in her room, was dressing; he would come up behind her silently and kiss her back, and she would cry out.

He could not keep himself from constantly touching her comb, her rings, her shawl; sometimes, he would press big, full-mouthed, smacking kisses on her cheeks, or else trail a long row of little kisses along her bare arm, from her fingertips to her shoulders; and, half-smiling and half-irritated, she would push him away, the way one does with a clinging child.

Before she had married, she had believed herself to be in love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from this love had not arrived, she thought that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wanted to know exactly what people meant in life by words like bliss, like passion and intoxication, words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

1. A tilbury was a fashionable two-wheeled carriage with no top.

CHAPTER 6

She had read Paul et Virginie,¹ and she had fantasized about the little bamboo cottage, the Negro Domingo, the dog Fidèle, but even more the sweet friendship of some good little brother who would go and gather ripe fruits for you from great trees taller than spires, or who would run barefoot in the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.

When she was thirteen, her father had taken her to town himself to place her in the convent school. They stopped at an inn in the Saint-Gervais quarter, where they ate from painted plates depicting the story of Mademoiselle de la Vallière.² The explanatory legends, cut into here and there by the scraping of knives, glorified religion, the delicacies of the heart, and the pomps of the court, all at the same time.

Far from being bored in the convent at first, she enjoyed the company of the good sisters who, to amuse her, took her to the chapel, which was linked to the refectory by a long corridor. She did not play much during recreation periods, learning her catechism well, and she was the one who could always answer the vicar’s more difficult questions. Living thus, without ever leaving the warm, close atmosphere of classrooms and among those pale-faced women wearing rosaries with brass crucifixes, she drowsed softly in the mystic languor exhaled by the scents of the altar, the coolness of the holy water fonts, and the glow of the candles. Instead of following the Mass, she would gaze upon the pious little illustrations, with azure borders, in her missal, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced by sharp arrows, and poor Jesus, who stumbled as He carried His cross. She tried to mortify herself by going without food for a whole day. She tried to think of some vow she could fulfill.

When she went to confession, she would make up little sins in order to stay there as long as she could, on her knees in the darkness, hands joined together, her face close to the grill, below the priest’s whispers. The analogies of fiancé, spouse, heavenly lover, and eternal marriage that recurred in the sermons aroused an unexpected sweetness in the depths of her soul.

In the evening before prayers, there was a religious reading in the study. During the week this would be some brief segment of sacred history or selections from the Abbé Frayssinous’ Lectures,³ and on Sunday, passages from the Génie du Christianisme.⁴ How she listened, those first times, to the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholy, echoing throughout the earth and all eternity! If she had spent her childhood in some back apartment in a business district, she might perhaps have been open to those lyrical invasions of Nature which normally reach us only through the interpretations of writers. But she knew the countryside all too well; she knew the lowing of herds, the milking, the plows. Accustomed to the calm side of things, she turned instead to the unpredictable. She loved the sea only for its tempests, and greenery only when it was scattered among ruins. She had to be able to take some personal profit out of things; and she rejected as useless anything that did not contribute to her heart’s immediate gratification—being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, seeking out emotions rather than landscapes.

There was an old maid at the convent who came for a week each month to mend the linen. She was protected by the Archbishop because she belonged to an old, noble family ruined in the Revolution, and she ate at the refectory with the nuns, chatting with them after dinner before returning to her work. The girls often slipped out of the study to go visit with her. She knew by heart the love songs of the previous century, and she sang them softly as she continued sewing. She would tell stories, bring news to you, do errands for you in town, and would secretly lend the older girls some novel, which she always carried in the pocket of her apron, long chapters of which she herself would consume during her breaks. It was always nothing but love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in deserted pavilions, postilions⁵ killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, somber forests, troubled hearts, oaths, sighs, tears, and kisses, gondolas in the moonlight, nightingales in groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous like nobody really is, always well dressed, pouring out tears like so many water jars. For six months, at the age of fifteen, Emma fouled her hands with this dust from old reading rooms. Later, with Walter Scott, she became smitten with historical subjects, fantasizing about old chests, guardrooms, and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, beneath trefoiled arches, spent their days leaning on stone balconies, chin in hand, watching a white-plumed knight on a black horse galloping toward them from the distant countryside. At that time she subscribed to the cult of Mary Stuart, and passionately venerated illustrious or doomed women. Joan of Arc, Héloise, Agnes Sorel, la belle Ferronière,⁶ and Clémence Isaure⁷ stood out for her like comets from the shadowy immensity of history, from which also emerged here and there, more nearly lost in darkness and unrelated to each other, Saint Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, some of Louis XI’s savageries, a bit of Saint Bartholomew, the Béarnais’ plume, and always the memory of those painted plates that praised Louis XIV.

In music class, the ballads she sang were full of little, golden-winged angels, Madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers, peaceful compositions that allowed her, despite the inanity of the style and the sloppiness of the music, a glimpse of the seductive phantasmagoria of sentimental realities. Some of her friends brought into the convent keepsake books⁸ that they had received as gifts. These had to be hidden, with a great deal of fuss; they would read them in the dormitory. Handling their beautiful satin bindings delicately, Emma fixed her dazzled gaze on the names of unknown authors who usually had signed their pieces as “count” or “viscount.”

She would tremble, her breath lifting the tissue paper from the engraving, which rose up in a double fold and sank back softly upon the page. There, behind a balcony’s balustrade, was a young man in a short cloak, holding tightly in his arms a young girl in a white dress with an alms purse hanging from her belt; or there were unnamed portraits of English ladies with blond curls who, beneath their round straw hats, gazed out at you with large clear eyes. Some could be seen relaxing in their carriages, gliding through parks, a greyhound leaping ahead in front of the horses being driven at a trot by two small postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming on couches beside an opened letter, contemplated the moon through a partly opened window half draped by a black curtain. Naïve ones, with one tear on their cheeks, were kissing a dove through the bars of a gothic cage, or smiling, their heads leaned to one side, were plucking the petals of a daisy with their tapered fingers, which curved like pointed slippers. And you were there also, you sultans with your long pipes, swooning under arbors in the arms of dancing girls, giaours,⁹ Turkish sabers, Greek caps, and above all you pallid landscapes of extravagant lands, which often present to us all at once palm trees and pines, tigers on the right with a lion on the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon, Roman ruins in the foreground, and then crouching camels; the whole framed by a well-tended virgin forest, with a great perpendicular sunbeam flickering on the water where, standing out in white scratches on a steel-gray background, swans are swimming.

And the oil-lamp’s shade, hung from the wall over Emma’s head, illuminated all these tableaus of the world, passing before her one after the other in the dormitory’s silence, which was broken only by the distant sounds of some belated carriage still rolling across the boulevards.

When her mother died, she cried a great deal for the first few days. She had a funeral picture made of the deceased’s hair, and she sent a long letter to Les Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, in which she asked to be buried herself, when the time came, in the same grave. Her father thought she must be sick and came to see her. Emma was inwardly pleased at having achieved on her first try that rare ideal of pallid existences that mediocre spirits never attain. She thus let herself glide into Lamartinian meanderings,¹⁰ hearing harps on the lakes, all the songs of dying swans, all the falling leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the eternal echoing in the valleys. She grew bored with it, refused to admit it, continued out of habit, then out of vanity, and was at last startled to realize she was healed, with no more sadness in her heart than wrinkles on her brow.

The good sisters, who had been so certain of her vocation, began to see, to their astonishment, that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping from their hands. They had in fact showered on her so many prayers, retreats, novenas, and sermons, so thoroughly preached the respect due to saints and martyrs, and given so much good counsel about bodily modesty and the soul’s salvation, that she reacted the way a horse does when the bridle is too tight: she stopped short and the bit slipped from her teeth. Her nature, positive when amid its own enthusiasms, having loved the church for its flowers, music for its romantic lyrics, and literature for its emotional excitements, rebelled against the mysteries of faith precisely in proportion to her irritation with discipline, which had always been repugnant to her temperament. When her father came to take her from the school, no one was sorry to see her go. The mother superior even thought that she had recently started to become irreverent toward the community.

Emma, at home again, amused herself at first by taking charge of the servants, and then she began to detest the country and missed her convent. When Charles came to Les Bertaux for the first time, she thought of herself as entirely disillusioned, having nothing more to learn and nothing more to feel.

But the anxiety that came with her new status, or perhaps the irritation caused by the presence of this man, had been enough to make her believe that she at last knew that marvelous passion that, up to now, had seemed like a great pink-winged bird soaring in the splendor of poetic skies; and she could not believe, now, that this very calm in which she was living was the happiness of her dreams.

1.Paul et Virginie (1788) was a highly popular sentimental novel byBernardin de Saint-Pierre, set on the island of Mauritius, which is a kind of unspoiled Eden for the two young lovers.

2. Mademoiselle de la Vallière (1644–1700) was a mistress of LouisXIV; when a younger woman won his attentions, she went into a convent and became widely known and beloved for her piety.Plates depicting stages in her life story, like the one here, were common.

3. The lectures of Abbé Denis de Frayssinous (1765–1841) weredelivered in Paris between 1802 and 1822 and were published in book form in 1825 as Défense du chris-tianisme.

4. Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme (1802) arguedpowerfully for religion’s role in satisfying the innate human desire for the infinite; another of its points, alsoimportant for Emma’s character, was its insistence that the good and the beautiful are one.

5. When a coach was drawn by a pair or more of horses, often a postilionwould be employed to ride one of the first horses to guide the team.

6.La belle ferronière is a widely reproduced Renaissance portrait,possibly by Da Vinci; it was purchased by the Louvre in the early nineteenth century. A ferronière is a jeweledchain worn around the forehead by women in the sixteenth century. There is an old, erroneous tradition about a Madame Ferronwho was said to be a mistress of King François I, and the portrait was said to be of her (which would make the termferronière an ingenious pun); Flaubert may mean to suggest that Emma has read some version of this story.

7. Clémence Isaure lived in Toulouse in the fourteenth century; shefounded the Académie des Jeux Floraux, an institute dedicated to the poetry of the troubadours; as its name may suggest,it honored the best poets with garlands of flowers, and it still exists today.

8. A keepsake (Flaubert uses the English word) was a kind of anthologypopular in both England and France in the early nineteenth century; expensively produced and lavishly illustrated, keepsakestypically printed poems and stories by “society” writers, many of them amateurs whose appeal lay in theiraristocratic names.

9. The giaour—a Turkish term for an infidel or non-Muslim—hadbecome a standard romantic literary figure following Lord Byron’s enormously popular narrative poem, The Giaour(1812).

10. Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was one of the great FrenchRomantic poets; his work tends to the meditative and elegiac, with the kind of imagery mentioned here. WhenMadameBovary was published in 1857, Flaubert was pleasantly surprised to hear that Lamartine had praised it enthusiastically.

CHAPTER 7

She thought sometimes, however, that these were the most beautiful days of her life, the honeymoon, as they called it. To taste its real sweetness, it would no doubt have been necessary to travel to those countries with the sonorous names where the first days of a marriage are passed in exquisite idleness. In a post chaise, behind blue silk shades, one would slowly climb up steep, craggy roads, hearing the postilion’s song echo through the mountains along with the goats’ bells and the muffled sound of the waterfall. When the sun went down, one would inhale the scent of lemon trees on the gulf shores; then, in the evening, alone and holding hands on the villa’s terrace, one would gaze at the stars while making future plans. It seemed to her that happiness must be a product of certain places on the earth, like a plant that needs a particular soil and dies out anywhere else. Why couldn’t she lean on the balcony of a Swiss chalet or bury her sorrows in a Scottish cottage, with a husband wearing a black velvet suit with long coattails, wearing soft boots, a pointed hat, and long cuffs!

She would have perhaps liked someone to confide in about all these things. But how to express an elusive uneasiness that changes its shape as the clouds do, that swirls like the wind? She lacked the words for it, as well as an occasion, as well as the courage.

But if Charles had wanted, if he had even suspected, if his gaze had just once managed to align with her thoughts, she felt, it would have been as if a great weight had been lifted from her heart, the way fruit falls from a tree when it’s shaken. But as the intimacy of their life together increased, an inner emotional detachment was growing within her, and distancing her from him.

Conversation from Charles was flat as a sidewalk, and every idea that walked over it was dressed in ordinary clothes, arousing neither emotion, nor laughter, nor reverie. He had never felt curious enough, he said, the whole time he lived in Rouen, to go see the visiting Parisian actors at the theater. He didn’t know how to swim, nor how to fence, nor how to handle a pistol, and one day, he could not even explain an equestrian term she had run across in a novel.

But a man—shouldn’t he know everything, excel in many, varied activities, initiate you into passion’s energies, into the refinements of life, into all its mysteries? But this one—he taught nothing, knew nothing, desired nothing. He believed that she was happy; and she resented that placid calm, that dull serenity, the very happiness she gave to him.

Sometimes she would draw; and for Charles it was a great delight to stand upright near her and watch her as she bent over her drawing board, her eyes squinting to see her work better, or as she rolled little bread pellets between her fingers for erasers. And as for the piano playing, the faster her fingers flew, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with assurance, running up and down the keyboard from top to bottom without a break. Shaken thus by her, the old instrument with its frayed strings could be heard at the other end of the village if the window were open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing bareheaded on the highway, wearing his moccasins, would stop to listen to her, his sheet of paper in his hand.

Emma, moreover, did know how to run the house. She sent patients the bills for their visits using such well-turned phrases that they didn’t sound like bills. When, on a Sunday, they would have some neighbor over for dinner, she found a way to present some tasty dish, knew how to arrange pyramids of greengages on vine leaves, or preserves served turned up on a plate, and she even spoke of buying fingerbowls for dessert. All this resulted in greater public admiration for Bovary.

And Charles also ended up thinking more highly of himself for possessing such a wife. He proudly pointed out, in the sitting room, two of her small pencil sketches that he had had put in very large frames and hung against the wallpaper with long green cords. People coming back after Mass would see him in his doorway wearing fine needlepoint slippers.

He would get back home late, at ten o’clock or sometimes even midnight. At those times he would ask for supper, and since the maid was asleep, Emma would serve him. He would take off his coat so as to dine more comfortably. He would tell her, one after another, about every person he had run into, the villages he had been in and the prescriptions he had written, and, pleased with himself, he would finish off the stew, peel his cheese, munch on an apple, empty his carafe, and then take himself off to bed, lying on his back and snoring.

Since he had long been used to wearing a nightcap, his scarf would not stay in place around his ears; so his hair, in the morning, was flattened and askew all around his face and whitened from the feathers of the pillow, whose drawstrings had come undone during the night. He always wore heavy boots that had two thick creases over the instep running obliquely toward the ankles, whereas the rest of the boots’ uppers ran in a straight line, as if stretched over a wooden leg. He said they were good enough for the country.

This economy won his mother’s approval; for she came to visit him as before, whenever there had been some violent little blowup at her house; and yet, Madame Bovary the elder seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She found her living too high above her station in life; firewood, sugar, and candles flew away like the place was some great mansion, and the amount of coal burned in the kitchen would have been enough for twenty-five meals! She arranged the linen in Emma’s dresser and taught her to keep a close eye on the butcher when he delivered the meat. Emma tolerated these lessons; her mother-in-law lavished them on her; and the words my daughter and my mother were exchanged all day long, accompanied by a slight quivering about the lips, each one speaking gentle words in a voice trembling with rage.

Back in the era of Madame Dubuc, the old woman could still believe she was the favorite; but now Charles’ love for Emma seemed to her to be a betrayal of her affection, an intrusion into what belonged to her; and she observed her son’s happiness with a quiet sorrow, the way a bankrupt watches, through the windows, people dining in what was once his house. She would remind him, in the guise of reminiscences, of all her troubles and sacrifices, and, comparing these with Emma’s carelessness, she would conclude that it was not at all rational for him to adore her so exclusively.

Charles didn’t know how to respond; he respected his mother, and he loved his wife beyond all limits; he considered the judgment of the one to be infallible, but he also found the other to be beyond reproach. When his mother had left, he tried timidly to hazard, using his mother’s terms, one or two of the more benign observations he had heard her make. Emma showed him how wrong he was in short order, and sent him right back to his patients.

But in keeping with what she believed to be the soundest theories, she wanted to give herself up to love. In the moonlight, in the garden, she would recite to him all the impassioned verses that she knew by heart, and would sing to him melancholy adagios with a sigh; but afterwards she found herself just as calm as before, and Charles appeared to be no more amorous and no more moved.

When she had thus beaten on the flint in her heart without eliciting any spark, and being, moreover, as incapable of understanding anything she did not feel as believing in anything that did not reveal itself in conventional forms, she easily persuaded herself that Charles’ love no longer had anything intense about it. His effusions had become routine; he embraced her at certain hours. It was one habit among others, like a dessert one looked forward to after an insipid meal.

A gamekeeper, whose inflamed lungs Charles had healed, had given Madame a little Italian greyhound; she took it out for walks, for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a few minutes and to get away from the eternal garden and the dusty road.

She would go as far as the beech wood at Banneville, near the abandoned summer house that stands at an angle to the wall, near the open fields. In the sunken ditch, among the grass, grew reeds with sharp-edged leaves.

She would begin by looking all around her to see if anything had changed since her last time there. She would find the foxgloves and the wild wallflowers in the same places, the clumps of nettles surrounding the large stones, and the patches of lichen still stretched across the house’s three windows, whose always-closed shutters were moldering on their rusty hinges. Her thoughts, aimless at first, roamed randomly like her greyhound, running in circles through the fields and yapping at yellow butterflies, chasing after little field mice or chewing on the poppies at the edge of the wheat field. Then her ideas bit by bit came into focus, and seated on the grass, into which she dug her parasol’s tip with small, sharp thrusts, she would repeat to herself:

“Why, my God, did I get married?”

She would ask herself whether there might have been some way, some combination of circumstances that would have let her meet some other man; and she tried to imagine what those nonexistent events might have been, what that different life, that other husband might have been like. Certainly, none of them were at all like this one. He would have been handsome, a man of spirit, distinguished, attractive, like the ones who had undoubtedly married her old friends at the convent school. What were they doing now? In the city, with the sounds of the street, the buzzing of the theaters and the lights of the ballrooms, they led lives where the heart could expand and the senses could bloom. But she—her life was as cold as a garret facing north, and boredom, the silent spider, was spinning its web across all the dark corners of her heart. She remembered the prize days at school, when she would climb the platform to receive her little wreaths. With her hair in braids, her white dress, and her openwork twill shoes, she had a well-bred air, and when she returned to her seat the gentlemen would bend toward her and compliment her; the courtyard was full of carriages, people said good-bye to her through the windows, the music master bowed to her as he passed with his violin case. How far away it all was! How far away it was!

She called to Djali,¹ held her between her knees, passed her fingers over her long, delicate head, and spoke to her:

“Come, kiss your mistress; you don’t have any sorrows.”

Then, observing the graceful animal’s melancholy face while it yawned slowly, she was moved, and comparing the dog to herself, she spoke aloud to her as if to an afflicted wretch who needed consolation.

Sometimes gusts of wind came up, breezes from the sea that with a single sweep would roll across the whole plateau of the Caux countryside, bringing a salt freshness all through the fields. The rushes whistled close to the ground and the beech leaves rustled in a swift shudder, while the treetops, swaying without stop, continued their deep murmur. Emma wrapped her shawl tight around her shoulders and got up.

In the avenue a green light filtering through the foliage lit up the low-growing moss that crunched softly beneath her feet. The sun was going down; the sky was reddening between the branches, and the uniform trunks of trees planted in a straight line were like brown columns standing out against a background of gold; feeling a sudden fear, she called Djali, and made her way quickly back to Tostes by the main road, slumped down into an armchair and did not speak a word all evening.

But toward the end of September, something extraordinary burst into her life: she was invited to La Vaubyessard, home of the Marquis d’Andervilliers.

Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, hoping now to get back into political life, was preparing well in advance his candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies. During the winter he presided over the distribution of a great deal of firewood, and in the General Council, he was always insisting on better roads for his district. He had had an abscess in his mouth during the warm weather, which Charles had cured, as if by a miracle, with a touch of his lancet. The steward he had sent to pay for the operation related, that evening, that he had seen some superb cherries in the doctor’s little garden. Now, cherry trees did not grow well at La Vaubyessard, and the Marquis asked Bovary for a few cuttings, took it upon himself to thank him in person, got a look at Emma, found that she had a pretty shape and did not curtsey at all like a peasant—was pretty enough, in fact, that he felt it would not be going beyond the proper bounds of condescension, nor making a mistake, to invite the young couple to the chateau.

On a Wednesday at three o’clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, seated in their cart, set off for La Vaubyessard with a big trunk fastened to the rear and a hatbox fastened to the front. Charles had, also, a bandbox² balanced between his legs.

They arrived at nightfall, when the lamps in the park were being lit, to light the way for the carriages.

1. Djali was the name of the goat trained by the Gypsy Esmeralda in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831).

2. A bandbox was a light, thin, usually circular container used for carrying hats and other items of clothing.

CHAPTER 8

The chateau was of modern construction, in the Italian style, with two projecting wings and three flights of steps; it spread itself out behind a vast lawn where a few cows grazed among clumps of large, evenly spaced trees, while groupings of shrubs, rhododendrons, syringa, and snowballs swelled out their unequal tufts of foliage along the winding lines of the sandy road. A river flowed under a bridge; through the mists one could make out buildings with thatched roofs scattered across the meadow, which was bordered by two gently sloping tree-covered hills, and beyond them, among the trees, in two parallel lines, were the coach-houses and stables, all that remained of the old, demolished chateau.

Charles’ cart came to a stop before the middle flight of steps; servants appeared; the Marquis came forward and, offering his arm to the doctor’s wife, conducted her into the foyer.

Its floor was marble tiles, it was high-ceilinged, and the sounds of footsteps and voices echoed as in a church. Straight ahead was a staircase, and to the left a gallery overlooked a garden and led to a billiard room, from which the clicking sounds of ivory balls could be heard when one approached the door. As she crossed it in order to get to the salon, Emma saw men with serious expressions around the billiard table, their chins bent over their high cravats, all wearing decorations, smiling silently as they shot with their cues. On the dark wood wall panels were big gilded frames inscribed on the lower borders with names in black letters. She read: “Jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers d’Yverbonville, Count of La Vaubyessard and Baron of La Fresnaye, killed in the battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587.” And on another: “Jean Antoine-Henry-Guy d’Andervilliers of La Vaubyessard, admiral of France and knight of the Order of Saint Michael, wounded in the combat at La Hogue-Saint-Vaast on May 29, 1692, died at La Vaubyessard on January 23, 1693.” The ones after that could barely be read because the lamplight, which was turned toward the green cloth of the billiard table, cast a shadow everywhere else in the room. Turning the hanging canvases brown, it highlighted only the cracks in the varnish; and from all those big, gilt-edged black squares, only the lighter parts of the paintings would emerge here and there: a pale forehead, two eyes that gazed out at you, wigs flowing down over powdered shoulders, red suits, or the buckle of a garter at the top of a plump calf.

The Marquis opened the door of the salon; one of the women arose (the Marquise herself ), came to greet Emma, and seated her on a small love seat next to her, where she began to chat in a friendly way, as if she had known her for a long time. She was a woman of about forty, with handsome shoulders, a hooked nose, and a drawl, and tonight she was wearing a simple lace shawl over her brown hair, falling behind her head in a point. A young blond woman was sitting on her other side in a high-backed chair; and gentlemen, sporting little flowers in the boutonnieres of their suits, were chatting with ladies around the fireplace.

At seven o’clock, dinner was served. The men, more numerous than the ladies, were seated at the first table, in the foyer, while the ladies sat at the second, in the dining room, with the Marquis and Marquise.

Upon entering, Emma felt herself enveloped in a warm air, a mixture of scents of flowers, of fine linen, of the aroma of the meats and the truffles. The flames from the candelabras flickered on the silver; the faceted crystal pieces, thinly misted over with steam, reflected each other with pale gleams; flower bouquets were arranged in a line from one end of the table to the other; and on the wide-bordered dishes, napkins folded like bishop’s miters held small, oval rolls between their gaping folds. The red claws of lobsters hung over the dishes; large pieces of fruit were piled high in open baskets; the quails still wore their feathers, steam rising from them; and, wearing silk stockings, knee breeches, white cravat, and a frilled shirt, as solemn as a magistrate, the steward, passing dishes of carved meat between shoulders, would make the piece you had chosen leap up with a flick of his spoon. And on the large porcelain stove, with inlaid copper, the statue of a woman draped to the chin gazed, immobile, on the room filled with people.

Madame Bovary noticed that many of the women had not placed their gloves in their wine glasses.

But at the far end of the table, alone among all the women, bent over his full plate, his napkin tied around his neck like a child, an old man was eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot, and he wore a short ponytail tied with a black ribbon. This was the Marquis’ father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdière, once the favorite of the Count d’Artois in the days of the Vaudreuil hunting parties hosted by the Marquis de Con-flans, and rumored to have been the lover of Marie-Antoinette, between Messieurs de Coigny and de Lauzun. He had led a noisily debauched life full of duels, wagers, and abducted women; he had run through his fortune and terrorized his entire family. A servant stood behind his chair and spoke loudly into his ear, naming the dishes at which he pointed and stammered; and Emma’s eyes were constantly drawn to this old man with drooping lips as if to something precious and hallowed. He had lived at Court and slept in the bed of queens!

Iced champagne was poured. Emma shivered all over when she felt the coldness in her mouth. She had never before seen pomegranates nor tasted pineapples. Even the powdered sugar seemed to her to be whiter and finer than it was elsewhere.

Afterwards, the ladies went up to their rooms to dress for the ball.

Emma dressed with the painstaking self-consciousness of an actress preparing for her debut. She arranged her hair according to the hairdresser’s suggestions, and put on her muslin dress which had been laid out on the bed. Charles’ trousers pinched him across the stomach.

“The shoe straps will get in the way for dancing,” he said.

“Dancing?” Emma replied.

“Yes!”

“Are you out of your mind? Everyone will laugh at you; stay in your place. And besides, it’s more seemly for a doctor,” she added.

Charles said no more. He paced back and forth, waiting for Emma to finish dressing.

From behind, he watched her reflection in the mirror, between two candles. Her black eyes seemed even blacker. Her hair, puffed out gently around her ears, seemed to glow with a blue tint; a rose in her chignon trembled on its wavering stem, with artificial dewdrops on the tips of its leaves. She wore a gown of pale saffron, decorated with three small bouquets of pompon roses mixed with greenery.

Charles came and kissed her on the shoulder.

“Leave me alone!” she said. “You’ll wrinkle my dress.”

They heard the flourish of a violin and notes from a horn. She descended the stairs, barely able to keep herself from running.

The quadrilles had begun. Everyone was arriving. There was pushing. She stationed herself on a seat near the door. After the quadrille, the floor stayed free for groups of men standing and talking, and for liveried servants carrying large platters. Down the line of seated women, painted fans were quivering, bouquets partly concealed smiling faces, and perfume bottles with gold stoppers were turning in half-opened hands whose thin white gloves revealed the shapes of fingernails and hugged the flesh tightly at the wrist. Lace ornaments, diamond brooches, and bracelets with lockets trembled on bodices, glimmered on breasts, rattled on bare arms. Hairdos, tight across foreheads and twisted at napes, wore as crowns clusters or bunches of forget-me-nots, jasmine, pomegranate flowers, wheat ears, or cornflowers. Sitting peacefully in their places, frowning mothers wore red turbans.

Emma’s heart sped up when, her partner holding her by the fingertips, she took a place in the line and waited for the violinist’s bow stroke to begin. But her emotion quickly passed; and swaying with the orchestra’s rhythm, she glided forward, her neck moving lightly. A smile came to her lips at certain delicate touches from the violin, playing solo sometimes when the other instruments were mute; the distinctive sound of gold coins dropping on the card tables in the next room could be heard; and then suddenly everything began again, the cornet hurling out a sonorous figure. Feet fell back into rhythm, skirts swirled and billowed against each other, hands were joined, then separated; the same pair of eyes that had just fallen before you now rose back up to fix their gaze on yours.

Some men (about fifteen), ranging from twenty-five to forty were scattered among the dancers or chatting in the doorways; they were distinguished from the crowd by their family resemblance despite their differences in age, dress, and facial features.

Their clothes, better made, seemed of a suppler texture, and their hair, swept forward in curls at the temples, shone with a finer pomade. They had the coloring of wealth, that special white complexion that is accentuated by the pallor of porcelain, the sheen of satin, the varnish of fine furniture, and that is nurtured by a careful diet of exquisite foods. Their necks turned smoothly in low-folded cravats; their long sideburns fell over high collars; they wiped their lips with handkerchiefs embroidered with large monograms, from which an elegant scent emanated. Those who were beginning to age had a youthful air, while the young ones had a certain maturity about their faces. The indifference in their gazes revealed the calm of daily gratified passions; and through the veneer of their gentle manners pierced that particular brutality that bespeaks the casual domination of things in which force is exerted and vanity entertained: the handling of racehorses and the company of loose women.

A few feet away from Emma, a gentleman in a blue coat was chatting about Italy with a pale young woman wearing a pearl necklace. They were praising the size of the pillars in Saint Peter’s, Tivoli, Vesuvius, Castellamare, and the Cascine, the roses at Genoa, the Coliseum by moonlight. Emma listened, with her other ear, to a conversation full of words she didn’t understand. People were gathered around a very young man who had outraced, the week before, Miss Arabelle and Romulus, and had won two thousand louis by jumping a ditch, in England. One man was complaining that his racehorses were getting fat; another, that a printer’s error had misrepresented his horse’s name.

The atmosphere in the ballroom grew heavy; the lights were growing dim. People streamed back into the billiard room. A servant got up on a chair and shattered two windowpanes; at the sound of the breaking glass, Emma turned her head, and she could make out the faces of peasants in the garden, pressed up against the window, looking in at them. And then the memory of Les Bertaux came back to her. She could see the farm again, the muddy pond, her father in his smock beneath the apple trees, and she could see herself again as she was then, skimming the cream off the milk pans in the dairy with her finger. But in the brilliance of this present moment, her past life, so clear and distinct until now, faded away completely, and she almost doubted that she had lived it. She was here now; and beyond the ball there was nothing but shadow darkening everything else. She was eating a maraschino ice, holding it in a silver gilt shell in her left hand, and she half-closed her eyes with the spoon between her teeth.

A woman near her let her fan drop. A man, dancing, passed by.

“Would you be so kind, Monsieur,” the lady said, “as to pick up my fan from behind the sofa!”

The gentleman bowed, and as he bent forward to extend his arm, Emma saw the young lady’s hand throw something white, folded into a triangle, into his hat. The gentleman retrieved the fan and offered it respectfully to the lady; she thanked him with a nod of her head and turned to sniff her bouquet.

After the supper, with a great many Spanish wines and Rhine wines, with bisque soups and cream of almond soups, Trafalgar puddings, and all sorts of cold meats surrounded by molded jellies trembling on their dishes, the carriages began to drive off, one after the other. By raising the corner of the muslin curtain, you could see their lanterns as they glimmered in the darkness. The seats began to empty; a few card players still remained; the musicians were cooling their fingertips on their tongues; Charles was half asleep, leaning up against a door.

At three in the morning, the cotillion began. Emma did not know how to waltz. Everyone was waltzing, even the young Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers and her mother the Marquise; the only people still there were the overnight guests at the chateau, about a dozen people.

But one of the waltzers, who was familiarly called the Viscount, wearing a low-cut waistcoat that seemed molded to his chest, came back a second time to invite Madame Bovary to dance, assuring her that he would lead her and that she would manage very well.

They began slowly, and then sped up. They whirled; everything was spinning around them, the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, and the floor, like a disc on a pivot. As they passed the doors, the hem of Emma’s dress caught against his trousers; their legs intertwined; he lowered his eyes toward her, she raised her eyes to him; a sluggishness suddenly came over her, and she halted. They started up again; and with an even more rapid movement the Viscount, pulling her along, disappeared with her to the far end of the gallery where, out of breath, she almost fell and, for an instant, rested her head upon his chest. And then, still turning but more slowly now, he guided her back to her place; she leaned back against the wall and covered her eyes with her hand.

When she opened her eyes again, in the middle of the room was a lady seated on a stool with three waltzers kneeling before her. She chose the Viscount, and the violin started up again.

They all watched the pair. Back and forth they went, her body rigid, her chin lowered, and he always in the same pose, his back arched, his elbow rounded, his chin thrust forward. She knew how to waltz, that one! They continued for a long time, exhausting all the others.

People chatted for a few minutes more, and after saying good night, or rather good morning, the chateau’s guests went off to bed.

Charles hauled himself upstairs by the banister; his legs wouldn’t hold him up another minute. He had been standing up for five hours in a row around the tables watching people play whist without understanding a bit of it. And so he heaved a great, satisfied sigh when he had pulled off his boots.

Emma put a shawl around her shoulders, opened the window, and leaned out.

The night was black. A few drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the damp wind, and it refreshed her eyes. The music from the ball continued to hum in her ears, and she made an effort to stay awake, in order to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to abandon.

Dawn began to break. She gazed, for a long while, across at the windows in the chateau’s other wing, trying to guess which ones were the rooms of the people she had observed during the evening. She would have liked to know about their lives, to penetrate into them, to lose herself in them.

But she was shivering with cold. She undressed and nestled down between the sheets, against the sleeping Charles.

There were a lot of people at the breakfast. The meal lasted ten minutes; no liqueurs were served, which surprised the doctor. Then Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers collected some bits of rolls in a basket to take out to the swans on the little pond, and they all went for a walk in the hothouses, where strange plants bristling with hairs rose up in pyramids beneath hanging vases that, like over-full serpents’ nests, let long, green, interlaced tendrils fall from their edges. The orangery, which they came to at the other end, led via a covered passage to the chateau’s outbuildings. The Marquis, to amuse the young woman, took her to see the stables. Over the basket-shaped racks, porcelain slabs were inscribed in black with the horses’ names. Each animal stirred in its stall when they came close to it and clicked their tongues. The flooring in the harness room shone as brightly as the polished floor of a drawing room. Carriage harnesses were set in the middle on two twisting columns, and the bits, the whips, the spurs, and the curbs were arranged in a line all along the wall.

In the meantime, Charles went to ask a servant to ready his cart. They brought it around to the front steps and, all the luggage having been crammed in, the Bovarys paid their respects to the Marquis and the Marquise, and set off for Tostes.

In silence, Emma watched the wheels turn. Charles, seated on the far edge of the bench, held the reins with his two arms spread wide apart, and the little horse trotted along between the shafts, which were too wide for him. The loose reins slapping against his cropper became wet with lather, and the box tied on to the back of the cart made loud, regular thumps against it.

They had reached the heights of Thibourville when suddenly, right in front of them, some men on horseback passed by, laughing, cigars in their mouths. Emma thought she recognized the Viscount; she turned, and saw nothing on the horizon except their heads rising and falling to the unequal cadences of a trot or a gallop.

A quarter of a league farther on, they had to stop to mend some broken traces with a rope.

But Charles, giving the harness one more look, saw something on the ground, between his horse’s legs, and he picked up a cigar case bordered with green silk, emblazoned in the center with a coat of arms that resembled a carriage door.

“There are even two cigars in it,” he said. “These will be for tonight after dinner.”

“You smoke now?” she asked.

“Sometimes, when I get the chance.”

He put his find in his pocket and whipped on the old horse.

When they got home, the dinner had not been prepared. Madame lost her temper. Nastasie talked back insolently.

“Get out!” said Emma. “Who do you think you are? I’m firing you!”

They had onion soup for dinner, and some veal cooked with sorrel. Charles, sitting across from Emma, rubbed his hands together happily and said:

“It’s so good to be back home!”

They could hear Nastasie crying in the other room. He was rather fond of the poor girl. She had kept him company for many evenings during the rough times of his widowerhood. She had been his first patient, his oldest acquaintance in the region.

“Are you really going to send her away for good?” he finally asked.

“Yes. Who’s going to stop me?” she replied.

Then they warmed themselves in the kitchen while their room was being readied. Charles began to smoke. He smoked by pushing out his lips, spitting constantly, recoiling with every puff.

“You’re going to make yourself sick,” she said disdainfully.

He threw away his cigar, and ran to the pump to swallow a glass of cold water. Emma picked up the cigar case and threw it quickly into the bottom of the cabinet.

It was a long day, that next day. She walked in her little garden, going up and down the same paths, stopping before the flowerbeds, before the trellis, before the plaster priest, considering with astonishment all these things that had once been so familiar to her. How far off the ball seemed already! Who was it that decreed so much distance between yesterday’s morning and today’s evening? Her trip to La Vaubyessard had created a kind of hole in her life, like one of those great crevasses that a storm can sometimes carve out in the mountains in a single night. But she resigned herself: she reverently packed away in her chest of drawers all her beautiful clothes, right down to the satin slippers, their soles yellow with the slick wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: by rubbing up against wealth, some layer had been added which would never come off.

It became, then, an occupation for Emma to remember the ball. Every time Wednesday came around, she would awaken and say to herself, “Ah! It was a week ago … it was two weeks ago … three weeks ago, I was there!”And little by little, the faces grew confused in her memory; she forgot the tune of the quadrilles; she no longer saw clearly the liveries and the rooms; some of the details had gone, but the regret remained.

CHAPTER 9

Often, when Charles was out, she would go and take the green silk cigar case from the cabinet, from between the folds of linen where she had left it.

She would look at it, open it, and even sniff the scent of its lining, a mixture of verbena and tobacco. Who was its owner? … the Viscount. Perhaps it was a gift from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some rosewood frame, a pretty little thing that would have to be kept secret, that must have taken many hours, with the soft curls of the pensive worker bent over it. A sigh of love had passed through the canvas mesh; every prick of the needle had fixed there some hope or some memory, and all these interwoven silk threads were simply the continuation of the same silent passion. And then the Viscount, one morning, had taken it away with him. What would they have spoken about while it remained on the wide-mantled fireplace, between the vases of flowers and the Pompadour clocks? She was in Tostes. He, in Paris now; so far away! What was it like, that Paris? What a grand name! She would repeat it under her breath, for the pleasure of it; it sounded in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it flamed before her eyes across the labels of her cosmetics jars.

At night, when the fishmongers in their carts passed under her windows singing the “Marjolaine,”¹ she would awaken; and, listening to the sound of the iron-rimmed wheels dying away as they reached the country road, she would say to herself:

“They’ll be there tomorrow!”

And she would follow them in her thoughts, as they ascended and descended the hills, passed through villages, made their way along the highway by the light of the stars. And at the end of some indeterminate distance, there would always be a confused, indistinct place where her dream expired.

She bought a map of Paris, and with her fingertip on the map, she would take walks in the capital. She would go up the boulevards, stopping at every corner, between the street lines, in front of the white squares that represented houses. When her eyes tired at last, she would close her eyelids and see in the shadows the gas jets fluttering in the wind, and see the carriages stop and lower their steps with a great clatter before the theater entrances.

She subscribed to the Corbeille, a lady’s magazine, and to the Sylphe des Salons.² She devoured all the reviews, without missing a single one, of opening nights, of races, of soirées, and she took an interest in a singer’s debut, in the opening of a new shop. She knew the current fashions, the addresses of the best tailors, the right days for the Bois or for the Opera. She studied the descriptions of furnishings in Eugène Sue;³ she read Balzac and George Sand, seeking in their books the vicarious satisfaction of her own desires. She took her book with her even to the table, and she would turn the pages while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Viscount always returned as she read. She would invent relationships between him and the fictional characters. But the circle, at whose center he stood, bit by bit spread outward, and the halo that emanated from his face spread outward too, in order to illuminate other dreams.

Paris, vaster than the ocean, glimmered in Emma’s eyes within a rose-tinted atmosphere. But the many lives bustling in that tumult were divided up into parts and classified into different types of pictures. Emma could only make out two or three, which hid all the others from her, but which, by themselves, represented all of humanity. In the world of the ambassadors one walked across gleaming parquet floors, through mirror-paneled salons, around oval tables covered with gold-fringed velvet cloths. There were dresses with bustles, great mysteries and private miseries hidden behind smiles. Then came the society of duchesses: everyone there was pale; everyone arose at four in the afternoon; the women—poor angels!—wore English lace on the hems of their petticoats, and the men, all unappreciated geniuses beneath their mild exteriors, rode horses to death at every country party, passed their summers at Baden, and, at around forty, married heiresses. In the private rooms of those restaurants where one dines after midnight, the colorful crowd of writers and actresses laughed by candlelight. That group was as extravagant as kings, full of idealistic ambitions and fantastic dreams. Theirs was an existence higher than all the others, somewhere between heaven and earth, up in the storm clouds, something sublime. As for the rest of the world, it was lost, having no particular location, and being thus without substance. For the closer things were to her, the more her thoughts turned away from them. Everything that immediately surrounded her—the boring countryside, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence—all this seemed to her to be an exception in the world, some odd accident in which she was trapped, while beyond this place the immense country of happiness and of passions stretched out as far as the eye could see. In her desires, she confused the sensualities of luxury with the joys of the heart, the elegance of manners with the delicacy of sentiment. Didn’t love require, like Indian plants, some special ground prepared for it, some particular climate? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears that flowed over yielding hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness—these could not be separated from the balconies of grand, leisure-filled chateaux, from boudoirs with silk curtains and thick, plush carpets, from well-filled flowerboxes, from beds on raised platforms, nor from gleaming precious stones and lace-trimmed livery.

The postboy, who came every morning to groom the mare, passed through the corridor with his heavy wooden clogs; there were holes in his smock, and he wore no socks. And this was the groom in knee-breeches she had to be content with! When his work was done, he would not return for the rest of the day, because Charles, on his return, always put up his horse himself, unsaddling her and adjusting the halter, while the maid brought out a bucket of hay and, as best as she could, threw it into the manger.

To replace Nastasie (who had finally left Tostes in a stream of tears), Emma had hired a fourteen-year-old girl, an orphan with a sweet face. She forbade her to wear cotton bonnets, taught her that you need to address people in the third person, to carry a glass of water on a plate, to knock before entering, how to iron, to starch, and to dress herself; she wanted to make her into a lady’s maid. The new maid obeyed without protest for fear of being fired; and since Madame usually left the key in the kitchen cabinet, Félicité would take a little supply of sugar away with her every night, which she would eat all alone in her bed after saying her prayers.

Sometimes in the afternoons, she would go off to chat with the postilions across the way. Madame stayed upstairs, in her rooms.

Emma would wear an open dressing gown, revealing, between the lapels of her bodice, a pleated chemisette with three gold buttons. For a belt, she wore a tasseled rope, and her little garnet-colored slippers had a tuft of wide ribbons that spilled over onto her instep. She had bought herself a blotter, a writing case, a pen holder, and some envelopes, even though she had no one at all to write to; she would dust her shelves, look at herself in the mirror, pick up a book, and then, daydreaming between the lines, she would let it fall onto her knees. She felt urges to go traveling, or to return to her convent. She wanted at the same time to die and to live in Paris.

When it snowed or when it rained, Charles would ride his horse across the fields. He would eat omelets at farmhouse tables, poke his arms into damp beds, receive the warm jet of bloodlettings full in the face, listen to death rattles, investigate bedpans, and tuck in more than his share of dirty linen; but every night he returned to a roaring fire, a set table, comfortable furniture, and a well-dressed wife, charming and fresh-smelling, and he could not figure out the source of that scent, wondering whether it was in fact her skin that perfumed her chemise.

She charmed him by the sheer quantity of her refinements; now it was a new method of cutting paper sconces for the candles, now a flounce she had changed on her dress, now an extraordinary name for some simple dish that the maid had ruined, but whose every bite Charles gulped down with pleasure. In Rouen, she saw some women who wore charms on their watch chains; she bought charms. She wanted two large vases of blue glass for the fireplace, and a bit later, an ivory workbox with a silver-gilt thimble. The less Charles understood these refinements, the more he submitted to their seduction. They added something to his sensual pleasures and to the sweetness of his hearth. It was like some golden powder being spread all along the little path of his life.

His health was good, and he looked good; his reputation was firmly established. The country people cherished him because he was not proud. He would pat the children, never went to the café, and, in general, inspired trust by his good morals. He was especially successful with catarrhs and chest illnesses. Always greatly afraid of killing some patient, he rarely prescribed anything beyond sedatives, an occasional emetic, a foot bath, or leeches. It wasn’t surgery that frightened him; he would bleed someone for you copiously, like a horse, and when it came to extracting teeth, he had one hell of a grip.

Eventually, to keep himself up to date, he took out a subscription to the Ruche Médicale,⁴ a new journal whose prospectus he had received. He would read a little of it after dinner, but the warmth of the room together with his digestion made him fall asleep within five minutes; and there he stayed, his chin propped on his hands and his hair falling like a mane down to the base of the reading lamp. Emma would look at him and shrug her shoulders. Why, at least, could she not have for a husband one of those taciturn but impassioned men who work all night at their books, those men who finally, at age sixty, when rheumatism sets in, wear a set of decorations on their ill-made black suits? She would have liked for this name Bovary, which was hers, to be illustrious, displayed in the bookshops, cited in the journals, known to all of France. But Charles had no ambition! A doctor from Yvetot, with whom he had lately been in consultation, had mildly humiliated him at the bedside of a patient, in front of the assembled relatives. When Charles told Emma about it later that night, Emma blew up at the colleague. Charles was touched. He kissed her forehead, a tear in his eye. But she was beside herself with shame, and she felt like striking him; to calm herself, she went into the corridor to open the window and breathe in the fresh air.

“What a man! What a man!” she repeated in a low voice, biting her lips.

She felt herself becoming in general more irritated with him. As he grew older, he took on some crude mannerisms: during dessert he would whittle the corks of the empty bottles; after eating, he would run his tongue over his teeth; with his soup, he made a gulping noise with every mouthful; and since he was starting to gain weight, his puffed-out cheeks seemed to push his already small eyes up toward his temples.

Emma would sometimes retuck the red border of his undershirt into his waistcoat, rearrange his cravat, and throw out the dirty gloves he was about to put on; and this was not, as he believed, for his sake; it was for herself, out of her own inflated ego, and out of nervous irritation. And sometimes she would tell him about things she had read, such as a passage in a novel, a new play, or some anecdote about high society that they were reporting in her magazines; because, after all, Charles was somebody, an always open ear, and always ready to approve of her. She did enough confiding to her greyhound! She would have done the same to the logs in the fireplaces or the pendulum of the clock.

But in the depths of her heart, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a shipwrecked sailor, she looked upon the solitude of her life with despairing eyes, searching far off for some white sail to appear in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would blow it toward her, towards what shore it would drive her, whether it would be a rowboat or a three-deck ship, loaded down with anguish or stocked to the portholes with happiness. But every morning when she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; and she listened closely to every sound, leaped out of bed, and was shocked when it hadn’t come; then at sunset, always sadder, she wished for the next day to come.

Springtime returned. She felt some shortness of breath during the first warm days, when the pear trees were in flower.

When July came, she counted on her fingers how many weeks there were until October, thinking that the Marquis d’Andervilliers might have another ball at La Vaubyessard. But September passed by with no letters and no visits.

After that bitter disappointment, her heart grew empty all over again, and then the series of identical days started over.

And that was how the days were going to be from now on, always the same, beyond numbering, and never bringing anything! Other lives, flat as they might be, at least had the chance of something happening. One little adventure sometimes brought with it an infinite series of twists, and the scene would change. But for her, nothing would happen; God had willed it that way! The future was a long black corridor with, at its end, a firmly locked door.

She gave up music. Why play? Who would listen? Since she would never wear a short-sleeved velvet gown and play in concert on an Érard piano,⁵ swiftly touching the keys with her light fingers and sensing around her, like a breeze, a growing murmur of ecstasy, it wasn’t worth the trouble to bore herself by practicing. She left her sketch pads and her tapestry in the cupboard. What was the point? What was the point? Needlework annoyed her.

“I’ve read everything,” she said to herself.

And she would sit heating the tongs, or watching the rain come down.

On Sundays, how sad she was when they rang the bell for vespers! She would listen in a kind of attentive stupor to the cracked chimes of the bell, one by one. Some cat up on the rooftops, walking along slowly, would arch its back in the pale rays of the sun. The wind on the highway blew about great clouds of dust. Sometimes far away a dog would howl: and the church bell, its chimings evenly spaced, would continue its monotonous ringing, which faded and lost itself in the countryside.

But then the people would come out of the church. The women in waxed clogs, the peasants in new smocks, the little children who skipped along bareheaded in front of them—all of them were going back home. And then until night came, a group of five or six men, always the same ones, would stay on playing bouchon in front of the inn’s large door.

The winter was cold. Every morning the windows were covered with frost, and the whitish light that came through them, as if through ground glass, sometimes did not change the whole day long. By four o’clock, the lamp had to be lit.

On days when the weather was good, she would go down into the garden. The dew had left a silver lace on the cabbages, with long, transparent threads stretching from one to the other. No birds could be heard; everything seemed to be asleep, the straw-covered espalier and the vine, like a huge, sick serpent strung under the wall coping where one could see, coming up close, the wood lice with their many feet crawling around. Among the spruce trees by the hedgerow, the priest in his three-cornered hat who was reading in his breviary had lost his right foot, and the plaster itself, peeling off in the frost, had made white scabs on his face.

Then she would go back in, close the door, stoke the coals, and, weakened by the heat from the hearth, would feel her boredom growing even heavier and weighing down upon her. She would have liked very much to go downstairs and chat with the maid, but a sense of propriety restrained her.

Every day at the same hour the schoolmaster in his black silk cap would open the shutters of his house, and the village policeman would pass by, his saber strapped over his smock. Evening and morning, the post-horses, three by three, would cross the street to drink from the pond. Sometimes the bell of the tavern door would tinkle, and when it was windy one could hear the creaking of the two little brass basins on their rod that served as a sign for the wigmaker’s shop. The shop had for decoration an old engraving of women’s fashions glued to one windowpane, as well as a wax bust of a woman with yellow hair. The wigmaker, he too, lamented his unfulfilled vocation, his lost future; and dreaming of owning a shop in a big town, Rouen for example, overlooking the quay, near the theater, he paced back and forth all day from the city hall to the church, somber, waiting for customers. When Madame Bovary looked up she always saw him there, like a sentry on duty, his cap pulled down over his ears, wearing his thick wool vest.

In the afternoons, sometimes a man’s head would appear outside the window of her room—a tanned face, black sideburns, slowly smiling a wide, sweet smile, revealing white teeth. Then a waltz would begin; and on the organ was a little drawing room with dancers the size of a finger, women in pink turbans, Tyroleans in jackets, monkeys in black suits, gentlemen in knee breeches, turning, turning around the armchairs, sofas, and tables, multiplying themselves in the little pieces of mirror held together at the corners by strips of gold paper. The man cranked the organ’s handle, looking to the right, to the left, and toward the windows. From time to time, while he shot out a long jet of brown saliva toward the curb, he would use his knee to lift up his instrument, whose heavy strap was tiring his arm; and sometimes doleful and drawling, sometimes joyful and fast-paced, the music escaped from the box, droning through its pink taffeta curtain fastened by a copper arabesque grill. Those were the tunes that were being played elsewhere, in the theaters, sung in drawing rooms, danced to in the evenings under lighted chandeliers, echoes of the life that reached even to Emma. Sarabands without end whirled in her head, and like a dancer on a flowered carpet, her thoughts leaped with the notes, swaying from dream to dream, from sorrow to sorrow. When the man had received some money in his cap, he would pull down an old blue cloth cover, swing the organ onto his back, and go off with a heavy step. She would watch him depart.

But it was mealtimes above all that were hardest for her to bear, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the sweating walls, the damp flagstone floor; all the bitterness of life seemed to her to be served up on her plate, and with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose up from the depths of her soul other flavorless, sickening gusts. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble on a few hazelnuts or, at times, would amuse herself by drawing lines on the oilcloth with the tip of her knife.

Now she neglected everything in the household, and when Charles’ mother came to spend part of Lent at Tostes, she was amazed at the change. She who had formerly been so careful, so elegant, now went whole days without getting dressed, wearing gray cotton stockings, lighting the house with mere candles. She kept repeating that they had to economize since they weren’t rich, and adding that she was quite contented, very happy, that she liked Tostes very much, and making up other little speeches that dumfounded her mother-in-law. But Emma seemed as little disposed as ever to follow her advice; one time, in fact, Charles’ mother having thought it fit to maintain that masters ought to keep a close eye on their servants’ religious habits, Emma responded with so angry a look and so cold a smile that the good woman never tried anything like that again.

Emma was becoming difficult, capricious. She would order dishes to be prepared for her, and then wouldn’t eat a bite; one day she would drink only fresh milk, and the next day, cups of tea by the dozen. Often, she would obstinately refuse to go outside, and then she would feel suffocated and throw open the windows and put on light dresses. When she had harshly scolded her servant, she would then give her presents or send her out for a walk with the neighbors, just as she would sometimes toss all the coins in her purse to the poor, though she was by no means a tender-hearted person, or particularly sensitive to other people’s feelings—like most country people, who always retain something of their fathers’ hard, calloused hands within their souls.

Toward the end of February, old Rouault commemorated his cure by bringing his son-in-law a superb turkey, and he stayed in Tostes for three days. Since Charles was with his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the bedroom, spat on the andirons, talked farming, calves, cows, poultry, and the county council; so much so that she closed the door, when he departed, with a sense of satisfaction that surprised even herself. Anyway, she no longer hid her contempt for everything and everybody; and set herself to occasionally expressing eccentric opinions, condemning what others applauded and applauding perverse or immoral things, all of which often made her husband widen his eyes at her.

Would this suffering last forever? Would she never be able to get out of it? But she was just as good as all those people who lived happy lives! She had seen duchesses at La Vaubyessard with thicker waists and more vulgar ways, and she cursed God’s injustice; she would lean her head against the walls and cry; she envied exciting lives, masked balls, and shameless pleasures with all the mad delights that she had never known and that other lives must include.

She grew pale and began to have heart palpitations. Charles gave her valerian and camphor baths. But all that only seemed to annoy her even more.

On certain days, she would begin to chatter with a feverish abandon; but these exaltations would be quickly followed by stupors into which she remained sunk without speaking, without moving. What would revive her then was splashing eau-de-cologne from a bottle over her arms.

Because she complained constantly about Tostes, Charles thought that the cause of her illness must be some local influence, and, fixing on this idea, he started to talk seriously about going elsewhere to set up his practice.

At that point, she began drinking vinegar to make herself thinner, contracted a dry little cough, and lost her appetite entirely.

Leaving Tostes was a serious matter for Charles, after living there for four years and at the very moment when he was just beginning to get settled in. But if it had to be done! He brought her to Rouen to consult with his old professor. It was a nervous malady: she had to have a change of air.

After looking around everywhere he could, Charles learned that there was a good-sized market town in the Neufchâtel district called Yonville-l’Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had cleared out just the week before. So he wrote to the local pharmacist to find out the size of the population, how far it was from the nearest doctor, how much his predecessor had made per year, et cetera; and, the replies having been satisfactory, he resolved to move there toward springtime, if Emma’s health had not improved.

One day, in preparation for her move, she was arranging things in a drawer when something pricked her fingers. It was the metal wire from her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellowed with dust, and the satin ribbons with their silver border were shredded along the edges. She threw it in the fire. It flared up more quickly than dried straw. Then it looked like a little red bush against the cinders, slowly being consumed. She watched it burn. The little cardboard berries burst, the brass wires bent and twisted, the braiding melted down; and the paper flower petals, shriveling, swayed against the back of the stove like black butterflies and finally flew up the chimney.

When they left Tostes, in the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant.

1. The “Marjolaine” is an old, traditional Parisian workman’s song, dating back to the twelfth century.

2. These two fashionable Parisian women’s magazines, as Laget points out, were not contemporary with each other: the Corbeille (the word means a basket) flourished between 1843 and 1878, while the Sylph des Salons only lasted from 1829 to 1830.

3. The novels of Eugène Sue (1804–57) were extremely popular in the period, especially his serialized novels about fashionable contemporary life. Flaubert detested his work, seeing it as the worst kind of commercial fiction.

4. Flaubert slightly alters the title of a well-known digest titled La Ruche scientifique (the word ruche means beehive), which published abstracts and summaries of medical and scientific articles and books.

5. The pianos designed by Sébastian Érard (1752–1831) were used by the finest musicians of the era, including Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt; it is difficult to imagine a health officer being able to afford one.

PART II

CHAPTER 1

Yonville-l’Abbaye¹ (so named for an old Capuchin abbey, even the ruins of which no longer exist) is a market town some twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville and the Beauvais roads, lying in a valley watered by the Rieule, a small river that flows into the Andelle after having turned three watermills near its mouth, where there are a few trout; the boys amuse themselves by fishing for them on Sundays.

If you leave the highway at La Boissière and go straight on to the top of the Leux hills, you will see the valley below. The river running through it divides it into what seem to be two distinct physiognomies: everything on the left is pasture, and everything on the right is farmland. The meadow stretches along under a bulge of low hills, to join up behind in the pasture lands near Bray, while on the eastern side the gently rising plain broadens out, revealing its blond wheat fields as far as the eye can see. The water flowing by the edge of the grass creates a white line separating the color of the meadows from that of the cultivated farmland, and the countryside looks like a great cloak spread out, with a green velvet collar edged with a silver fringe.

On the horizon, when you arrive, you see straight ahead the oaks of the Argueil forest, with the slopes of the Saint-Jean hill scarred from top to bottom with long, irregular red lines; these are the tracks of the rains, and these brick-tones, cut in fine streaks against the gray color of the mountain, are the effect of the iron-heavy waters that originate in springs in the surrounding regions.

This is the border region of Normandy, Picardy, and the Île-de-France, a bastard country where the language has no accent and the landscape no character. This is where they make the worst Neufchâtel cheeses in the whole district, and moreover, farming is an expensive proposition here, because it takes a lot of manure to enrich this crumbly soil, full as it is of sand and pebbles.

Up until 1835 there was no decent, passable road to get to Yonville; but around that time, a connecting byroad was established, linking up the road to Abbeville with that of the one to Amiens; the new road is sometimes used by Rouen wagoners on their way to Flanders. But for all that, Yonville-l’Abbaye has not changed a bit despite its new outlets. Instead of improving the soil, they stubbornly keep their land for pasture despite the depreciation in its value, and the lazy little town, turning its back on the plain, has continued its natural growth toward the river. You can see it from far off stretching along the water’s edge, like a cowherd taking his siesta by the river.

At the foot of the hill, after the bridge, a roadway planted with young aspens leads you straight to the first homes in the area. They are enclosed by hedges, set in the midst of yards full of scattered outbuildings, wine presses, cart sheds, and distilleries under dense trees, from the lower branches of which are hung ladders, poles, and scythes. The thatched roofs, like fur caps pulled down over the eyes, hang down and cover the top third of the low windows—whose panes bulge out to a knot in the center, like the bottoms of bottles. Sometimes, a scraggly pear tree leans against a plaster wall crossed diagonally by black joists, and the ground floors have little swinging gates at their doors for protection from the chicks that come to the thresholds to peck at crumbs of brown bread dipped in cider. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses come closer together, the hedges disappear; a bundle of ferns sways below a window, hanging from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith’s forge, then a wheelwright’s shop with two or three new carts out in front, partly blocking the way. Then, across an open space, appears a white house in the middle of a lawn decorated by a Cupid, one finger pressed against his lips; two cast-iron urns stand at either side of the porch; a signboard gleams on the door: this is the notary’s house, the finest one in the area.

The church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces further down, at the entrance to the square. The little cemetery surrounding it, enclosed by a wall chest high, is so full of graves that the old gravestones sunk in the ground form a continuous pavement of regular squares broken only by the grass growing between them. The church had been rebuilt during the last years of Charles X’s reign. The wooden roof is starting to rot from the top down, and here and there black holes appear in its blue paint. Over the doorway, where the organ would be, is a loft for the men, with a spiral staircase that echoes under their wooden shoes.

The daylight, coming in through the plain glass windows, obliquely lights up the pews ranged perpendicular to the wall, with here and there straw mats nailed to them, and just beneath them in big letters the words “Monsieur so-and-so’s pew.” Farther on, at the area where the nave narrows, the confessional is complemented by a statuette of the Virgin, dressed in a satin robe, a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars on her head, her cheeks stained purple like some idol from the Sandwich Islands; and finally, a copy of the Holy Family, A Gift from the Minister of the Interior dominates the high altar between four candlesticks, closing off the perspective. The choir stalls, of pinewood, remain unpainted.

The marketplace—that is, a tiled roof supported by twenty posts—itself occupies about half of Yonville’s public square. The town hall, built from the design of a Paris architect, is a sort of Greek temple that forms the corner next to the pharmacist’s shop. It has, on the ground floor, three Ionic columns and, on the second floor, a semicircular gallery terminating in a tympanum adorned with a Gallic cock who rests one foot upon the constitution and holds in the other the scales of justice.

But what really attracts the eye, standing across from the Golden Lion inn, is the pharmacy of Monsieur Homais! Especially in the evening, when his lamp is lit, once the red and green apothecary jars that adorn his window cast their two bright colors across the sidewalk, then, looking through them, as if through Bengal lights,² one can see the shadow of the pharmacist leaning over his desk. His house from top to bottom is papered with inscriptions written in script, in round hand, in block letters: “Vichy, Seltzer, and Barège waters, purifying agents, Raspail medicine, Arabian racahout,³ Darcet lozenges, Regnault salve, bandages, baths, medicinal chocolate,” et cetera. And the sign stretching across the entire width of the shop reads, in golden letters, Homais, Pharmacist. Then, at the back of the shop, behind the big scales affixed to the counter, the word Laboratory appears above a glass door which, halfway up, repeats once more Homais in gold letters on a black background.

There is nothing more to see in Yonville. The street (the only one), about as long as a gunshot and lined with a few shops on either side, comes to a sudden end at the turn of the highway. Leaving it and heading off to the right, following the Saint-Jean hills, one soon comes to the cemetery.

In the time of cholera,⁴ to enlarge it, they pulled down part of a wall and bought three adjoining acres; but this entire new section is largely empty, for the graves continue, as before, to crowd together near the gate. The groundskeeper, who is also the gravedigger and the church’s verger (thereby making a double profit out of the parish’s corpses), has taken advantage of the empty ground to plant potatoes there. But from year to year his little field shrinks, and when there is an epidemic, he doesn’t know whether to rejoice at the deaths or grieve at the burials.

“You feed yourself on the dead, Lestiboudois! ” the priest said to him one day.

This somber remark made him think, and it made him stop for a while; but today he continues to cultivate his little tubers, and he even goes so far as to claim, with complete assurance, that they grow by themselves.

Since the time of the events we are about to narrate here, nothing has really changed in Yonville. The tin tricolor flag still turns at the top of the church steeple; the dry-goods merchant’s shop still waves its two calico streamers in the wind; the pharmacist’s fetuses, like little packets of white tinder, continue to rot away bit by bit in their muddy alcohol; and above the inn’s big door, the old golden lion, faded by the rains, still shows off its poodle’s mane to passersby.

On the evening when the Bovarys were due to arrive, the inn’s landlady, the widow Madame Lefrançois, was so busy that the sweat poured off her in big drops as she shuffled her saucepans. The next day was the town’ s market day. She had to cut the meat in advance, clean the chickens, prepare the soup and the coffee. And she also had to make the meals for her boarders, and for the doctor, his wife, and their maid; the billiard room echoed with laughter; three millers in the little parlor were calling for brandy to be brought; the wood was blazing, the coals crackling, and, on the long kitchen table among the quarters of raw mutton, piles of plates rose up, rattling from the shaking of the cutting board where the spinach was being chopped. From the yard the squawking of chickens could be heard, as the servant chased them around to cut off their heads.

A pockmarked man wearing green leather slippers and a velvet cap with a gold tassel was warming his back at the fireplace. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he seemed as content with life as the goldfinch suspended over his head in its wicker cage. This was the pharmacist.

“Artémise!” the landlady cried, “chop some wood, fill the pitchers, serve the brandy, hurry up! If only I knew what sort of dessert to serve the people you’re expecting! Good heavens! Those moving men are starting up their racket again in the billiard room! And is their cart still up against the front door? The Hirondelle could crash into it when it gets here! Call ’Polyte to move it away! … just think, Monsieur Homais, since this morning they’ve played fifteen games and drank eight jugs of cider! … And they’re going to rip the cloth for me,” she continued, keeping an eye on them from a distance, her skimming ladle in her hand.

“That wouldn’t be such a loss,” Monsieur Homais replied. “you could buy another one.”

“Another billiard cloth!” the widow exclaimed.

“Since that one’s falling to pieces, Madame Lefrançois; I keep telling you, you’re making a mistake! A big mistake! And anyway, the players nowadays want narrow pockets and heavy cues. People just don’t play the way they used to; everything has changed! You have to keep up with the times! Look at Tellier … ”

The hostess reddened with irritation. The pharmacist added:

“His billiard table, say what you like, is nicer than yours; and suppose we had a patriotic pool tournament, for example, to benefit Poland, or the Lyons flood victims …”

“Good-for-nothings like him don’t frighten me!” the hostess interrupted, shrugging her fat shoulders. “Come on, come on, Monsieur Homais! As long as the Golden Lion is here, people will be coming. We’ve feathered our nest just fine! One of these mornings you’ll see the Café Français closed down, with a placard stuck on the shutters! … Change my billiard table,” she went on, talking to herself, “when this one is so handy for folding the laundry on, and when I’ve been able to fit six guests on it during hunting season! … But that slowpoke Hivert still isn’t here!”

“Are you waiting for him before you serve your gentlemen’s dinner?” the pharmacist asked.

“Waiting for him? And what about Monsieur Binet? He’ll walk in at six on the dot, because nobody on earth is more exact when it comes to being on time. He always has to have his place in the little parlor! You’d have to kill him to make him eat anywhere else! And he’s so fussy! And so finicky about his cider! Not like Monsieur Léon—now him, he’ll come in sometimes at seven, sometimes even at seven-thirty; and he doesn’t pay any attention to what he’s eating. What a nice young man! Never raises his voice!”

“That’s the difference, you see, between someone who’s had an education and an old soldier turned tax collector.”

The clock struck six. Binet came in.

He was dressed in a blue frock coat that hung straight down on his thin body, and his leather cap, with its ear flaps tied up on top of his head, revealed below its turned-up visor a bald forehead, flattened out by the helmet he had worn for so long. He wore a black waistcoat, a horsehair collar, gray trousers, and, no matter what the season, well-polished boots that had two parallel bulges where his toes thrust upward. Not one hair was out of place in the careful line of blond whiskers that circled his jaws and framed, like a border in a garden, his long, dull face with its little eyes and its hooked nose. Formidable at every kind of card game, a good hunter, a man of excellent penmanship, he had a lathe at his home with which he entertained himself by making napkin rings, cluttering his house with them, with the single-mindedness of an artist and the self-importance of a bourgeois.

He made straight for the little parlor: but first it was necessary to get the three millers out of it; and during the entire time it took to set his table, Binet remained silent in his place near the stove; then, he closed the door and removed his hat, in his customary way.

“He won’t wear out his tongue with polite conversation!” said the pharmacist, when he was alone with the hostess.

“He never says much,” she replied. “Last week, two traveling clothes salesmen were here, real funny guys who told so many jokes that evening I was crying from laughter: well! He just sat there like a fish and didn’t say a word.”

“Yes,” said the pharmacist, “no imagination, no little bursts of wit, no social graces!”

“But they say he has his talents,” she objected.

“Talents!” replied Monsieur Homais. “Him! Talents? In his own line of work, possibly,” he added in a calmer tone.

And he went on: “Ah, if a businessman with important connections, a magistrate, a doctor, a pharmacist were to become so absorbed that they became eccentric or even gruff, I would understand that; history gives us examples! But at least it’s because they’re thinking about something. Take me for example: how many times have I looked all over my desk for a pen to write out a label, only to find that I’d put it behind my ear!”

But Madame Lefrançois went to the door to see if the Hirondelle⁵ had come. She jumped: a man dressed in black suddenly strode into the kitchen. In the last gleams of the twilight one could see that his face was ruddy and his form athletic.

“What can I do for you, Monsieur le curé?” asked the landlady, while she reached up for one of the brass candlesticks that were arranged in a row with their candles. “Will you have a drink? A drop of cassis, a glass of wine?”

The priest very politely declined. He had come to look for his umbrella, which he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after having asked Madame Lefrançois to have it sent to him at the rectory that evening, he left to get back to the church, where the Angelus was ringing.

When the pharmacist could no longer hear the sound of his steps outside in the square, he said he found the priest’s behavior just now quite unseemly. That refusal to accept some refreshment seemed to him the most loathsome hypocrisy; all priests guzzle liquor on the sly, and they were all trying to bring back the days of the tithe.

The hostess took up the priest’s defense:

“Well, anyway, he could bend four men like you over his knee. Last year, he helped our folks bring in the hay; he could carry up to six bales at once, that’s how strong he is!”

“Bravo!” said the pharmacist. “So send your daughters off to confess to strapping fellows like that! If I were the government, I’d like to have priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrançois, every month, a good strong bloodletting, for the sake of law and order!”

“Oh be quiet, Monsieur Homais! You’re a blasphemer! You have no religion!”

The pharmacist replied, “Yes, I have a religion, my religion, and it’s greater than all of theirs, with their mumbo-jumbo and their magic tricks! On the contrary, I worship God! I believe in a Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he is, it doesn’t matter, who has placed us here below on Earth to fulfill our duties as citizens, and as fathers of families; but I don’t have any need to go into a church to kiss silver plates and take money out of my pocket to fatten up a gang of frauds who eat better than we do! Because one can honor God just as well in the woods, in a field, or even in contemplating the ethereal vault above, the way the ancients did. My God, mine, is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Béranger! I’m for the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar⁶ and the immortal principles of 1789! Therefore I cannot accept some good old fellow of a God who walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies screeching, and revives himself three days later—things that are absurd in themselves, and what’s more, completely opposed to all the laws of physics— which demonstrates, by the way, how the priests have always wallowed in base ignorance and want to drown the people in it right along with them!”

He stopped, and looked around for an audience, for in his excitement the pharmacist had for a moment imagined himself in the midst of a town council. But the inn’s landlady didn’t hear him; she was listening to the sound of distant wheels. They could hear the sounds of a carriage along with the clatter of loose horseshoes beating the ground, and at last the Hirondelle stopped in front of the door.

The coach was a yellow box mounted on two great wheels that reached all the way to the roof, preventing its passengers from being able to see the road, and muddying their shoulders. The little panes of the narrow windows rattled in their frames when the doors were closed, and they retained spots of mud here and there amid the old layers of dust that even the rainstorms never entirely washed off. It was drawn by three horses, the first one as the leader, and on the downhills, its bottom would bump the ground with a jolt.

Some Yonville townspeople came out into the square; they spoke all at once, asking for news, for information, for their food baskets: Hivert didn’t know which one to answer first. He was the one who went to town and did errands and made purchases for the local people. He went to shops, brought back rolls of leather for the shoemaker, scrap iron for the blacksmith, a barrel of herring for the innkeeper, bonnets from the milliner, wigs from the hairdresser; and all along the road on his return trip, he distributed his packages, tossing them over fences and walls while standing upright on his seat, calling out at the top of his voice while his horses trotted along on their own.

He had been delayed by an accident: Madame Bovary’s greyhound had run off across the fields. They had whistled for it for a quarter of an hour. Hivert had even turned and driven back a mile or so, thinking every moment that he would catch sight of it; but at last they had to move on. Emma had wept and was very angry; she blamed Charles for causing the disaster. Monsieur Lheureux, a dry-goods merchant who happened to be in the coach with her, tried to console her by telling numerous stories of lost dogs who years later recognized their masters. People talked about one, he said, who had found its way back from Constantinople to Paris. Another one had come a hundred and twenty miles in a straight line and had swum four rivers; and his own father had owned a poodle that, after being lost for twelve years, suddenly jumped up on his back one evening, as he was walking down the street on his way to dinner.

1. Yonville, Flaubert insisted, was entirely fictional. But he did base it on several small towns, especially Forge-les-Eaux and Ry; after the novel had become a modern classic, the citizens of Ry erected a monument to Flaubert, claiming the dubious honor of having been the model for Yonville. Researchers in the late nineteenth century, eager to find the real bases for the novel, reported a number of Ry inhabitants who insisted they or their parents had been the originals of some of the characters (see Claudine Gothot-Mersch, La Genèse de “Madame Bovary” [Paris: José Corti, 1966], 30–32). Today, the connection with Madame Bovary has come to dominate Ry, where one can visit restored homes from the era, take an extensive “Bovary tour,” and even view an elaborate puppet show based on the novel.

2. Bengal lights were originally flares, but they were also used as fireworks. They were known as Bengal lights because they were a mix of sulfur and saltpeter, and the chief source of saltpeter was India.

3. Racahout originated in Arabia; the ingredients can differ, but it is served as a sweet-tasting gruel, and is often given to invalids.

4. The cholera epidemic in France was in 1832.

5. The stagecoach is named for the swiftly flying swallow, the hirondelle.

6. The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar was a long section of Book 4 of Rousseau’s Émile (1762). It was an influential (and, at the time, scandalous) critique of institutional religion, presenting instead a more generalized deism.

CHAPTER 2

Emma got out first, followed by Félicité, Monsieur Lheureux, and a nurse, and they had to wake Charles up; sitting in his corner, he had fallen sound asleep as soon as night fell.

Homais introduced himself; he offered Madame his compliments, and Monsieur his respects, said that he had been delighted to have been able to be of some service to them, and added cordially that he had been so bold as to invite himself to join their dinner, his wife being away.

Madame Bovary, when she had come in the kitchen, walked over to the fireplace. With the tips of two fingers, she grasped her dress at the knees and lifted it up to her ankles, holding out toward the fire, above the leg of lamb turning on a spit, her foot encased in a black boot. The flame fully illuminated her, its harsh light penetrating the cloth of her dress, the smooth pores of her white skin, even the eyelids that she blinked from time to time. A strong red glow moved over her, due to the wind coming through the half-open door.

On the other side of the fireplace, a young man with fair hair stood gazing at her silently.

Since he was enormously bored with Yonville, where he was a clerk to the notary Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Léon Dupuis (for it was he, the second habitué of the Golden Lion) often put off his dinner hour in hopes that some traveler would turn up at the inn, someone with whom he could chat during the evening. On the days when he finished his work early, he had no choice but to arrive punctually, and then submit to the company of Binet from soup to cheese. And so it was with joy that he accepted the hostess’ suggestion that he dine with the newcomers, and they all walked together into the large parlor where Madame Lefrançois, with great pomp, had set a table for four.

Homais begged permission to keep his skullcap on, for fear of catching a head cold.

Then, turning to his neighbor: “Madame is no doubt a bit tired? A person gets so terribly jolted around in our Hirondelle.”

“That’s true,” Emma replied, “but all this trouble always amuses me; I love to have a change of scene.”

“It’s such a bore,” the clerk said with a sigh, “to be always stuck in one place!”

“If you were like me,” said Charles, “always obliged to be on horseback … ”

“But,” Léon continued, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, “there’s nothing more pleasant, it seems to me—that is, when a person can—” he added.

“Anyway,” said the pharmacist, “the practice of medicine is not so very difficult in our district; for the state of our roads allows the use of a cabriolet, and generally people pay well, the farmers being pretty well off. We have, speaking from the medical point of view, apart from the usual cases of enteritis, bronchitis, liver problems, and the like, from time to time a few intermittent fevers around harvest time, but, in general, very few serious illnesses, nothing worth mentioning, unless it be quite a lot of scrofula, which comes no doubt from the deplorable hygienic conditions of our peasant housing. Ah, you will find a great many prejudices to combat, Monsieur Bovary! Many stubborn habits, against which all the efforts of your science will have to do battle on a daily basis; for here people still turn to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than coming directly to the doctor or the pharmacist. The climate, however, is, to tell the truth, not all bad, and we even count some nonagenarians in the parish. The thermometer—I have made some observations—in winter goes down to about four degrees, and in the warmest season rises to twenty-five or thirty degrees centigrade at the most, which gives us twenty-four on the Réaumur scale¹ at most, or in other words fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit (the English scale), no more than that! And in fact we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side; from the west winds by the Saint-Jean hills on the other; and this heat, however, which, due to the water vapors given off from the river and the considerable presence of cattle in the fields, which exhale, as you know, a great deal of ammonia, or, that is, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen—no, it’s only nitrogen and hydrogen—and which, sucking up the earth’s humus and blending together all these different emanations, reunites them into a single bundle, so to speak, and combining itself with the electricity in the atmosphere, when there is any, can, in the long run, as in tropical countries, give rise to insalubrious miasmas—this heat, I say, finds itself nicely tempered on the side it comes from, or rather on the side it would come from, that is to say the southern side, by the southeasterly winds that, being cooled themselves by passing over the Seine, come upon us abruptly sometimes, like breezes from Russia!”

“Are there at least some good walks around here?” Madame Bovary continued, speaking to the young man.

“Oh, hardly any,” he replied. “There’s a place they call the Pasture, on the top of a hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes on Sundays I go there with a book, to watch the sunset.”

“I don’t think there’s anything as lovely as sunsets,” she said, “but especially by the seaside.”

“Oh, I love the sea!” said Monsieur Léon.

“And doesn’t it seem to you,” Madame Bovary replied, “that the spirit can roam more freely over that limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul and suggests ideas of the infinite, of the ideal?”

“It’s the same with mountain landscapes,” said Léon. “I have a cousin who traveled to Switzerland last year, and he told me you simply can’t imagine the poetry of the lakes, the delight of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. You see pines of an unbelievable size across the torrents, little cottages practically hanging from precipices, and when the clouds part, a thousand feet below you, whole valleys. Sights like those just have to fill a person with enthusiasm, dispose him toward prayer, toward ecstasy! So it doesn’t surprise me any more to think of that celebrated musician who, in order to stimulate his imagination more powerfully, used to play his piano in front of some imposing scene.”

“Do you play music?” she asked.

“No, but I love it very much,” he replied.

“Oh, don’t believe him, Madame Bovary,” Homais interrupted, bending over his plate, “it’s pure modesty. Come on, my friend! Just the other day in your room you were singing the ‘Guardian Angel’² delightfully! I was listening to you from my laboratory; you performed it like an actor.”

Léon did room at the pharmacist’s, where he had a little apartment on the third floor, overlooking the square. He blushed at his landlord’s compliment, though Homais had already turned back toward the doctor and was enumerating for him, one after the other, the principal citizens of Yonville. He was telling anecdotes and supplying information; nobody knew what the notary’s exact wealth amounted to, and then there was the Tuvache concern, which was facing some real problems.

Emma continued:

“And what music is your favorite?”

“Oh! German music, the kind that sets you dreaming.”

“Are you familiar with the Italians?”

“Not yet; but I’ll get to see them next year, when I go to live in Paris, to finish my law studies.”

“I’ve just had the honor,” the pharmacist said, “of explaining to your spouse all about that poor Yanoda who ran off; you’ll find, thanks to his absurd extravagances, that you’ll be enjoying one of Yonville’s most comfortable houses. What makes it especially convenient for a doctor is its door onto the back lane, which lets people go in and leave without being seen. Moreover, it includes everything most pleasant in a household: laundry, kitchen with pantry, sitting room, fruit storeroom, et cetera. He was a lively fellow who didn’t keep much of an eye on his expenses! He had an arbor built beside the river expressly for drinking his beer in the summer, and if Madame enjoys gardening, she will be able to … ”

“My wife doesn’t much care for it,” said Charles; “and even though she has been advised to get some exercise, she’d rather stay in her room all day, reading.”

“That’s just like me,” said Léon. “Really, what could be better than spending an evening by the fireside with a book, while the wind beats on the windowpanes, while the lamp burns?”

“Isn’t that true?” she said, fixing her great black eyes, wide open, upon him.

“At those times you think about nothing in particular,” he went on, “and the hours pass by. Sitting still, you walk through lands that you feel you can see, and your thoughts merge with the fiction, hovering over the details or following along with the plot. You commune with the characters; it seems as if it’s your heart beating beneath their clothes.”

“So true! So true!” she said.

“Has it ever happened to you,” Léon continued, “to come across, in a book, some vague idea that you once had, or some shadowy image that seems to return to you from a great distance, which seems to be the most complete expression possible of your most fleeting feelings?”

“I have felt that,” she replied.

“That’s why,” he said, “I love the poets above all. I find verses to be more sensitive than prose, and they certainly bring me to tears more often.”

“Yet they’re fatiguing in the long run,” Emma replied. “And right now, on the contrary, I love those stories that you can read scarcely taking a breath, stories that frighten me. I detest common, everyday heroes and restrained emotions, like the ones in real life.”

“And I really think,” the clerk observed, “that those works that don’t touch the heart are missing the true aim of Art. It’s so sweet a thing, amidst all of life’s disenchantments, to be able to come back and think about noble characters, pure feelings, and scenes of happiness. As for me, living here far away from the world, it’s my only distraction; but Yonville has so few resources!”

“Just like Tostes, no doubt,” replied Emma, “so I always subscribed to a lending library.”

“If Madame would do me the honor of making use of it,” said the pharmacist, who had just heard these last words, “I have at her disposal a library composed of the best authors: Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille,³ Walter Scott, The Literary Echo,⁴et cetera, and I subscribe, moreover, to various periodicals, among them the Rouen Lantern,⁵ a daily, because I have the advantage of being their correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel, Yonville, and the vicinity.”

They had been at the table for two and a half hours; for the servant Artémise, nonchalantly dragging her slippers over the tiles, brought the dishes in out of order, forgot everything, paid attention to nothing, and constantly left the billiard room door half open, so that its latch banged against the wall.

Without noticing it himself, as he talked Léon had placed his foot on one of the crossbars of Madame Bovary’s chair. She was wearing a thin scarf of blue silk to keep her fluted cambric ruff in place; and, depending on the movement of her head, the lower part of her face would either sink into the fabric or gently rise up out of it. And sitting thus, close to each other, while Charles and the pharmacist talked, they entered into one of those vague conversations where chance phrases continually bring you back to the fixed center, to feelings held in common. Paris plays, the titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world neither of them knew, Tostes, where she had lived, Yonville, where they were now—they discussed it all, up to the end of the dinner.

When coffee was served, Félicité went off to prepare the bedroom in the new house, and the group soon got up from the table. Madame Lefrançois was asleep beside the embers, while the stable boy with a lantern in his hand waited to lead Monsieur and Madame Bovary to their new home. His red hair had wisps of straw stuck in it, and he limped with his left leg. When he had picked up the priest’s umbrella with his other hand, they all set off.

The town was asleep. The market pillars cast long shadows. The earth seemed entirely gray, as on a summer’s night.

But since the doctor’s house was only about fifty paces from the inn, they soon had to say their good-nights, and the group dispersed.

As soon as she entered the hall, Emma felt the coldness of the plaster walls seeming to fall over her shoulders like a damp cloth. The walls were newly done, and the wooden steps creaked. In the second-floor bedroom, a whitish light entered the uncurtained windows. Through them one could see treetops and, farther out, the meadow, half submerged in the fog that steamed up from the river in the moonlight. In the middle of the room was a jumble of dresser drawers, bottles, curtain rods, gilt poles, mattresses on the chairs, and basins on the floor: the two moving men had simply left everything there carelessly.

It was the fourth time she had gone to bed in an unknown environment. The first was on the day she had come to the convent, the second that of her arrival in Tostes, the third at La Vaubyessard, and the fourth was this time; and each one had been a kind of inauguration, a new phase in her life. She did not believe that things could be the same in different places, and since the part of her life she had already lived had been unpleasant, the part that remained would, no doubt, be better.

1. The Réaumur scale (which set the freezing and boiling points of water at zero and eighty degrees respectively) had been in wide use in the eighteenth century, but France had officially switched to the Celsius scale in the 1790s.

2. The “Guardian Angel” was a poem published in 1839 by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, set to music by Pauline Duchambge. Flaubert implicitly mocks the sentimental, dreamy lyric of Desbordes-Valmore, but in recent years critics—notably Yves Bonnefoy, who has edited a selection of her poems (Poésies [Paris: Gallimard, 2001])—have reevaluated her work, and her rank in nineteenth-century French poetry is much higher today.

3. Jacques Delille (1738–1813) would appeal to Homais, as a poet whose subject matter included agricultural description, and one who was approved by the literary establishment of the day.

4. This was l’Écho des feuilletons, a popular Parisian paper that reprinted stories and poems; it lasted from 1841 to 1887.

5. Flaubert had originally used the actual title of the Rouen paper, Le Journal de Rouen, but a Rouen friend, Frédéric Baudry, implored him to use a fictional title. He agonized over the issue in a letter to Bouilhet, complaining that changing the title would “ruin the rhythms of my poor sentences,” and saying he was “torn between my longstanding hatred for the Journal de Rouen on the one hand and the desire to be a decent fellow on the other” (October 5, 1856, in Correspondance, vol. II:638–40). He finally settled on Le Fanal de Rouen, translated here as the Rouen Lantern.

CHAPTER 3

The next day when she awoke she saw the clerk in the square. She was in her dressing gown. He looked up and bowed to her. She made a slight, rapid bow and reclosed the window.

Léon waited all day long for six o’clock to arrive; but when he came into the inn, he saw only Monsieur Binet, seated at his table.

The previous day’s dinner had been a significant event for him; he had never before conversed for two hours straight with a lady. How was it that he had been able to express so many things to her, and in such language, so many things that he had never said so well before? He was normally shy, and kept up the sort of reserve that arose from a combination of modesty and dissimulation. In Yonville, people thought he had the right sort of manners. He listened to the opinions of his elders, and he was not all wrapped up in politics like so many young men. And then he had his talents: he painted in watercolors, could read music in the key of G, and was happy to discuss literature after dinner, when he wasn’t playing cards. Monsieur Homais respected him for his education; Madame Homais was fond of him for his good nature, for he would often take the Homais children to the garden— brats whose faces were always dirty, very badly brought up, and tending to sluggishness like their mother. To look after them they had, besides the maid, Justin, the pharmacist’s apprentice, a distant cousin of Homais whom they had taken in out of charity, and who thus was also useful as a servant.

The druggist showed himself to be the best of neighbors. He informed Madame Bovary about the local merchants, had his own cider merchant call on her, tasted the drink himself, and saw to it that the barrels were placed in the cellar properly; and he also showed her how to go about getting a good price on butter; and he made an arrangement with the sexton Lestiboudois who, apart from his churchly and mortuary functions, served as gardener to Yonville’s principal homes, for hire by the hour or the year, according to the individual’s wishes.

But it was not pure altruism that drove the pharmacist to such heights of obsequious cordiality; there was in fact another motive.

He had violated Article i of the law of the 19th of Ventose, year XI,¹ which forbids anyone without a diploma from practicing medicine; and the result was that certain dark, anonymous accusations had landed Homais before the royal prosecutor in Rouen, in his own private office. The magistrate received him standing up, wearing his formal robes, ermine on his shoulders, and official cap on his head. This was in the morning, before the court session. He could hear the policemen’s heavy boots in the corridor, and, in the distance, what sounded like huge locks being turned. The pharmacist’s ears began to ring so much that he believed he would have a stroke; he vividly imagined the deepest reaches of a dungeon, his family in tears, the pharmacy put up for sale, all his jars dispersed; and he had to go into a café afterward to drink a glass of rum and seltzer water to calm his nerves.

But time slowly weakened the memory of his warning, and he continued, just as before, to give harmless consultations in the back room of his shop. But the mayor had his eye on him, some colleagues were jealous, and he had to be very careful; by binding Monsieur Bovary to him with his favors, he hoped to win his gratitude and prevent him from speaking out later if he happened to find out anything. And thus every morning he brought the newspaper to him, and many afternoons he would leave the pharmacy for a few moments to go over and chat with the health officer.

Charles was gloomy: patients were not coming. He would stay sitting in one place for long hours without speaking, would go nap in his office, or would sit and watch his wife sewing. For diversion, he busied himself at home playing handyman, and he even tried to brighten up the attic with some paint left behind by the painters. But money problems worried him. He had spent so much on repairs at Tostes, so much on Madame’s wardrobe and on the move, that the entire dowry, over three thousand écus, had trickled away in two years. And then there had been so many things broken or lost in the move from Tostes to Yonville—not to mention the plaster priest, which had fallen off the cart after a severe jolt, shattering into a thousand pieces on the Quincampoix pavement.

But there was one more pleasant anxiety that helped to distract him, namely, his wife’s pregnancy. The closer the due date came, the more he cherished her. It was another fleshly bond being established between them, and it seemed like a continuation and deepening of their union. When, standing off at a distance, he saw her heavy walk, and her uncorseted hips gently swaying—when they sat facing each other, and he could freely gaze at her while she wearily shifted positions in the armchair—then his happiness knew no limits. He would get up, kiss her, caress her face, call her “little mama,” try to talk her into dancing, and, half laughing and half weeping, pour out every little endearment that came into his head. The idea of having fathered a child delighted him. There was nothing lacking in his life now. He knew the whole range of human existence now, and he sat down at the table before it, rested his elbows, and contemplated it with serenity.

Emma at first felt a great astonishment, and then she became anxious for the child to be born so she would learn what it was to be a mother. But not being able to spend as much as she wanted, to have a boat-shaped cradle with pink silk curtains and embroidered caps for the baby, she gave up caring about it all in a fit of bitterness, and she ordered everything from a village seamstress, without choosing or even discussing any of it. So she took no pleasure in those preparations that help to stimulate a mother’s love, and her affection was perhaps weakened from the beginning.

But since Charles would speak about the baby at every meal, she soon began to think about it more seriously.

She wanted a boy; he would be strong, dark, and named Georges; and this idea of having a male child was like a hoped-for revenge upon all her former powerlessness. A man, whatever else he is, is free; he can explore passions and countries, overcome obstacles, taste the most exotic pleasure. But a woman is always held back. Inert and flexible at the same time, she is hampered both by the weakness of her flesh and by the legal restrictions imposed upon her. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet held by a string, flutters in every wind: there is always some desire luring her, some convention restraining her.

She gave birth on a Sunday about six in the morning, as the sun was rising.

“It’s a girl!” said Charles.

She turned her head away and fainted.

Almost immediately Madame Homais ran over to embrace her, as did Madame Lefrançois of the Golden Lion. The pharmacist, a discreet man, only addressed a few provisional congratulations through the half-opened door. He wanted to see the infant and found it well formed.

During her convalescence, she busied herself a great deal in seeking out a name for her daughter. First she reviewed all the ones with Italian endings, like Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde well enough, and Yseult or Léocadie even more. Charles wanted to name the child after his mother; Emma opposed the idea. They ran through the saints’ calendar from one end to the other, and they asked outsiders for advice.

“Monsieur Léon,” said the pharmacist, “with whom I was conversing the other day, is quite surprised that you haven’t chosen Madeleine, which is all the rage right now.”

But Charles’ mother protested strongly against that great sinner’s name.² As for Monsieur Homais, he had a predilection for names that recalled great men, an illustrious deed, or a noble idea, and this was the system by which he had baptized his four children. Thus, Napoléon represented glory and Franklin liberty; Irma was, perhaps, a concession to Romanticism; but Athalie was an homage to the most immortal masterpiece of the French stage.³ Because his philosophical convictions were no impediment to his aesthetic tastes, the thinker in him did not stifle the man of feeling; he knew how to make distinctions, to keep the roles of imagination and fanaticism quite separate. In the tragedy of Athalie, for example, he could condemn the ideas but admire the style; he could damn the conception, but applaud all the details; he could be infuriated by the characters but be carried away with enthusiasm over their speeches. When he read the great, famous passages, he was transported; but when he realized that the bigoted Catholics would draw some profit from them for their sales pitches, he despaired, and tangled up in these confused and contradictory feelings, he would have liked to put the laurel wreath on Racine with his own hands and at the same time sit down and argue with him for a good quarter of an hour.

Eventually, Emma recalled that at La Vaubyessard she had heard the Marquise call a young woman Berthe; from that moment it was settled. Since Monsieur Rouault was unable to come, they asked Homais to be the child’s godfather. All the gifts he gave came right out of his shop, namely: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three marshmallow cakes, and six sticks of sugar candy that he had found in a cupboard. There was a big dinner on the evening of the ceremony; the priest was there, and things began to heat up when the liqueurs were served: Homais recited from The Good Man’s God by Béranger,⁴ Monsieur Léon sang a barcarole, and Madame Bovary senior, who was godmother, sang a ballad from the days of the Empire. Finally, Monsieur Bovary senior insisted that the infant be brought down, and he proceeded to baptize her with a glass of champagne, pouring it down from high over her head. This mockery of the first of the sacraments outraged the Abbé Bournisien; Bovary senior responded by quoting from The War of the Gods,⁵ and the cleric got up to leave; the ladies pleaded with him; Homais intervened, and they succeeded in getting the priest to sit back down again, and he then went back to calmly sipping his half-finished coffee.

Monsieur Bovary senior stayed on for a month in Yonville, where he dazzled the locals with his superb silver-trimmed police hat; he wore it in the morning when he went out into the square to smoke. Having also the habit of consuming a great deal of brandy, he would often send the maid to the Golden Lion to fetch him a bottle, which he would charge to his son’s account; and to scent his scarves, he used up the entirety of his daughter-in-law’s eau de cologne.

She found his company by no means displeasing. He had gotten around in the world; he spoke about Berlin, Vienna, Strasbourg, his time as an officer, the mistresses he had had, the grand dinners he had attended; and then he was playful too, and from time to time, on the staircase or in the garden he would seize her around the waist and cry out:

“Charles, look out for yourself!”

Then Charles’ mother began to fear for the happiness of her son, and fearing that her husband would in the long run have an immoral influence on the young woman’s thinking, she hastened their departure. Perhaps she had even more serious concerns. Monsieur Bovary was a man who respected nothing.

One day, Emma was suddenly seized with an urge to visit her little girl, who had been put out to nurse with the carpenter’s wife, and without looking at the almanac to be sure the six weeks of the Virgin⁶ were over, she set out on the path to the Rollet house, located at the edge of town beneath the hills, between the highway and the fields.

It was noontime; the houses had their shutters closed, and the slate roofs gleaming under the harsh light of the bright blue sky seemed to be shooting sparks from the gable tops. A strong wind was blowing. Emma felt weak as she walked; the pebbles on the walkway hurt her feet; she was unsure whether she ought to turn back and go home or stop in somewhere and sit down.

At that moment Monsieur Léon came out of a neighboring doorway with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came over to greet her, and they stood in the shade in front of Lheureux’s shop under the projecting gray awning.

Madame Bovary said she was going to see her child, but that she was beginning to feel tired.

“If … ,” Léon replied, not daring to continue.

“Do you have business somewhere?” she asked.

And upon the clerk’s reply, she asked him to accompany her. By that evening, everyone in Yonville knew all about it, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife, declared to her maid that Madame Bovary was compromising herself.

To get to the wet nurse’s house, they had to turn left off the street toward the cemetery and follow a narrow path, bordered with a privet hedge, that ran between cottages and yards. The hedge was in bloom, as were the blue veronicas, the wild briers, the nettles, and the thin brambles pushing out from the bushes. Through the gaps in the hedges they could see, in front of the huts, a pig on a manure pile, or tethered cows rubbing their horns against tree trunks. The two of them, side by side, walked along slowly, she leaning on him and he slowing his pace to match hers; in front of them, a swarm of flies was hovering, buzzing in the warm air.

They recognized the house by the old walnut tree shading it. Built low and covered with brown tiles, it had hanging in front, beneath the attic window, a string of onions. Sticks of firewood stood against a thorn fence enclosing a lettuce patch, a few lavender bushes, and some sweet peas that hung upon their trellises. There was dirty water running here and there over the grass, and miscellaneous rags were hung everywhere—some knitted stockings, a red calico nightdress—and a big, heavy linen sheet was spread along the length of the hedge. At the sound of the gate, the wet nurse appeared, holding a nursing child in one arm. With her other hand she was dragging along a poor scrawny little brat, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hatmaker left in the country by his parents, who were too preoccupied with their business.

“Come in,” she said. “Your little one is over there, the one that’s sleeping.”

The bedroom on the ground floor, the only one in the house, had a large uncurtained bed in the back, against the wall, while a kneading trough occupied the side with the window, one pane of which was patched with a blue, cut-out paper sun. In the corner, behind the door, shiny hobnail boots were set in a row under the drain board near a bottle of oil with a feather sticking out of it; a Mathieu Laensberg almanac⁷ trailed along the dusty mantelpiece among gunflints, candle ends, and little bits of tinder. And the final luxury item in the room was a picture of Fame Blowing Her Trumpet, probably snipped out from some perfume advertisement, and nailed to the wall with six shoe nails.

Emma’s child was asleep on the floor in a wicker cradle. She picked her up with the blanket she was wrapped in and began to sing softly while rocking her.

Léon walked around the room; it felt strange to him to observe this beautiful lady in her nankeen⁸ dress right in the midst of all this poverty. Madame Bovary blushed; he turned away, thinking there might have been some impertinence in the way he had been looking at her. Then she put the child back in its bed; it had just thrown up on her collar. The wet nurse hurried to wipe it off, protesting that it wouldn’t show.

“She’s done that to me plenty of times,” she said, “and I’m forever washing her up! Would you be good enough to tell the grocer Camus to let me have a little soap when I need it? It would be more convenient for you, because then I wouldn’t have to bother you for it.”

“Yes, fine!” Emma said. “Good-bye, Madame Rollet.”

And she went out, wiping her shoes on the doorstep.

The good woman followed her out through the yard, talking the whole way about how hard it was for her to get up during the nights.

“I’m so worn out sometimes that I fall asleep in my chair; also, you ought to at least give me a pound of ground coffee, because that would last me a month, and I could have it in the mornings with some milk.”

Having put up with her thanks, Madame Bovary went on. She was only a little way down the path when the sound of wooden shoes made her turn around: it was the wet nurse!

“What is it?”

Then the peasant took her aside behind an elm tree and started talking about her husband who, what with his job and the six francs a year that the captain …

“Get to the point,” said Emma.

“Well!” replied the wet nurse, heaving a sigh with every word, “I’m afraid that it’ll make him angry to see me having coffee by myself: you know, these men …”

“But you’ll have some,” Emma repeated. “I’ll get you some! You’re beginning to annoy me!”

“Oh, my poor dear lady, it’s just that, because of his wounds, he has terrible chest pains. He tells me even cider weakens him.”

“But do hurry up, Madame Rollet!”

“So,” she continued with a curtsy, “if it wouldn’t be too much to ask of you … ” She curtsied again: “whenever you could … ” She said with pleading eyes: “just a jar of brandy,” she said finally, “and I’ll massage your little one’s feet with it; they’re just as soft as your tongue.”

Finally rid of the wet nurse, Emma took Léon’s arm again. She walked swiftly for a while; then she slowed down, and her gaze wandered to the young man’s shoulder, whose frock coat had a black velvet collar. His light brown hair fell over it, straight and carefully combed. She noted his fingernails, longer than was usual for Yonville. Trimming them was one of the clerk’s major occupations, and he kept, for that very purpose, a special knife in his desk.

They returned to Yonville by following the riverside. During the warm weather, the river’s water level fell, revealing the garden walls down to their bases, with their few steps leading down to the water. The river flowed silently, rapid and cold-looking; long, thin grasses bent down within it, moving with the current, and like loosened hair, spread out green in the limpid water. Sometimes, at the tops of the reeds or on a leaf of the water lilies, a thin-legged insect was walking or alighting. A sunray pierced the little blue bubbles made by the breaking waves; the old, branchless willows reflected their gray bark in the water, and beyond, all around them, the meadows seemed empty. It was the dinner hour at the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard nothing as they walked along but the rhythm of their steps on the path, the words they said to each other, and the brushing sounds of Emma’s dress as it rustled around her.

The garden walls, with pieces of bottles stuck in their copings, were as warm as windows in a greenhouse. Between the bricks, wallflowers had pushed their way out, and as Madame Bovary walked by, she used the tip of her opened parasol to make some of the withered flowers crumble into a yellow dust, and at times a branch of overhanging honeysuckle or clematis caught in its fringe and trailed along its silk.

They were talking about a troupe of Spanish dancers who were coming soon to the theater in Rouen.

“Are you going?” she asked.

“If I can,” he replied.

Did they have nothing else to say to each other? But their eyes were filled with a more serious conversation, and while they were struggling to come up with banal phrases, they felt the same languor overcoming them both; it was like a murmuring of the soul, profound and continuous, more powerful than the sound of their voices. Surprised, wondering at this new sweetness, they never thought to speak about it or inquire into its cause. Future joys are like tropical shores: they project their native indolence, a perfumed breeze, over the vast spaces that precede them, and we let ourselves doze off within that intoxication, with no anxieties about the horizon that, in fact, we have not even seen.

The ground in one spot had been torn up by the hooves of cattle; they had to walk on the big green rocks spaced evenly across the mud. She frequently stopped to study her footing—and faltering on a wobbling stone, elbows in the air, bent forward, entirely uncertain, she laughed aloud, out of fear of falling into the puddles of water.

When they had reached her garden, Madame Bovary opened the little gate, ran up the steps, and disappeared.

Léon went back to his office. His employer was not there; he looked briefly at the files, then trimmed a pen, and then finally picked up his hat and left.

He went up to the Pasture at the top of the Argueil hills, where the forest began; he lay down beneath some pines and watched the sky through his fingers.

“How bored I am!” he said to himself. “How bored I am!”

He had grounds for complaint, he thought, having to live in this village, with Homais for a friend and Monsieur Guillaumin for a boss. The latter, entirely absorbed by his business, wearing his gold-rimmed spectacles, with his red whiskers hanging over his white cravat, understood nothing about intellectual refinement, even though he put on a stiff English style that had greatly impressed the clerk at first. As for the pharmacist’s wife, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle as a sheep, cherishing her children, her father, her mother, her cousins, weeping over the misfortune of others, letting household matters go, and detesting corsets—but so slow-moving, so boring to listen to, her looks so common and her conversation so limited that he had never even dreamed, though she was thirty and he twenty, though they slept next door to each other, and though they spoke every day, that she could be a wife to someone, or that she possessed anything of the female sex beyond her dress.

And then, what else was there? Binet, a few business people, two or three innkeepers, the priest, and finally Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his two sons, rich, crude, obtuse, farming their own land and feasting with their own family, and pious on top of it all, and altogether insufferable companions.

But against the common background of all those human faces, the figure of Emma stood out, isolated from them, but even more distant; for he felt there was some vague abyss between him and her.

At the beginning, he came to visit her several times in the company of the pharmacist. Charles did not at all seem very interested in seeing him; and Léon didn’t know what to do, torn between his fear of being indiscreet and his desire for an intimacy that seemed nearly impossible.

1. The 19th of Ventose, year XI, is the date, using the Revolutionary calendar, corresponding to March 10, 1803. The month was named from the Latin ventosus, meaning windy.

2. The name Madeleine is derived from the biblical Magdalene.

3. Jean Racine’s tragedy, Athalie (produced in 1691), involves a deeply serious Judeo-Christian theme.

4. Béranger’s “The Good Man’s God” (“Le Dieu des bonnes gens”), 1817, was an anticlerical poem.

5.The War of the Gods (La Guerre des dieux) was an anti-Christian mock-epic poem of 1799 by Évariste-Désiré de Forges de Parny (1753–1814).

6. The “six weeks of the Virgin” was a semireligious, semisuperstitious custom; women who had delivered a baby were to wait six weeks—as, supposedly, Mary had done, between the Nativity and the Purification—before going outdoors.

7. Mathieu Laensberg almanacs were widely distributed throughout the countryside in the nineteenth century, often given away by merchants and salesmen.

8.Nankeen is a kind of cotton, stiff and durable, usually yellow.

CHAPTER 4

During the first days of the cold weather, Emma moved from her bedroom to the parlor, a long, low-ceilinged room with a thick piece of coral branch spread out across the mirror on the mantel. Seated in her chair by the window, she could see the townspeople pass by on the sidewalk.

Léon, twice a day, left his office for the Golden Lion. Emma could hear him coming from far away; she bent forward, listening, and the young man slipped in through the inn’s curtain, always dressed the same way, and without turning his head. But when, at dusk, her chin in her hand, she had abandoned her sewing and left it lying on her knees, she would often shudder at the apparition of the young man’s shadow slipping past. She would stand up and give orders to set the table.

Monsieur Homais would come in during dinner. His skullcap in his hand, he would enter silently so as not to disturb anyone, and would always repeat the same phrase: “Good evening to the assembly!” Then, when he had settled himself in his place at the table, between husband and wife, he would ask the doctor for news about his patients, and the doctor would consult with him about the likelihood of getting paid. Then, they would discuss what there had been in the paper. By that hour, Homais knew it all pretty much by heart; and he would recount it all in its entirety, including the journalists’ comments and the whole story of every single disaster that had occurred in France or anywhere else. But when the topics began to dry up, he did not hesitate to toss out little comments on the dishes he saw on the table before him. Sometimes he would even half rise and point out to Madame the tenderest slice or, turning himself toward the maid, would give her advice on the preparation of ragouts and the health effects of various seasonings; he would talk about aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatin in a bewildering manner. His head, moreover, more stuffed with recipes than his pharmacy was with bottles, Homais excelled in making preserves, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs, and he also knew all about the newest fuel-saving stoves, along with the art of preserving cheeses and healing sick wines.

At eight, Justin would come looking for him to lock up the pharmacy. Then Monsieur Homais would give him a knowing look, especially if Félicité were there, having noticed that his apprentice had become unusually fond of the doctor’s house.

“My fine lad,” he would say, “is beginning to get ideas, and devil take me if he isn’t in love with your maid!”

A more serious fault, for which Homais reproached him, was his constant eavesdropping on conversations. On Sundays, for instance, they couldn’t get him out of the drawing room, when Madame Homais had called him to come and get the children who had fallen asleep in the armchairs, pulling off the oversized calico chair covers.

There was not much of a crowd at these gatherings at the pharmacist’s, his malicious gossip and his political opinions having alienated, one by one, various respectable people. The clerk was always there. As soon as the doorbell sounded, he would run to Madame Bovary, take her shawl, and put away beneath the shop counter the thick felt slippers she wore over her shoes when there was snow.

First they played several games of trente et un; then Homais played écarté with Emma; Léon, standing behind her, would give her advice. His hands on the back of her chair, he would gaze down at the teeth of her comb biting into her chignon. Every time she moved to throw down her cards, her dress would ride up on her right side. From her pinned up hair, a brown shadow was cast down her back until it was lost, little by little, in darkness. Her dress, then, fell in two billowing folds on either side of her chair, reaching to the floor. When Léon at times felt the sole of his boot touch it, he would jump back as if he had stepped on someone.

When the card playing was over, the pharmacist and the doctor would play dominoes, and Emma, changing her seat, would lean on the table to leaf through L’Illustration. She had brought along her fashion magazine. Léon would sit close to her; they would look at the engravings together, and each would wait for the other at the bottom of the pages. Often, she would ask him to recite poetry to her; Léon declaimed poems with a slow, languid voice that he would carefully allow to trail off at the love passages. But he was frustrated by the sound of the dominoes; Monsieur Homais was good at the game: he would beat Charles by a full double-six. And when they had reached three hundred, they would both stretch out in front of the fireplace and soon fall asleep. The fire died out in its embers; the teapot was empty; Léon would continue reading and Emma listening to him, mechanically turning the lampshade, the gauze of which was painted with Pierrots in carriages and tightrope dancers with their balancing poles. Léon would pause, pointing toward the sleeping audience; and then they would speak with lowered voices, their conversation seeming all the sweeter for not being overhead.

And so a kind of bond was established between them, an ongoing exchange of books and ballads; Monsieur Bovary, not a very jealous sort, was not concerned by it.

For his birthday, he received a fine phrenological head, marked with numbers down to the thorax and painted blue. This was a piece of thoughtfulness on the clerk’s part. And there were many other instances of it, including running errands for him in Rouen; and when a novelist’s book inspired a craze for cactus plants, Léon bought one for Madame, carrying it back on his knees in the Hirondelle, pricking his fingers on its spiky hairs.

She had a railed shelf fixed against her window for her flower pots. The clerk too had a hanging garden; they would see each other when tending their flowers at the window.

Among the windows in the village, there was one even more frequently occupied; for on Sundays from morning till night, and every afternoon if the sky was clear, one could see at his attic window the thin profile of Monsieur Binet bent over his lathe, whose monotonous hum could be heard as far away as the Golden Lion.

Coming home one evening, Léon found in his room a rug of velvet and wool, with a leaf design against a light background. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin, the children, even the cook; he talked about it to his employer; everybody wanted to see this rug; but why was the doctor’s wife giving the clerk presents? It seemed odd, and everyone decided that she must be his girlfriend.

He made it easy to believe, the way he would talk endlessly about her charms and her wit, so much so that Binet replied quite harshly to him:

“Why should I give a damn, since I’m not one of her crowd?”

He tortured himself trying to figure out how to make his declaration to her; and constantly hesitating between his fear of displeasing her and his shame at being such a coward, he wept out of discouragement and desire. Then he would make energetic decisions; he would write letters, then tear them up, put the matter off till a certain time, then put it off again. Often he would set off to see her, determined to risk everything; but his resolution deserted him in Emma’s presence, and when Charles would turn up and invite him to climb into his cart and go see some patient in the neighborhood, he would accept right away, bow to Madame, and go off. Her husband—well, after all, wasn’t he a part of her?

As for Emma, she never asked herself whether she was in love with him. Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and lightning—a hurricane from the skies crashing down upon your life, turning it upside down, ripping away the will like leaves from a tree, carrying off the whole of one’s heart into the abyss. She did not know how the rain can fall softly on a house’s terrace when the gutters are blocked up and slowly form lakes, and she would have remained securely unaware of this—until, one day, she suddenly discovered a crack in the wall.

CHAPTER 5

It was a Sunday in February, on a snowy afternoon.

They had all—Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and Monsieur Léon—gone to see, about a mile outside of Yonville, a flax mill that was being built in the valley. The pharmacist had brought along Napoléon and Athalie to give them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them, carrying umbrellas on his shoulder.

Nothing, however, could have been less curious than this curiosity. A large stretch of empty ground, upon which a number of already rusted gear wheels were scattered among heaps of sand and stones, surrounded a long rectangular building whose walls were pierced by a number of small windows. The building wasn’t finished yet, and they could see the sky through the roof joists. Attached to the girder on the gable end was a bale of straw mixed with ears of wheat, tied with tricolor ribbons that fluttered in the wind.

Homais was talking. He was explaining to the assembly the future importance of the flax mill, calculating the strength of the flooring, the thickness of the walls, and greatly regretting not having a measuring rod with him, like the one Monsieur Binet had for his own personal use.

Emma, who had taken his arm, was leaning a little on his shoulder, and she was looking at the disc of the sun shining far off through the mist in a dazzling whiteness; then she turned her head: Charles was there. He had his cap pulled down over his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were shivering, which gave his face a look of stupidity; even his back, his calm, untroubled back, was irritating to look at, and she thought that his very coat displayed all the banality of his character.

While she was looking at him and taking a kind of perverse sensual pleasure in her irritation, Léon took a step forward. The cold made him pale, and it seemed to add a gentler, more languid air to his face: between his cravat and his slightly loosened shirt collar, his skin was visible; the tip of his ear showed under a lock of hair, and his large blue eyes, raised upward to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain lakes that mirror the sky.

“You fool!” the pharmacist suddenly shouted.

And he ran to his son, who had just leaped into a pile of lime in order to whiten his boots. As reproaches were hurled at him, Napoléon began to wail, while Justin wiped off the shoes with a clump of straw. But a knife was needed; Charles offered his.

“Ah!” she said to herself: “He carries a knife in his pocket, just like a peasant!”

Frost was beginning to fall, and they turned back to Yonville.

That evening, Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbors’, and when Charles had gone and she felt herself alone, the comparison arose again with an almost immediate clarity and with that greater perspective that memory gives to things. From her bed, looking at the bright-burning fire, she could see again, just as she had at the mill, Léon standing, leaning on his cane in one hand and holding Athalie with the other as she peacefully sucked on a piece of ice. She thought him charming; she could not tear her thoughts from him; she pictured his gestures and movements on other days, remembered things he had said, the sound of his voice, everything about him; and she repeated to herself, her lips advancing as if for a kiss:

“Yes, charming, charming! Could he be in love?” she asked herself. “But with whom? … It must be me!”

All the proofs arose at once before her, and her heart leaped. The flame in the fireplace made a joyous light shimmer on the ceiling; she turned onto her back, stretching out her arms.

And then began the eternal lamentation: “Oh, if heaven had only willed it! And why couldn’t it be? Why did things have to be this way?”

When Charles came back at midnight, she acted as if she had just awakened, and, when he made some noise in getting undressed, she complained of a migraine; then she nonchalantly asked what had happened during the evening.

“Monsieur Léon,” he said, “went up to his room early.”

She couldn’t keep from smiling, and she went to sleep, her soul filled with a new rapture.

The next day, just at nightfall, she received a visit from Monsieur Lheureux, who dealt in fashionable novelties. This shopkeeper was a clever man.

Born a Gascon but having become a Norman, he grafted the Cauchois cunning onto his southern talkativeness. His fat face, smooth and beardless, had a tint like watered-down licorice, and his white hair made his little black eyes seem even harder and brighter. Nobody knew what he had done before he came to Yonville: a traveling salesman, said some, a banker in Routot, said others. The one thing that was certain was that he could do in his head the kind of calculations that would frighten even Binet. Polite to the point of being obsequious, he always stood slightly bent forward, like someone greeting you, or making you a proposal.

After leaving his hat, banded with crêpe, at the door, he placed a green box on the table and began by complaining, in polite phrases, that Madame had not yet placed her confidence in him. A poor shop like his was not designed to attract an elegant lady; he stressed the word. But all she had to do was ask, and he would take it upon himself to provide her with whatever she wanted, whether cotton goods or lingerie, whether hats or novelties; for he went to the city regularly, four times a month. He had connections at the finest firms. She could ask about him at the Trois Frères, at the Barbe d’Or, or at the Grand Sauvage; all those gentlemen knew him as well as the insides of their pockets! Today, therefore, he had come by to show Madame just a few articles that he happened to have, thanks to the rarest of opportunities. And he pulled half a dozen embroidered collars out of the box.

Madame Bovary looked them over.

“I don’t need anything,” she said.

Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately laid out three Algerian scarves, several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and, finally, four eggcups made of coconut wood, carved in openwork by convicts. And then, both hands on the table, his neck stretched out, leaning forward, his mouth gaping open, he followed Emma’s gaze as she paced, undecided, in front of his merchandise. From time to time, as if to remove a speck of dust, he would flick a finger over the silk of the scarves, spread out at their full length; and they would quiver in response with a light rustling sound, making the gold spangles of their tissue sparkle in the green light of the early evening.

“How much are they?”

“A pittance,” he replied, “a pittance; but there’s no hurry; you can pay whenever you’re ready; we’re not Jews!”

She considered for a few seconds, and ended by saying no thank you to Monsieur Lheureux, who replied calmly:

“Very well! We’ll reach an understanding eventually; I’ve always managed to work things out with the ladies … all except my own!”

Emma smiled.

“I wanted to let you know,” he went on good-naturedly after his little joke, “that I’m not concerned about the money. I could give you some, if you needed it.”

She made a surprised gesture.

“Ah!” he said quickly, in a lowered voice, “I wouldn’t have to go very far to find you some; you can count on that.”

And he turned to ask her for news about Monsieur Tellier, the proprietor of the Café Français, who was just then a patient of Charles.

“What’s the matter with Monsieur Tellier? … He coughs enough to shake the whole house, and I’m afraid that before long he’ll need a wooden overcoat more than a flannel nightshirt! He had plenty of little adventures when he was young! People like that, Madame, have no sense of self-discipline! He’s burned himself out with brandy! But it’s too bad, all the same, to see an acquaintance on his way out.”

And as he fastened up his box, he went on about the doctor’s patients.

“It’s the weather, I suppose,” he said, looking out the window with a frown, “that causes all these illnesses? Me, I don’t feel quite up to snuff myself; one of these days I’m going to have to come and see Monsieur myself, about this pain I have in my back. Well then, good-bye, Madame Bovary; I’m at your service; your very humble servant!”

And he closed the door quietly.

Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom, on a tray by the fireside; she took her time eating; everything tasted good to her.

“How wise I was!” she said to herself, thinking about the scarves.

She heard steps on the stairs: it was Léon. She stood up and snatched up the top dust cloth from a pile on the dresser waiting to be mended. She seemed very busy when he came in.

Their conversation languished, Madame Bovary letting it drop every few minutes, while he himself seemed embarrassed. Seated on a low chair near the fire, he turned her ivory needle case in his fingers; she kept on with her needlework or, now and then, straightened out the folds in the cloth with her fingernail. She didn’t speak; he became quiet too, as enthralled by her silence as he had been by her words.

“Poor boy!” she thought.

“How have I displeased her?” he asked himself.

But Léon eventually spoke, saying that one of these days he would have to go to Rouen on some office business.

“Your music subscription has run out—should I renew it?”

“No,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“Because …”

And pursing her lips, she slowly drew out a long stitch of gray thread.

Her working irritated Léon. The tips of Emma’s fingers seemed to be roughening from it; a gallant phrase came into his head, but he didn’t risk it.

“So you’re giving it up?” he continued.

“What?” she asked quickly. “Music? Oh, my God, yes! Don’t I have a house to keep up, a husband to take care of, a thousand things really, so many duties that have to come first?”

She looked at the clock. Charles was late. So she acted as if she were anxious. She repeated two or three times:

“He’s so good!”

The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But all these expressions of tenderness surprised and annoyed him; nonetheless he went on singing his praises, as did everyone else, he said, and above all, the pharmacist.

“Ah, he’s a fine man,” Emma replied.

“Certainly,” said the clerk.

And he began to talk about Madame Homais, whose unkempt appearance usually made them both laugh.

Emma interrupted: “But what difference does that make? A good housewife and mother shouldn’t be all that concerned about her looks.”

Then she relapsed into silence.

It was the same on the following days: her talk, her manners, everything had changed. She was seen taking her household work more seriously, going regularly to church, and being stricter with her maid.

She took Berthe back from the wet nurse. Félicité brought her in when there were visitors, and Madame Bovary undressed her to show her legs. She declared that she adored children; they were her consolation, her joy, her obsession, and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outbursts that, to anyone but Yonvillians, would have called up memories of Sachette in Notre-Dame de Paris.¹

When Charles came home, he would find his slippers warming by the fire. His waistcoats no longer lacked lining, nor his shirts buttons, and he even had the pleasure of seeing his cotton nightcaps arranged in neat piles in the armoire. She no longer grumbled, as she had before, at taking walks in the garden; she consented to whatever he proposed, although she did not understand what it was that was making her submit without a murmur— and when Léon saw him by the fireside after dinner, his two hands folded over his stomach, his two feet propped on the andirons, his cheeks flushed from digestion, and his eyes moist with happiness, with the baby crawling on the carpet and that woman with the slim waist standing behind his easy chair and bending over to kiss his forehead:

“What insanity!” he said to himself. “How could I ever get close to her?”

And so she seemed to him so virtuous, so inaccessible, that every hope, even the vaguest, abandoned him.

But through this renunciation, he was granting her an extraordinary status. She now stood apart from those carnal qualities that he could never hope to experience; and in his heart she continued to rise up, mounting high above him, detaching herself from him, taking wing like a goddess. It was one of those pure sentiments, which don’t interfere with real life, which one cultivates because they are rare, and the loss of which would cause more pain than possessing it gives pleasure.

Emma became thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair parted in two, her large eyes, her straight nose, her birdlike walk, and her new habit of silence: didn’t she seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, bearing on her forehead the mysterious imprint of some sublime destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at the same time so gentle and so reserved, that to be near her was to feel a glacial charm, like the shudder one feels in churches when the scent of the flowers mingles with the chill of the marble. Even the others felt that seductive power. The pharmacist said:

“She’s a woman of great abilities; she wouldn’t be out of place in a subprefecture.”

The townswomen admired her thrift, the patients her politeness, the poor her charity.

But inside, she seethed with lusts, with rage, with hatred. That dress with its neat folds concealed a heart in turmoil, and those so-chaste lips uttered no hints about the torment she felt. She was in love with Léon, and she sought out solitude in order to be able to delight undisturbed in the mental image of him. Actually seeing him troubled the sensual pleasure of that meditation. Emma’s heart raced at the sound of his footsteps: then, in his presence, the emotion subsided, and all that remained of it was an enormous astonishment that always ended in sorrow.

Léon did not know that when he left her house in his own despair, she would get up after him so as to be able to watch him go down the street. She worried over his comings and goings; she secretly watched his face; she would invent a whole complex story as a pretext for visiting his room. She thought the pharmacist’s wife was lucky to sleep under the same roof as he did; and her thoughts continually swooped down upon that house, like the pigeons from the Golden Lion who came to dip their pink feet and their white wings in its gutters. But the more aware Emma was of her love, the more she repressed it so as to hide it, and allow it to diminish. She would have liked Léon to suspect; and she imagined chance events or catastrophes that would have made it clear to him. But what held her back, no doubt, was laziness or fear as much as modesty. She thought that she had pushed him away too firmly, that the moment had passed, that everything was lost. Then pride, the joy of saying to herself, “I am virtuous,” gazing at herself in the mirror making poses of resignation, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she was making.

Then, the appetites of the flesh, the lust for money, and the melancholy of her passion all combined into one agony—and instead of turning her thoughts away from it, she attached herself to it all the more, stimulating herself with suffering and seeking it out on all occasions. She would get angry over a poorly served dish or a door left open, would groan for the velvet she didn’t own, the happiness she didn’t have, her dreams too lofty and her house too small.

What exasperated her was that Charles didn’t appear to suspect her torment. His belief that he was making her happy seemed to her to be an imbecilic insult, and his certainty about it seemed ingratitude. For whom, then, was she being so sensible? Wasn’t it him, that obstacle to all her happiness, that cause of all her misery, who was like the sharp clasp of a complicated strap that was binding her in on all sides?

Thus, she transferred onto him the host of hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to lessen it only intensified it; for that wasted effort only added to her other reasons for despair, and to her alienation from him. She was naturally kind to herself, and this led her to more rebellions. Domestic mediocrity drove her to fantasies of luxury, and maternal tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her so as to be able to detest him with more justification, to avenge herself on him. She was shocked sometimes by the horrific possibilities that crossed her mind; and did she have to go on smiling, repeating that she was happy, act as if she were, let it always seem that way?

But she felt disgust at all this hypocrisy. The temptation to run away with Léon seized her, to run somewhere far away, to try for a different fate; but immediately a dark abyss opened up within her soul, shadowy and obscure.

“Besides, he doesn’t love me anymore,” she thought. “What will become of me? What help can I expect, what consolation, what relief?”

She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, her tears flowing down.

“Why not tell Monsieur about it?” the maid would ask, when she came in during one of these crises.

“It’s only nerves,” Emma replied. “Don’t tell him about it; you’ll only worry him.”

“Oh, yes!” Félicité went on. “You’re just like Mademoiselle Guérin, the daughter of old Guérin, the fisherman at Pollet that I knew at Dieppe before coming to you. She was so sad, so sad that seeing her standing in her doorway made you think of a burial shroud hanging in front of the door. Her sickness, they said, was like a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors couldn’t do anything, the priest either. When it came on too strong, she’d go off all alone to the seashore, so bad off that the customs officer on duty often found her lying flat on her stomach, crying into the pebbles. But then it went away after her marriage, they say.”

“But for me,” Emma replied, “it was after the marriage that it started.”

1. La Sachette, in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), is a single mother who loves her daughter with an intense and almost religious passion; the child is stolen by Gypsies, and the mother goes into lifelong mourning.

CHAPTER 6

One evening when the window was open, and she was watching the sexton Lestiboudois trim the hedges, she suddenly heard the church bell ringing the Angelus.

It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are blooming; a warm wind blows over the flowerbeds, and the gardens seem like women dressing themselves up for the summer holidays. Through the arbor’s lattice and everywhere far beyond, one could see the river tracing its sinuous and vagabond course through the grassy meadows. The evening mist was passing through the leafless poplars, giving a violet tint to their outlines, more pale, more transparent than a delicate gauze draped across their branches. In the distance, cattle were walking along; but neither their steps nor their lowings could be heard; and the church bell, still ringing, continued to sound its peaceful lamentation through the air.

In that repeated chiming, the young woman’s thoughts strayed back to memories of her youth and of the convent school. She remembered the candelabra standing taller than the altar, with its flower-filled vases, and the tabernacle’s thin columns. She wished she could lose herself once more in that long line of white veils, here and there accented by the black, stiff veils worn by the good sisters, bent over their prie-Dieux; on Sundays at Mass, when she raised her head she would behold the Virgin’s sweet face through the billowing blue incense smoke rising upward. Then she would be gripped by a tender lassitude: she would feel herself weak and abandoned, like a bird’s feather turning in a stormy wind; and so it was that, almost without being aware of it, she was walking toward the church, bent on any devotion at all so long as it would absorb her soul, and so long as her entire existence could become lost in it.

In the square she ran into Lestiboudois, who was returning from the church; for, in order not to clip his working day too short, he preferred to interrupt one task and then come back to it, and so he ended up ringing the Angelus whenever it suited him. Besides, ringing it earlier alerted the children to the hour of their catechism class.

Already a few of them had arrived early and were playing at marbles on the cemetery stones. Others, sitting astride the wall, were swinging their legs, using their wooden shoes to crush down the big nettles growing between the smaller wall and the most recent graves. This was the only greenspace; everything else was stone, and it was always covered with a fine powdery dust, despite the sacristan’s sweeping.

The children in felt shoes ran around as if the church were a playground built for them, and their shouts could be heard over the booming of the bell. The sound diminished with the oscillation of the thick rope that hung from the top of the bell and dragged its end along the ground. Some swallows flew by, emitting little cries, cutting through the air, returning swiftly to their yellow nests beneath the eaves. At the far end of the church’s interior, a lamp was burning, or rather a wick in a nightlight, in a hanging glass. From a distance, its light was a white spot, trembling upon its oil. A long ray of sun was crossing the nave, making the side aisles and the corners even darker.

“Where is the priest?” Madame Bovary asked a young boy, who was amusing himself by shaking the gate’s latch in its worn hole.

“He’s coming,” he answered.

And in fact the presbytery door creaked open, revealing Abbé Bournisien; the children flew wildly into the church.

“Those rascals!” the cleric muttered. “Always the same!”

And picking up a tattered catechism that he had almost tripped over: “No respect for anything!”

But when he noticed Madame Bovary: “Excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.”

He stuck the catechism in his pocket and stood there, swinging the heavy sacristy key between his fingers.

The light from the setting sun, falling directly upon his face, turned his woolen cassock gray; its elbows were shiny, and it was frayed at the hem. Grease and tobacco stains ran in a line, following the buttons, up over his large chest, and they grew more numerous the closer they came to his neck band, upon which the abundant folds of his red flesh reposed; his face was sprinkled with yellow pimples that disappeared under the coarse hair of his graying beard. He had just had his dinner, and he was breathing noisily.

“And how are you?” he added.

“Not well,” she answered; “I’m suffering.”

“Ah, well, me too!” the cleric replied. “These first warm days, you know, they weaken a person surprisingly. But what can you do! We are born to suffer, as Saint Paul says. But Monsieur Bovary, what does he think?”

“Oh, him!” she said with a disdainful gesture.

“What?” said the priest, surprised. “Hasn’t he prescribed something for you?”

“Oh,” said Emma, “it isn’t earthly remedies that I need.”

But the priest was looking back from time to time into the church, where all the kneeling boys were shoving each other and falling over like packs of cards.

“I’d like to know … ,” she continued.

“Just wait, Riboudet,” the cleric called out in an angry voice, “I’ll warm your ears for you, you little brat!”

Then, turning back to Emma:

“He’s the son of Boudet the carpenter; his parents are well off, and they let him do whatever he likes. He’d be a quick learner, if he only wanted to, because he’s a clever boy. So I sometimes, just for a joke, I call him Riboudet—after the hill, you know, on the way to Maromme—and sometimes I’ll even say ‘Mon Riboudet.’ Ha ha! You see, Mont Riboudet! The other day I told it to the Monsignor, and he laughed at it—yes, he deigned to laugh! … And Monsieur Bovary, how is he doing?”

She seemed not to hear. He continued:

“Always busy, I suppose? Because he and I are the two busiest people in the parish. But he, he’s the doctor of the body,” he added with a thick laugh, “and me, I’m in charge of the souls!”

She fixed her pleading eyes on the priest.

“Yes … ,” she said; “you ease every pain.”

“Oh, don’t even talk about it, Madame Bovary! Just this morning, I had to go into Bas-Diauville to see about a cow that was all swollen up; they thought it was some witchcraft. All their cows, I don’t know how … Excuse me. Longuemarre and Boudet! Nitwits! Will you stop it!”

And with a bound, he leaped into the church.

Now the boys were crowding around the pulpit, climbing up on the cantor’s stool, opening up the missal; others were tiptoeing their way to the confessional. But the priest came upon them suddenly and distributed a hailstorm of slaps among all of them. Grasping them by the shirt collars, he picked them up off the ground and set them down kneeling on the choir’s stone floor, firmly, as if he meant to plant them there.

“So,” he said when he returned to Emma, unfolding his big calico handkerchief, “the farmers have plenty to complain about!”

“And others too,” she replied.

“Definitely! The town workers, for instance.”

“They’re not the ones …”

“Excuse me! I’ve known poor mothers, virtuous women I assure you, veritable saints, who didn’t even have enough bread.”

“But the ones,” Emma said, the corners of her mouth twitching as she spoke, “the ones, Father, those who do have bread but who don’t have …”

“Fire in the winter,” said the priest.

“What? What does that matter?”

“What does it matter? It seems to me, I think, that if a person is warm, well fed, … because, after all …”

“My God! My God!” she sighed.

“You don’t feel well?” he said, approaching her with a concerned air.

“It’s your digestion, I assume? You need to go back home, Madame Bovary, and drink a little tea; that will strengthen you, or maybe a glass of cold water with some brown sugar.”

“Why?”

She looked like someone who had just awakened from a dream.

“It’s just that you put your hand to your forehead. I thought you were having a dizzy spell.”

Then, suddenly remembering: “But you wanted to ask me something? What was it? I don’t remember any more.”

“Me? Nothing … nothing,” Emma repeated.

And her gaze, which she had been casting around her, slowly came to rest on the old man in the cassock. They considered each other, face to face, without speaking.

“Well, Madame Bovary,” he said at last, “my excuses, but duty comes first, you know; I have to see to my little brats. First Communion is coming up. We won’t be ready, I fear! So after Ascension, I’m going to keep them an extra hour every Wednesday. These poor children! You can’t set them too soon on the path of the Lord because, after all, He recommended it Himself through the mouth of his divine Son … Good health to you, Madame; and give my respects to Monsieur, your husband.”

And he went into the church, making a genuflection at the door.

Emma watched him disappear between the double line of pews, walking with heavy steps, his head bent slightly to his shoulder, and his two hands together behind him, half open.

Then she turned on her heels, in a single movement, like a statue on a pivot, and set off toward her house. But she continued to hear the priest’s loud voice, and the clear voices of the children, from behind her as she walked:

“Are you a Christian?”

“Yes, I am a Christian.”

“What is a Christian?”

“A Christian is one who, being baptized … baptized … baptized …”

She walked up her stairs clinging to the banister and, when she reached her bedroom, let herself fall into an armchair.

The whitish light coming in through the windows fell in gentle waves. The furniture in the room seemed to have become more immobile, and it was fading into the shadows as into a dark ocean. The fire had gone out, the clock ticked continually, and Emma felt vaguely astounded at the calm of these things, while there was so much turmoil inside her. But between the window and worktable was little Berthe, tottering unsteadily in her knitted booties, and trying to come toward her mother in order to catch hold of her apron strings.

“Leave me alone!” she said, pushing the child away with her hand.

The little girl soon came closer, up against her knees, and leaning on them with her arms, she raised her big blue eyes up toward her, while a string of pure saliva dribbled from her lips onto the silk of the apron.

“Leave me alone!” the young woman repeated, angrily.

The expression on her face frightened the child, and she began to cry.

“Oh! Leave me alone, will you!” she said, pushing her with her elbow.

Berthe fell onto the base of the chest of drawers, against the brass hook; she cut her cheek, and the blood flowed. Madame Bovary rushed to pick her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the maid as loud as she could, and she was about to begin cursing herself when Charles appeared. It was his dinner hour, and he was returning home.

“Look, dear,” she said in a calm voice: “Look, the little one was playing, and she fell down and hurt herself.”

Charles reassured her that it was not at all serious, and he went off to find some adhesive plaster for the cut.

Madame Bovary did not go down to the parlor; she wanted to stay alone and care for the child. Then as she watched her sleeping, what remained of her anxiety dissipated by degrees, and she felt she was both foolish and good-hearted to have been so worried about so small a thing. Berthe was no longer sobbing. Her breathing now was lifting the cotton coverlet very slightly. Big teardrops hung in the corners of her almost closed eyelids, which showed her pale, deep-set pupils behind the eyelashes; the adhesive plaster stuck on her cheek was pulling the skin away at an angle.

“It’s a strange thing,” Emma thought, “how ugly this child is!”

At eleven o’clock, when Charles returned from the pharmacy (where he had gone to return what was left of the adhesive plaster), he found his wife standing up beside the cradle.

“But I promise you, it’s nothing!” he said, kissing her forehead. “Don’t torture yourself, my poor darling; you’ll make yourself ill!”

He had stayed on a long time at the pharmacist’s. Even though he had not seemed terribly upset, Monsieur Homais nonetheless was determined to steady him, to keep up his morale. They went on to talk about the various dangers that menace children, and how scatterbrained servants were. Madame Homais knew something about that subject, still carrying the scars on her chest from a bowlful of hot food that a cook, long ago, had dropped down her smock. As a result, these good parents took plenty of precautions. Knives were never sharpened, nor floors waxed. The windows had iron grates, and the fireplace strong bars. The little Homais children, despite their independence, couldn’t take a step without someone watching them from behind; at the slightest sign of a cold, their father stuffed them with cough syrup, and until they were four they were pitilessly swaddled with thick quilts. This was, to tell the truth, one of Madame Homais’ obsessions; her husband was inwardly worried that such compression could have negative effects on the intellectual organs, and once he forgot himself so much as to say:

“Are you trying to make Caribs or Botocudos¹ out of them?”

Charles, however, had been trying to interrupt the conversation a number of times.

“I’d like to talk to you,” he whispered quietly into the clerk’s ear, and so Léon led him upstairs.

“Does he suspect something?” he asked himself. His heart was hammering, and one possibility after another was passing through his mind.

At last Charles, having closed the door, asked him if he would go to Rouen and find out the price of a good daguerreotype; it was a sentimental surprise he had in mind for his wife, a special gift, a portrait of himself dressed in black. But he had to know how much it was going to take; this sort of errand shouldn’t cause Léon much trouble, since he went to the city almost every week.

But for what purpose? Homais suspected there was some young man’s affair at the bottom of it, some intrigue. But he was wrong; Léon was not involved in any infatuation. He had been more unhappy than usual, as Madame Lefrançois could see perfectly well from the amount of food he left on his plate. To find out more about it, she questioned the tax collector; Binet replied haughtily that he was certainly not in the pay of the police.

His dinner companion, nonetheless, did seem quite eccentric to him; for Léon would often throw himself back in his chair, stretch out his arms, and complain vaguely about life.

“It’s because you don’t give yourself enough distractions,” said the tax collector.

“Like what?”

“If I were in your shoes, I’d get myself a lathe!”

“But I don’t know how to operate one.”

“Well, yes, that’s true!” said the other, stroking his jaw with a mixture of disdain and self-satisfaction.

Léon was tired of loving without any results; he was beginning to feel that depression caused by a repetitive, unvaried life, when no particular interest drives you and no hope sustains you. He was so bored with Yonville and Yonvillians that the mere sight of certain people or certain houses irritated him beyond endurance; and the pharmacist, good fellow that he was, had become absolutely unbearable to him. On the other hand, the prospect of a real change in life frightened him as much as it tempted him.

That apprehension soon evolved into impatience, and then Paris beckoned to him, from far off in the distance, with its sounds of masked balls and laughing grisettes. Since he was supposed to finish his law studies there, why not go? What was holding him back? And mentally he began making preparations; he arranged his daily schedule in advance. In his head, he furnished an apartment. He would lead an artist’s life! He would take guitar lessons! He would have a dressing gown, a Basque beret, slippers of blue velvet! And he even delighted in picturing two crossed fencing foils hung over his mantel, with a skull and the guitar above them.

The hard part was getting his mother to consent; but nothing could appear more reasonable. His employer had even been urging him to look into another office where he could develop his talents more fully. Taking a middle course, then, Léon looked for a second clerk’s position in Rouen, found nothing, and finally wrote a long, detailed letter to his mother where he set out his reasons for going to live in Paris immediately. She consented to it.

He did not hurry about it, though. Every day for a month, Hivert carried boxes, suitcases, packages for him from Yonville to Rouen, from Rouen to Yonville; and when Léon had packed up his wardrobe, had his three armchairs restuffed, purchased a supply of neckties—when, in short, he had made more preparations than he would have needed for a trip around the world—he put it off from week to week, until he received a second letter from his mother urging him to leave soon, if he wanted to pass his second examination before the vacations.

When the moment for farewell embraces had come, Madame Homais cried; Justin sobbed; Homais, as a rational man, hid his emotion; he wanted to carry his friend’s coat for him as far as the gate of the notary, who would take Léon to Rouen in his own carriage. He just had time to say his goodbyes to Monsieur Bovary.

When he reached the top of the stairs he stopped, feeling out of breath. As he entered, Madame Bovary got up quickly.

“It’s me again!” Léon said.

“I was sure of it!”

She bit her lips, and the blood surging beneath reddened her skin from the roots of her hair to the edge of her collar. She remained standing, leaning her shoulder against the wood paneling.

“Monsieur isn’t here?” he continued.

“He’s gone.”

She repeated: “He’s gone.”

Then there was a silence. They looked at each other; and their thoughts merged together in the same anguish, embracing each other tightly like two throbbing hearts.

“I’d like to kiss Berthe,” Léon said.

Emma went down a few steps and called Félicité.

He threw one long look around the room, taking in the walls, the shelves, the fireplace, as if to penetrate it all, to carry it all along with him.

But she came back in, and the servant brought Berthe, who was dangling a toy windmill, roof side down, on the end of a string.

Léon gave her several kisses on the neck.

“Good-bye, poor child! Good-bye, dear little one, good-bye!”

And he handed her back to her mother.

“Take her away,” she said.

They remained standing there, alone.

Madame Bovary, her back turned, had her face pressed up against a windowpane; Léon was holding his cap in his hand, tapping it softly against his thigh.

“It’s going to rain,” said Emma.

“I have an overcoat,” he replied.

“Ah!”

She turned around, her chin lowered, her forehead bent down. The light slipped over it as it would over marble, down to the curve of her eyebrows, but it was impossible to guess what it was Emma was watching in the distance, nor what it was she was thinking deep inside.

“Well, good-bye!” he sighed.

She raised her head abruptly:

“Yes, good-bye … Go then!”

They both took a step toward each other: he held out his hand, and she hesitated.

“Well, English style then,” she said, surrendering her hand to his, and forcing herself to laugh.

Léon felt her hand with his fingers, and the very essence of his entire being felt as if it were flowing into that warm palm.

Then he opened his hand; their eyes met again, and he left.

When he was outside in the marketplace, he stopped and hid himself behind a pillar in order to contemplate one last time that white house with its four green blinds. He thought he could see a shadow behind the window, within the bedroom; but the curtain, slipping off its peg as if on its own, slowly straightened its long slanting folds, and in a single movement spread itself out, hanging straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Léon turned and began to run.

He could see from afar his employer’s carriage in the road, and beside it a man in a thick apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were chatting together. They were waiting for him.

“Embrace me,” said the pharmacist, tears in his eyes. “Here’s your coat, my good friend; be careful about the cold. Take care of yourself! Be good to yourself!”

“Come on, Léon, get in!” said the notary.

Homais bent over the mudguard and, in a voice broken by sobs, only got two sad words out:

“Safe journey!”

“Good evening,” said Monsieur Guillaumin. “Off we go!”

They left, and Homais went back home.

Madame Bovary had opened her window onto the garden, and she was watching the clouds. They were piling up in the sunset, toward Rouen, their black, scrolling shapes moving swiftly, and behind them were the great rays of the sun, like golden arrows stuck in a hanging trophy, while the rest of the sky was empty and white as porcelain. But a gust of wind came up, bending the poplars, and suddenly rain began to fall; it pattered on the green leaves. Then quickly the sun came back out, the hens cackled, sparrows were beating their wings in the warm foliage, and pools of water on the gravel crept outward, carrying off the pink flowers of an acacia.

“Oh, how far away he must be by now!” she thought.

Monsieur Homais, as usual, came by at six-thirty during their dinner.

“Well!” he said as he seated himself. “So we’ve got our young man sent off on his way!”

“So it seems,” the doctor replied.

Then, turning in his chair:

“And what’s new with you?”

“Not much. But my wife was a little sentimental this afternoon. You know, women—the littlest things upset them! And mine more than others! And it would be wrong to try to change them, since their nervous system is so much more volatile than ours.”

“That poor Léon!” said Charles. “How will he live in Paris? Will he be able to get used to it?”

Madame Bovary sighed.

“Oh, come on now,” said the pharmacist, clucking his tongue. “The dinner parties at restaurants! The masked balls! The champagne! He’ll get along just fine, I promise you.”

“I don’t think he’ll turn bad,” Bovary objected.

“Nor do I!” Monsieur Homais quickly replied. “Though he’ll have to do like the others do, or risk looking like a Jesuit. And you don’t know the kind of life those jokers lead in the Latin Quarter, with the actresses! And besides, people think well of students in Paris. As long as they have a little charm, they’re received into the best society, and there have even been cases of ladies from the Faubourg Saint Germain falling in love with them, which gives them the chance to make very good marriages.”

“But,” said the doctor, “I fear for him that … living there …”

“You’re right,” the pharmacist interrupted, “and that’s the other side of the coin! A person has to keep his hand on his wallet at all times. So, let’s suppose you’re in a public park; an individual comes up to you, well dressed, even decorated, someone you’d take for a diplomat; he approaches you: you converse; he ingratiates himself, offers you a pinch of snuff, or maybe picks up your hat for you. Now he’s made friends with you; he takes you to a café, invites you to visit his house in the country, introduces you, over a couple of drinks, to all sorts of acquaintances, and three-quarters of the time, all this is only to swindle you out of your purse and get you involved in wicked doings.”

“That’s true,” Charles replied; “but I was thinking more of the diseases, like typhoid fever for example, that attack students from the provinces.”

Emma shuddered.

“Because of the change of diet,” the pharmacist continued, “and of the disturbance it causes in the system as a whole. And then, the water in Paris, I tell you! And the dishes they serve in restaurants, all those spicy foods end up heating the blood, and if you ask me they can’t compare with a good stew. As for me, I’ve always preferred home cooking: it’s more healthful! And when I was studying pharmacy in Rouen, I made sure to live in a boarding house; I ate with the professors.”

And he continued in this vein, laying out his general opinions and his personal feelings, right up to the moment when Justin came to find him to mix an eggnog that needed preparing.

“Not one second of rest!” he exclaimed. “My nose always to the grindstone! I can’t go out for a minute! Like a workhorse, always having to sweat blood! What a yoke I have to wear!”

Then, when he was at the door:

“By the way, have you heard the news?”

“What’s that?”

“That it’s very probable,” Homais replied, raising his eyebrows and putting on one of his most serious expressions, “that the agricultural fair of the Seine-Inférieure will be held this year in Yonville-l’Abbaye. That’s the word, anyway, that’s going around. The paper said something about it this morning. This would be of the greatest importance for our district! But we’ll talk about it later. I can see my way very well, thank you; Justin has the lantern.”

1. Caribs and Botocudos were tribes in the Antilles and South America, respectively.

CHAPTER 7

The next day for Emma was a depressing one. Everything seemed to be enveloped in a kind of blackness that hovered confusedly over the surface of things, and the grief sinking into her soul howled softly like a winter wind in an abandoned chateau. Her state of mind was that kind of reverie we slip into over something that is gone forever, the fatigue that sets in when we have done everything we could have done—the pain, in short, that you feel when everything you are accustomed to doing is interrupted, when a prolonged vibration comes to an abrupt end.

As with her return from La Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were whirling in her head, she felt a dreary melancholy, a numbing despair. Léon reappeared, taller, more handsome, sweeter, more vague; although he was separated from her, he had not left, he was there, and the walls of the house still seemed to retain his shadow. She could not take her eyes off the carpet on which he had walked, the empty furniture where he had sat. The river continued to flow, slowly pushing its little waves along the slippery banks. They had walked there many times, with the same murmuring of the waves over the moss-covered pebbles. What fine sunny days they had had! What fine afternoons, alone in the shade at the foot of the garden! He would read aloud, bareheaded, seated on a footstool made of dried sticks; the cool breeze from the meadows would make the pages of his book tremble, and the nasturtiums in the arbor … Oh! He was gone, the only delight in her life, her only possible hope for happiness! Why didn’t she seize that happiness when it presented itself! Why didn’t she hold onto it with both hands, go down on her knees when it wanted to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not having loved Léon; she thirsted for his lips. She felt an urge to run to him, to rejoin him, to throw herself into his arms, to say to him, “Here I am, and I am yours!” But Emma was weighed down in advance by the impracticalities of the idea, and her desires, augmented by regret, only intensified.

From then on, the memory of Léon occupied the center point of her unhappiness; it gleamed there, more vividly than a fire abandoned by travelers on a snow-covered Russian steppe. She would hurry toward it, huddle herself next to it, carefully stir the almost-dying embers, look all around for anything that would help revive it; and the most distant memories as well as the most recent events, things she had experienced as well as things she had imagined, her voluptuous desires that were now scattering away, her plans for happiness that now creaked in the wind like dead branches, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the dead debris of her domestic life—she gathered it all, took it all up, and used it to rekindle the fire of her sorrow.

But the flame did die down, whether because she exhausted the fuel or because she had built the fire too high. Absence snuffed out her love bit by bit, and her regret was stifled by daily routine; and the burning gleam that had made her pale sky purple was increasingly covered over by shadow, and it faded out by degrees. In the numbness of her consciousness, she even took her repugnance toward her husband as a yearning for her lover, the fires of hatred for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest outside went on raging, and as passion was burned down to cinders, and no help came, no sun appeared, darkness fell on all sides, and she remained lost within a terrible cold that pierced her through and through.

And then the bad days of Tostes started up again. She considered her present situation even more miserable, because now she had the experience of grief along with the certitude that it would never end.

A woman who had had to endure such great sacrifice deserved a few self-indulgences. She bought an old Gothic prie-Dieu, and she spent fourteen francs in one month on lemons for polishing her nails; she ordered a blue cashmere dress from Rouen; from Lheureux, she bought one of his most beautiful scarves; she tied it around her waist, over her dressing gown, and with the blinds closed and a book in her hand, she lounged, stretched out on a couch, dressed in her new purchases.

She changed her hairstyle frequently: she did her hair in Chinese fashion, or in long, flowing curls, or plaited in braids; she parted it on one side and rolled it under, like a man.

She wanted to learn Italian: she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and a supply of white paper. She tried to do some serious reading, in history and philosophy. Sometimes at night Charles would awaken with a start, thinking he was being called to tend to a patient:

“I’m on my way,” he would stammer.

But it had been the sound of Emma striking a match to relight her lamp. But her reading turned out just like her embroidery projects—half-finished, piled away in the cupboard; she would start something, drop it, and move on to something else.

She had wild moods, in which she could easily have been persuaded to commit any extreme act. She insisted one day, to her husband’s disbelief, that she could easily drink an entire large glass of brandy, and when Charles was foolish enough to dare her, she swallowed every last drop.

Despite her “giddy” airs (the Yonville housewives’ term for it), Emma nonetheless never seemed happy, and the corners of her mouth were fixed in that pursed look that puckers the faces of old maids and of people whose hopes have been dashed. She was pale all over, as white as linen; the skin on her nose was drawn taut at the nostrils, and her eyes would gaze at you vaguely. When she discovered three gray hairs on her temples, she started referring to her old age.

She often had fainting fits. One day she coughed up some blood, and when Charles fussed over her, revealing how worried he really was: “Oh,” she said, “what does it matter?”

Charles sought refuge in his office; and he wept, his elbows on the table, sitting in his office chair below the phrenological head.

Then he wrote to his mother to beg her to come, and together they had long discussions on the subject of Emma.

What should they decide to do? What could they do, considering that she refused every suggestion they made?

“Do you know what your wife needs?” said Charles’ mother. “She needs to be forced into some kind of work, some manual labor! If she had to earn her bread, like so many other women do, she wouldn’t have these foolish whims; they come from those ideas she has in her head, and from not doing anything all day.”

“But she keeps busy,” Charles said.

“Oh? Busy? With what? Reading novels, wicked books, books against religion, where they make fun of priests in speeches taken from Voltaire.

But all that has its consequences, my poor boy, and a person who doesn’t have religion will always turn out bad.”

Thus, they resolved to prevent Emma from reading novels. But the plan didn’t look so easy to carry out. The good mother took on the task herself: when she was in Rouen, she would go personally to the lending library and tell them Emma was canceling her subscription. And wouldn’t they have the right to call in the police then, if the book lender insisted on poisoning her?

The good-byes between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were dry. In the three weeks they had been together, they hadn’t exchanged half a dozen words about anything other than household matters, and polite phrases when they were at the table or going to bed.

The elder Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, which was market day in Yonville.

Since morning the square had been blocked by a row of carts, their back ends tilted up and their shafts in the air, stretching out in front of the houses from the church to the inn. Along the other side were canvas booths selling cotton goods, blankets, and wool stockings, together with halters for horses and packets of blue ribbons, their ends fluttering in the air. There was heavy hardware spread out on the ground amid pyramids of eggs, and hampers filled with cheeses with wisps of sticky straw jutting out from them; near the wheat machinery, clucking hens were poking their heads out through the bars of their cages. People crowded together into the same spot, unwilling to budge, putting the pharmacist’s shop window in some danger. On Wednesdays his place was never empty, and people crowded in less to buy medicine than to ask for advice—so famous was Monsieur Homais in the surrounding villages. His robust self-certainty had fascinated the country people. They saw him as a greater physician than any of the real doctors.

Emma was leaning out the window (where she often was: in the provinces, the window substitutes for the theater and the public promenades), and she was amusing herself watching the swarm of country louts, when she noticed a gentleman dressed in a green velvet coat. He wore fine yellow gloves, though he also wore sturdy gaiters on his legs; and he was heading toward the doctor’s house, followed by a peasant who walked with his head bent down and a very determined air about him.

“May I see Monsieur?” he asked Justin, who was chatting with Félicité in the doorway. And, taking him for the house’s servant:

“Tell him that Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger, of La Huchette, is here.”

It was not territorial vanity that made him add the name of his estate, but simply the desire to identify himself better. La Huchette was in fact an estate near Yonville, where he had recently purchased the chateau, along with its two farms, which he was running himself—without, however, putting out any great effort in doing so. He lived as a bachelor, and was said to have at least fifteen thousand in rents!

Charles came in the room. Monsieur Boulanger introduced his man, who was asking to be bled because he was feeling pins and needles all over.

“That’ll cure it,” he insisted, against all arguments.

So Bovary began by bringing out a bandage and a basin, and he asked Justin to hold it. Then, addressing the peasant, who had already gone pale:

“Don’t be afraid, my friend.”

“No, no,” said the other, “go ahead!”

And with an air of bravado, he held out his thick arm. With the first prick of the lancet, the blood shot out and spattered against the mirror.

“Hold the basin closer!” Charles exclaimed.

“Gawd!” said the peasant. “You’d swear it was a fountain, the way it runs. Look how red my blood is! That must be a good sign, don’t you think?”

The health officer said, “Now sometimes, they don’t feel anything at first, but then comes a fainting fit, especially with strong people like this one.”

At these words, the peasant dropped the little box he had been turning in his fingers. A great shudder in his shoulders made the back of his chair creak. His hat fell to the floor.

“I was afraid of this,” Bovary said, pressing his finger against the vein.

The basin began to shake in Justin’s hands; his knees shook, and he turned pale.

“Emma! Emma!” Charles called out.

She came down the stairs at a bound.

“Some vinegar!” he cried. “Oh my God, two of them at once!”

And he was so rattled he could barely apply the compress.

“It’s nothing,” Monsieur Boulanger said soothingly as he propped Justin up in his arms.

And he sat him down on the table, leaning his back against the wall.

Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat. There was a knot in his shirt’s strings; for several minutes she was busy, moving her fingers lightly around the young man’s neck; then she poured some vinegar on her cotton handkerchief; she dabbed it on his temples with little strokes, then blew on it delicately.

The farmhand came to; but Justin’s faint continued, and his pupils were disappearing into the white sclera of his eyeballs, like blue flowers into milk.

“We’d better not let him see that,” Charles said.

Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table; in the movement she made in bending down, her dress billowed around her on the stone floor (it was a summer dress with four flounces, yellow, with a long waist and a wide skirt)—and as Emma, bending down, tottered a little with her arms outstretched, the fabric swelled in places and clung in others, following the contours of her breasts. Then she went off to get a jug of water, and she was in the process of melting some lumps of sugar when the pharmacist came in. In the general tumult, the maid had gone to find him; when he saw his apprentice’s eyes were open, he finally let himself breathe. Then, he looked him over from all sides, and from head to toe.

“Idiot!” he said; “what a little idiot! I-d-i-o-t! Such a big operation, a bleeding! And such a fearless boy! A kind of squirrel, that’s what you are, climbing to the treetops to shake the nuts free! Oh yes, brag, boast some more! This is a fine trait for a would-be pharmacist to have; because you could be called in on serious matters, in front of magistrates who need your help to make a decision; and you’d better keep your head on your shoulders then, reason carefully, show them you’re a man, or they’ll think you’re an imbecile.”

Justin didn’t respond. The pharmacist went on:

“Who asked you to come here anyway? You’re always pestering Monsieur and Madame! And besides, on Wednesdays I especially need you in the shop. There are twenty people over there right now. I left them all, out of my concern for you. Come on, let’s go! Hurry up! Wait for me there, and keep an eye on the jars!”

When Justin, his clothes put back in order, had gone, they talked a while about fainting spells. Madame Bovary had never had one.

“That’s remarkable for a lady!” said Monsieur Boulanger. “But some people are very sensitive. I once saw, at a duel, a second lose consciousness just from the sound of the pistols being loaded.”

“As for me,” said the pharmacist, “the sight of other people’s blood doesn’t bother me at all. But just thinking about seeing my own blood flowing out is enough to make me weak, if I imagine it for too long.”

Meanwhile, Monsieur Boulanger dismissed his man, telling him he should relax now that he had satisfied his whim.

“That whim gave me the opportunity of becoming acquainted with you,” he added.

And he was looking at Emma as he said it.

Then he left three francs on the table’s corner, bowed casually, and left.

Soon he was on the other side of the river (it was the way back to La Huchette); and Emma saw him in the meadow, walking along beneath the poplars, slowing down from time to time, like a person thinking something through.

“She’s very appealing,” he was saying to himself. “Very appealing, that doctor’s wife! Good teeth, black eyes, good-looking foot, a figure like a Parisienne. Where the devil did she come from? And how did he find her, that oaf?”

Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was thirty-four years old, with a brutal temperament and a perceptive mind; he had much experience with women, and knew them well. This one had seemed pretty to him: and so he went on thinking about her, and about her husband.

“He strikes me as stupid. She must be bored with him. His nails are dirty, and he hasn’t shaved in three days. While he goes running off after his patients, she stays home and darns socks. And it bores her! She’d like to live in town, dance the polka every night! Poor little wife! That one’s gasping for love, like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water. Give her three flattering words and that one would adore you, no doubt about it! It would be sweet! And delightful! … Yes, but how would I get rid of her afterward?”

Then the problems that pleasure can present, seen in perspective, made him mentally contrast her with his mistress. She was an actress in Rouen, kept by him; now, when he paused to picture her mentally, he knew he had had enough of her.

“Ah, Madame Bovary,” he thought, “is much prettier than her, and better yet, much fresher. Virginie is definitely putting on weight. Her pleasures are so tiresome. And then that mania for shrimp!”

The countryside was deserted, and Rodolphe could hear nothing around him but the steady sound of his boots as they swished through the grass, and the chirp of grasshoppers hidden far off among the oats; he again pictured Emma in the consulting room, dressed as she was then, and he undressed her.

“Yes! I’ll have her!” he cried, stabbing his walking stick sharply into a clump of earth before him.

And at once he began to consider the strategic aspects of the undertaking.

He asked himself:

“Where will we meet? With what excuse? She’ll have her brat hanging on her neck all the time, and the maid, the neighbors, the husband, every conceivable obstacle. Bah!” he said; “it’s a waste of time.”

But then he resumed:

“She has those eyes that pierce through your heart like a knife. And that pale skin! … I’ve always adored pale women!”

When he reached the top of the Argeuil hill, he had made his decision.

“All I have to do is find the occasion. Well, I’ll stop by now and then; I’ll send them some venison, some poultry; I’ll have myself bled, if I have to; we’ll become friends, I’ll invite them over … Wait!” He went on: “The agricultural show is coming up; she’ll be there, I’ll see her. We’ll make a bold start—that’s the surest way!”

CHAPTER 8

It had finally arrived, the day of the famous agricultural show! The first thing on the morning of the solemn occasion, all the townspeople were at their doorways talking about the preparations; garlands of ivy had been hung on the front of the town hall; a tent, in a meadow, had been set up for the banquet, and in the middle of the town square, in front of the church, a sort of cannon was set to go off to salute the arrival of the prefect and the names of the prizewinning farmers. The National Guard from Buchy (there was none in Yonville) had come to join with the fire brigade, of which Binet was the captain. He wore, that day, an even higher collar than usual; and buttoned up tightly in his tunic, his torso was so stiff and immobilized that all the vital parts of his person seemed to have descended into his two legs, which rose and fell rhythmically as he marched in place. Since there was a certain rivalry between the tax collector and the colonel, they each demonstrated their talents by drilling their men separately. Back and forth passed the red epaulets and the black shirt fronts. There was no end to it, and they kept starting up again! Never had there been such a display of pomp! A number of the townspeople had, the evening before, washed down their houses; tricolor flags hung from open windows; all the cafés were full; and in the fine weather, the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the colored neckerchiefs all seemed brighter than snow, shining in the sharp sunlight, their diverse patterns relieving the somber monotony of the black frock coats and the blue smocks. The farmers’ wives from the nearby districts got down from their horses and undid the large pins with which they had kept their dresses fastened tightly around their bodies, to avoid mud splashes; and their husbands, on the other hand, in order to avoid losing their hats, had tied handkerchiefs around them, a corner of which they kept clenched in their teeth.

The crowd poured into the main street from both ends of the village. They streamed out from the side streets, the lanes, and the houses, and from time to time could be heard the banging of a door-knocker when a townswoman in her cotton gloves stepped outside to watch the festivities. What everyone most marveled at were the two large frames with lanterns that flanked the stage where the dignitaries would sit; and besides this, there were four poles set against the four pillars of the town hall, each bearing a small, green cloth standard embellished with inscriptions in gold lettering:one read “Commerce”; another, “Agriculture”; the third, “Industry”; and the fourth, “The Fine Arts.”

But the joy brightening every face seemed to darken that of Madame Lefrançois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen steps, she muttered to herself:

“How stupid! How stupid they are with their canvas tent! Do they really think the prefect will want to have his dinner down there under a tent like a street performer? They call all this nonsense a benefit to the town! It sure wasn’t worth the trouble to bring that greasy-spoon cook all the way from Neufchâtel! And for who? For cowherds! For tramps!”

The pharmacist passed by. He wore a black suit, nankeen trousers, beaver shoes, and, most unusual for him, a hat—a low-crowned hat.

“Your servant!” he said. “Pardon me; I’m in a hurry.”

And when the fat widow asked him where he was going:

“It does seem strange to you, doesn’t it? I, the one who always stays cooped up in my laboratory like a rat with his cheese.”

“What cheese?” asked the innkeeper.

“No, never mind,” Homais replied. “I was just trying to say, Madame Lefrançois, that I normally stay close to home like a recluse. But today, given the circumstances, I had to …”

“Oh, you’re going down there?” she asked disdainfully.

“Yes, I’m going there,” replied the startled pharmacist. “Am I not a member of the advisory committee?”

Madame Lefrançois considered this for a few minutes, and finally replied with a smile:

“That’s something else then! But what do you have to do with agriculture? Do you even understand anything about it?”

“Certainly I understand it, because I am a pharmacist, and that is to say a chemist! And chemistry, Madame Lefrançois, having for its object the knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of all bodies in nature, it follows that agriculture is included within its domain! And in fact, the composition of manure, the fermentation of liquids, the analysis of gas and the influence of miasmas—what is all that, I ask you, if not chemistry, pure and simple?”

The innkeeper made no reply. Homais went on:

“Do you think that, in order to be an agronomist, it’s necessary to have worked the earth oneself, or to have fattened fowls? Rather, one must know the composition of the substances in question, the geological deposits, the atmospheric actions, the quality of the soils, the minerals, the waters, the density of different bodies and their capillarity! And who knows whatelse. And one must have the deepest knowledge of all the principles of hygiene, in order to direct and critique the construction of buildings, the diets of animals, the feeding of servants! What’s more, Madame Lefrançois, one must know botany, in order to tell plants apart. Do you see? Which ones are salutary, which ones deleterious, which are unproductive and which nutritive; whether it’s good to pluck them up here and replant them there, to propagate these and destroy those; in short, one must stay current with scientific advancements by means of pamphlets and professional papers, and be constantly on the lookout for improvements …”

The innkeeper kept her eyes fixed on the doorway of the Café Français, and the pharmacist continued:

“Would to God that our farmers were chemists, or that they would at least listen to scientific advice! Thus, for my part, I have recently composed a significant paper, a memorandum of over seventy-two pages, entitled: On Cider, Its Manufacture and Its Effects, Followed by Several New Reflections on the Subject, which I have sent to the Agricultural Society of Rouen; which earned for me the honor of being received among its members, Agricultural Section, Pomological Class. Well! If my work had been granted an even wider audience …”

But the pharmacist stopped talking, as Madame Lefrançois appeared to be preoccupied.

“Look at them over there!” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense! A dump like that!”

And shrugging her shoulders—which made the stitches in her sweater stretch out over her bosom—she pointed with both hands at her rival’s café, from which the sound of singing could be heard.

“Anyway, he won’t have it for long,” she added. “In a week, it’ll be all over.”

Homais stepped back in shock. She came down the three steps and whispered in his ear.

“What? Didn’t you know? They’re taking him over next week. It’s Lheureux who’s making him sell out. He’s killed him off with promissory notes.”

“What a horrible catastrophe!” cried the pharmacist, who always found a suitable expression for every conceivable circumstance.

The landlady went on to tell him the story, which she had heard from Théodore, Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, and as much as she loathed Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was a wheedler, a sneak.

“Ah, look there,” she said; “look over in the market: he’s bowing to Madame Bovary, who’s wearing a green hat. She’s on Monsieur Boulanger’s arm.”

“Madame Bovary!” exclaimed Homais. “I must go and pay her my compliments. Perhaps she’d like to have a seat in the enclosure, under the peristyle.”

And without listening to Madame Lefrançois, who was calling him back to continue her story, the pharmacist set off at a rapid pace, a smile on his face, his bearing erect and formal, distributing greetings copiously to the right and to the left, and taking up a great deal of space with the great tails of his black suit flapping in the wind behind him.

Rodolphe, having seen him coming, had suddenly quickened his pace; but Madame Bovary grew short of breath; so he slowed down and said to her with a smile and with a brutal tone:

“It’s to avoid that fat man: you know, the pharmacist.”

She poked him with her elbow.

“What does that mean?” he asked himself.

And he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, while continuing to walk.

Her face in profile was so calm that he could divine nothing from it. In the sunlight, it stood out from the oval of her bonnet, which had pale ribbons the color of leaves on a reed. Her eyes, with their long, curved lashes, looked straight ahead, and though they were wide open, they seemed slightly narrowed by her cheekbones and by the pressure of the blood pulsing quietly beneath her delicate skin. A slightly pink color ran along the bridge of her nose. She was leaning her head to one side, and he could see the pearly tips of her white teeth between her lips.

“Is she laughing at me?” wondered Rodolphe.

Emma’s gesture, however, had only been meant as a warning, because Monsieur Lheureux was walking alongside them, and he spoke to them from time to time, trying to initiate a conversation.

“This is superb weather! Everyone is outside! The winds are from the east.”

Neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe made much of a reply to him, whereas at the slightest movement either of them made, he would hurry closer to them, tipping his hat and saying, “Excuse me?”

When they came to the blacksmith’s house, instead of following the road up to the fence, Rodolphe abruptly took a side path, pulling Madame Bovary along with him; he called out:

“Good day, Monsieur Lheureux! See you soon!”

“You certainly sent him on his way!” she said, laughing.

He replied, “Why let ourselves be intruded upon by others? And since today I have the happiness of being with you …”

Emma reddened. He didn’t finish his sentence. He went on to speak of the fine weather and the pleasures of walking on grass. A few daisies had sprung up.

“Here are some pretty daisies,” he said, “and enough of them to provide prophecies for all the lovesick girls.”

He added:

“Should I pick them? What do you think?”

“Why? Are you in love?” she said with a little cough.

“Well, who knows?” replied Rodolphe.

The meadow was beginning to fill up, and the housewives jostled you with their big umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. Often you had to step aside to make way for a line of farm girls, servants in blue stockings, flat shoes, and silver rings, who smelled of milk when you passed close to them. They walked along hand in hand, spreading out the whole length of the meadow, from the row of aspens to the banquet tent. But now it was time for the competition, and farmers one after another filed into a kind of horse track formed by a long rope supported on sticks.

The animals were there, noses turned toward the rope, forming an uneven line with their unequal rumps. Sleepy pigs were burrowing their noses into the earth, calves were mooing, sheep were bleating; cows, leaning on a folded knee, were stretching out their stomachs on the grass and slowly chewing, blinking their heavy eyes at the gnats buzzing around them. Carters with bare arms were holding the halters of rearing stallions that were neighing with dilated nostrils, staring over at the mares. The mares stood peaceably, necks stretched out, manes hanging down, while their foals were resting in the shade or coming over to suckle; and looking out over the long undulation of all these packed-in bodies, you could see a white mane rising somewhere down the line like a wave, or perhaps a pair of sharp horns protruding, and the heads of running men. To the side, outside the enclosure a hundred feet or so, there was a large black bull, muzzled, wearing an iron ring in his nostril, and moving no more than a bronze statue of an animal. A ragged child held him by a rope.

Meanwhile, the judges were slowly walking down the lines, examining each animal and then consulting together in low voices. One of them, the one who looked the most important, was taking notes in a book as he walked. This was the jury president: Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville. As soon as he saw Rodolphe, he came over quickly, smiling amiably and saying:

“What, Monsieur Boulanger, you’re deserting us so soon?”

Rodolphe protested that he was coming soon. But when the president had gone:

“Good lord, no,” he said, “I won’t go with them: your company is much better than his.”

And while continuing to mock the agricultural show, Rodolphe showed his blue ticket to the gendarme so they could move about more freely, and he even stopped from time to time in front of some fine exhibit, though Madame Bovary showed no interest in any of them. He noticed this, and he began to make jokes about the ladies of Yonville and their fashion sense, and he then apologized for his own. His outfit exhibited that incoherence that mixes some common items with some highly affected ones, in which the vulgar believe they are seeing the sign of an eccentric life, the discords that arise from profound feeling, from the tyranny of art, and from a certain contempt for social conventions—all of which may strike them as either seductive or exasperating. Thus, the wind would puff his cotton shirt with frilled cuffs out from the opening of his gray jacket, and his broad-striped trousers revealed at the ankle his nankeen boots with patent leather uppers. They were so highly polished that the grass was reflected in them. He stamped over horse dung in them, one hand in his jacket pocket, his straw hat tilted to one side.

“And besides,” he continued, “when one lives in the country …”

“It’s all wasted effort,” said Emma.

“Exactly!” Rodolphe replied. “To think that not one of these fine people is capable of appreciating the cut of a suit!”

They went on to talk about provincial mediocrity, the lives it stifled, the ideals it crushed.

“And so,” Rodolphe said, “I retreat into my own sadness …”

“You!” she cried, astonished. “But you seem so carefree!”

“Oh yes, in appearance, because I know how to put on a mocking mask for other people; but for all that, there are times when the sight of a cemetery in the moonlight makes me wonder if I wouldn’t be better off to go and join the ones who are at peace there …”

“Oh! But what about your friends?” she said. “You must think of them.”

“My friends? Which ones? Do I have any? Who really cares about me?”

He accompanied these last words with a sort of hissing sound.

But now they had to separate from each other because of a great pile of chairs that a man behind them was carrying. He was so overloaded that the only visible parts of him were the points of his shoes and the ends of his two extended arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, who was carrying chairs from the church out to the multitude. Always inventive when it came to his own interests, he had discovered this means of making a profit from the agricultural show, and his idea was so successful that he hardly knewwhich way to turn. In fact the townspeople, who had grown hot and tired, were quarreling over these chairs, their straw smelling of incense, and they leaned themselves against their thick backs, stained with candle wax, with a certain veneration.

Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe’s arm; he continued, as if talking to himself:

“Yes, so many things have been denied to me! Always alone! Oh, if I had only had some goal in my life, if I had only met with some affection, if I had found someone … Oh, how I would have expended all the energy I’m capable of, how I would have overcome everything, conquered everything!”

“But it seems to me,” Emma said, “that you hardly have much to complain about.”

“You think so?” he exclaimed.

“Because after all … ,” she replied, “you are free.”

She hesitated.

“And rich.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” he replied.

And she swore she was not mocking him, when a blast from the cannon sounded; suddenly, everyone began to surge wildly toward the village.

It was a false alarm. The prefect had not arrived; and the jury members were greatly embarrassed, uncertain whether they ought to begin the proceedings or continue to wait.

Finally, at the back of the square, a big rented landau coach appeared, drawn by two skinny horses being whipped on forcefully by a coachman in a white hat. Binet scarcely had time to cry, “To your arms!” and the colonel to follow suit. The men rushed toward their stacked rifles. They hurled themselves at them. A few even forgot to attach their collars. But the pre-fectorial carriage seemed to anticipate this shortcoming, and the two yoked nags, waddling along in their harness, came up in a little trot to the front of the town hall’s peristyle at exactly the moment when the National Guard and the firemen were deployed, beating their drums and marching in place.

“Present!” Binet shouted.

“Halt!” cried the colonel. “Left face!”

And after presenting arms, the clattering of which sounded like a brass kettle tumbling down a flight of stairs, all the guns were lowered.

Then could be seen, stepping down from the carriage, a gentleman wearing a short jacket with silver braiding, bald in the front with a tuft of hair in the back, with a pallid complexion and the most benign appearance. His eyes, very large and heavy-lidded, half closed to contemplate the crowd,while he raised his pointed nose and made his sunken mouth form a smile. He could tell the mayor by his sash, and he explained to him that the prefect had not been able to come. He was himself one of the Counselors of the prefecture; to this he added some excuses. Tuvache responded with his compliments, and the other admitted that he didn’t know how to proceed; and there they stood, face to face, their foreheads almost touching, with the jury members all around them, the dignitaries, the National Guard, and the crowd. The Counselor, pressing his little black tri-cornered hat against his chest, repeated his greetings while Tuvache bent into an arc, smiled back at him, stammered, sought for some appropriate phrases, and avowed his devotion to the monarchy and his appreciation of the honor being done to Yonville.

Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, came up to take the coach horses’ bridle, and limping on his clubfoot, conducted them to the door of the Golden Lion, where a crowd of peasants had gathered to look at the coach. The drum beat, the howitzer boomed, and the gentlemen mounted the stage in a line, seating themselves in the armchairs of red Utrecht velvet that Madame Tuvache had provided.

Everyone on the platform looked alike. Their soft blond faces, a little tanned by the sun, had the color of sweet cider, and their bushy side whiskers emerged from high, stiff collars, held up by white cravats with wide bows. All the waistcoats were velvet; all the watches had oval carnelian seals at the end of long ribbons; every man rested his two hands on his two thighs, carefully tending the drape of his trousers, whose starched cloth shone more brightly than the leather of his heavy boots.

The ladies of the group were behind them, below the porch and between the pillars, while the common crowd faced them, some standing and some sitting on chairs. In fact, Lestiboudois had carried over all the ones he could bring from the meadow, and he was constantly running back to find more in the church, causing such a commotion with his business that it was very difficult to make one’s way to the little stair steps leading up to the platform.

“I happen to think,” Monsieur Lheureux said to the pharmacist (who was passing by to get to his seat), “that they should have put two Venetian poles up there: with something both rich and a little severe for ornamentation, it would have been quite striking.”

“Certainly,” Homais replied. “But what can you do! The mayor took charge of everything himself. He’s not a man of much taste, poor Tuvache; he is entirely devoid of what they call the artistic sense.”

Meanwhile, Rodolphe with Madame Bovary had gone up to the second floor of the town hall, to the council chamber, and seeing it was empty, he had declared that they could enjoy the show more comfortably from there. He picked up three stools from the oval table beneath the king’s bust, and when he had brought them over to one of the windows, they sat down next to each other.

There was some commotion going on below on the platform, with lengthy whisperings and discussions. Finally, the Counselor arose. By now it was known that his name was Lieuvain, and people were repeating the name to each other throughout the crowd. When he had put a series of pages in order, and brought them up close enough to his eyes to read them, he began:

“Gentlemen,

“May I be permitted to begin—before discussing with you the object of today’s gathering, and this feeling, I feel quite sure, will by shared by all of you—may I be permitted, I say, to pay my respects to the national administration, to the government, to the monarch, gentlemen, to our sovereign, to that well-beloved king to whom no branch of either public or private prosperity is a thing indifferent, and who directs, with a hand at once firm and wise, the ship of state amidst the unceasing perils of a stormy sea, and who knows, moreover, how to make peace as respected as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts.”

“I should move back a bit,” said Rodolphe.

“Why?” asked Emma.

But just then the Counselor’s voice rose to an extraordinary pitch. He was declaiming:

“The days have passed, gentlemen, when civil discord bloodied our public squares, when the landlord, the businessman, the workingman himself, falling asleep in the evening, a peaceful sleep, had to tremble at the thought of being suddenly awakened by the sound of inflammatory tocsins, when the most subversive ideas were audaciously undermining the bases …”

“It’s just that I might be seen from down there,” Rodolphe replied; “and then I’d have to be making excuses for weeks, and with my bad reputation …”

“Oh, you’re exaggerating,” said Emma.

“No, no, it’s terrible, I assure you.”

“But, gentlemen,” the Counselor continued, “if cht, and I turn my eyes to the current situation of our beautiful nation, what do I see there? Everywhere, commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new paths of communication, like so many arteries in the body of the State, are establishing new connections; our great manufacturing centers have resumed their activity; religion, stronger than ever, smiles on every one of us; our ports are full, trust is reborn, and France, at last, can breathe!”

“Besides,” Rodolphe went on, “from the world’s point of view, perhaps they’re right.”

“How do you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, “you know, don’t you, that there are some souls in constant torment? They have to alternate, back and forth, between dream and action, the purest of passions, the wildest of joys, and they thus thrust themselves into all sorts of fantasies, all sorts of madness.”

At this, she looked at him the way one looks at a person who has visited strange, unknown countries, and she replied:

“We don’t even have that distraction, we poor women!”

“A sad distraction, because it doesn’t lead to happiness.”

“But does a person ever find happiness?”

“Yes—one day, it will be found,” he answered.

“And this is precisely what you have understood,” the Counselor was saying. “You, farmers and farm workers; you, the peaceful pioneers in the great work of civilization! You, men of progress, men of morality! You have understood, I say, that political storm clouds are far more frightening than any disturbances in the atmosphere …”

“It will be found one day,” Rodolphe repeated, “all at once, and just when one has despaired of it. Then the clouds will part, the skies open, and it will be like a voice crying out, ‘Here it is!’ You sense a need to tell that woman everything, to sacrifice everything for her! It’s not a matter of explaining yourself; she will intuit everything. You’ve both already met, in your dreams.” He looked at her. “And finally, there it is, that treasure you’ve searched for so long, there, right in front of you; it gleams, it sparkles. But there is still doubt; one dares not believe in it; one stands still, bedazzled, as if coming out of shadows and into daylight.”

And as he finished speaking these words, Rodolphe added a sort of pantomime. He passed his hand across his eyes, like a person who felt dizzy all of a sudden; then he let his hand fall back down, on top of Emma’s. She pulled hers back. But the Counselor continued to read his speech:

“And who would be surprised at this, gentlemen? Only a man who is so blind, so entirely immersed—I do not hesitate to use the word—so entirely immersed in the prejudices of another age as to misunderstand still the spirit of our agricultural population. Where can we find, truly, more patriotism than in the country, more devotion to the public good, in short, more intelligence? And I do not mean, gentlemen, that superficial intelligence, that vain ornament of idlers, but rather that profound and moderate intelligence that applies itself above all else to pursuing useful ends, and thus contributing to the good of all, to common improvement, to upholding the State, the fruit of respect for the law and the practice of one’s duties …”

“Oh, there it is again,” said Rodolphe. “Always duties—words like that bore me to death. They’re all a heap of old fools in flannel waistcoats, and bigoted old women with their footwarmers and their rosaries, constantly droning into our ears that word ‘Duty! Duty!’ My God, what is duty but to feel what is great, to cherish what’s beautiful, and not to accept all the social conventions, along with the humiliations they impose on us.”

“But still … but still … ,” Madame Bovary objected.

“No! Why preach against the passions? Are they not the only beautiful thing there is on earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of poetry and music, of the arts, of everything?”

“But one has to have some concern for the world’s opinion, and obey its moral code,” Emma said.

“Oh, but there are two moralities,” he replied. “The little one, the conventional one, the morality of men, the one that varies constantly and that makes so much noise and fuss here on earth, like this assembly of imbeciles you see down there. But the other morality, the eternal one, that one is all around and above us, like the landscape surrounding us, and the blue sky that gives us light.”

Monsieur Lieuvain had just paused to wipe his lips with his pocket handkerchief. He continued:

“But why should I point out to you here, gentlemen, the usefulness of agriculture? Who is it that fulfills our needs? Who is it who provides our subsistence? Is it not the farmer? The farmer, gentlemen, who, sowing the fecund furrows of the countryside with hard-working hands, causes the wheat to spring forth, which, being ground and turned to powder by ingenious technical means and exiting the process under the name of flour, is thence transported to the cities, and is soon brought to the baker, who makes of it nutrition for both poor and rich. And is it not the farmer who fattens his abundant flocks in the meadows to clothe us? For how would we clothe ourselves, how nourish ourselves, without the farmer? And gentlemen, do we need to go even that far afield for examples? Who among us has not frequently reflected on the important things we receive from that humble animal, the ornament of our farmyards, who furnishes us with soft pillows for our beds, succulent meat for our tables, and eggs? But I would never come to an end if I had to enumerate, one after another, all the different products that the earth, well-cultivated, like a generous mother, provides for her children. Here, the vine; elsewhere, apples for cider; there, rapeseed oil; farther away, cheeses; and flax: gentlemen, let us not forget flax! Which has grown considerably in importance over these last several years, and to which I would particularly draw your attention.”

He didn’t have to draw very hard, because every mouth in the crowd was gaping open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache, right next to him, listened with his eyes wide open; Monsieur Derozerays would softly close his eyelids from time to time; and farther away, the pharmacist, with his son Napoléon between his knees, cupped his hand behind his ear so as not to miss a single syllable. The other jury members nodded their chins slowly into their waistcoats to signal their approval. The firemen, below the platform, leaned on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with one elbow out, the point of his saber in the air. He may have been listening, but he could not see anything, because his helmet’s visor had slipped down onto his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of Tuvache, had tilted his own visor at an even more extreme angle, for he was wearing an enormous helmet that wobbled on his head, revealing the border of his cotton kerchief. He smiled underneath it with a childlike sweetness, and his small, pale face, running with sweat, wore an expression that combined pleasure, despondency, and sleepiness.

The square was packed with people up to the house fronts. They were leaning out of every window, others standing in every doorway, and Justin, in front of the pharmacy, seemed transfixed by what he was seeing. Despite the hushed silence, Monsieur Lieuvain’s voice was lost as it came through the air. You would catch bits of phrases, interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the crowd; and then you would suddenly hear from behind you the long bellow of a bull or the bleating of lambs replying to each other on the street corners. In fact, the cowherds and the shepherds had driven their beasts right up to the edge of the square, and they lowed from time to time, while they ripped off some bit of foliage that hung within reach of their mouths.

Rodolphe had moved closer to Emma, and he was saying in a low voice, speaking quickly:

“Doesn’t this conspiracy of society disgust you? Is there one single feeling that it doesn’t condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest sympathies are persecuted, slandered, and, if it does so happen that two poor souls find each other, everything is organized to keep them apart. But they will try, they will beat their wings, they will call to each other. Oh! But it doesn’t matter, because sooner or later, in six months, in ten years, they will come together, they will love each other, because fate demands it, and because they were born for each other.”

He had his arms folded across his knees, and in that pose lifting his face up toward Emma, close to her, he gazed at her fixedly. She could see small gold flecks in his eyes, radiating outward from his black pupils, and she could even smell the scent of the pomade gleaming in his hair. And then she felt a weakness overcoming her, and she recalled the Viscount who had made her waltz at La Vaubyessard, whose beard had given off the same vanilla and citron scent as this man’s hair; and mechanically, she half closed her eyes to breathe it in the better. But in making that movement and arching in her chair, she saw off in the distance the old Hirondelle coach coming slowly down the Leux hillside, a long plume of dust trailing behind it. It was in that yellow coach that Léon so often had returned to her; and it was by that very route that he had gone away forever! She thought she could see his face in the window, and then everything became confused: some clouds were passing by; she felt as if she were turning again in the waltz under the chandeliers’ lights, in the Viscount’s arms, and that Léon was not far off, that he was on his way … and still she sensed Rodolphe’s head very close to her. The sweetness of this sensation thus seeped into her old desires and, like grains of sand in a gust of wind, they whirled within the subtle rush of the scent that was spreading itself throughout her soul. She dilated her nostrils several times to breathe in deeply the freshness of the ivy wound around the columns. She removed her gloves, she wiped her hands; then, with her handkerchief, she fanned her face, while over the beating of her temples she could hear the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the Counselor as he intoned his sentences.

He was saying:

“Continue! Persevere! Listen neither to the suggestions of routine nor the too hasty counsels of a reckless empiricism! Above all, apply yourself to the enrichment of the soil, to good manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races! May this agricultural fair be for you like a peaceful arena from which the victor, as he departs, extends his hand to the vanquished and fraternizes with him, in the hope of an even better success! And you, venerable servants! Humble domestics, whose painful labor no government until now has taken into account, come forward and receive the recompense for your silent virtues, and rest assured that the State henceforth has its eyes fixed upon you, that it encourages you, that it protects you, that it will do right by all your justifiable complaints and will lighten, insofar as it is able, the burdens of your painful sacrifices!”

Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, and began another speech. His was, perhaps, considerably less flowery than the Counselor’s, but he made up for this with a more positive style, that is, by more specialized knowledge and more exalted considerations. Thus, praise of the government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture took up more. He demonstrated the relations between the two, and how they had always contributed to civilization. Rodolphe, with Madame Bovary, was talking dreams, premonitions, magnetism. The orator went back to the cradle of society, painting for us those savage days when men ate acorns and lived deep in the woods. But then they moved beyond animal skins, put on clothes, plowed the fields, planted vines. Was this a good thing, or did these discoveries result in more inconveniences than advantages? Monsieur Derozerays homed in on this problem. From magnetism, Rodolphe had bit by bit approached the topic of affinities, and while the Président was citing Cincinnatus at the plow, Diocletian planting his cabbages, and the Chinese emperors launching the new year by sowing seed, the young man was explaining to the young woman that such irresistible attractions had their origins in a previous existence.

“And so, consider ourselves,” he was saying. “Why is it that we met? What chance brought it about? It can only be because our particular inclinations were pushing us toward each other across the distance, like two rivers that eventually flow into each other.”

And he took her hand; she did not withdraw it.

“For good farming practices in general!” cried the Président.

“So, for example, when I came to your house today …”

“To Monsieur Bizet, of Quincampoix!”

“Did I know I would be accompanying you?”

“Seventy francs!”

“A hundred times I wanted to leave, and yet I followed you, I stayed.”

“Manures.”

“Just as I will remain this evening, tomorrow, the next days, all my life!”

“To Monsieur Caron of Argeuil, a gold medal!”

“Because I have never found so complete a charm in the company of any other woman.”

“To Monsieur Bain, of Givry-Saint-Martin!”

“And so I will carry with me the memory of you.”

“For a merino ram.”

“But you will forget about me, I will have passed away like a shadow.”

“To Monsieur Belot, of Notre-Dame …”

“Oh no! I will remain, won’t I, somewhere in your thoughts, in your life?”

“Porcine race, a shared prize: sixty francs to Messieurs Lehérissé and Cullembourg!”

Rodolphe pressed her hand, and he felt it all warm and trembling, like a captive dove anxious to resume its flight; but, whether because she was trying to withdraw her hand or because she was responding to the pressure of his, she moved her fingers slightly, and he exclaimed:

“Oh, thank you! You do not reject me! You are good! You understand that I’m yours! Let me just look at you, let me contemplate you!”

A gust of wind blew in through the window and ruffled the cloth on the table, and in the square below, it lifted all the great bonnets of the peasant women, like the wings of so many white butterflies all beating at once.

“The use of oil cakes,” the Président continued.

And now he began to speed up.

“Flemish manure—flax cultivation—drainage, long leases—domestic service.”

Rodolphe spoke no more. They were looking at each other. A supreme desire caused their dry lips to quiver; and gently, effortlessly, their fingers joined.

“Catherine-Nicaise-Elisabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerrière, for fifty-four years of service on the same farm, a silver medal—value, twenty-five francs!”

“Where is she, Catherine Leroux?” the Counselor repeated.

She did not come forward, and voices could be heard whispering:

“Go on.”

“No.”

“To the left!”

“Don’t be afraid!”

“Oh, how stupid the woman is!”

“Is that her finally?” Tuvache asked.

“Yes—there she is!”

“Make her come up then!”

Then up to the platform came a little old woman, fearful looking, seeming to shrink inward under her poor clothes. She wore big wooden clogs on her feet, and a large blue apron hung from her waist. Her scrawny face, framed by a borderless cap, was more wrinkled than a withered old russet apple, and from the sleeves of her red jacket extended two long hands, with gnarled joints. Barn dust, soapsuds, and the grease from sheep’s wool had so thoroughly encrusted, scratched, hardened them that they seemed dirty, even though they had been rinsed in clear water; and they remained half open as a result of having worked for so long, as if presenting themselves as humble witnesses of all the suffering she had endured. A kind of monastic rigidity gave a dignity to her expression. There was nothing sorrowful and nothing sentimental in her pale gaze. Through a long life with animals, she had taken on their muteness and their placidity. This was the first time she had found herself in so numerous a company; and inwardly terrified by the flags, the drums, by the men in black suits and the Counselor’s Cross of Honor, she remained absolutely motionless, not knowing whether to go forward or to turn and run away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jurymen smiling at her. And there she stood, before all the beaming townspeople, this half a century of servitude.

“Come forward, venerable Catherine-Nicaise-Elisabeth Leroux!” said the Counselor, who had taken the list of winners out of the Président’s hands.

And looking back and forth between the piece of paper and the old woman, he repeated in a paternal tone:

“Come forward, come forward!”

“Are you deaf?” said Tuvache, twitching in his chair.

And he began to shout in her ear:

“Fifty-four years of service! A silver medal! Twenty-five francs! It’s for you.”

Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it thoughtfully. And a beatific smile spread over her face, and they could hear her murmuring as she walked away:

“I’ll give it to the priest back home, so he’ll say Masses for me.”

“What a fanatic!” the pharmacist exclaimed, bending toward the notary.

The program was over; the crowd dispersed; and now that the speeches had been read out, everyone returned to his station, and everything went back to normal: the masters bullied the servants, and the latter beat the animals, the indolent winners who now returned to their stables, a green wreath between their horns.

In the meantime, the National Guardsmen had gone up to the second floor of the town hall, with buns skewered on their bayonets, the battalion’s drummer hauling up a basket of bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe’s arm; he escorted her to her house; they separated in front of her door; then he went for a walk alone in the meadow, waiting for the banquet hour.

The feast was lengthy, raucous, and poorly served; people were so crowded together they could barely move their elbows, and the narrow planks being used for benches almost broke under the guests’ weight. They ate copiously. Each one was determined to eat his share. Sweat was running down every forehead; and a whitish vapor, like a river mist on an autumn day, floated over the tables between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning his back against the canvas tent, was thinking so intently about Emma that he heard nothing around him. Behind him, outside the tent, on the grass, servants were piling up the dirty plates; his neighbors were speaking, and he didn’t reply; they refilled his glass, and a silence took root in his thought, despite the growing noise around him. He was thinking of what she had said, and the shape of her lips; her face, as in a magic mirror, gleamed at him from the polished visors of the military caps; the folds of her dress hung all down the walls, and days of love unfurled before him, stretching out infinitely into the future.

He saw her again that evening during the fireworks; but she was with her husband, Madame Homais, and the pharmacist, who was terribly worried about the danger of stray rockets; and he constantly left the group to go give advice to Binet.

The fireworks sent to Monsieur Tuvache’s house had been locked up in the basement, out of an excess of precaution; and so the damp powder would scarcely light, and the major piece, which was supposed to be a dragon biting its tail, fizzled out altogether. From time to time, there was a pathetic Roman candle, and then the gaping crowd would set up a clamor that mingled with the squeals of women whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma, silent, nestled gently against Charles’ shoulder; then, her chin raised up, she would follow the luminous jet of the fireworks in the black sky. Rodolphe contemplated her in the light of the burning lanterns.

They were extinguished one by one. The stars came out. A few drops of rain began to fall. She tied her scarf over her head.

At that moment, the Counselor’s carriage came out from the inn. His coachman, who was drunk, abruptly nodded off, and from a distance they could see, above the coach’s hood, between the two lanterns, the large mass of his body being swayed to the right and to the left, depending on which way the coach rocked.

“Really,” said the pharmacist, “they ought to clamp down on drunkenness! I’d like to see the names of all those who were intoxicated during the week inscribed on a tablet ad hoc and hung on the town hall door! And besides, from a statistical point of view, you’d then have a public record to use in case of … But excuse me.”

And off he ran again to the captain.

The latter was going back to his house. He was going to get back to his lathe.

“Perhaps it might not be a bad idea,” Homais said to him, “to send one of your men, or to go yourself …”

“Leave me alone,” the tax collector replied. “There’s nothing to worry about!”

“Rest easy,” said the pharmacist when he returned to his friends. “Monsieur Binet has assured me that measures have been taken. No sparks will fall. The pumps are full. Let’s go home to bed.”

“Heavens! I’m ready for it,” said Madame Homais, who was yawning considerably. “But that’s all right; we’ve had a beautiful day for our celebration.”

Rodolphe echoed her quietly, with a tender look: “Oh yes! Very beautiful.”

And having said good night to each other, they separated.

Two days later, in the Rouen Lantern, there was a long article about the agricultural fair. Homais had written it—with gusto—the day after:

“Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Where is the crowd hurrying, like the waves of a furious sea, under a pitiless tropical sun spreading its torrential heat over our fallow lands?”

Then he went on to speak about the condition of the peasants. Certainly, the government was doing a great deal, but it was not enough! “Have courage!” he exclaimed. “A thousand reforms are essential; let us accomplish them!” Then, touching upon the Counselor’s entry, he did not fail to note “the martial air of our militia,” nor “our most vivacious village girls,” nor the old bald men “like patriarchs who were there, some of whom are the remains of our immortal legions, whose hearts still throb at the manly sound of the drums.” He noted himself among the most prominent of the jury, and he even pointed out, in a footnote, that Monsieur Homais, pharmacist, had written a memorandum on cider for the Agriculture Society. When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he depicted the joy of the winners in dithyrambic strains. “Father embraced his son, brother his brother, husband his wife. More than one proudly displayed his humble medal to the crowd, and, no doubt, when he returns home to hisgood housewife, he will have hung it up, weeping, on the modest walls of his cottage.

“Around six o’clock, a banquet, set up in Monsieur Liegeard’s meadow, brought all the celebration’s principal figures together. The greatest cordiality never ceased to reign. Various toasts were proposed: Monsieur Lieuvain, to the monarch! Monsieur Tuvache, to the Prefect! Monsieur Derozerays, to agriculture! Monsieur Homais, to industry and the fine arts, those two sisters! Monsieur Leplichey, to progress! In the evening, a brilliant fireworks display suddenly illuminated the skies. One might say it was a veritable kaleidoscope, a true scene from the opera, and for a moment, our little town could imagine itself transported into a dream from the Thousand and One Nights.

“Let us note that not a single untoward event arose to disturb this family gathering.”

And he added:

“However, the absence of the clergy was noted. No doubt the priests have a different definition of progress. As you wish, men of Loyola!”

CHAPTER 9¹

Six weeks passed by. Rodolphe did not return. One evening, at last, he appeared.

“Better not come around too soon,” he had said to himself the day after the agricultural fair. “That would be a mistake.”

So, at the end of that week, he had left to go hunting.

When the hunt was over, he worried that perhaps he was proceeding too slowly, but then he reasoned to himself:

“But if she loved me from that very first day, she’ll have to love me even more out of her impatience to see me again. So let’s carry on!”

And he knew that he had calculated correctly when, coming into the room now, he saw Emma go pale.

She was alone. Daylight was fading. The thin muslin curtains across the windows thickened in the dusk, and the gilt front of the barometer, struck by a ray of the sun, reflected like fire in the coral-edged mirror.

Rodolphe remained standing; and Emma scarcely made any replies to his opening polite sentences.

“As for me,” he said, “I’ve been busy. I’ve been sick.”

“Seriously sick?” she cried.

“Well!” Rodolphe said, sitting down on a stool next to her. “No! … It’s more that I didn’t want to come back.”

“Why?”

“You can’t guess?”

He looked directly at her now, and so intensely that she lowered her head and reddened. He continued:

“Emma …”

“Sir!” she said, and moved slightly away from him.

“Ah, you see,” he continued in a melancholic tone, “that I was right not to want to come back; because this name, this name that fills my heart and just now slipped out, you deny it to me! Madame Bovary! … Yes, everybody calls you that! … But it’s not your name, after all; it’s another man’s name!”

And he repeated: “Another man’s!”

And he hid his face in his hands.

“Yes, I think about you continually! … The memory of you tears at me! … Oh, forgive me! … I’ll leave you alone … Farewell! I’ll go far away … so far that you’ll never hear anyone speak of me again! But still … today … I can’t say what force it was that drove me toward you! Because you can’t fight against heaven, you can’t resist the smiles of the angels! You simply have to let yourself be pulled along by the beautiful, the charming, the adorable!”

This was the first time Emma had had such things said to her; and her pride, like someone relaxing in a steam bath, languorously stretched out its whole length in the warmth of this language.

“But,” he went on, “if I had not come, if I hadn’t been able to see you, ah, at least I know your surroundings so very well. At night, every night, I got up, I came by here, I gazed at your house, the roof shining in the moonlight, the trees in the garden swaying against your window, and the small lamp, that glow, shining through the curtains, in the darkness. Ah, you couldn’t know that there was, so close and yet so far from you, a poor, miserable …”

She turned toward him with a sob.

“Oh, you are so good!” she said.

“No, I love you, that’s all! You don’t doubt it! Say it to me, one word, one single word!”

And Rodolphe had, imperceptibly, let himself slide down off the stool, and he knelt on the floor beside her; but they heard the sound of boots in the kitchen, and the door, he suddenly realized, had not been closed.

“How good it would be of you,” he said as he quickly stood up, “to satisfy that whim of mine!”

That is, to visit her house; he had wanted to see it, and Madame Bovary had seen nothing at all inappropriate in the request, and now they both were standing when Charles entered the room.

“Hello, Doctor,” Rodolphe said to him.

The health officer, flattered by this unexpected title, began to gush obsequiously, which gave the other the opportunity to pull himself together.

Then he said, “Madame has been telling me about her health …”

Charles interrupted: he had a thousand anxieties, in fact; his wife’s respiratory problems were starting up again. At that, Rodolphe asked whether some exercise on horseback wouldn’t do her good.

“Certainly! Excellent, perfect! … Now there’s an idea! You should follow up on that,” he said to her.

And when she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered her one of his; she refused the offer; he did not insist; and then, to give his visit a better motive, he invented a story about his farmhand, the one Charles had bled, saying he was still experiencing dizzy spells.

“I’ll come by,” said Bovary.

“No, no, I’ll bring him to you; we’ll come here, to make it more convenient for you.”

“Ah, fine. Thank you.”

And then, when they were alone:

“Why didn’t you accept Monsieur Boulanger’s offer, which was so gracious?”

She put on a sulky air, tried out a thousand excuses, and at last declared that it might seem strange.

“Oh, I couldn’t care less!” Charles said, pirouetting around. “Health above all else! You’re making a mistake!”

“Well then! How am I supposed to ride, when I don’t have a riding outfit?”

“We’ll have to get you one!” he replied.

The outfit decided her.

When the riding habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was now available for him, and that they appreciated his kindness.

The next day, at noon, Rodolphe came up to Charles’ door with two horses. One of them wore little pink pompons on its ears, and a woman’s saddle made of buckskin.

Rodolphe had put on his high, soft boots, saying to himself that she would undoubtedly never have seen the like; and in fact Emma was charmed by the figure he cut when he appeared in front of the house in his velvet coat and his white knit riding breeches. She was ready, she was waiting for him.

Justin slipped out of the pharmacy to look at her, and the apothecary likewise troubled himself to emerge for the occasion. He gave Monsieur Boulanger some advice.

“Bad luck happens so quickly! Be careful! Your horses might be too spirited!”

She heard sounds from over her head: it was Félicité beating out a rhythm on the windowpanes to amuse little Berthe. The child threw a kiss; her mother signaled back with the pommel of her riding crop.

“Have a good ride!” cried Monsieur Homais. “Prudence above all! Prudence!”

And he waved his newspaper at them as he watched them ride off.

As soon as he felt the softer earth beneath him, Emma’s horse broke into a gallop. Rodolphe galloped alongside her. Now and then they exchanged a word or two. Bent slightly forward, keeping her hand up and her right arm extended, she gave herself up to the rhythmic movement that rocked her in the saddle.

At the foot of the hill, Rodolphe loosened the reins: they raced off together as one; then, at the top, abruptly, the horses stopped, and Emma’s long blue veil settled back into place.

These were the first days of October. A low fog lay on the landscape. Mists spread out on the horizon, settling in the hollows of the hillsides; some wisps detached themselves, rose up, and were lost. At times when the clouds parted and a ray of sun shone through, they could see the distant rooftops of Yonville with its gardens alongside the river, its barnyards, its walls, and the church steeple. Emma squinted to make out her house, and never had this poor village in which she lived seemed so very small. From the high ground where they were, the whole valley seemed an immense pale lake evaporating into the air. Here and there, great clumps of trees sprung up like black rocks; and the tall lines of poplars, overtopping the fog, looked like shorelines stirred by the wind.

To one side, among the firs, a brown light was moving over the grass in the warm air. The earth, reddish brown like powdered tobacco, deadened the sounds of the horses’ steps; as they walked along, their iron-shod hooves nudged fallen pine cones before them.

Rodolphe and Emma followed the edge of the forest. She turned away frequently to avoid his gaze, and then she only saw the long rows of fir trunks, the endless succession of which made her a little dizzy. The horses panted. The leather saddles creaked.

At the moment they turned to enter the forest, the sun came out.

“God is protecting us!” said Rodolphe.

“Do you think so?” she said.

“Let’s go on! Let’s go on!” he replied.

He clicked his tongue. The two beasts began to trot more quickly.

Some long ferns on the edge of the path got tangled in Emma’s stirrup. Rodolphe, without dismounting, bent over and pulled them off as they rode. Other times, to pull back the branches, he passed closer to her, and Emma felt his knee rub against her leg. The sky had become blue. The leaves were still. There were great open spaces of heather in bloom; and patches of violets alternated with the jumbled undergrowth, gray, fawn-colored, or golden, colors as diverse as the various trees. Often they heard a soft beating of wings in the bushes, or the harsh but muffled cries of the crows as they flew up off the oaks.

They dismounted. Rodolphe tethered the horses. She walked ahead, on the moss between the wagon ruts.

But her too-long dress got in the way, even though she held it up behind her by the train, and Rodolphe, walking behind, contemplated the delicate white of her stocking between the black hem and the black boot, and he felt he was glimpsing her nudity.

She stopped.

“I’m so tired,” she said.

“Come, let’s push on!” he replied. “You can do it!”

Then, after another hundred steps, she stopped again; and, through the long veil falling from her masculine hat all the way to her hips, he could see her face; the veil gave it a bluish cast, as if she had swum up from an azure wave.

“Where are we going?”

He made no reply. She was almost panting. Rodolphe looked around, and he silently chewed at his moustache.

They came to a wider clearing where the young trees had been cut down. They sat down on a fallen tree trunk, and Rodolphe began to speak to her of his love.

She was not at all frightened by his compliments at first. He was calm, serious, melancholic.

Emma listened with her head lowered, poking at some wood shavings on the ground with the toe of her boot.

“Isn’t it true that our destinies are linked now?”

“No!” she replied. “You know very well. It’s impossible.”

She got up to leave. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having looked at him for a few moments with a moist, loving gaze, she spoke sharply:

“Oh, come, let’s not talk about it any more … Where are the horses? Let’s go back.”

He made an angry, bored gesture. She repeated:

“Where are the horses? Where are the horses?”

Then, smiling strangely, with his eyes fixed and his teeth clenched, he came forward, his arms outstretched. She recoiled, trembling. She stammered:

“Oh, you’re frightening me! You’re hurting me! Let’s go back.”

“If we must,” he replied, immediately changing the look on his face.

And he instantly became respectful again, reassuring and mild-mannered. She gave him her arm. They turned back. He said:

“What’s wrong? Why? I don’t understand. You must have misunderstood me? You stand in my soul like a Madonna on a pedestal, in a high, immaculate place. But I need you in order to live! I need your eyes, your voice, your thoughts. Be my friend, my sister, my angel!”

And he stretched out his arm, encircling her waist. She tried gently to disengage him. He held on as they continued to walk.

But they heard the two horses ahead, grazing on the leaves.

“Oh, once more,” said Rodolphe, “let’s not leave! Stay!”

He drew her further away, near to a small pond where floating weeds spread their green color over the water. Withered water lilies were held immobile by the reeds. At the sound of their footsteps on the grass, frogs leaped away to hide.

“It’s wrong, it’s wrong,” she was saying. “I’m mad to listen to you.”

“Why? … Emma! Emma!”

“Oh, Rodolphe! …” said the young woman slowly, turning to lean her head on his shoulder.

The cloth of her dress caught on the velvet of his coat, she tilted back her white throat, which was swelling with a sigh, and overcome, in tears, with a long shudder, hiding her face, she gave herself up to him.

The shadows of the evening descended; the sun, on the horizon, passed between the branches and blinded her. Here and there, all around her, little luminous patches trembled, as if hummingbirds in flight had scattered their feathers on the ground. Silence was everywhere; the trees seemed to emanate a sort of sweetness; she felt her heart begin to beat again, and felt the blood circulating in her flesh like a stream of milk. Then she heard far away, beyond the forest, coming from the hills on the other side of the valley, a vague, prolonged cry, a voice that faded away, and she listened silently, the voice blending like music with the last vibrations of her pulsating nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was using his pocket knife to repair one of the broken bridles.

They came back to Yonville by the same path. They saw the tracks of their own horses in the mud, side by side, the same bushes, the same stones in the grass. Nothing around them had changed; yet, for her, something greater had happened than if the mountains themselves had moved. Rodolphe from time to time bent and took her hand to kiss it.

She was charming on horseback! Sitting erect with her narrow waist, her knee bent against the horse’s mane, a little flushed in the fresh air, in the red glow of the evening.

Entering Yonville, she made her horse prance a little on the paving stones. Everyone watched her from their windows.

At dinner, her husband said that she looked healthier; but she seemed not to hear him when he asked her about her day’s outing; and she remained still, leaning her elbow next to her plate, between the two lit candles.

“Emma!” he said.

“What?”

“Well, I spent this afternoon with Monsieur Alexandre; he has an old mare that’s still in good shape, just a little bad in the knees, which we could buy, I’m sure of it, for a hundred écus …”

He added:

“And, thinking that it would please you, I took it … I bought it … Did I do the right thing? Tell me.”

She nodded her head in assent; then, fifteen minutes later:

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

“Yes. Why?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing, dear.”

And once she was rid of Charles, she went up to her room and locked the door.

At first it was all a whirl; she saw the trees, the pathways, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she still felt the pressure of his arms while the leaves trembled and the reeds sighed in the wind.

But seeing herself in the mirror, she was startled by her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, never of such depths. Some subtle thing had spread through her and transfigured her.

She repeated: “I have a lover! A lover!” delighting in the concept as if it were another puberty that she was passing through. She was at last going to feel those joys of love, that fever of happiness that she had despaired of. She was entering into something marvelous where everything would be passion, ecstasy, delirium; a bluish immensity surrounded her, the heights of passion sparkling within her exalted thoughts, ordinary existence appearing only at a distance, far below, in the darkness, down in the valleys between these high peaks.

Then she remembered the heroines in the books she had read, and the lyrical legion of adulterous women sang in her memory with the voices of sisters casting their spell on her. She was herself becoming a real part of these imaginations, realizing the long dream of her youth, seeing herself now as one of those lovers she had so long envied. And more: Emma now experienced a satisfaction that felt like revenge. Hadn’t she suffered enough! But now she triumphed, and love, stifled for so long, burst forth, effervescing in joy. She savored it without remorse, without disquiet, without anxiety.

The following day went by in a new kind of sweetness. They made promises to each other. She told him about her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with kisses; and gazing on him with half-closed eyes, she asked him again to say her name and to tell her that he loved her. This was in the forest, like the day before, but now in a shoemaker’s hut. The walls were of straw, and the roof hung so low that they had to remain bent over. They sat side by side, on a bed of dry leaves.

From that day on, they wrote each other regularly every evening. Emma carried her letter to the end of the garden by the river, to a fissure in the terrace wall. Rodolphe would come to get it and put another one there, which she always complained was too short.

One morning, when Charles had left before dawn, she was seized by a whim to see Rodolphe right then. She could get to La Huchette quickly, stay there an hour, and be back in Yonville while everyone else was still asleep. The idea made her pant with desire; she quickly found herself in the middle of the meadow, walking rapidly, without looking back.

Day began to dawn. From afar, Emma recognized her lover’s home, with its two dove-tailed weathervanes forming a black silhouette against the pale dawn sky.

After the barnyard, she found a building that had to be the chateau. She went in, as if the walls had opened of themselves at her approach. A large, straight staircase led up to a corridor. Emma turned the handle of a door and there, suddenly, at the back of the room, she saw a sleeping man. It was Rodolphe. She cried out to him.

“You here! You here!” he repeated. “How did you manage to get here? Oh, your dress is wet!”

“I love you!” she replied, putting her arms around him.

This first audacity having been a success, now every time Charles left early, Emma would quickly dress herself and hurry stealthily down the steps that led to the riverside.

But when the crossing plank for the cows had been removed, she had to follow the garden walls running along the river; the bank was slippery; to keep from falling, she had to grip the overhanging tufts of wilted wildflowers. Then she had to cross the ploughed fields where she sank in the mud, stumbled, and got her thin boots stuck. Her scarf, tied around her head, fluttered in the wind that blew across the meadows; she was afraid of the cattle; she began to run; she arrived out of breath, her cheeks pink, her whole person exhaling the fresh scent of sap, of greenery, and of the open air. At that hour, Rodolphe would still be asleep. It was as if a spring morning had entered his room.

The yellow curtains, hanging down the whole length of the windows, allowed in a heavy, blond kind of light. Emma groped her way, blinking her eyes, while drops of dew hung suspended from her hair, creating a kind of topaz halo all around her face. Rodolphe, laughing, would pull her to him and press her to his heart.

Later, she began examining his quarters, opening drawers, combing her hair with his comb and looking at herself in his shaving mirror. Often, she would even put between her teeth the stem of a huge pipe that lay on his night table, among lemons and lumps of sugar, next to a water carafe.

It would take them a good quarter of an hour to say their good-byes. Then Emma would cry; she would have liked never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than her was pushing her toward him, so much so that one day, seeing her turn up unexpectedly, he frowned, as if he were displeased.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Are you ill? Speak to me!”

At last he declared, in his most serious tone, that her visits were becoming indiscreet and that she was compromising herself.

1. Flaubert began this chapter in April 1854. He wrote to Louise Colet, on April 18, that “I think I’ve taken a great step forward, namely the subtle transition from the psychological to the dramatic section. Now, I’m going to enter the action, and my own passions will be the driving force. I only have some half-tones still to sketch in. This is going to be more enjoyable, for the reader at least… . When will the wonderful day come when I can write, The End ? This September, it will be three years that I’ve been on this book. That’s a long time, three years spent on the same idea, writing in the same style (above all that style, from which my own personality was as absent as the Emperor of China’s), always living with the same characters, in the same setting, whipping myself along for the same illusion” (Correspondance, vol. II:551–52).

CHAPTER 10

Rodolphe’s fears slowly took possession of her. Love had at first intoxicated her, and she had thought of nothing beyond that. But now that it had become indispensable to her life, she was afraid of losing any part of it or even of disturbing it in any way. When she came back from his house, she would cast anxious glances all around her, carefully scanning every shape passing on the horizon, and every village window from which she might be seen. She would listen for footsteps, for shouts, for the sound of plows; and she would come to a halt, more pale and trembling than the leaves of the poplars that swayed over her head.

One morning when she was returning, she suddenly thought she could make out the long barrel of a rifle that seemed to be aimed directly at her. It was sticking out sideways from the rim of a small barrel, half buried in the grass, on the edge of a ditch. Emma, ready to faint from fright, came forward nonetheless, and a man emerged from the barrel like a jack-in-the-box. He had leggings buckled up to his knees, a cap pulled down to his eyes, shivering lips, and a red nose. It was captain Binet, out hunting wild ducks.

“You should have called out before you got so close!” he cried. “When you see a gun, you should always give a warning.”

In this way, the tax collector tried to hide the scare he had just had; for a decree from the prefecture had outlawed duck hunting except in boats. Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was acting quite illegally. So he was expecting to encounter a game warden any minute. But this anxiety only added a thrill to his hunting pleasure, and all alone in his barrel, he congratulated himself on his good fortune and on his cleverness.

At the sight of Emma, he felt a great weight lifted off him, and he quickly struck up a conversation:

“It’s definitely not warm; it’s nippy!”

Emma didn’t reply. He went on:

“And here you are, out and about so early?”

“Yes,” she stammered. “I’m just coming back from the wet nurse’s, where my daughter is.”

“Ah, good! Good! As for me, just as you can see, I’ve been here since dawn; but the weather’s so nasty that unless you have the bird right in front of you …”

“Good day, Monsieur Binet,” she interrupted, turning on her heel.

“Your servant, Madame,” he replied in a dry tone.

And he got back into his barrel.

Emma regretted having left the tax collector in such a brusque way. He would undoubtedly start to form unpleasant suspicions. The story about the nurse was the worst excuse possible, everybody in Yonville knowing perfectly well that the child had been home for a year. Besides, nobody lived near the place; the path she had been on led only to La Huchette; Binet, therefore, had guessed where she had been, and he wouldn’t keep quiet about it, he would gossip, it was certain! She spent the entire day tormenting herself, thinking up every lie she possibly could, and having always before her eyes that imbecile with his game bag.

After dinner, Charles, seeing her fretful, wanted to distract her by taking her to the pharmacist’s; and who was the first person she saw upon entering the pharmacy but the tax collector! He was standing in front of the counter, in the glow of a red jar, and he was saying:

“Give me, please, half an ounce of vitriol.”

“Justin!” cried the pharmacist. “Bring us the sulfuric acid.”

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

“No, wait, it’s not worth your trouble, she’s coming down. You can warm yourself up at the stove while you’re waiting … Pardon me … Hello, Doctor,” (because the pharmacist loved to pronounce that word doctor, as if, in addressing somebody else with the term, something of its splendor reflected back on himself ). “… But look out, Justin, don’t knock the mortars over! Go up instead to the little room and find some chairs; and you know very well we don’t move the armchairs from the drawing room.”

Homais was hurrying out from behind the counter to put his armchair back where it belonged when Binet asked for half an ounce of sugar acid.

“Sugar acid?” said the pharmacist disdainfully. “I don’t know what it is, never heard of it! Do you perhaps mean oxalic acid? It’s oxalic, isn’t it?”

Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make a copper solution for cleaning his various hunting gear. Emma shuddered. The pharmacist began to say:

“Actually, the weather isn’t right for it now, because of the humidity.”

“All the same,” the tax collector replied in a cunning tone of voice, “there are some people who like it just fine.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“And also give me …”

“He’ll never leave!” she thought.

“A half ounce of resin and of turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and three half ounces of animal black, please, to polish the patent leather on my gear.”

The pharmacist was starting to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared with Irma in her arms, Napoléon at her side, and Athalie behind. She went to sit down on the velvet-covered bench by the window, and the little boy squatted down on a stool while his older sister prowled around the jujube box near her papa. He was filling funnels and corking flasks, sticking on labels, making up packages. All were quiet around him, and the only sounds were the occasional clinking of the scale’s weights, along with a few softly spoken words from the pharmacist to his pupil.

“How is your little daughter doing?” Madame Homais suddenly asked.

“Silence!” exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in his account book.

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

“Hush, hush!” said Emma, pointing to the pharmacist.

But Binet, entirely absorbed in going over his bill, had probably not heard anything. At last he left the shop. Then Emma, relieved, let out a great sigh.

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

“Oh, it’s because it’s so warm,” she replied.

The next day they discussed how to arrange their meetings; Emma wanted to bribe her servant with a present; but it would be much better to find some discreet house in Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.

All that winter, three or four times a week, he would come to her garden in the dark of night. Emma had purposely taken the key out of the gate, and Charles thought it had been lost.

To let her know he was there, Rodolphe would throw a handful of sand up against her shutters. She would leap up at once; but sometimes he would have to wait, for Charles had the absurd habit of chatting by the fireside, and he would go on and on.

She burned with impatience; if looks could have done it, she would have hurled him out of the window. Finally, she would begin to get ready for bed, then pick up a book and continue to read peacefully, acting as if the book fascinated her. Charles, in bed, would call for her to come.

“Come along to bed, Emma,” he would say. “It’s time.”

“Yes, I’m coming!” she would reply.

Then, since the candles bothered his eyes, he would turn toward the wall and go to sleep. Then she would escape, holding her breath, smiling, her heart throbbing, in her nightdress.

Rodolphe had a large cloak; he would wrap her entirely in it, and putting his arm around her waist, he would lead her without saying a word to the bottom of the garden.

It was under the same arbor, on the same bench made of dry sticks where, in the past, Léon used to gaze at her so amorously during those summer nights. Now she hardly ever thought about him.

The stars were shining through the bare branches of the jasmine tree. They could hear the river flowing behind them, and from time to time the rustling of the dead reeds on the banks. Great masses of shadows would loom up here and there against the darkness and sometimes, rising up together in a single shuddering movement, would hang over them like immense black waves coming to engulf them. The cold of the night would make them hold each other even more tightly; the sighs from their lips seemed stronger; their eyes, which they could scarcely see, seemed larger to them, and in the midst of the silence, there were soft words spoken that fell upon their souls, crystalline, sonorous, reverberating in multiplying echoes.

When the night was rainy, they would take shelter in the consulting room, between the cart shed and the stable. She would light one of the kitchen candles, which she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe would settle in as if he were at home. The sight of the bookshelves, the desk, the whole room, made him merrier; and he couldn’t keep himself from making a series of jokes about Charles, which embarrassed Emma. She wanted to see him be more serious, and even more dramatic for the occasion, as she did the time she thought she heard footsteps approaching in the lane outside.

“Someone’s coming!” she said.

He snuffed out the candle.

“Do you have your pistols?”

“What for?”

“Well—to defend yourself with,” Emma replied.

“From your husband? Oh, the poor boy!”

And Rodolphe said this with a gesture signifying, “I’d crush him with a flick of my finger.”

She was stunned by his courage, while at the same time she felt there was something vulgar and indelicate in it that shocked her.

Rodolphe thought quite a lot about this incident with the pistols. If she had been speaking seriously, it was totally ridiculous, he thought, and even odious, because he had no reason at all to hate that poor old Charles, not being the sort one would call devoured by jealousy—and on that subject, Emma had made a solemn vow to him that he didn’t find in the best of taste.

Besides, she was becoming sentimental. They had had to exchange miniatures, they had had to cut off locks of hair, and now she was asking for a ring, a regular marriage ring, a symbol of their eternal union. She would often talk to him about the chimes of the evening or the voices of nature; and then she would talk about her mother, and about his. Rodolphe had lost his mother twenty years ago. Emma nevertheless would console him with simpering phrases, the sort you would use with a lost child, and more than once she had even said, while looking up at the moon:

“I am certain that up there, together, they both approve of our love.”

But she was so very pretty! He had had so few women who were that candid! This love affair without anything libertine about it was something new for him, something that, by getting him out of his normal, easy habits, flattered both his pride and his sensuality. Emma’s exaltation, which his good bourgeois sense disdained, seemed charming to him, deep down in his heart, since it was directed at him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer took any trouble about it, and his ways began to change imperceptibly.

He no longer used any of those sweet words that used to make her weep, nor those impassioned caresses that used to drive her mad; and so their great love, into which she had plunged herself entirely, now seemed to be shrinking beneath her, like the water of a stream being absorbed into its bed, and now she could see the sludge on the bottom. She did not want to believe it; she redoubled her tendernesses; and Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less.

She didn’t know whether she regretted having yielded to him or whether, on the contrary, she wanted only to love him more. The humiliation of sensing her own weakness turned into a resentment that was only tempered by voluptuous pleasures. This was not an attachment; it was more like a continuous seduction. It subjugated her. She was almost afraid of it.

On the surface, though, things seemed calmer than ever, Rodolphe having succeeded in conducting the adultery to suit his wishes; and after six months, when spring came, they found themselves facing each other like a married couple tending their domestic flame peacefully.

This was the time of year when Monsieur Rouault would send his turkey in remembrance of his healed leg. The gift always arrived with a letter. Emma cut the string that attached it to the basket, and read these lines:

My Dear Children,

I hope this turkey finds you in good health, and that it’s as good as the others; because it seems a little more tender, if I do say so, and heavier. But the next time, for a change, I’ll give you a turkey cock, unless you prefer the gobblers, and send me back the basket, if you don’t mind, along with the two other ones. I had a problem with my cart shed, its roof flew off into the trees, one night when it was blowing hard. The harvest is not very good either. Finally, I don’t know when I’ll see you. It’s hard for me to leave the house now, since I’m all alone, my poor Emma!

There was a space after these lines, as if the old man had let his pen drop to daydream for a while.

As for me, I’m doing well, except for a cold I caught the other day at the Yvetot fair, where I went to hire a shepherd, having fired mine because he was too particular about his food. Those bandits give us plenty to complain about! And he wasn’t honest, either.
    I heard from a peddler who was passing through your parts this winter, who had to have a tooth pulled, that Bovary is still working hard. That didn’t surprise me, and he showed me his tooth; we had a coffee together. I asked him if he’d seen you, and he said no, but he saw two animals in the stable, which seems to imply business is good. That’s good, my dear children, and may the good God send you every imaginable happiness.
    It grieves me that I haven’t got to know my much-loved granddaughter Berthe Bovary. I planted a plum tree with those little hard black plums¹ for her in the garden, under your window, and I won’t let anybody touch it except to make jam for her in the future, which I’ll keep in the cupboard and save for her, when she comes to visit.
    Farewell, my dear children. I kiss you, my daughter, you too, my son-in-law, and the little one, on both cheeks.

                              I am, with compliments,

                              Your loving father,

THÉODORE ROUAULT.

She stayed holding the coarse piece of paper in her hand for a few minutes. There were spelling errors all through it, and Emma followed the sweet thoughts that cackled through them like a hen half hidden in a thorn hedge. He had blotted the ink dry with ashes from the fireplace, and a little gray dust slipped from the letter onto her dress, and she felt as if she could almost see her father bending toward the hearth to pick up the tongs. What a long time it had been since she sat with him on the stool next to the fireplace, when she would hold a stick into the blazing flame of rushes until it caught fire! She remembered evenings in summer, filled with sun. The colts would whinny when anyone passed them, and gallop, gallop … Beneath her window there was a honeybee hive, and sometimes the bees would whirl in the light, beating against the window like little bouncing balls of gold. What happiness she had had then! What freedom! What hope! What an abundance of illusions! None of them remained anymore! She had slowly dispersed them all in the course of her soul’s life, through all her successive situations, in her virginity, her marriage, and in her love— losing them continually all along the path of her life, like a traveler who leaves behind some part of his wealth at every inn along the way.

But what was it that was making her so unhappy? Where was it, the great catastrophe that had overwhelmed her? And she raised up her head, looking around her, as if searching for what it was that caused her suffering.

An April sunray was shimmering over the porcelain on the shelves; the fire was burning; she felt, beneath her slippers, the softness of the carpet; the day was clear, the air was warm, and she heard her child outside shouting with laughter.

In fact, the little girl was rolling on the lawn, while the grass was being cut. She lay flat on her stomach atop a pile of cut grass. Her maid was holding her by the skirt. Lestiboudois was raking next to her, and every time he came close, she leaned forward, beating her arms in the air.

“Bring her to me!” said her mother, rushing out to embrace her. “How much I love you, my poor child! How much I love you!”

Then, noticing that her ears were a bit dirty, she quickly rang for warm water and bathed her, changed her underwear, stockings, and shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as if she had just returned from a long voyage, and finally, kissing her again and weeping a little, she gave the child back to the servant, who stood there stunned by this excess of maternal affection.

That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.

“It’ll pass,” he concluded; “it’s a whim.”

And he skipped three meetings in a row. When he returned, she was cold and almost disdainful.

“Ah! You’re wasting your time, my little one …”

And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the handkerchief she held on to.

That was when Emma repented!

She asked herself why she so loathed Charles, and whether it would not have been better to be able to love him. But he had no particular reaction to this new feeling of hers, so that she was stymied in her vague desire to sacrifice something, until the pharmacist arrived just in time to provide her an opportunity.

1. Rouault says he has planted un prunier de prunes d’avoine, an obscure piece of Norman dialect for a particular type of plum only good for making preserves; French philological dictionaries cite Flaubert’s novel as the only documented use of the term.

CHAPTER 11

He had recently read an article praising a new treatment for clubfoot; and since he was on the side of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, to be in the forefront of things, ought to have some operations for strephopodia.¹

“For after all,” he said to Emma, “what’s the risk? Let’s think it through.” He counted off on his fingers the advantages of trying it. “Success virtually certain, relief and improvement for the patient, and immediate celebrity for the surgeon. Why shouldn’t your husband, for example, cure that poor Hippolyte from the Golden Lion? Note that he would certainly tell all the travelers who come to the inn all about his cure, and then,” (Homais lowered his voice, and looked carefully all around) “what would prevent me from sending a little note about it to the newspaper? Well, good lord, an article circulates—people talk about it—and the whole thing ends up snowballing! And who knows? Who knows?”

In fact, Bovary might succeed; Emma had no reason to doubt his ability, and what satisfaction there would be in having engaged him in an endeavor that would enhance his reputation and his fortune! She was looking for something more solid than love to lean on.

Charles, urged on by both the pharmacist and her, let himself be convinced. He had Doctor Duval’s book² sent from Rouen, and every evening, his head in his hands, he buried himself in reading it.

While he was studying equin, varus, and valgus—that is to say, strephocatopodia, strephendopodia, and strephexopodia—or, to speak more plainly, the different ways the foot turns, whether downward, inward, or outward—along with strephypodia and strephanopodia (in other words, torsion either downward or upward)—Monsieur Homais was using every argument he could think of to convince the boy from the inn to let himself be operated upon.

“You’ll hardly feel anything, maybe, or just a little pain; it’s a simple prick like you’d feel with a bloodletting, less than the extraction of certain corns.”

Hippolyte, thinking it over, rolled his eyes stupidly.

“Anyway,” the pharmacist continued, “it has nothing to do with me! It’s for you! Out of a pure feeling of humanity! I want to see you, my friend, rid of this hideous limping and that swinging movement in your lumbar region which, whatever you say, must be a considerable hindrance to you in the exercise of your calling.”

Then Homais described for him how much more cheerful and capable he would feel, and even implied how much more attractive he would be to women, which made the stable boy break into a leering grin. Then he approached him by way of his vanity:

“You’re a man, aren’t you, damn it? What would happen if you were called to serve in the military, and you had to go fight to defend our flag? Ah, Hippolyte!”

And Homais walked away, declaring that he simply could not understand this stubbornness, this blindness, this rejection of the benefits of Science.

The unfortunate boy gave in, because it was like a conspiracy against him. Binet, who never meddled in other people’s affairs, Madame Lefrançois, Artémise, the neighbors, and even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache— everyone was urging him, lecturing him, making him feel ashamed; but the thing that finally made him decide, was that it wouldn’t cost him a thing. Bovary would even pay for the machine that was necessary for the operation. Emma was the one who came up with the idea for that generosity; and Charles agreed to it, telling himself that his wife was an angel.

Working with the pharmacist’s advice, and starting over three different times, he had the carpenter, with the locksmith’s help, build a kind of box weighing about eight pounds; neither iron, wood, sheet metal, leather, screws, or nuts were spared.

Meanwhile, in order to know which of Hippolyte’s tendons to clip, it was first necessary to know what sort of clubfoot he had.

He had a foot that formed almost a straight line with the leg, which did not keep it from being turned inward, so that it appeared to be an equin mixed with a bit of varus, or perhaps a light varus with a strong tendency toward equin. But with that equin—which was in fact as wide as a horse’s hoof, with rough skin, delicate tendons, and huge toes whose black nails looked like they were made of iron—the clubfooted stable boy bounded around the village from morning till night like a deer. He could always be seen on the square, leaping around the carts, thrusting his bad foot forward. The bad leg, in fact, seemed to be more vigorous than the other. Through long service, it had acquired what seemed like the moral qualities of patience and energy, and when he was given heavy work to do, he put his weight on it rather than the good foot.

Now, since it was an equin, the Achilles tendon would have to be cut, after which the anterior tibial muscle could be looked to for eliminating the varus; for the doctor dared not risk both operations at once, and in fact he was already trembling for fear of damaging some important region he knew nothing about.

Neither Ambrose Paré, when he applied a ligature to an artery for the first time since Celsus, the first time in fifteen hundred years; nor Dupuytren, about to cut open an abscess through a thick layer of brain; nor Gensoul, when he made the first removal of a superior maxillary³—none had a heart so throbbing, a hand so shaky, a mind so strained as Monsieur Bovary when he approached Hippolyte, his tenotomy scalpel in his hand. And just as in a hospital, on a table next to him lay a heap of gauze, waxed threads, and many bandages, a whole pyramid of bandages, all the bandages there were in the pharmacist’s shop. It was Monsieur Homais who had organized all the preparations since the morning, as much to dazzle the multitudes as to flatter his sense of self-importance. Charles pricked the skin; a dry crack was heard. The tendon was cut, the operation over. Hippolyte was so surprised that he couldn’t get over it; he bent over Bovary’s hands to cover them with kisses.

“Come now, calm yourself,” the pharmacist said. “You’ll have plenty of time to show your gratitude toward your benefactor!”

And he went out to narrate the results to five or six curious types who were standing in the courtyard, and who imagined that Hippolyte would come out walking normally. Then Charles, having buckled his patient in the machine, went back home, where Emma was anxiously awaiting him in the doorway. She leaped up to embrace him; they sat down at the table; he ate a great deal, and he even asked, at dessert, for a cup of coffee, an extravagance he only allowed himself on Sundays when there was company.

The evening was delightful, full of conversation and sharing of dreams. They talked about their future fortune, of improvements they would make in the household; he pictured how people would think more highly of him, how his comforts would increase, how his wife would always continue to love him; and she felt herself happy, and renewed, by a new, healthier, purer feeling, even feeling some tenderness for this poor boy who cherished her so. The idea of Rodolphe passed through her mind for a moment; but her gaze returned to Charles: she even noticed, with surprise, that his teeth were not horrible.

They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, rushing past the servant, suddenly entered their bedroom holding a sheet of paper with fresh writing on it. It was the publicity piece he was sending to the Rouen Lantern. He brought it for them to read.

“Read it to us yourself,” said Bovary.

He read:

“Despite the prejudices which are still spread over part of the face of Europe like a web, enlightenment has begun to dawn in our countryside. Thus it was that on Tuesday, our little town of Yonville was the theater of a surgical experiment that was at the same time an act of the highest philanthropy. Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners …”

“Oh, no! It’s too much! Too much!” said Charles, overcome with emotion.

“No, no, not at all! How is it too much! … ‘Operated on a clubfoot …’ I didn’t want to use the technical term because, you know, it’s a newspaper … not everyone would understand it; with the masses, one has to …”

“That’s true,” said Bovary. “Go on.”

“I’ll start over,” said the pharmacist. “Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners, operated on a clubfoot named Hippolyte Tautain, a stable boy for twenty-five years at the Golden Lion hotel, managed by Madame Lefrançois, on the Place d’Armes. The novelty of the attempt and the interest attaching to the subject had attracted such a crowd from the local population that the doorway to the establishment was packed. The operation, moreover, was carried out as if by magic, with only a very few drops of blood coming up onto the skin, as if to signify that the rebel tendon had finally ceded to the efforts of Science. The patient, strange as it may seem (and we can affirm this as having witnessed it with our own eyes), appeared to feel no pain at all. His state at present leaves nothing to be desired. Everything leads us to believe that his convalescence will be brief, and who knows whether, at the next village festival, we won’t see our Hippolyte among the Bacchic dancers, in the midst of other jolly fellows, and thus prove to every observer, by his verve and by his gambols, his complete cure? All honor to the generous savants! All honor to those untiring spirits who consecrate themselves to the improvement or at least the relief of their species! Honor! Three times honor! Is it not true that the blind will see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk? But what fanaticism used to promise to its elect in the old times, Science now will accomplish for all mankind! We will keep our readers up to date as to the subsequent phases of this remarkable cure.”

But none of this in any way prevented Madame Lefrançois, five days later, from coming to them in a state of terror and crying out:

“Help! He’s dying! … I’m going out of my mind!”

Charles hurried over to the Golden Lion, and the pharmacist, seeing him rushing past on the square without his hat on, left the pharmacy. He arrived out of breath himself, red in the face, worried, and asking everyone on the stairway:

“What’s the trouble with our interesting strephopode?”

He was twisting, the strephopode, in horrific convulsions, so violent that the machine enclosing his leg was smashing against the wall hard enough to break it down.

Taking many precautions so as not to disturb the position of the limb, they took the box off, and they saw a hideous spectacle. The shape of the foot had disappeared into such a swelling that the skin seemed about to burst entirely, and it was covered with bruises caused by the famous machine. Hippolyte had already complained that he was in pain; no one took heed of it; now they had to admit that he was not entirely wrong, and they left the limb free for a few hours. But the swelling had hardly subsided when the two savants judged it best to put the limb back inside the apparatus, and to even tighten it further, so as to hurry things along. Finally, three days later, Hippolyte could endure it no longer, and they again removed the machine, utterly shocked at what they saw. A bluish gray swelling extended all along the leg, with blisters here and there that oozed a black liquid. Things had taken a serious turn. Hippolyte was beginning to worry, and Madame Lefrançois installed him in the little room near the kitchen so that he would at least have some distraction.

But the tax collector, who dined there every day, complained bitterly about having such a neighbor. So they took Hippolyte into the billiard room.

There he was, groaning beneath his thick blankets, pale, his beard untrimmed, his eyes hollow, turning his sweaty head from time to time on the dirty pillow where flies would alight. Madame Bovary came to see him. She brought him some linens for his poultices, and consoled and encouraged him. And he certainly didn’t lack for company, especially on market days when the peasants pushed their billiard cues all around him, or fenced with them, smoking, drinking, singing, shouting.

“How are you doing?” they would say, slapping him on the shoulder. “Ah, you don’t look all that good, do you! But it’s your own fault. You should do this, you should do that.”

And they would tell him stories about people who had been cured entirely by other means; and then, as a sort of consolation, they would add:

“You give up too easily! Get up! You’re coddling yourself like a king! Oh, don’t you worry, old boy! Say, you don’t smell so good!”

In fact, the gangrene was mounting higher and higher. It was making even Bovary sick. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte would look at him with terror-filled eyes, stammering and sobbing:

“When will I be better? … Oh, save me! … I’m so miserable! I’m so miserable!”

And the doctor would leave, always suggesting he take care with his diet.

“Don’t listen to that, my boy,” Madame Lefrançois would say; “they’ve already made a martyr out of you! That will just make you weaker. Here, swallow this.”

And she would bring some good bouillon to him, a slice of lamb, a bit of bacon, and sometimes some little glasses of brandy, which he lacked the strength to raise to his lips.

The Abbé Bournisien, learning that he was worsening, asked to see him. He began by expressing pity for his suffering, but at the same time declaring that he really ought to rejoice, for this was the will of the Lord, and he should profit from the occasion by reconciling himself with heaven.

“Because,” the cleric said in a fatherly tone, “you have been neglecting your obligations somewhat; we rarely see you at Mass; and how many years has it been since you approached the Holy Communion table? I understand that your work, and the whirlwind of the world have been able to turn you away from your salvation. But now, this is the time to think about it. Don’t fall into despair, however; I have known some great sinners who, when they were about to appear before God (and you’re not close to that yet, of course), had begged for His mercy, and who certainly died in the best possible states of mind. Let us hope that, just like them, you’ll provide us all with a good example! And so, out of precaution, what’s there to stop you from saying a ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’ in the morning and the evening, and an ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’? Yes, do that! Do it for me, as a favor. What’s it going to cost you? … Will you promise me?”

The poor devil promised. The priest returned on the following days. He chatted with the innkeeper and even told some humorous stories with puns that Hippolyte didn’t understand. Then, as soon as circumstances permitted, he returned to religious matters, his face resuming an appropriate expression.

His zeal looked as if it might succeed; for soon the strephopode declared his wish to make a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours,⁴ if he recovered: to which Monsieur Bournisien replied that he saw nothing inappropriate in that; two precautions were better than one. What’s the risk?

The pharmacist was indignant at what he called the priest’s maneuverings; they would do harm, he argued, to Hippolyte’s convalescence, and he repeated to Madame Lefrançois:

“Leave him alone! Leave him alone! You’re going to damage his morale with your mysticism!”

But the good woman didn’t want to hear it. He was the cause of it all. In the spirit of contradiction, she even hung a holy water font, a full one, at his bedside, along with a little sprig of boxwood.

Meanwhile, neither religion nor surgery seemed to be helping him, and the unstoppable rot continued to mount up his extremities toward his stomach. In vain did they vary the medicines and change the poultices; the muscles weakened more every day, and at last Charles responded with an affirmative nod when Madame Lefrançois asked him whether, out of desperation, she couldn’t send for Monsieur Canivet from Neufchâtel, who was quite famous.

A medical doctor aged fifty, enjoying a solid reputation and very sure of himself, the distinguished colleague did not hesitate to burst out in a disdainful laugh when he uncovered the leg, gangrenous to the knee. Then, having declared that they would have to amputate, he went over to the pharmacist’s to rant against the asses who could have reduced an unlucky man to such a state. Shaking Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted angrily in the pharmacy.

“These are the great Parisian inventions! Here we can see the ideas of the gentlemen from the Capital! It’s just like strabismus, chloroform, or lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the government ought to outlaw! But they want to be clever, and they’ll stuff you full of their remedies without worrying about the consequences. But out here in the country, we’re not as good as they are; we aren’t sages, braggarts, fops! No, we’re practitioners, healers, and we wouldn’t dream of operating on someone who’s getting along just fine! Straighten a clubfoot! Can anybody straighten a clubfoot? It’s as absurd as if you were to, say, try to straighten out a hunchback!”

Homais suffered as he listened to all this, but he hid his discomfort behind a sycophantic smile, for he had to get along with Monsieur Canivet, whose prescriptions often found their way to Yonville; nor did he speak up in defense of Bovary, nor did he make any other comment at all, and abandoning his principles, he sacrificed his dignity in favor of the more serious demands of his business.

This was a major event in the village, this amputation at the thigh by Doctor Canivet! All the inhabitants were up early on that day, and the main road, despite being filled with people, had something lugubrious about it, as if there were going to be an execution. They were talking about Hippolyte’s illness at the grocer’s; the shops didn’t sell a thing, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife, didn’t budge from her window, so impatient was she to see the arrival of the surgeon.

He arrived in his gig, which he drove himself. But over the years, the spring on the right side had weakened under his corpulence, and as a result the gig tilted a bit to the one side as he drove, revealing on the cushion next to him a huge box covered in red leather, its three copper clasps shining magnificently.

When, like a whirlwind, he entered the Golden Lion’s courtyard, the doctor cried out loudly, ordering his horse to be unhitched; then he went to the stable to be sure the horse would have plenty of oats; for whenever he visited a patient, his first concern was for his mare and his gig. People even remarked on it, saying, “Oh, that Monsieur Canivet, what a character!” And they actually thought more highly of him because of his unshakable calm. The universe could have crushed the last man living before he would change the least of his habits.

Homais appeared.

“I’m counting on you,” said the doctor. “Everything ready? Let’s go!”

But the pharmacist, blushing, admitted that he was too sensitive to assist at such an operation.

“When one is simply a spectator,” he said, “the imagination, you understand, gets the better of one! And then I have such a nervous system that …”

“Bah!” Canivet interrupted. “You seem to me, on the contrary, to be the apoplectic type. But anyway, it doesn’t surprise me, because you fellows, you pharmacists, you’re always burrowed into your kitchens working, and that will inevitably have an effect on your constitution. Look at me, on the other hand: every day, I get up at four, I shave with cold water (I never feel the cold), I don’t wear flannel, I never catch colds, the old body’s in fine shape! I live sometimes this way, sometimes that, like a philosopher, take whatever kind of meal comes along! And that’s why I’m not delicate like you, and why to me it’s all the same to cut up a Christian or the first chicken that comes along. I suppose you’ll say, it’s all habit, just habit …”

Then, without any regard for Hippolyte, who was sweating with anguish beneath his covers, the two gentlemen got into a conversation in which the pharmacist compared the self-control of a surgeon to that of a general; and the comparison was agreeable to Canivet, who talked at length about the demands of his profession. He considered it like a priesthood, although those health officers did it dishonor. At last, coming back to the patient, he examined the bandages Homais had brought, the same ones he had brought before, and asked for someone to hold the limb for him. They sent for Lestiboudois, and Monsieur Canivet, having rolled up his sleeves, walked into the billiard room while the pharmacist stayed with Artémise and the innkeeper, the two of them paler than their aprons, their ears glued to the door.

Bovary, during all this, didn’t dare to budge from his house. He stayed downstairs in the parlor, sitting beside the unlit fireplace, his chin on his chest, his hands gripped together, staring straight ahead. “What a disaster!” he thought. “What a disappointment!” But he had taken every imaginable precaution. Fate must be mixed up in it. But what difference did that make—for if Hippolyte did die, it would be he who had murdered him. And then, what would he say when he made his visits, when people questioned him about it? Perhaps, though, he had made some mistake? He sought for it, but didn’t find it. But the very best surgeons made mistakes. But they would never believe that! On the contrary, they would laugh at him, jeer! They’d be talking about it all the way to Forges! In Neufchâtel! In Rouen! Everywhere! Who knows if some of his colleagues might write against him? There would be a scandal, he’d have to respond in the newspapers. Hippolyte could even bring him to trial. He saw himself dishonored, ruined, lost! And his imagination, assailed by a multitude of hypotheses, rolled among them like an empty barrel taken by the sea, and tossing on the waves.

Emma, sitting across from him, watched him; she didn’t share in his humiliation, but she was feeling a different one: it was to have imagined that such a man could be worth anything, as if she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity twenty times over.

Charles paced to and fro in the room. His boots creaked on the floor.

“Sit down, will you,” she said, “you’re getting on my nerves!”

He sat back down.

How could she—she who was so intelligent!—have been so wrong yet again? And besides, what lamentable madness could have led her to ruin her life in these continual sacrifices? She recalled all her natural instincts for luxury, all the deprivations of her soul, all the basenesses of her marriage, her household, her dreams fallen into the mud like wounded swallows, all that she had desired, all that she had given up, all that she could have had! And why, why?

In the midst of the silence that filled the village, a wrenching shriek cut through the air. Bovary paled almost to fainting. Her brows contracted, she made a nervous gesture, and she continued thinking. It was for him, though, for that creature, for that man who understood nothing! And there he was, completely calm, without even any concern that the ridicule attached to his name henceforth would also sully hers as well! She had tried to love him, and she had repented in tears for having given herself to another.

“But maybe it was a valgus?” suddenly exclaimed Bovary, who had been deep in his own thoughts.

At the unexpected shock of this statement, falling into the midst of her thoughts like a lead bullet on a silver platter, Emma shuddered and raised her head to divine what it was he was saying; and they looked at each other silently, almost dumbfounded to see each other, so far away had their separate thoughts taken them. Charles looked at her with the disturbed gaze of a drunken man, while continuing to listen, motionless, to the final cries of the amputee, which followed each other in drawn-out modulations, accented by sharp screams, like the far off howls of an animal being slaughtered. Emma bit her pale lips, and rolling a piece of coral she had broken between her fingers, she fixed an intense gaze on Charles, her eyes like two fiery arrows about to be released. Everything about him irritated her now, his face, his clothing, what he failed to say, his entire person, his very existence. She repented of her past virtue as if it had been a crime, and what was left of it crumbled now under the hammer blows of her pride. She felt delight in all the ugly ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover returned to her with dizzying seductiveness; she threw her soul into it, carried forward toward his image with a new enthusiasm; and Charles himself seemed detached from her life, absent forever, as impossible and annihilated as if he were in the process of dying before her eyes.

They heard footsteps on the sidewalk. Charles looked, and through the lowered blind he saw, at the corner of the market, in bright daylight, Doctor Canivet wiping his brow with his scarf. Homais, behind him, carried the big red box, and they were both heading toward the pharmacy.

Then, out of a sudden burst of tenderness and discouragement, Charles turned toward his wife, saying to her:

“Kiss me, my dear one!”

“Leave me alone!” she said, red with rage.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he repeated, stupefied. “Calm yourself, get hold of yourself! You know how much I love you! … Come to me!”

“Enough!” she cried in a terrible voice.

And making her escape from the room, Emma slammed the door so hard that the barometer bounced off the wall and broke on the floor.

Charles sank back into his armchair, overwhelmed, wondering what could be wrong with her, imagining some nervous illness, weeping, and vaguely sensing something fatal and incomprehensible circling around him.

When Rodolphe came to the garden that evening, he found his mistress waiting for him on the stairs, standing on the first step. They embraced, and all their bitterness melted away like snow in the heat of that kiss.

1. Strephopodia is a technical term for clubfoot. Technical terms abound in this chapter; Flaubert generally clarifies them by means of context, but at times they are meant to be somewhat bewildering.

2. Vincent Duval’s book, A Practical Treatise on Club Foot (Traité pratique du pied bot, 1839), was one of the books Flaubert used in researching this chapter.

3. Ambroise Paré (1509–90), Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835), and Joseph Gensoul (1747–1858) were all celebrated French surgeons.

4. The basilica of Notre-Dame du Bon Secours, in Guingamp on the Normandy coast, dates from the thirteenth century and is still today a pilgrimage site.

CHAPTER 12

They started to love each other all over again. Often, even in the middle of the day, Emma would suddenly write to him; then, through the window, she would make a sign to Justin who would quickly take off his apron and take the note over to La Huchette: Rodolphe would come; she wanted him to come to tell him that she was bored, that her husband was odious, and that her life was hideous!

“What can I do about it?” he cried one day, impatient with her.

“Oh, if you wanted to …”

She was seated on the ground between his knees, her hair undone, a lost look in her eyes.

“What then?” Rodolphe asked.

She sighed:

“We could go live somewhere else … someplace …”

“You’re mad, you really are!” he said, smiling. “How could we do it?”

She repeated the idea; he pretended not to understand her, and changed the subject.

What he really couldn’t understand was making so much trouble out of something as simple as a love affair. But she had a motive, a reason, something that served as a kind of driving force behind her affection for him.

Her affection for him, in fact, grew greater every day right along with the revulsion she felt for her husband. The more she devoted herself to the one, the more she detested the other; Charles never seemed so unpleasant to her, his fingers so coarse, his mind so flat, his manners so common, as when she had to return to him after one of her meetings with Rodolphe. And then, while she was playing the role of the virtuous wife, she would become inwardly enflamed with the idea of that head, its black hair curled over the tanned forehead, that body at once so robust and so elegant, that man, in short, who was so experienced intellectually, so passionate in his desire! It was for him that she trimmed her nails with the precision of a sculptor, for him that she could never have enough cold cream¹ on her skin, nor enough patchouli in her handkerchiefs. She loaded herself with bracelets, rings, necklaces. When he was going to visit her, she filled the two big blue-glass vases with roses, arranging her room and her person like a courtesan expecting a prince. The maid was forever tasked with washing her underthings; and all day long, Félicité couldn’t budge from the kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept her company, would watch her working.

His elbow resting on the long ironing board where she worked, he eagerly gazed upon all these feminine things spread out around him: the petticoats of fine stitched cotton, the shawls, the collars, the pantaloons with drawstrings, so wide at the hips and narrowing below.

“And what’s this for?” the boy asked, passing his hand over the crinoline or the hook-and-eye.

“You’ve never seen one of those?” Félicité laughed. “As if your employer, Madame Homais, didn’t have the same kind of things!”

“Oh, of course—Madame Homais!”

And then he added, meditatively:

“She’s not a lady, like Madame.”

But Félicité was getting impatient with him always hovering around her. She was six years older, and Théodore, Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, was beginning to court her.

“Let me be!” she said, picking up her starching pot. “Go on and grind some almonds instead; you’re always nosing around women; wait a bit before you get all mixed up in that, you naughty little boy, at least until you have a beard on your chin.”

“Come on, don’t get angry; I’m going to do her boots for you.”

And he went right over to get Emma’s shoes from the doorsill; they were crusted with mud—the mud from her meetings with Rodolphe— which fell off in a powder beneath his fingers, and which he observed as it rose up gently in a sunbeam.

“How afraid you are of spoiling them!” the kitchen maid said, for she never took such care when she cleaned them herself, because Madame would discard them as soon as the fabric was no longer new.

Emma had a great many of them in her armoire, and she would squander them freely, without Charles allowing himself to make any comment.

That is how she was able to spend three hundred francs for a wooden leg, which she felt was a suitable gift for Hippolyte. It had cork at the top, along with spring joints and a complex mechanism, and was covered by a black trouser leg ending in a patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to make use of such a superb leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to find him another, more ordinary one. The doctor, needless to say, again paid the bill for this purchase.

And so the stable boy bit by bit took up his old profession again. He could be seen as before crisscrossing the village, and when Charles heard him from a distance making that sharp sound with his cane on the pavement, he quickly turned and took another route.

It was the shopkeeper, Monsieur Lheureux, who had taken the order, which gave him the opportunity to visit Emma frequently. He chatted with her about all the latest things from Paris, about a thousand feminine trifles, always making himself agreeable and never asking for money. Emma surrendered to that ability of his to satisfy her every whim. Thus, she wanted to get a beautiful riding whip for Rodolphe, one that could only be found in the Rouen umbrella-maker’s shop. The very next week, Monsieur Lheureux placed it on her table.

But the next day he presented her with a bill of two hundred and seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was very much embarrassed: all the drawers in the writing desk were empty; they owed two weeks’ wages to Lestiboudois, two trimesters’ worth to the servant, along with a number of other debts, and Bovary was anxiously waiting for Monsieur Derozerays’ payment, which usually came in around Saint Peter’s day, at the end of June.

She succeeded initially in putting Lheureux off; finally he lost patience: his creditors were dogging him, his capital was tied up, and unless he could get some money in he would be forced to take back all the things she had purchased.

“Oh, take it back then!” Emma said.

“Oh no! I was only joking” he replied. “The only problem is the riding whip. I will really have to ask Monsieur to give it back.”

“No, no!” she exclaimed.

“Ah—I’ve got you now!” Lheureux thought.

And assured by this discovery, he left, repeating softly, with the whistling sound he always made:

“Very well! We’ll see! We’ll see!”

She was wondering how to get out of this, when the kitchen maid entered, placing a small roll of money on the mantel, wrapped in blue paper and inscribed for Monsieur Derozeray’s account. Emma jumped up and opened it. There were fifteen napoléons² in it. It was the whole amount. She heard Charles on the staircase; she threw the money in the back of her drawer and turned the key.

Three days later, Lheureux came back.

“I have an arrangement to propose to you,” he said. “If, in lieu of the amount you owe, you would be willing to take …”

“Here it is!” she said, putting fourteen napoléons in his hand.

The shopkeeper was astounded. Then, to hide his disappointment, he expansively made excuses and offers for other services, all of which Emma refused; when he was gone, she stood fingering in her apron pocket the two hundred-sou pieces he had given her in change. She promised herself she would economize, so she would be able to repay Charles’ money later …

“Bah!” she thought. “He won’t even notice it.”

Apart from the riding whip with its silver-gilt pommel, Rodolphe had been given a seal with this motto: Amor nel cor;³ a scarf to be used as a muffler; and a cigarette case exactly like the Viscount’s, which Charles had long ago found on the road and which Emma still kept. But he found these gifts humiliating. He refused several of them; she insisted, and Rodolphe ended by accepting them, but thinking her tyrannical and too demanding.

And then she had some strange ideas:

“On the stroke of midnight,” she would say, “you must think about me.”

And if he admitted that he hadn’t thought about her, there would be a flood of reproaches, always ending in the same, eternal phrases:

“Do you love me?”

“Yes, of course I love you!” he would reply.

“Very much!”

“Certainly!”

“You’ve never loved anyone as much, have you?”

“Did you think I was a virgin before you?” he would exclaim with a laugh.

Emma would cry, and he would force himself to console her, embellishing his protestations with little jokes.

“Oh, it’s just that I love you so!” she would continue. “I love you so much that I couldn’t live without you, don’t you know that? There are times when I want to see you again so badly that I feel like love is tearing me apart. I ask myself: ‘Where is he? Maybe he’s with other women? They’re smiling at him, he goes to them …’ Oh, it isn’t true is it, you aren’t attracted to anyone else? Some are more beautiful; but I, I know how to love better! I’m your slave, your concubine! You’re my king, my idol! You are good! You’re handsome! You’re strong!”

He had heard things like this so many times, there was nothing fresh about them for him. Emma was like all the other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping away inch by inch like a dress, left nakedly visible the eternal monotony of passion, which always takes on the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish—this man of so much experience—the difference of feeling beneath the sameness of expression. Because libertine or mercenary lips had murmured similar phrases to him, he believed very little in the sincerity of Emma’s; it seemed to him that one had to discount such exaggerated discourse that masked mediocre feelings: as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever state the exact measure of his needs, nor his ideas nor his sorrows, and since human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to, when what we want is to bring the stars themselves to tears.

But with that superior critical judgment belonging to someone who always holds back and never fully commits to anything, Rodolphe saw other sorts of pleasures to exploit in this love affair. He felt all modesty was an inconvenience. He treated her entirely without ceremony. He turned her into something supple and corrupt. It was a mindless sort of attachment, composed of admiration on his side and sensuality on hers, a beatitude that benumbed her; and her soul sank down into that intoxication and drowned and shriveled there, like the Duke of Clarence in his butt of malmsey.⁴

As a result of her amorous habits, Madame Bovary began to change. Her gaze became bolder, her language freer; she even had the impudence to walk out with Monsieur Rodolphe with a cigarette between her lips, as if to defy the whole world; and finally, those who still doubted had their doubts removed when they saw her, one day, get down from the Hirondelle, dressed in a tight-fitting waistcoat like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who had come to her son’s for refuge after an appalling scene with her husband, was by no means the least scandalized woman in town. There were plenty of other things to displease her: to begin with, Charles had not followed through on the interdiction against novels; then, the state of the house displeased her; she permitted herself to make some comments, which led to quarrels, one in particular concerning Félicité.

On the preceding night, Madame Bovary senior in passing down the corridor had surprised her in the company of a man, a man with dark whiskers, about forty years of age; at the sound of her footsteps, he had quickly escaped through the kitchen. This made Emma laugh; but the good mother was outraged, and declared that unless morals were a laughing matter, one ought to look after those of one’s servants.

“What world do you come from?” asked the daughter-in-law, with so impertinent a look on her face that the elder asked if she was in fact defending her own behavior.

“Get out!” said the young woman, leaping up.

“Emma! … Mama!” Charles cried, trying to reconcile them.

But they both rushed out separately in frustration. Emma stamped her feet, repeating:

“Oh! What manners! What a peasant!”

He ran after his mother; she was in a fit of rage, and she stammered:

“She’s insolent! Irresponsible! And maybe worse!”

And she wanted to leave immediately, if the other would not apologize. Charles returned to his wife and begged her to give in: he went down on his knees, and finally she said:

“All right! I’ll do it.”

In fact, she offered her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity of a marquise, saying to her:

“Pardon me, Madame.”

Then, back upstairs in her room, she threw herself flat on her bed and cried like a child, her face buried in the pillow.

She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the case of some extraordinary event she would fasten a small piece of white paper to the window blind so that if he happened to be in Yonville, he would hurry to the lane behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had waited three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly saw Rodolphe at the corner of the market. She was tempted to open the window and call out to him, but he had already disappeared. She sank back, in despair.

But soon she thought she heard someone on the sidewalk. It was him, undoubtedly; she ran down the stairs and crossed the yard. He was there, outside. She threw herself into his arms.

“Be careful,” he said.

“Oh, if you only knew!” she replied.

And she began to recount everything, in haste, disconnectedly, exaggerating the facts, inventing many more, and lavishing so many parenthetical remarks so abundantly that he couldn’t understand any of it.

“Come, my poor angel, be brave, be comforted, be patient!”

“But I’ve been patient for four years, and I’m suffering! … A love like ours should avow itself openly in the face of heaven! They’re torturing me. I can’t take it any more! Save me!”

She held Rodolphe tightly. Her eyes, brimming with tears, sparkled like flames under a wave; her throat was throbbing as she gasped for air; never had he loved her so much; so much in fact that he lost his head, and said to her:

“What should we do? What do you want?”

“Take me away!” she cried. “Carry me off! … Oh, I’m begging you!”

And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to draw from his kiss the consent she did not expect.

“But … ,” Rodolphe said.

“What? What is it?”

“Your daughter?”

She thought for a few minutes, and then replied:

“We’ll take her with us; it can’t be helped!”

“What a woman!” he said to himself, as he watched her leaving.

For she had just run off into the garden: someone was calling for her.

Madame Bovary senior, on the following days, was very surprised at the metamorphosis her daughter-in-law had undergone. Emma was in fact more docile, and was even deferential to the point of asking her for a recipe for pickling gherkins.

Was it all in order to fool the two of them? Or was it that she wanted, through a sort of voluptuous stoicism, to feel more deeply the bitterness of the things she was about to abandon? But on the contrary, she paid them no attention: she was living as if she were lost in relishing the anticipation of her coming happiness. With Rodolphe, it was the eternal subject of every conversation. She leaned on his shoulder, murmuring:

“Imagine, when we’re in the mail coach! … Can you believe it? Is it possible? It seems to me that the moment we feel the carriage start off, it’ll be as if we’re going up in a balloon, as if we were heading up to the clouds. Did you know I’m counting the days? Are you?”

Never was Madame Bovary as beautiful as she was at that period; she had that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from success, and which is nothing more than one’s temperament being in harmony with one’s circumstances. Her longings, her regrets, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-youthful illusions had all nurtured her gradually, the way fertilizer, rain, wind, and sun do a flower, and she was finally blossoming in the fullness of her nature. Her eyelids seemed to have been purposely formed for those long amorous looks in which the pupils disappeared, while her heavy breathing flared her thin nostrils outward and raised up the full corners of her lips, which in the light were slightly shaded with a black down. One would have said that some artist skilled in corruption had arranged the tangles of her hair on her neck; they wound negligently in a heavy mass, altering with her chance adulterous encounters, which loosened them every day. Her voice now took on a softer inflection, as did her body; something subtle and penetrating emanated from the very folds of her dress and the curve of her foot. Charles, as in the first days of his marriage, found her delicious and completely irresistible.

When he came home in the middle of the night, he dared not wake her. The porcelain nightlight cast a soft, trembling light on the ceiling, and the little cradle’s drawn curtains were like a billowing white tent in the shadow beside the bed. Charles gazed at them. He thought he could hear his daughter’s light breathing. She was going to start growing now; every season would show quick changes, and he could already picture her returning from school at the day’s end, laughing, her blouse stained with ink, her basket on her arm; then she would have to be sent to boarding school, which cost a lot; how would he afford it? He pondered. He thought he could rent a little farm in the neighborhood, which he would oversee himself in the mornings before he went to visit his patients. He would carefully save the income, and put it in the bank; then he would buy some stocks, somewhere, no matter where; and besides, his clientele would grow; he counted on it, because he wanted Berthe to be well brought up, to develop talents, to learn to play the piano. Oh, how pretty she would be later on, at fifteen, when she would resemble her mother and wear, just like her, big straw hats in the summer! From a distance, people would take them for sisters. He pictured her working in the evenings next to them, in the lamplight; she would be mending his slippers for him; she would busy herself taking care of the house; she would fill the place with her sweetness and her gaiety. And then he imagined her marrying: they would find her some good young man with a solid occupation; he would make her happy; it would last forever.

Emma was not asleep, but only pretending to be; and while he gradually dozed off beside her, she was dreaming other dreams.

Drawn by four galloping horses, for the last week she had been carried off to a new land, from which the two of them would never return. They were racing ahead, racing ahead, their arms intertwined, without speaking. Often, from a mountain’s top, they would suddenly catch sight of some splendid city with domes, bridges, ships, forests of lemon trees, white marble cathedrals with storks nesting in their spires. They would walk slowly because of the large flagstones, and there would be bouquets of flowers on the ground, offered to you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the bells ringing, the mules whinnying, along with the murmur of guitars and the sound of fountains, whose spray floated up and cooled the fruit piled in the shape of pyramids at the foot of pale statues smiling under the jets of water. And then one evening, they would arrive at a fishing village, where brown nets were drying in the wind, along the cliffs and near the cabins. It was there that they would stop and live: they would inhabit a low house with a flat roof, shaded by a palm tree, at the edge of a gulf, close to the sea. They would float in gondolas, sway in hammocks; and their life would be as easy and loose as their silk garments, as warm and star-spangled as the sweet nights they would contemplate. But in the vastness of this future that she was creating, no specifics emerged: the days, all of them magnificent, resembled each other as closely as waves of the sea; and the waves swayed on the infinite horizon, harmonious, pale blue, and bathed in sun. But the child began to cough in her cradle, or perhaps Bovary snored more loudly, and Emma would not sleep until morning, when the dawn whitened the windows, and when young Justin was already opening the pharmacy’s shutters.

She told Lheureux to come, and she said to him:

“I need a cloak, a large one, lined, with a big collar.”

“You’re going on a trip?” he asked.

“No! But … it doesn’t matter; I can count on you, can’t I? And soon!”

He bowed.

“And I also need,” she continued, “a trunk—not too heavy—but large.”

“Yes, yes, I see, about three feet by a foot and a half, the way they’re making them nowadays.”

“Along with an overnight bag.”

“There’s definitely,” Lheureux thought, “something going on here.”

“And wait,” said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt; “take this; you can pay for my things with it.”

But the merchant insisted she had it all wrong; they knew each other; didn’t he trust her? What childishness! But she insisted he at least take the chain, and Lheureux had already put it in his pocket and started to leave when she called him back.

“Leave everything at your shop. As for the cloak,” and she paused to think, “don’t bring that either; just give me the tailor’s address, and tell him to hold it for me.”

The next month was the date set for their flight. She would leave Yonville as if she were going to do errands in Rouen. Rodolphe would have got their tickets, arranged their passports, and would even have written to Paris so they would have the mail coach to themselves all the way to Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and continue from there without stopping, following the Genoa route. She would have taken care to send her baggage to Lheureux, who would have it put on the Hirondelle, in such a way that no one would have any suspicions; and in all this planning, not one word was said about the child. Rodolphe avoided the subject; and perhaps she did not think about it.

He wanted to have two more weeks to finish up some business affairs; then, after a week, he asked for two more, and then he said he was ill; then he went off on a trip; the month of August passed, and after all these delays, they decided that the date was definitely to be September 4, a Monday.

At last the Saturday before arrived.

Rodolphe came that evening, earlier than usual.

“Is everything ready?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

Then they walked around the flowerbed and went to sit near the terrace, on the edge of the wall.

“You seem sad,” Emma said.

“No—why?”

And he looked at her in an unusual way, but with tenderness.

“Is it because you’re leaving?” she continued. “Leaving all your ties here, your life? Oh, I understand … But me, I have nothing at all in the world! You are everything to me. And just so, I’ll be everything to you, I’ll be your family, your country: I’ll care for you, I’ll love you.”

“How delightful you are!” he said, seizing her in his arms.

“Really?” she asked with a sensual laugh. “Do you love me? Swear that you do!”

“Yes I love you! Yes I love you! I adore you, my love.”

The moon, full and crimson colored, was rising from the level of the earth, from the far reaches of the meadow. It rose quickly between the poplar branches, which hid it in places, like a black curtain with holes in it. And then it appeared, elegant and white, illuminating the empty sky; and then, slowing its progress, it dropped a large patch of light onto the river, which splintered it into an infinity of stars, and that silver gleam seemed to slither all down the river, like a headless serpent covered with luminous scales. It also resembled some monstrous candelabra with diamonds running all along it. The sweet night spread out all around them; patches of shadow hung among the leaves. Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in the cool wind deeply. They spoke no more, lost as they were in the onrush of their reverie. The tenderness of their early days returned to their hearts, abundant and silent as the flowing river, soft as the syringa’s perfume, and it projected into their memories shadows more immense, more melancholy than those that the motionless willows cast on the grass. At times, some night animal, a hedgehog or a weasel, would begin its hunting, rustling the leaves, or they would hear at times a ripe peach falling, solitary, from the trellis.

“Ah, such a beautiful night!” Rodolphe said.

“We’ll have many others!” Emma replied.

And then, as if speaking to herself:

“Yes, it will be good to travel … But why do I feel sad? Is it fear of the unknown … leaving my routines … or is it …? No, it’s an overflow of happiness! I’m so weak, aren’t I? Forgive me!”

“There’s still time!” he cried. “Think it over; you may perhaps regret it.”

“Never!” she said impetuously.

And drawing closer to him:

“What harm could happen to me? There’s no desert, no precipice, no ocean that I wouldn’t cross with you. The longer we live together, the more life will be like an embrace, one that grows ever tighter, more complete! We’ll have nothing to trouble us, no worries, no obstacles! We’ll be alone together, eternally … Say something—answer me.”

He responded “Yes … Yes … ,” at regular intervals.

She ran her hands through his hair, and she repeated in a childlike voice, with big tears falling from her eyes:

“Rodolphe! Rodolphe! Oh, Rodolphe, dear little Rodolphe!”

The clock struck midnight.

“Midnight!” she said. “Now it’s just one day! Now it will be tomorrow!”

He got up to leave; and as if that movement had been the signal for them to begin their flight, Emma suddenly became lively and cheerful:

“You have the passports?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not forgetting anything?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Definitely.”

“You’ll wait for me at the Hotel de Provence, right? At noon?”

He nodded.

“Until tomorrow, then!” Emma said, with a last caress.

And she watched him walking away.

He didn’t turn around. She ran after him, and leaning over the water’s edge among the reeds:

“Until tomorrow!” she exclaimed.

He was already on the other side of the river and walking swiftly through the meadow.

After a few minutes, Rodolphe stopped; and when he saw her, with her white dress, slowly vanish into the darkness like a phantom, his heart began to beat so fast that he had to lean against a tree to keep from falling down.

“What an idiot I am!” he said, swearing furiously. “But what’s the difference; she was a pretty mistress!”

And then Emma’s beauty, with all the pleasures her love had given him, rose up before him. At first he was saddened, but then he revolted against her.

“Because after all, I can’t leave the country—and with a child on my hands!”

He said these things to himself in order to strengthen his resolve.

“And besides, all the trouble, all the expense … Oh, no, no, a thousand times no! It really would be just too stupid!”

1. Flaubert uses the English term, cold-cream.

2. A napoléon was a gold coin worth 20 francs.

3. Amor nel cor: love from the heart. The sentimental motto had a personal resonance: Louise Colet had written a poem with this title, and she had given Flaubert a seal with it.

4. The story of the Duke of Clarence being drowned in a cask (“butt”) of malmsey wine is in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Flaubert could also have read about it in Ra-belais, who tells the story too in Book IV of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1551).

CHAPTER 13

As soon as he arrived home, Rodolphe quickly sat down at his desk, below the stag’s head trophy on his wall. But when he had his pen in his hand, he could not find the right words to say, and so, leaning on his elbows, he began to think. Emma already seemed to have receded into a distant past, as if the resolution he had made had already put an immense gulf between them.

In order to retrieve something of her, he went to the cupboard by his bed to get an old box of Rheims biscuits, in which he always stored women’s letters to him; from it escaped an odor of damp dust and of decayed roses. First he found a pocket handkerchief, covered with little faint spots. It was her handkerchief; once when they were out walking, she had had a nosebleed; he no longer recalled anything else about it. Next to it was the miniature Emma had given him, with all its corners chipped; her clothes seemed pretentious to him, and the intimate expression on her face was in the worst possible taste; then, by reflecting on that picture and trying to evoke the memory of the model, he found Emma’s traits becoming confused in his memory, as if the living woman and the painted one, rubbing up one against the other, were reciprocally effacing each other. Finally, he read over some of her letters; they were full of details regarding their journey, short, specific, and urgent as business letters. He wanted to find the long ones from the early days; in order to get to them at the bottom of the box, he had to sift through all the others, and he began mechanically rummaging through the heap of papers and objects, coming up with a jumble of bouquets, a garter, a black mask, hairpins, and locks of hair—so much hair!—brunette, blond; some of it, catching on the box’s hinges, broke when it was opened.

Amusing himself thus with his souvenirs, he looked closely at the handwriting and the varied styles of the letters. They were tender or jovial, facetious, melancholic; some of them demanded his love, and some his money. A given word would remind him of faces, of certain gestures, of a tone of voice; and sometimes, he remembered nothing at all.

These women, rushing all at once through his thoughts, actually crowded each other so that they began to shrink down to one single level of love where they were all equalized. So, picking up a random handful of the jumbled letters, he let them fall in cascades from his right hand to his left. Finally, bored and sleepy, Rodolphe put the box back in the cupboard, saying:

“What a pile of nonsense!”

And that summed up his view of the matter; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a schoolyard, had so trampled over his heart that nothing green could grow there, and what did pass through it was even more thoughtless than schoolboys, for it did not even leave its name scratched on the wall.

“All right,” he said to himself, “let’s get started!”

He wrote:

“Be brave, Emma! Be brave! I don’t want to be a curse upon your life.”

“After all, that’s true,” Rodolphe thought; “I’m acting in her interest; I’m being honest.”

“Have you carefully thought your decision through? Do you know the abyss into which I was leading you, my poor angel? You really don’t, do you? You were going forward, trusting and rash, with faith in happiness, in the future … Oh, how miserable we are! How senseless!”

Here Rodolphe paused, to find some good excuse.

“What if I told her that I’d lost all my money? No—and anyway that wouldn’t stop her. It would all start up again later. Is there any way to talk sense to women like this?”

He pondered, and then added:

“I will not forget you, believe me, and I will always feel a profound devotion to you; but one day, sooner or later, this ardor— like the destiny of all human things—will diminish, without a doubt! Weariness would come upon us, and who can say if I might not have had the terrible sorrow of having to witness your remorse, and of sharing in it myself, because I was its cause. The very idea of your regret is a torture to me, Emma! Forget me! Oh, why did I ever come to know you? Why were you so beautiful? Is it my fault? Oh, my God! No, no—only fate is to blame.”

“Now that’s a word that’s always effective,” he said to himself.

“Oh, if you had only been one of those women with a frivolous heart, the kind that’s common enough, then I might indeed have tried the experiment, for it would have held no danger for you. But that delicious exaltation, which is at once your charm and your torment, has kept you from seeing, adorable woman that you are, the falsity of our future position. And I too did not at first think it through, and I rested in the shade of that ideal happiness as if in the shade of a poisonous tropical tree, without foreseeing the consequences.”

“Maybe she’ll think I’m rejecting her out of stinginess … Well, it doesn’t matter; it’s too bad, but I have to finish it!”

“The world is cruel, Emma. Wherever we might have gone, it would have pursued us. It would have subjected you to indiscreet questions, to calumny, to disdain, perhaps even to insults. Insults to you! Oh! … And I, who would have placed you upon a throne! I, who carry the thought of you with me like a talisman! For I will punish myself with exile for all the evil I’ve done you. I am leaving. Where? I don’t have any idea—I am mad! Farewell! Be good always! And keep a memory of the unhappy one who has lost you. Teach my name to your child, so that she may repeat it in her prayers.”

The wicks of his two candles flickered. Rodolphe got up to close the window, and, when he had reseated himself:

“I think that’s about all. Oh! One more thing, so she won’t come charging after me:”

“I will be far away by the time you read these sad lines; for I wanted to flee quickly to avoid the temptation of seeing you again. No more weakness! I will return; and perhaps, later on, we will talk dispassionately together about our old love. Farewell!”

And he wrote another farewell, separated into two words—Fare well! — which he thought in excellent taste.

“Now how am I going to sign it?” he said to himself. “Your devoted … No. Your friend? … Yes, that’s it.”

“Your friend.”

He reread the letter. He thought it was good.

“Poor little woman!” he thought, with a feeling of tenderness. “She’s going to think I’m as unfeeling as a rock. There ought to be a few teardrops on it; but I’ve never been able to cry; it’s not my fault.” Then, having poured some water into a glass, Rodolphe dipped his finger in it and let a big drop fall on the paper, which blotched the ink slightly. Then, as he looked around for a seal, the Amor nel cor seal turned up.

“This doesn’t much fit the occasion. But bah! What’s the difference!”

After which he smoked three pipes, and then went to bed.

The next day, when he got up (he had slept late, and it was about two), he had a basket of apricots picked. He hid the letter at the bottom, under some grape leaves, and ordered his ploughman, Girard, to deliver it discreetly to Madame Bovary. He used this method to communicate with her, sending her fruits or game, according to the season.

“If she asks for news about me,” he said, “tell her that I’ve gone on a trip. Be sure to give the basket only to her—put it in her hands. Go, and be careful!”

Girard put on his new smock, knotted his handkerchief around the apricots, and walking with heavy steps in his big hobnailed clogs, set off placidly down the path to Yonville.

Madame Bovary, when he arrived at her house, was with Félicité, folding linen on the kitchen table.

“Here,” said the servant, “master sends you this.”

She was seized with apprehension, and while she searched in her pocket for some money, she looked at the peasant with such a dire expression that he looked back at her in amazement, not understanding how such a gift could so upset someone. Finally he left. Félicité stayed. She couldn’t wait; she ran into the drawing room as if she were taking the apricots there, turned the basket upside down, tore through the leaves, found the letter, opened it; and, in horror, she began to run upstairs to her room as if she were pursued by a terrible fire.

Charles was there, she saw him; he spoke to her, she heard nothing, and she continued to climb the stairs quickly, breathless, lost, drunk, and always holding on to that terrible sheet of paper, crackling in her hand like a piece of tin. On the third floor, she stopped in front of the attic door, which was closed.

Then she wanted to calm herself; she remembered the letter; she had to read it through, she didn’t dare. Besides, where? How? They would see her.

“Ah! No, here I’ll be safe,” she thought.

Emma pushed open the door and went in.

The roof slates emitted a heavy heat that pressed down on her temples and stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed attic window; she pulled back its bolt, and a blinding light burst instantly into the room.

Opposite her, over the rooftops, the open countryside extended as far as the eye could see. Below her, the village square was empty; the stones of the sidewalk glittered, the weathervanes on the houses were utterly still; on the corner, coming from a lower storey, there was a sort of humming sound, strident and harsh. It was Binet, working at his lathe.

Leaning against the window frame, she reread the letter with angry sneers. But the more she focused on it, the more confused her thoughts became. She saw him again, she heard his voice, she held him in her arms; and her throbbing heart, beating in her chest like great blows from a hammer, began to accelerate and to become irregular. She cast her eyes around her, hoping the world would crumble. Why not end it? What was holding her back? She was free. And she stepped forward, looking down at the paving stones, saying to herself:

“Let’s go! Let’s go!”

The luminous beam of sunlight reflecting up from below was pulling the weight of her body forward to the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the swaying square was creeping upward along the walls, and that the floor she stood on was tilted like a tossing boat. She stood at the edge, almost suspended in air, surrounded by an immense space. The blue of the sky swept over her, the air rushing through her hollowed brain, all she had to do was to let go, let herself fall; and the lathe’s buzzing never stopped, sounding like a furious voice calling to her.

“Emma! Emma!” Charles cried.

She stopped.

“Where are you? Come down!”

The idea that she had just escaped from death made her almost faint with terror; she closed her eyes; then she shuddered when she felt a hand on her sleeve: it was Félicité.

“Monsieur is waiting for you, Madame; the soup is on the table.”

And she had to go downstairs! She had to go sit at the table!

She tried to eat. The bites she took choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as if to examine its mending, and she wanted very much to apply herself to this task, to count the threads in the linen. Suddenly, the memory of the letter came back to her. Had she lost it? Where could it be? But she felt such an inner weariness that she was unable to invent a pretext for leaving the table. And she had become cowardly too; she was afraid of Charles; he knew everything, it was certain! And in fact he pronounced these words, strangely:

“We won’t be seeing Monsieur Rodolphe anytime soon, it appears.”

“Who told you that?” she asked, trembling.

“Who told me?” he replied, a bit surprised by her brusque tone. “It was Girard, who I met just now at the doorway of the Café Français. He’s gone on a trip, or he’s about to go.”

A sob escaped her.

“What’s so surprising about that? He goes off now and then for his own distraction, and, by God, I approve of it. When a person has money, and is a young bachelor! … Besides, he has himself some good times, our friend! He’s quite a playboy! Monsieur Langlois told me …”

He stopped speaking, for decorum’s sake, because the maid had entered.

She put the apricots spilled on the shelf back in the basket; Charles, without noticing his wife’s reddening, picked one out and bit into it.

“Oh! Perfect!” he said. “Here, try one.”

He held the basket out to her, and she gently pushed it away.

“Smell them, then: what an aroma!” he said, passing it back and forth under her nose.

“I’m choking!” she cried, leaping up suddenly.

But by an effort of will, the spasm disappeared; then she said:

“It’s nothing! It’s nothing! It’s just nerves! Sit back down, eat!”

For she feared he would question her if he tried to care for her, and that he would never leave her alone.

Charles, to obey her, sat back down, and he spit the apricot pits into his hand, and then deposited them on his plate.

Suddenly a blue tilbury coach passed rapidly through the square. Emma uttered a loud cry and fell down, rigid, onto the floor.

In fact Rodolphe, after thinking it all over, had decided to leave for Rouen. Now, since there was no other road from La Huchette to Buchy except through Yonville, he had to go through the village, and Emma had recognized him in the glow of the lanterns, which flashed through the dusk like lightning.

The pharmacist, hearing the uproar, ran to the Bovarys’ at once. The table and all the dishes had been knocked over; sauce, meat, cutlery, salt, and oil were scattered all over the room; Charles was shouting for help; Berthe, frightened, was crying; and Félicité, her hands shaking, was unlacing her mistress, whose whole body was shuddering in convulsions.

“I’ll run to my laboratory to find some aromatic vinegar,” said the pharmacist.

Then, when she smelled the bottle and opened her eyes:

“I was sure it would do the trick,” he said; “that would wake the dead.”

“Talk to us!” said Charles. “Talk to us! Pull yourself together! It’s me, your Charles, the one who loves you! Do you recognize me? Look, here’s your little girl: kiss her!”

The child stretched her arms out to her mother to hug her. But Emma, turning her head away, said in a clipped voice:

“No, no … No one!”

She fainted again. They carried her to her bed.

She lay there stretched out, her mouth open, her eyelids closed, hands open, motionless and white as a wax statue. Two streams of tears ran from her eyes, and slowly dropped onto the pillow.

Charles stood in the back of the alcove, and the pharmacist, next to him, kept that meditative silence that is befitting during life’s serious occasions.

“Don’t worry,” he said, nudging his elbow, “I think the crisis is past.”

“Yes, she’s resting a little now!” replied Charles, as he watched her sleep. “Poor woman! Poor woman! … She’s fallen asleep now!”

Then Homais asked how the accident had happened. Charles replied that she had been seized suddenly while she was eating apricots.

“Extraordinary!” said the pharmacist. “But it might be that the apricots precipitated a syncope! There are some systems just that impressionable when they encounter certain odors! And this could be quite a good question to examine, as much from a pathological angle as from a physiological one. The priests know how important this is, which is why they have always mixed scents in with their rituals. It’s in order to stupefy your senses and provoke ecstasies, which is, moreover, very easy to bring about with persons of the weaker sex, who are more delicate than the others. Cases have been cited of people fainting at the scent of burnt hartshorn, of fresh bread …”

“Be careful not to wake her up!” said Bovary in a low voice.

“And it’s not only humans,” the pharmacist continued, “who are subject to these anomalies, but animals as well. Thus, you are certainly aware of the singularly aphrodisiac effect that nepeta cataria, vulgarly known as catnip, has on the feline race; and moreover, to cite an example I can personally warrant as genuine, Bridoux (one of my old comrades, currently living on the Rue Malpalu) owns a dog who falls into convulsions the minute anyone shows him a snuffbox. He has often demonstrated this for his friends, at his summerhouse in the Bois Guillaume. Can you believe that a simple sternutation could effect such ravages on the organism of a quadruped? It’s exceptionally curious, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes,” said Charles, who wasn’t listening.

“It proves,” said the other, smiling with a self-important air, “that irregularities are beyond number with regard to the nervous system. In the case of Madame, she has always seemed to me, I must say, a very sensitive type. And therefore I would by no means recommend to you, my old friend, any of those so-called remedies that, on the pretext of attacking the symptoms, in fact attack the constitution! No, none of those pointless medications! Just diet, that’s all! Sedatives, emollients, dulcifiers. Also, don’t you think that it might be necessary to arouse her imagination?”

“In what way? How?” said Bovary.

“Ah, that’s the question! That’s definitively the question: ‘That is the question!’¹—as I recently read in a newspaper.”

But Emma, awaking, cried out, “And the letter? And the letter?”

They thought she was delirious; and by midnight, she was; a cerebral fever was diagnosed.

For forty-three days, Charles did not leave her side. He abandoned all his patients; he no longer went to bed, but was continually taking her pulse, applying mustard plasters, cold-water compresses. He sent Justin to Neufchâtel to find some ice; on the way back, the ice melted; he sent him again. He called in Monsieur Canivet for a consultation; he sent for his old master from Rouen, Doctor Larivière; he was desperate. What frightened him the most was Emma’s complete prostration; for she didn’t speak, didn’t hear, and didn’t even seem to be suffering—as if her body and soul were now both resting together after their struggles.

Toward the middle of October, she was able to sit up in bed, propped up with pillows. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first bread and jam. Her strength returned; she would get up for a few hours in the afternoon, and, on one day when she felt herself to be better, he tried to get her to take a turn in the garden, leaning on his arm. The gravel on the path had disappeared beneath the dead leaves; she walked along step by step, dragging her slippers, and leaning on Charles’ shoulder, she continued to smile.

They walked in this way to the bottom of the garden, near the terrace. She slowly straightened herself up, using her hand to shade her eyes and look around her. She looked far off, as far away as she could, but there was nothing on the horizon but great grass fires, smoking on the hillsides.

“You’re going to get overtired, my dear one,” said Bovary.

And pushing her gently to get her to enter the arbor:

“Sit on this bench: you’ll be more comfortable.”

“Oh no! Not there, not there!” she exclaimed, her voice faltering.

She had a dizzy spell, and from that evening on, her illness returned, in a less clearly defined way, true, and with more complicated symptoms. Sometimes she felt pain in her heart, and sometimes in her chest, then the head, then the limbs; there were fits of vomiting, in which Charles thought he could see the first signs of cancer.

And as if that weren’t enough, the poor man had money worries!

1. In English in the original. Homais is unaware that he’s quoting from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

CHAPTER 14

In the first place, he didn’t know how he could pay Homais for all the medications he brought to him; and even though as a doctor he was not required to pay for them, still he blushed at the obligation. Then the household expenses, now that the kitchen maid had taken charge, had become horrific; bills rained upon the house; the tradesmen grumbled; Monsieur Lheureux in particular harassed him. In fact, when Emma’s illness was at its worst, the latter took advantage of the circumstances to increase his bill, hurriedly delivering the cloak, the overnight bag, two trunks instead of one, and a great many other things as well. In vain Charles said he didn’t need them, for the merchant responded arrogantly that all these things had been ordered, and he could not return them; besides, this would only upset Madame during her convalescence; Monsieur ought to think it over; in short, he was determined to pursue his case in court rather than give up his rights and take back the merchandise. Afterward, Charles gave orders that it should all be returned to his shop; Félicité forgot to do it; Charles had other worries; he thought no more about it; Monsieur Lhereux went back on the attack and, alternating between menacing and whining, managed to get Bovary to sign a promissory note, due in full in six months. But he had scarcely signed the note when an audacious idea occurred to him: to borrow a thousand francs from Monsieur Lheureux. So he asked, with an embarrassed air, whether it would be possible, adding that the loan would be for a year, at whatever rate of interest he wanted. Lheureux ran back to his shop, bringing back the money and dictating another note, by which Bovary agreed to pay, on September 1 of the following year, the sum of one thousand and seventy francs, which, along with the one hundred and eighty already stipulated, came to exactly twelve hundred and fifty. Thus the loan, at six percent, and his twenty-five percent commission, and the goods bringing in another third at minimum—all of this ought to give him, twelve months hence, a hundred and thirty francs in profit; and he hoped the business would not stop there, that they would be unable to pay the debt, that it would have to be renewed, and that his poor, thin money, after being nourished and fed at the doctor’s as at a rest home, would one day return to him much plumper, and fat enough to burst the money bag.

Besides, everything he did was successful. He had the contract to supply cider to the Neufchâtel hospital; Monsieur Guillaumin had promised him some shares in the peat bogs at Grumesnil, and he was thinking about establishing a new coach line between Argueil and Rouen, which would certainly not be long in ruining the old rattletrap that the Golden Lion ran, and which, being faster, cheaper, and carrying more luggage, would put all Yonville’s business in his hands.

Charles often wondered how he would be able to pay so much money back in the following year; and he imagined various expedients, such as asking his father for help or selling something. But his father would turn a deaf ear to him, and he personally didn’t have anything to sell. Then the problems seemed so large and intractable that he quickly dismissed such unpleasant topics from his mind. He reproached himself for having forgotten Emma; as if, since all his thoughts rightfully belonged to her, it was robbing her of something not to be continually thinking of her.

The winter was a harsh one. Madame’s convalescence was slow. When the sun was out, her chair could be pushed up near the window, the one overlooking the square, because she could no longer bear looking at the garden, and the shutters on that side of the room remained permanently closed. She wanted them to sell the horse; what had once delighted her now displeased her. Her thoughts seemed to be limited to her own state of health. She stayed in her bed taking small meals, and she would ring for the maid to ask about her tisanes or to chat. Meanwhile, the snow on the market roof cast a white, still light in her room; later, the rains began to fall. And every day Emma waited with a kind of anxiety for the recurrence of little events that had nothing to do with her. The most important was the arrival, every evening, of the Hirondelle. Then the innkeeper would shout and other voices would respond, while Hippolyte’s lantern, as he looked for boxes in the baggage compartment, would gleam like a star in the darkness. At noon, Charles would return; then he would leave again; then she would take some bouillon, and around five o’clock, when the sun began to set, the children coming home from school would drag their clogs along the sidewalk and take turns knocking the shutter latches with their rulers.

That was the hour when Monsieur Bournisien would come to visit her. He would inquire about her health, bring her news, and exhort her toward religion in a gentle kind of chatter that was not unpleasant to her. The very sight of his cassock was a comfort to her.

One day when her illness was at its worst, she thought she was dying, and she asked for Communion; and the longer they went on making preparations for the sacrament, turning her night table covered with syrups into an altar, Félicité strewing dahlia petals on the floor, the more Emma felt something powerful passing over her, lifting off her sorrows, her perceptions, her feelings. The heaviness of her body was lightened, another life was beginning; she felt that her being, mounting up toward God, would be annihilated in His love like burning incense turned into vapor. They sprinkled holy water on her bedclothes; the priest removed the white host from the holy ciborium; and she almost swooned with a celestial joy as she put out her lips to receive the body of the Savior held toward her. The curtains of her alcove fluttered gently around her like clouds, and the rays of the two candles burning on the nightstand seemed to her like dazzling haloes. Then she let her head fall back, believing she could hear all around her the music of seraphic harps, and see in an azure sky a golden throne in the midst of the saints holding green palm fronds, and on it God the Father radiant in majesty, making a sign for angels with wings of flame to descend to earth to carry her up in their arms.

That splendid vision remained in her memory as the most beautiful thing it was possible to imagine; so much so that now she would try to recapture the sensation, which did return with the same sweetness, but not with the same intensity. Her soul, crippled by pride, was resting at last in Christian humility; and savoring the pleasure of being weak, Emma contemplated the destruction of her will within herself, which would open a broad entry point for heavenly grace. So there were greater joys than happiness, and a love higher than all other loves, without interruption and without end, which only increased for all eternity! She could see, among the illusions her hope generated, a state of purity hovering above the earth and mixing with the sky, a state where she aspired to be. She wanted to become a saint. She bought rosaries and wore amulets; she wished she could have a reliquary studded with emeralds at her bedside so she could kiss it every evening.

The priest marveled at these new dispositions of hers, even though Emma’s new religiosity might, he thought, because of its sheer fervor, come a little too close to heresy or even extravagance. But not being very well versed in these matters, at least once they passed a certain point, he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, the Monsignor’s bookseller, to send him something worthwhile for a very clever lady. The bookseller, with as much indifference as if he had been sending a load of trading beads to deepest Africa, packed up randomly whatever was currently popular in the field of pious books. There were little question-and-answer manuals, high-handed pamphlets in the style of Monsieur de Maistre,¹ and the species of novel that comes in pink wrappers and honeyed style, fabricated by troubadour seminarians or repentant blue-stockings. Among the titles were Think about It Carefully; A Man of the World at Mary’s Feet, by Monsieur de ***, holder of several honors; The Errors of Voltaire, for the Benefit of Young People, et cetera.²

Madame Bovary did not yet have a mind sufficiently clear to apply herself to anything at all; and besides, she read these books in too much of a hurry. The rules of ritual irritated her; the arrogance of the polemical writings displeased her by their dogged attacks on people she hadn’t heard of; and the secular stories, with their religious overlay, seemed to her to have been written in such total ignorance of the real world that they insensibly distanced her from the truths whose proofs she had been seeking. But she persisted, and when the volume fell from her hands, she believed herself seized by the most refined Catholic melancholy that an ethereal soul can imagine.

As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had buried it in the depths of her heart; and it remained there, more solemn, more motionless than a mummified king in an underground vault. An exhalation slipped up from that great embalmed love that, penetrating into everything, perfumed with tenderness the immaculate atmosphere in which she was trying to live. When she got down on her knees on her gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same soft words that she had once murmured to her lover during the effusions of adultery. It was in an attempt to entice faith to come to her; but no joys descended from heaven; and she would get back up, her legs fatigued, with the vague sense of having been the dupe of an enormous scam. But this quest for faith, she thought, was just one more merit in her favor; and in the pride of her devotion, Emma compared herself to the great ladies of the past, the ones whose glory she had daydreamed about over the portrait of La Vallière, those ladies who, majestically trailing the lace-trimmed trains of their long dresses, retired into solitude to shed at the feet of Christ all the tears of a heart wounded by life.

Then, she indulged herself in excessive charities. She sewed clothes for the poor; she sent firewood to women in labor; and one day Charles returned to find three tramps at the kitchen table eating soup. She had her little daughter returned from the nurse, where Charles had sent her during Emma’s illness. She wanted to teach her to read; no matter how much Berthe cried, she did not become annoyed. She was determinedly resigned, universally indulgent. Her language on any subject was conspicuously idealistic. She would say to her child:

“Has your stomach ache passed, my angel?”

Madame Bovary senior could find nothing to criticize, except perhaps that mania for knitting jackets for orphans instead of mending her own dish towels. But harassed as she was by domestic quarrels, the good old woman enjoyed being in that peaceful house, and she even stayed on after Easter, in order to avoid the sarcasms of her husband who never failed, every Good Friday, to order sausages.

Apart from the company of her mother-in-law, who strengthened her somewhat with her proper decision-making and her serious manner, Emma had other visitors almost every day. They were Madame Langlois, Madame Caron, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and every day from two to five o’clock, the excellent Madame Homais, who had never wanted to believe any of the gossip going around about her neighbor. The Homais children also came to visit her; Justin brought them. He came up to her room with them, and he remained standing near the door, without moving or speaking. Often Madame Bovary, paying no attention to him, would begin dressing. She would begin by taking out her comb, shaking out her hair vigorously; and the first time he saw that mass of hair falling all the way down to her knees in black ringlets, it was for the poor boy a kind of abrupt entry into something extraordinary and new, the splendor of which terrified him.

Emma undoubtedly never noticed his silent eagerness nor his timidities. She never suspected that love, which had disappeared from her life, was in fact palpitating there, right beside her, beneath that coarse canvas shirt, and within that adolescent heart so open to the emanations of her beauty. Besides, she treated things now with such indifference, she combined her affectionate words with such disdainful looks in such contradictory ways that her egoism could no longer be distinguished from her charity, nor her corruption from her virtue. One evening, for example, she flew into a rage with her maid, who had asked if she could go out and had stammered as she tried to find a pretext; then, abruptly:

“So you love him?” she said.

And without waiting for a reply from Félicité, who was blushing, she added in a melancholic tone:

“Well, run along! Enjoy yourself!”

At the beginning of spring, she had the garden completely redone, despite Bovary’s objections; but he was happy to see her manifesting some preferences. And the stronger she grew, the stronger her will grew. First, she found means to expel Madame Rollet, the nurse, from her kitchen, where she had taken to coming during Emma’s convalescence, bringing with her two nurslings and a boarder who ate as rapaciously as a cannibal. Then she began to disengage from the Homais family, one by one dismissed all the other visitors, and even attended church less assiduously, earning the pharmacist’s highest approval, who said to her amiably:

“You were almost wearing a cassock yourself for a while there!”

Monsieur Bournisien, just as before, came by every day, after his catechism class. He preferred to stay outdoors and enjoy the air in the grove, his term for the arbor. It was the time of day when Charles came home. They were both hot; some sweet cider was brought out, and they drank together to Madame’s complete recovery.

Binet was there, or rather a little further down, against the terrace wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary would invite him to have a drink, and he was an expert on uncorking bottles.

“You have to hold the bottle perpendicular to the table,” he would say, casting a self-satisfied glance all around him, to the very extremity of the landscape, “and after you cut the strings, press the cork up with little thrusts, gently, gently, the way they do with seltzer water in restaurants.”

But the cider, in the course of the demonstration, would often spurt out right in their faces, and then the cleric would never fail to make the same joke, with a thick laugh:

“Its goodness leaps right out at you!”

He was actually a pretty good fellow, and one day he was not even scandalized by the pharmacist advising Charles to take Emma, for a distraction, to the theater in Rouen to see the famous tenor Lagardy. Homais was surprised at his silence, so he asked his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous to one’s morality than literature.

But the pharmacist took up the defense of literature. The theater, he argued, helped to break down prejudices, and under the mask of pleasure, taught virtue.

“Castigat ridendo mores,³ Monsieur Bournisien! And consider the majority of Voltaire’s tragedies; they are skillfully seeded with philosophical reflections, making them a veritable school of morality and diplomacy for the people.”

“Me,” said Binet, “I once saw a play called The Gamin of Paris,⁴ and it showed this old general who was really something. He puts down this young society man, who seduced a working girl, who at the end …”

“Well of course!” Homais went on, “there is bad literature, just as there is bad pharmacy; but to condemn altogether the most important of the fine arts seems to me a foolish blunder, a gothic idea, one worthy of the era that imprisoned Galileo.”

“I am well aware,” the priest objected, “that there are good works by good authors; however, if only because persons of different sexes are brought together in seductive scenes decorated with worldly pomp, and then those pagan disguises, that makeup, those lights, those effeminate voices, all that in the long run has to engender a certain mental libertinism that leads to wicked thoughts, to impure temptations. Such at any rate is the opinion of all the Fathers. And finally,” he added in a mystical tone of voice, while rolling a pinch of snuff between his fingers, “if the Church has condemned plays, she must have been right; we must submit to her decrees.”

“Why,” the pharmacist asked, “does she excommunicate actors? Because in other eras they openly took part in the religious ceremonies. Yes, they acted right in the middle of the choir a species of farce called mysteries, which often offended against the laws of decency.”

The cleric contented himself with uttering a groan, and the pharmacist pursued the point:

“It’s just like in the Bible; there is … you know … more than one detail … spicy sorts of things, really … lively ones!”

And when Monsieur Bournisien made an irritated gesture:

“Ah! You agree then that it isn’t a book that should be put into the hands of a young person, and I would be very sorry if Athalie …”

“But it’s the Protestants, not us, who recommend the Bible!” cried the other, impatiently.

“It doesn’t matter!” said Homais. “I’m surprised that in our days, in this enlightened century, anyone stubbornly continues to proscribe an intellectual relaxation that is inoffensive, moralizing, and even sometimes therapeutic; wouldn’t you agree, Doctor?”

“No doubt,” replied the doctor casually, either because he shared the same ideas and didn’t want to offend anyone, or because in fact he had no ideas at all.

The conversation seemed to be concluded, when the pharmacist judged it opportune to take one more shot.

“I’ve known of priests who dress like townsfolk in order to go watch dancing girls jiggling.”

“Come now!” said the priest.

“Ah yes, I’ve known some!”

And separating the syllables of his phrase, Homais repeated:

“I-have-known-some!”

“Well then, they were in the wrong,” said Bournisien, resigned to having to listen to anything.

“By heaven, they get up to more tricks than that too!” exclaimed the pharmacist.

“Monsieur!” said the cleric with so fierce a look in his eyes that the pharmacist was intimidated.

“I only mean to say,” he went on in a softer tone, “that tolerance is the surest way of attracting souls to religion.”

“That’s true! That’s true!” the good priest conceded, sitting back down in his chair.

But he only stayed a couple of minutes. Then, once he was gone, Monsieur Homais said to the doctor:

“Now that’s what I call a real dustup! I showed him up, you saw it! … Anyway, believe me, take Madame to the theater, if only to irritate one of these crows for once in your life, damn it! If anyone could replace me, I’d come along with you myself. Hurry! Lagardy is only giving one performance; he’s engaged to go to England for quite a high fee. People say he’s quite the playboy! He’s rolling in money! He travels with three mistresses and a cook! All these great artists burn the candle at both ends; they have to live a debauched life to keep their imaginations stimulated. But they die in the poorhouse because they haven’t got the sense, while they’re young, to save their money. Well, have a pleasant dinner; see you tomorrow!”

This idea of the theater quickly germinated in Bovary’s head; he mentioned it to his wife soon after, but she rejected it at first, pleading fatigue, the trouble, and the expense; but, most unusually for him, Charles did not give in, so strongly did he believe that this recreation would be good for her. He saw nothing to prevent them; his mother had unexpectedly sent them three hundred francs, the current debts were not unmanageable, and the payments due to Monsieur Lheureux were so far off that he didn’t have to think much about them. And besides, believing that she was refusing out of consideration for him, Charles insisted all the more; so much so that she finally gave in to his ceaseless arguments. And the next day, at eight o’clock, they set off in the Hirondelle.

There was nothing at all keeping the pharmacist in Yonville, but believing that he dare not leave, he sighed at seeing them depart.

“Well then, have a good journey!” he said to them. “Fortunate mortals that you are!”

Then, speaking to Emma, who was wearing a blue silk dress with four flounces:

“You’re as pretty as a goddess of love! You’ll positively thrive in Rouen!”

The coach stopped at the Red Cross inn, on the Place Beauvoisine. It was the sort of inn found in every provincial town, with large stables and little bedrooms, where one can see chickens in the courtyard pecking at oats under the muddy gigs of traveling salesmen—a good old inn with a worm-eaten wooden balcony that creaks in the wind on winter nights, always full of people, noise, and food, with black tables sticky from glorias, thick windows yellowed by flies, damp napkins stained with cheap wine; a place that, smelling always of the village, like a country boy dressed in city clothes, has a café on the street, and, on the country side, a vegetable garden. Charles got right to business. He confused the stage boxes with the gallery, the pit with the boxes, asked for explanations, failed to understand them, was sent from the box office to the manager, returned to the inn, then returned to the theater, and ended by covering the whole length of the town from the theater to the boulevard several times.

Madame bought herself a hat, gloves, a bouquet. Monsieur was terribly afraid of missing the beginning; and without even giving themselves the time to consume a bowl of soup, they presented themselves in front of the theater doors, which were still closed.

1. Joseph de Maistre (1755–1821) was an ultraconservative Catholic royalist, who wrote powerful attacks on the French Revolution and the ideal of individual freedom.

2. The three titles mentioned are far below de Maistre in style and power, but like his work, they all argue for the importance of religion in the state and in the personal life of the citizen. They in no way relate to the religious fervor Emma is feeling. The first (1815) was by Abbé Vinson; the second (1836) by Victor d’Anglars; and the third (1762) by Abbé Claude-Adrien Nonnotte.

3. Castigat ridendo mores, “criticize customs through humor,” is a Latin phrase associated with Molière, though it does not appear in his work. The phrase was often used to justify satirical comedy.

4. The Gamin of Paris was a vaudeville-style play (1836) by the prolific Jean-François-Alfred Bayard (1796–1853).

CHAPTER 15

The crowd was waiting against the wall, divided symmetrically between railings. At the corner of the nearby streets, gigantic posters repeated in flamboyant script, “Lucia di Lammermoor¹… Lagardy … Opera” et cetera. The weather was fine; people were hot; sweat was running under hairdos; handkerchiefs were dabbing at reddened foreheads; from time to time a warm wind blowing up from the river would gently flutter the awnings hanging from the doorways of the bars. A little further down, however, people were cooled by a glacial current of air that smelled of tallow, leather, and oil. This was the exhalation from the Rue des Charrettes, full of big dark warehouses where casks are stored.

For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma wanted to take a walk along the harbor before going in, and Bovary, out of prudence, kept the tickets in his hand, in his trouser pocket, pressing them tightly against his stomach.

Her heart began beating faster as soon as they reached the vestibule. She smiled involuntarily out of vanity at seeing the crowd rushing to the right down the other corridor while she walked up the staircase toward the reserved seats. She felt a childlike pleasure in pushing open the wide, tapes-tried doors with her finger; she breathed in deeply the dusty odor of the corridor, and when she was seated in her box, she leaned forward as casually as a duchess.

The theater was beginning to fill; opera glasses were taken out of their cases, and the subscribers, catching sight of each other, were bowing. They had come to the arts to relax from the anxieties of their commerce; but by no means did they forget about business, and they continued talking about cotton, alcohol, or indigo. The heads of older people could be seen, impassive and peaceful, their white hair and complexions making them resemble silver medals tarnished by lead fumes. Good-looking young men were strutting in the pit, revealing, in their open waistcoats, cravats of pink or apple-green; and Madame Bovary admired them from above, as they draped the open palms of their yellow gloves over the golden knobs of their canes.

Meanwhile, the orchestra’s candles were lit; the chandelier with its glittering crystals descended from the ceiling, casting a sudden gaiety over the theater; then the musicians entered, one after the other, and there was at first an extended din of snoring basses, squeaking violins, blaring cornets, and cheeping flutes and flageolets. But then three taps were heard on the stage; a drum roll began, the brass instruments played some chords, and the curtain rose up, revealing a landscape.

There was a crossroads in a forest, with a fountain on the left, shaded by an oak tree. Peasants and lords with plaids over their shoulders were singing a hunting song together; then a captain suddenly came on, invoking the angel of evil, lifting both arms up to heaven; another appeared; they exited, and the hunters started up again.

She found herself taken back to her childhood reading, to the world of Walter Scott. She felt she could hear, coming through the mist, the sound of Scottish bagpipes echoing across the heather. Her memory of the novel made it easier to follow the libretto, and she could follow the story phrase by phrase, while vague thoughts came and went in her mind, dispersed by gusts of music. She gave herself up to the rocking, lulling movement of the melodies, feeling her entire being vibrating as if the violin bows were being drawn over her nerves. She stared avidly at the costumes, the sets, the characters, the painted trees that shook when the actors walked past them, the velvet caps, the cloaks, the swords, all those imaginary things fluttering past within the harmony as if in the air of another world. But one young woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She remained there alone, and then the flute began to play like the murmur of a fountain or like the warbling of a bird. Lucia solemnly started into her cavatina in G major; she lamented for love, she wished to have wings. Emma too would have liked to flee from life, carried off in an embrace. Suddenly, Edgar Lagardy appeared.

He had that splendid pallor that gives a marble-like appearance to the passionate races of the South. His robust body was tightly clad in a brown doublet; a little carved dagger hung against his left thigh, and he cast languishing glances around him, revealing his white teeth. People said that a Polish princess, hearing him sing one night on the beach at Biarritz where he then mended boats, had fallen in love with him. She ruined herself over him. He had left her there for other women, and those romantic stories only served to enhance his artistic reputation. The clever ham always took care to have some poetic phrase dropped into his publicity material, something regarding the fascination of his person and the sensitivity of his soul. A fine vocal organ, an imperturbable cool, more temperament than intelligence, more overstatement than real lyricism—all these came together to make up the charm of this marvelous charlatan, in whom there was something of both the hairdresser and the toreador.

From the very first scene, the audience was enraptured. He pressed Lucia in his arms, he left her, he returned, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of rage, and then elegiac gurgles of infinite sweetness, the notes escaping from his bared throat, full of sighs and kisses. Emma leaned forward to watch him, digging her fingernails into the velvet railing of the box. Her heart swelled with those melodious lamentations accompanied by the double basses, like the cries of the shipwrecked in a furious tempest. In them she recognized all the intoxications, all the anguish from which she had almost died. The soprano’s voice seemed only an echo of her own consciousness, and this illusion charming her seemed something from her own life. But no one on earth had ever loved her with a love like this. He had not wept the way Edgar did, that last night in the moonlight when they were saying to each other, “until tomorrow! Until tomorrow …” The room resounded with bravos; they repeated the passage all over again; the lovers spoke of the flowers on their tomb, of vows, of exile, of fate, of hopes, and when they finally sent forth their final adieu, Emma burst out with a sharp cry that blended with the vibrations of the final chords.

“But why,” asked Bovary, “is that lord persecuting her?”

“No, no,” Emma replied; “he’s her lover.”

“But he swears to take vengeance on her family, while the other one, the one who was on before, said, ‘I love Lucia and I believe she loves me!’ And besides, he went off with her father, arm in arm. Because it is her father, isn’t it, the short ugly one wearing the cock’s feather in his hat?”

Despite Emma’s explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began in which Gilbert reveals his heinous plots to his master Ashton, Charles, seeing the false engagement ring meant to deceive Lucia, thought that it was a love token sent by Edgar. He admitted, moreover, that he couldn’t understand the story because of the music, which very much got in the way of the words.

“What’s the difference?” said Emma. “Be quiet!”

“It’s because I like to know what’s going on,” he said, leaning against her shoulder. “You know that.”

“Be quiet! Be quiet!” she repeated impatiently.

Lucia came forward, partly supported by her ladies, a wreath of orange blossoms in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her dress. Emma thought of her wedding day; and she saw herself there again, among the wheat fields, on the little path, when they were walking to the church. Why hadn’t she, like this woman, resisted, pleaded? But on the contrary, she had been joyful, without seeing the abyss into which she was hurling herself … Oh! If only, in the springtime of her beauty, before the defilement of marriage and the disillusionment of adultery, she had been able to base her life upon some great, solid heart, then virtue, tenderness, sensuality, and duty would have been harmoniously blended, and she would never have fallen from so high a state of happiness. But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie dreamed up to cause the despair of every desire. She now knew the pettiness of the passions that art exaggerated. Forcing herself to turn away from such thoughts, Emma now wanted to see in this reproduction of her sorrows nothing more than a plastic fantasy to amuse the eyes, and she even smiled to herself with a scornful pity when, at the back of the stage, a man dressed in a black cloak appeared.

He swept off his large Spanish hat with a single gesture; and at once the instruments and singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury, dominated all the others with his stronger voice; Ashton hurled murderous provocations at him in profound tones; Lucia sent up her shrill lamentation; Arthur, to the side, modulated his tones in the middle register, and the minister’s bass boomed like an organ while the ladies’ voices repeated his words and took them up in a delightful chorus. All were lined up in a row gesticulating; and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, mercy, and astonishment were all breathed out at the same time from their open mouths. The offended lover brandished his bare sword: his lace ruffle jerked up and down according to the movements of his chest, and he stalked from right to left, making the stage boards rattle with the silver-gilt spurs on his soft boots, which flared out at the ankles. He must, she thought, possess an inexhaustible love, to be able to pour it out over the crowd in such streams. All her attempts to be critical faded away under the force of the poetic role that was absorbing her; and, drawn to the man by the illusion of the character he was playing, she tried to imagine his life, that captivating, extraordinary, splendid life of his, one that could have been hers if fate had willed it so. They would have known each other, they would have loved each other! With him, through all the capitals of Europe, she would have traveled, sharing his fatigue, his pride, gathering up the flowers people threw to him, sewing his costumes herself; and then, every evening, standing in the back of the box behind a golden trellis, she would have eagerly breathed in the outpourings of his soul, which would always be sung only for her; even as he was acting on the stage, he would be looking at her! But now a mad idea seized hold of her: he was looking directly at her, she was sure of it! She felt like running into his arms to take refuge in his strength as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out to him, “Take me away! Carry me off with you! Let us go now! Yours, yours—all my passion, all my dreams!”

The curtain came down.

The odor of gas mixed with that of the crowd’s breath; the waving of the ladies’ fans only made the air more stifling. Emma wanted to go outside; the crowd blocked the corridors, and she fell back into her chair with palpitations that were suffocating. Charles, fearing she might faint, ran off to the bar to get her a glass of barley water.

He had a great deal of difficulty getting back to his seat with the glass of water in his hands, because people kept bumping his elbows at every step, and he spilled three-fourths of it on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves; feeling the cold liquid trickling down her back, she shrieked like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband, a mill owner, shouted angrily at the clumsy fool; and while she used her handkerchief to sponge up the stains from her lovely cherry-colored taffeta gown, he was gruffly muttering words about indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At last Charles got back to Emma, and, out of breath, said to her:

“I thought, good lord, that I’d never make it back! There is such a crowd! Such a crowd!”

He added:

“But guess who I met up there? Monsieur Léon!”

“Léon?”

“Himself! He’s going to come to pay you his respects.”

And just as he finished saying those words, the one-time clerk of Yonville stepped into their box.

He held out his hand with a gentleman’s ease: and Madame Bovary mechanically extended her own, evidently obeying the attraction of a will stronger than her own. She had not touched that hand since that spring evening when rain was falling on the green leaves, when they said good-bye to each other, standing in front of the window. But quickly remembering the requisite courtesies of the present situation, she made an effort to shake off that torpor of her memories, and began to stammer out rapid phrases.

“Ah, hello! … Imagine! You here?”

“Silence!” cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was about to begin.

“So you’re in Rouen?”

“Yes.”

“And since when?”

“Throw them out! Throw them out!”

Other people had turned to stare at them; they were silent.

But from that moment on, she didn’t listen to the music anymore; and the chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the great duet in D major: for her, all of it took place in the distance, as if the instruments had become less sonorous, the characters more remote; she remembered the card parties at the pharmacist’s, and the walk to the wet nurse’s, the readings in the arbor, the intimate moments by the fireside, the whole impoverished love so calm and so long, so discreet, so tender, which she had nonetheless forgotten until now. Why had he come back? What combination of events had placed him back in her life? He stood behind her, leaning his shoulder against the wall of the box; and she now and then felt herself trembling beneath the warmth of his breath upon her hair.

“Are you enjoying this?” he asked, bending down so close to her that the tip of his moustache brushed her cheek.

She replied carelessly:

“Oh, my God, no! Not very much.”

Then he proposed that they leave the theater, to go and have an ice somewhere.

“Ah, but not yet! Let’s stay!” said Bovary. “Her hair has come undone: this is going to be tragic.”

But the mad scene did not interest Emma at all, and the singer’s acting seemed exaggerated to her.

“She’s shouting too loud,” she said to Charles, who was listening.

“Yes, perhaps … a little,” he replied, undecided between the genuineness of his pleasure and his respect for the opinions of his wife.

Then Léon said with a sigh:

“The heat today is …”

“Unendurable! That’s right.”

“Are you uncomfortable?” asked Bovary.

“Yes, I’m stifling: let’s go.”

Monsieur Léon carefully placed her long, lace shawl over her shoulders, and the three of them went to sit down by the harbor in the fresh air, outside the windows of a café.

They began to talk about her illness, but Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, afraid, she said, of boring Monsieur Léon; and the latter told them that he had come to Rouen to spend two years in a big firm in order to get some experience with business in Normandy, which was different from that in Paris. Then he asked about Berthe, the Homais family, Madame Lefrançois; and since they had nothing else to say to each other, in the presence of the husband, the conversation soon came to a halt.

Some people coming back from the theater were passing on the sidewalk, humming or shouting at the tops of their voices, “O bel ange, ma Lucia! ” Then Léon, adopting the role of the dilettante, began to talk about music. He had seen Tamburini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi; and compared to them, Lagardy, despite his great reputation, wasn’t worth much.

“Still,” interrupted Charles, who had been eating his rum sherbet little spoonfuls at a time, “they say that he’s really wonderful in the last act; I’m sorry we left before the end, because I was beginning to enjoy it.”

“Well,” said the clerk, “he’ll be giving another performance soon.”

But Charles replied that they had to leave the next day.

“Unless,” he added, turning to his wife, “you’d like to stay on alone, my little kitten?”

And changing his strategy in the face of this unexpected and hopeful development, the young man began singing Lagardy’s praises, especially his performance in the last act. It was something superb, something sublime! Then Charles insisted:

“You can come back on Sunday. Come on, decide! If you feel this would do you even the slightest good, you really ought to stay.”

Meanwhile the tables around them were emptying; a waiter came and stood discreetly near them; Charles, who understood, reached for his purse; but the clerk reached out and held back his arm, and he did not forget to leave two extra silver coins for the waiter, which he made resound on the marble table.

“I feel bad, really,” Bovary murmured, “about the money that you’re …”

The other made a cordially dismissive gesture, and, picking up his hat:

“So it’s settled? Tomorrow at six o’clock?”

Charles objected again that he could not stay away that long, but there was nothing to prevent Emma …

“It’s just that … ,” she stammered with an unusual smile, “I’m not too …”

“Well! You’ll think it over, and we’ll see. The night brings counsel …”

Then to Léon, who was walking along with them:

“Now that you’re back in our part of the world, I trust you’ll come by, sometime or other, and have dinner with us?”

The clerk assured him that he wouldn’t fail to do so, for in any case he had to go to Yonville to take care of some business for his firm. And they separated in front of the Saint-Herbland Passage, at the very moment when the cathedral clock was sounding eleven-thirty.

1. Lucia di Lammermoor, Donizetti’s 1835 opera, was performed in French for the first time in 1839. It is based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). The story is a highly romantic and melodramatic tale of doomed love, set in the hill country of southern Scotland.

PART III

CHAPTER 1

During his law studies in Paris, Monsieur Léon was a frequent presence at the Chaumière,¹ where he actually had pretty good success with the grisettes, who thought he had a distinguished air. He was the most decorous of students: he wore his hair neither too short nor too long, nor did he burn through all his money on the first day of the trimester, and he kept on good terms with the professors. As for any excesses, he avoided them as much out of timidity as moral scrupulousness.

Often, when he stayed in his rooms reading, or when he sat for an evening under the linden trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, he would let his law book fall from his hands, and the memory of Emma would come back to him. But the feeling weakened bit by bit, and other desires grew, took over, and covered it up, even though it persisted beneath them; for Léon did not lose all hope, and a kind of uncertain promise swayed ahead of him in the future, like some golden fruit suspended from a fantastic tree.

And then, when he saw her again after three years of absence, his passion came to life again. He simply must, he thought to himself, make up his mind to possess her. Moreover, his old shyness had been worn away by contact with more frolicsome company, and when he returned to the provinces he felt scorn for anyone who had not trodden the boulevards of Paris with polished boots. If he had to face an elegant Parisian woman in lace, or in the salon of some illustrious doctor, a man with decorations and a carriage, the poor clerk would no doubt tremble like a child; but here, in Rouen, on the harbor, before the wife of this little doctor, he was comfortable, certain in advance that he would dazzle her. Such confidence depends on our surroundings: we don’t speak in the drawing room in the same way we would in a garret; and the wealthy woman can feel that all the bank notes surrounding her are guarding her virtue invisibly, like armor in the lining of her corset.

When Monsieur and Madame Bovary left him the night before, Léon followed them at a distance; and having seen them stopping at the Red Cross, he turned on his heels and spent the rest of the night devising a plan.

So the next day at about five o’clock he entered the inn’s kitchen, his throat constricted, his cheeks pale, with the coward’s determination to let nothing stop him this time.

“Monsieur is not here,” a servant replied.

He took that as a good omen. He went upstairs.

Emma was not disturbed by his coming; on the contrary, she apologized for not having told him where they were staying.

“Oh! I guessed,” Léon replied.

“How?”

He claimed he had been guided to her by chance, by instinct. She began to smile, and Léon quickly moved to cover his foolishness by saying that he spent the morning looking for her at all the hotels in town.

“So you have decided to stay on?” he added.

“Yes,” she said, “and it was a mistake. I can’t let myself get used to impractical pleasures, when there are a thousand responsibilities …”

“Oh, yes, I can imagine …”

“No, you can’t, because you’re not a woman.”

But men also have their own difficulties, and the conversation turned toward some philosophical reflections. Emma expounded at length on the poverty of earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the human soul is buried.

Whether out of a need to make himself seem impressive, or out of a naïve imitation of Emma’s melancholy, the young man declared that he had been immensely bored throughout his law studies. Legal procedure irritated him, other vocations were attractive to him, and his mother never ceased to torment him with every letter she sent. As they talked and became increasingly specific about the causes of their unhappiness, each of them became more enthusiastic in their progressive confidences. But sometimes they would stop just short of a complete explanation, searching for some phrase that would translate it in the right way for the situation. She by no means confessed her passion for another man; he did not say that he had forgotten her.

It may be that he no longer remembered his late suppers after balls with costumed girls; and she no longer recalled, perhaps, those mornings when she would run through the grass toward her lover’s chateau. The sounds of the city barely reached them; and the room seemed small, as if to bring them even closer together in their solitude. Emma, wearing a dimity dressing gown, was leaning her head against the back of the old armchair; the yellow wallpaper was like a background of gold for her; and her bare head was repeated in the mirror, with its firm white part in the middle, and with the tips of her ears showing beneath her hair.

“But do excuse me,” she said, “I’m so wrong to bore you with my eternal complaints!”

“No, never! Never!”

“If you only knew,” she replied, raising her beautiful eyes up toward the ceiling, a tear forming in each of them, “all the things I’ve dreamed of!”

“And me too! Oh, I’ve suffered so much! Often I’d go out, to get away, and drag myself along the docks, drowning myself in the noise of the crowd, but without being able to escape the obsession that always pursued me. On the boulevard there is an engraver’s shop, with an Italian print that represents a Muse. She’s clothed in a tunic and she’s looking at the moon, with forget-me-nots in her uncovered hair. Something always pushed me toward that place; I would stay there for whole hours.”

And then, in a trembling voice:

“She looked a little like you.”

Madame Bovary turned her face away, so that he would not see the irrepressible smile she felt forming on her lips.

“Many times,” he went on, “I would write letters to you, and then I would tear them up.”

She did not reply. He continued:

“I would often fantasize that some chance event would bring you to me. I thought I saw you on street corners; and I would run after all the carriages from which a shawl or a veil like yours was fluttering from the window …”

She seemed determined to let him speak without interrupting him. Crossing her arms and lowering her head, she looked at the rosette on her slippers, and she occasionally made little movements with her toes inside their satin.

Then at last she sighed:

“The saddest thing, don’t you think, is dragging out a pointless existence like mine? If our sorrows at least did someone some good, we could console ourselves with the thought of making a sacrifice!”

He began to praise virtue, duty, and acts of silent self-denial, feeling in himself an incredible need for self-sacrifice that he could not satisfy.

“I would very much like,” she said, “to be a nun working in a hospital.”

“Alas!” he replied, “we men have no such holy missions, and I can’t see any career … unless maybe that of a doctor …”

With a light shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted to say she regretted that she hadn’t died of her illness; what a pity! She wouldn’t be suffering even more now. Léon quickly spoke of envying the peace of the tomb, and he had even written out his will one evening, asking that he be buried in that beautiful coverlet with velvet bands that she had given him; for that is how they both wanted to have been, each of them creating an ideal to which they now were adjusting their past lives. And besides, speech is a rolling pin, stretching and drawing the feelings outward.

But with regard to this story about the coverlet:

“But why?” she asked.

“Why?”

He hesitated.

“Because I have loved you so much!”

And applauding himself for having crossed this difficult threshold, Léon watched her face out of the corner of his eye.

It was like the sky, when a sudden wind chases the clouds away. The heap of sad thoughts that had darkened them seemed to drift away from her blue eyes; her whole face shone.

He waited. Finally she replied:

“I always suspected it …”

Then they went on to tell each other about little events from their far-away life, whose pleasures and sorrows had just been summed up in that single word. He reminisced about the clematis arbor, the dresses she had worn, the furniture in her room, everything in her house.

“And our poor cacti, what happened to them?”

“The cold killed them off last winter.”

“Ah, do you know how much I’ve thought about them? I would often picture them just as they were when, in the summer mornings, the sun struck them through the blinds … and I would picture your two bare arms working around the flowers.”

“My poor friend!” she said, holding her hand out to him.

Léon with alacrity raised it to his lips. Then, after he had taken a deep breath:

“You were, in those days, some incomprehensible force that had taken over my life. One time, for example, I came to your house; but—you probably won’t remember it.”

“I do,” she said. “Go on.”

“You were downstairs in the hall, ready to go out, on the bottom stair— I even remember you had a hat with little blue flowers; and without any invitation on your part, and despite myself, I went out with you. But with every passing minute I was more and more aware of my foolishness, and I continued walking along by you, not daring to commit myself to actually following you, and not wanting to leave you. When you went into a shop, I stayed out in the street, and I watched you through the window taking off your gloves and counting the change on the counter. Then you went on to call on Madame Tuvache, they let you in, and I stayed standing, like an idiot, outside that big heavy door that closed behind you.”

Madame Bovary, as she listened to him, was surprised at feeling so old; all these things reappearing before her seemed to be widening her existence; it created a vastness of sentiment to which she now was returning; and she said from time to time, her voice low and her eyelids half closed:

“Yes, that’s right! … That’s right! … That’s right!”

They heard eight o’clock sounding from the various clocks in the Beauvoisine Quarter, which is full of schools, churches, and large, abandoned houses. They no longer spoke; but they felt, as they looked at each other, a kind of reverberation in their heads, as if some sonorous thing had escaped from each one’s fixed stare. They had just joined their hands; and the past, the future, reminiscences, and dreams all were blended together in the sweetness of that ecstasy. Night was darkening the walls, on which still shone, half lost in the shadow, the crude colors of four prints representing four scenes from the Tour de Nesle,² each with a caption below, in both Spanish and French. Through the sashed window, they could see a corner of the black sky, between the pointed roofs.

She got up to light two candles on the chest of drawers, and then sat down again.

“Well? …” said Léon.

“Well? …” she replied.

And he was trying to find a way to restart their interrupted conversation, when she said to him:

“Why is it that no one, up until this moment, has ever spoken to me like this before?”

The clerk exclaimed that ideal natures were difficult for others to understand. As for him, from the moment he first saw her, he had loved her; and he despaired when he thought about the happiness they would have had if, by the grace of fate, they had met earlier; they would have been bound to each other indissolubly.

“I’ve sometimes dreamed about it,” she replied.

“What a dream!” Léon murmured.

And gently fingering the blue border of her long white sash, he added:

“What is there to prevent us from starting over?”

“No, my friend,” she replied. “I am too old … you are too young … forget me! Others will love you … you will love them.”

“Not like you!” he cried.

“What a child you are! Come, let’s be wiser. I want us to be.”

She explained to him how impossible their love would be, and that they would have to remain, as in the past, on the simple terms of a fraternal friendship.

Was she saying this seriously? No doubt Emma herself didn’t know, entirely occupied as she was with the charm of this seduction and the necessity of defending herself from it; and contemplating the young man with a tender look, she gently fended off the timid caresses his trembling hands were attempting.

“Ah, pardon me,” he said, drawing them back.

And Emma was seized with a vague fright in the face of this timidity, more dangerous for her than Rodolphe’s boldness had been when he stepped toward her with his arms open. No other man had ever seemed so beautiful to her as this one. His countenance breathed an exquisite candor. He lowered his long, fine, curled eyelashes. His soft-skinned cheek was reddened—she thought—with desire for her body, and Emma felt an overpowering urge to press her lips to it. And then, bending toward the clock as if to see what time it was:

“It’s so late—my God!” she said. “How we’ve chattered!”

He understood the inference, and looked around for his hat.

“I’ve even forgotten the theater! That poor Bovary left me here specifically for that! Monsieur Lormaux, from the Rue Grand-Pont, was supposed to take me, along with his wife.”

And the opportunity was lost, because she was to leave the next day.

“Really?” said Léon.

“Yes.”

“But I have to see you again,” he said, “I have something to tell you …”

“What?”

“A thing … very grave, very serious. Oh, no, no! You won’t leave me, it’s impossible! If you only knew … Listen to me … Haven’t you understood me? Haven’t you guessed? …”

“You speak plainly enough,” said Emma.

“Oh, jokes! Enough, enough! Arrange it, for pity’s sake, that I can see you again … just once … one time.”

“All right …”

She stopped herself, as if changing her mind:

“Oh! But not here!”

“Wherever you like.”

“Would you like …”

She seemed to be thinking, and then she said abruptly:

“Tomorrow, at eleven o’clock, in the cathedral.”

“I’ll be there!” he cried, taking hold of her hands, which she pulled away.

And because they found themselves standing up, him behind her and Emma lowering her head, he bent toward her neck and kissed her, a lingering kiss, on the nape.

“You’re mad! Ah, you’re mad!” she said with little, throaty laughs, as his kisses multiplied.

Then, advancing his head over her shoulders, he seemed to be seeking permission from her eyes. They fell upon him, full of an icy majesty.

Léon took three steps back, to leave. He stood on the threshold. Then he whispered, his voice trembling:

“Until tomorrow.”

She replied with a nod of her head, and disappeared like a bird into the next room.

That evening, Emma wrote an interminable letter to the clerk, in which she broke off the meeting; everything was over, and for their own happiness they should not meet. But when the letter was finished, since she didn’t know Léon’s address, she was vexed.

“I’ll give it to him myself,” she said to herself; “he will come.”

The next day, Léon, his window open, humming to himself on the balcony, polished his shoes himself, applying several layers. He put on white trousers, thin socks, a green jacket, applied every scent he had to his handkerchief and then, having curled his hair, uncurled it so as to give himself a more natural elegance.

“It’s still too early!” he thought, looking over at the wigmaker’s cuckoo clock, which sounded nine o’clock.

He read an old fashion magazine, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three different streets, thought that it must be time and slowly headed toward the Notre-Dame square.

It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate shone in the jewelers’ windows, and the light slanting down on the cathedral glittered in the cracks between the gray paving stones; a flock of birds was whirling up in the blue sky, around the trefoils of the steeples; the square, echoing with shouts, smelled of the flowers lining its pavement, roses, jasmine, carnations, narcissus, and tuberoses, spaced irregularly between the damp greenery, the catnip, and the chickweed for the birds; the fountain gurgled in the middle, and bareheaded merchant women under large umbrellas, among melons piled in pyramids, were wrapping bouquets of violets in paper.

The young man took one. It was the first time that he had bought flowers for a woman; and his chest, as he breathed in their scent, swelled with pride, as if this homage he planned for another somehow reflected back on himself.

But he was afraid of being seen; he went resolutely into the church.

The verger was standing on the doorstep, in the middle of the left doorway, beneath the Mariamne Dancing,³ with a plumed hat, a rapier at his side, and a cane in his hand, more majestic than a cardinal and gleaming like a ciborium.

He advanced toward Léon, and with that oily, benevolent smile that clerics adopt when they catechize children:

“Monsieur is perhaps not from around here? Monsieur would like to see the curiosities of the church?”

“No,” said the other.

At first he walked down the side aisles. Then he went back to look out on the square. Emma had not arrived. He went back up into the choir.

The nave was reflected in the full holy-water fonts, as were the beginnings of the arches and parts of the stained-glass windows. But the reflection of the painted windows, breaking off at the border of the marble, continued further on, on the stone floors, like a multicolored carpet. The full daylight outside stretched into the church in three enormous rays, through the three open doorways. Now and then at the upper end, a sacristan passed, performing that sideways genuflection before the altar made by the devout when they’re in a hurry. The crystal chandeliers hung motionless. In the choir, a silver lamp was burning; and, from the side chapels, the darker parts of the church, sometimes arose a sound like sighs, along with the sound of a grate being closed, its echo reverberating under the high vaults.

Léon was walking near the walls at a measured pace. Never had life seemed so good to him. She was going to come soon, charming and nervous, glancing over her shoulder to see who was looking at her—and with her flounced dress, her gold lorgnette, her thin boots, with all those elegances that he had not yet tasted, and with the indescribable allure of virtue seduced. The church, like a gigantic boudoir, spread out around her; the arches bent forward to receive in the shadows the confession of her love: the windows shone resplendent to illuminate her face, and the censers were going to burn so that she would appear like an angel in the perfumed smoke.

However, she did not come. He sat down on a chair, and his eyes encountered a blue window depicting boatmen carrying baskets. He gazed at it at length, attentively, counting the scales on the fish and the buttonholes in the doublets, while his thoughts wandered off in search of Emma.

The verger, off to the side, was inwardly indignant about this individual who gave himself permission to admire the cathedral on his own. It seemed to him a monstrous thing to do, a kind of theft, and almost a sacrilege.

But then a rustling of silk over the stones, the border of a hat, a black cape … It was she! Léon got up and rushed to meet her.

Emma was pale. She was walking rapidly.

“Read this!” she said, handing him some paper. “Oh! No.”

And she abruptly pulled back her hand, in order to go into the chapel of the Virgin where, kneeling down against a chair, she began to pray.

The young man was annoyed by this fantastical piety; but then he felt there was a certain charm in the way she looked, lost in prayer like an Andalusian marquise right in the middle of their rendezvous; but then he quickly grew bored with it, because she didn’t stop.

Emma was praying, or rather trying hard to pray, hoping that some sudden sense of resolution would come down to her from the sky; and, trying to attract some divine intervention, she filled her eyes with the tabernacle’s splendors, breathing in the perfume of the white flowers blooming in the large vases, and taking in the church’s silence, which, however, only made the tumult in her heart grow all the more.

She got back up, and they started to leave, when the verger rapidly approached them, saying:

“Madame is perhaps not from around here? Madame would like to see the curiosities of the church?”

“No!” exclaimed the clerk.

“But why not?” she asked.

For in her tottering virtue, she was trying to hang on to the Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs—to anything.

Then, so as to proceed in the proper order, the verger took them back to the entrance near the square where he pointed with his cane at a large circle of black stones with neither inscription nor carving:

“That,” he said majestically, “is the circumference of the beautiful Amboise bell. It weighed forty thousand pounds. It had no equal in all of Europe. The workman who forged it died of joy …”

“Let’s leave,” said Léon.

The old man started off again; then, coming back to the Virgin’s chapel, he extended his arms in an all-embracing gesture, and with more pride than a country squire showing off his fruit trees to you:

“This simple stone covers Pierre de Brézé, lord of Varenne and of Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou and governor of Normandy, who died in the battle of Montlhery, July 16, 1465.”

Léon, biting his lips, was fuming.

“And to the right, this gentleman encased in iron, on a prancing horse, is his grandson Louis de Brézé, lord of Breval and of Montchauvet, Count de Maulevrier, Baron de Mauny, chamberlain to the king, Knight of the Order, and likewise governor of Normandy, who died July 23, 1531, on a Sunday as the inscription reports; and below, this figure about to descend into his tomb represents the same. It would be impossible, would it not, to find a more perfect representation of our mortality?”

Madame Bovary took out her lorgnette. Léon, motionless, watched her, no longer even trying to say a single word, or make a single gesture, so discouraged was he under this double assault of chatter and indifference.

The eternal guide continued:

“Near to him, this woman on her knees weeping is his wife, Diane de Poitiers, Countess of Brézé, Duchess of Valentinois, born in 1499 and dead in 1566; and to the left, the one holding an infant, is the holy Virgin. And now, turn to this side: here are the tombs of the Amboise family. Two of them were cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one was a minister under Louis XII. He did a great deal of good for the cathedral. In his will, he left thirty thousand gold écus for the poor.”

And without stopping, talking the whole time, he pushed them into a chapel full of railings and moved a few of them aside, revealing a sort of block that might once have been an ill-made statue.

“This once decorated,” he said with a lengthy groan, “the tomb of Richard the Lion-Hearted, King of England and Duke of Normandy. It was the Calvinists, Monsieur, who reduced it to this state. Out of spite, they buried it in the ground under the episcopal seat of Monsignor. See, here is the door that Monsignor uses to return to his home. Let us go on now to see the Gargoyle windows.”

But Léon suddenly drew a silver piece from his pocket and seized Emma by the arm. The verger stood there stupefied, unable to understand this untimely generosity, while there were so many things left to see. So he called them back:

“Monsieur! The steeple! The steeple!”

“Thank you anyway,” Léon said.

“Monsieur is making a mistake! It is four hundred and forty feet high, just nine less than the great pyramid of Egypt. It is entirely cast iron, and it …”

Léon fled; for he felt that his love, which for two hours now had been as immobilized as the stones in the church, was going to evaporate like smoke and go up that sort of truncated funnel, that oblong cage, that open chimney that rises up so grotesquely from the cathedral like the outlandish fantasy of some overly imaginative metal worker.

“Where are we going, then?” she asked.

Without replying, he continued to walk rapidly, and Madame Bovary had already moistened her finger in the holy water font when they heard a great puffing coming up behind them, punctuated by the tapping of a cane. Léon turned around.

“Monsieur!”

“What?”

And he recognized the verger, holding about twenty heavy, bound volumes in his arms, balancing them against his chest. These were books that discussed the cathedral.

“Imbecile!” Léon muttered, hurrying out of the church.

There was a little urchin playing outside on the square:

“Go and find me a cab!”

The child shot off like a bullet down the Rue Quatre-Vents; then they stood face to face for a few minutes, a little uncomfortable.

“Oh, Léon! … Really … I don’t know … if I should … !”

She whimpered. Then, in a more serious tone:

“It’s very improper, don’t you know that?”

“How so?” the clerk replied. “They do it in Paris!”

And that word, like an irresistible argument, convinced her.

However, the cab did not come. Léon was afraid she might go back into the church. At last the cab appeared.

“At least go out through the north door!” the verger shouted to them, still standing in the doorway, “so as to see the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, the Paradise, the King David, and the Condemned in the flames of hell.”

“Where to, Monsieur?” asked the driver.

“Wherever you like!” said Léon, pushing Emma into the cab.

And the slow-moving vehicle set off.

It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoléon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short in front of the statue of Pierre Corneille.

“Go on!” came a voice from the inside. The cab started off again, and when it reached the Carrefour LaFayette, it sped up on the descent, and entered the train station at a full gallop.

“No, keep going!” the same voice cried.

The cab drove through the city gate and soon, arriving at the Cours, trotted quietly beneath the tall elm trees. The cab driver wiped his forehead, put his leather cap between his legs, and drove the cab beyond the side alley by the meadow, along the riverside.

It drove along the river, on the towing path paved with cobblestones, and then proceeded for a long time toward the Oyssel side, beyond the islands.

But then suddenly it turned and crossed Quatremares, Sotteville, Grande-Chaussée, Rue d’Elbeuf, and then made its third stop in front of the botanical gardens.

“Keep going!” said the voice inside, even more furiously.

And so, taking up its course again, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the Quai des Curandiers, the Quai aux Meules, once more past the bridge, by the Place du Champ-de-Mars and behind the hospital gardens, where old men in black coats stroll in the sun, all along the terrace green with ivy. It went back up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, crossed the Boulevard Cauchoise, and then crossed the whole of Mont-Riboudet as far as the Deville hills.

It returned; and then, with no plan and no direction, it wandered. People saw it in Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont Gargan, at Rouge-Mare and the Place du Gaillardbois; on the Rue Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, in front of Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise—in front of the Customs—at Basse-Vieille-Tour, at the Trois-Pipes, and at the Cimetière Monumental. From time to time the cab driver, from his seat, would cast desperate glances at the passing cafés. He could not understand what rage for locomotion possessed these individuals who would not consider stopping. He did try sometimes, and as soon as he did he heard angry exclamations from behind him. Then he lashed his sweating nags anew, but without caring anymore when they bumped up against things here and there; he was entirely demoralized, and almost weeping with thirst, with fatigue, and depression.

And on the harbor, among the wagons and barrels, and in the streets and on the corners, the townspeople stared in amazement at this sight, so unusual in the provinces, of a cab that kept reappeaing, its blinds drawn, shut up more tightly than a tomb, and tossing about like a ship.

Once, in the middle of the day, in the open countryside, at the time when the sun beat most fiercely against the old silver-plated lanterns, a naked hand emerged from beneath the little yellow-canvas blinds, and it tossed out some torn-up scraps of paper, which dispersed in the wind and alit further on, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover all in bloom.

And then, about six o’clock, the cab stopped in a back street in the Beau-voisine Quarter, and a woman got down from it, walking with her veil down and without looking back.

1. La Chaumière was a long-established (1788–1855) nightclub/cabaret with a bohemian, even scandalous reputation; it was situated on the corner of the Boulevard d’Enfer and the Boulevard Montparnasse. A chaumière is a thatched cottage.

2. La Tour de Nesle was an extravagant romantic play by Alexandre Dumas the elder (1802–70), performed in 1832. The tower itself is associated with the wife of Louis xi, Marguerite de Bourgogne (1290–1315), who, the stories say, lured her lovers there before having them thrown into the Seine.

3. The details of the cathedral in Rouen, Flaubert’s hometown, are quite precise, but this is an exception: the actual sculpture over the Saint Jean door is of Salome, whose dance would lead to the death of John the Baptist. Mariamne (not “Marianne,” as it is often misprinted) was the wife of Herod the First; Flaubert seems to confuse her— perhaps intentionally?—with Salome, who danced for a different Herod.

CHAPTER 2

When she reached the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the Hirondelle. Hivert, who had waited fifty-three minutes for her, had given up and gone without her.

There was nothing forcing her to leave; but she had promised that she would come back that night. And Charles was waiting for her; and she already felt in her heart that cowardly docility that is, for a great many women, both the punishment accepted and the payment made for adultery.

She quickly packed her bags, paid the bill, got a cab in the courtyard, and urging the driver to hurry, asking him every minute about the time and the miles they had covered, finally caught up with the Hirondelle on the outskirts of Quincampoix.

As soon as she had settled in her seat, she closed her eyes and didn’t open them until they reached the foot of the hill, where she saw Félicité in the distance, standing in front of the blacksmith’s shop, keeping watch for her. Hivert stopped the horses, and the kitchen maid, standing on tiptoe to reach the coach window, said mysteriously:

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

The village was as quiet as it always was. There were little pink, steaming mounds at the street corners, because it was jam-making time, and everybody in Yonville was preparing the year’s supply at the same time. But most impressive was the much larger mound in front of the pharmacist’s shop, surpassing all the others with the superiority that a laboratory must have over ordinary ovens, a general demand over individual needs.

She went in. The big armchair was turned over, and the Rouen Lantern was spread out on the floor between the two pestles. She pushed open the hall door; and in the middle of the kitchen, among the brown jars full of currants, powdered and lump sugar, the scales on the table, the pans on the fire, she saw the entire Homais family, both big and small, wearing aprons reaching up to their chins and holding forks in their hands. Justin was standing there, his head lowered, and the pharmacist was shouting:

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

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” the pharmacist responded. “We’re making preserves: they’re cooking; but things were about to boil over because there’s too much heat, and I asked for another pan. And then he, out of feeblemindedness, out of laziness, went to the laboratory and took the key, hanging on its hook, to the capharnaüm!”

That is what the pharmacist called a little room under the roof full of the tools and materials of his trade. He often spent long hours alone there, labeling, decanting, and repacking; and he thought of it not as a simple storeroom but as a veritable sanctuary from which would emerge afterwards, from his own hands, all the sorts of pills, boluses, tisanes, lotions, and potions that would make their way into the world and enhance his renown. No one else ever set foot in there; and he had such veneration for the place that he even swept it himself. Finally, if the pharmacy, open to anyone, was the place where he displayed his pride, the capharnaüm was the refuge where, egotistically secluding himself, Homais delighted in indulging his personal obsessions; and thus Justin’s thoughtlessness seemed to him to be a monstrous irreverence; and redder than the currants, he repeated:

“Yes, the capharnaüm! The key that locks away the acids and the caustic alkalis! In order to find a spare pan! A pan with a lid! One I may never use! Everything is crucial in the delicate operations of our art! But, what the devil! You have to make distinctions and not employ something destined for pharmaceutical use for a domestic one! It’s as if you were to carve a fowl with a scalpel, as if a magistrate …”

“Calm down!” Madame Homais said.

And Athalie, tugging at his coat:

“Papa! Papa!”

“No, leave me alone!” said the pharmacist. “Leave me alone! Goodness! Might as well be a grocer, I swear! Go on, go on! Respect nothing! Break! Smash! Let the leeches out! Burn the all-heal! Pickle the cucumbers in the window display jars, rip up the bandages!”

“But you had … ,” Emma said.

“In a minute! Do you know what you exposed yourself to? Didn’t you see anything, in the corner, to the left, on the third shelf? Speak, respond, say something!”

“I d-don’t know,” the boy stammered.

“Ah! You don’t know! Well, I know! You saw a bottle of blue glass, sealed with yellow wax, containing a white powder, on which I had written: Dangerous! And do you know what was inside? Arsenic! And you went and touched it! And you took a pan that was right next to it!”

“Right next to it!” cried Madame Homais, wringing her hands. “Arsenic? You could have poisoned us all!”

And the children all began to cry, as if they already felt hideous pains in their entrails.

“Or perhaps poisoned a patient!” the pharmacist continued. “Do you want to see me hauled to court and put in the criminal’s dock? See me dragged up to the gallows? Don’t you see the care I take in handling my materials, even though I’m thoroughly used to all this? Sometimes I even frighten myself when I think about my responsibility! Because the government persecutes us, and the absurd legislation that rules us is a veritable Damoclean sword over our heads!”

Emma was no longer thinking of what she had come for, and the pharmacist raged on breathlessly:

“This is how you repay all the good that has been done for you! This is my recompense for all the paternal cares I’ve lavished on you! Because without me, where would you be? What would you do? Who gives you your food, education, clothing, and all the means you need to someday become an honorable figure in the ranks of society? But for that you have to pull hard on the oars, and you have to acquire, as they say, calluses on your hands. Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.”¹

He was so exasperated that he was speaking in Latin. He would have broken into Chinese and Greenlandish if he had known those languages; for he found himself in one of those crises where the entire soul opens up and reveals vaguely what is hidden within it—like the ocean in a tempest, when it opens itself up to reveal everything, from the seaweed on its shores to the sands at the bottom of its abysses.

And he went on:

“I’m beginning to seriously regret taking you into my charge! I would have certainly done better to have left you to rot in the poverty and filth you were born in! You’ll never be good for anything except herding cattle! You have absolutely no scientific aptitude! You barely know how to affix a label! And there you are living in my house, like a mooching cleric, in clover, pampering yourself!

But Emma, turning to Madame Homais:

“They said I should come here …”

“Oh! My God,” the pharmacist’s wife interrupted with a sad expression, “how can I tell you? … It’s a terrible thing!”

She couldn’t finish. The pharmacist was thundering:

“Empty it! Clean it! Take it back! And hurry up!” And gripping Justin by the collar of his smock, he caused a book to tumble out of his pocket.

The boy bent down. But Homais was faster and, having picked up the book, he stared at it, wide eyed, mouth agape.

“Conjugal … Love!” he said, slowly drawing out the two words. “Ah! Very good! Very good! Very nice! And with pictures! … Oh, this is too much!”

Madame Homais stepped forward.

“No—don’t touch it!”

The children wanted to look at the pictures.

“Get out!” he said imperiously.

And they went out.

At first he walked up and down the room, taking big steps, keeping the volume open between his fingers, rolling his eyes, choking, huffing and puffing, apoplectic. Then he walked straight up to his pupil and, planting himself right in front of him, his arms crossed:

“So you have all the vices, do you, you little wretch? Take care, you’re on a steep path! You haven’t thought what it could do, this vile book, if it fell into the hands of my children, kindled a spark in their minds, tarnished Athalie’s purity, corrupted Napoléon! He’s already built like a man. Can you be sure, at least, that they have not read it? Can you guarantee me …”

“But please, Monsieur,” Emma said, “you had something to tell me?”

“Yes, that’s correct, Madame. Your father-in-law is dead!”

In fact Charles’ father had died suddenly two nights before, from an attack of apoplexy, right after getting up from the table; and out of an excess of concern for Emma’s sensibilities, Charles had asked Monsieur Homais to break the horrible news to her gently.

He had carefully thought out his phrasing, rounding it and polishing it and making it rhythmical; it was a masterpiece of prudence and smooth transitions, of subtle and delicate wording; but anger had driven out rhetoric.

Emma, abandoning hope of getting any details, left the pharmacy; for Monsieur Homais had resumed his vituperations. He was calming himself, though, and now he was growling in more paternal tones, while fanning himself with his cap.

“It’s not that I entirely disapprove of such a book! The author was a doctor. There are certain scientific aspects of the subject that are not so bad for a man to know about, even, I would dare to say, that a man should know about. But later, later! At least wait until you’re a man yourself, and your character has been formed.”

At Emma’s knock on the door, Charles, who had been waiting for her, came forward with his arms open, saying to her with tears in his voice:

“Oh, my dearest one …”

And he bent forward gently to kiss her. But when his lips touched her, the memory of the other one seized hold of her, and she passed her hand over her face with a shudder.

Still, she did manage to say:

“Yes, I know … I know …”

He showed her the letter in which his mother narrated the events without any sentimental hypocrisy. She only regretted that her husband had not received the aid of religion, having died in Doudeville, in the street, outside the door of a café, after a patriotic celebration with some of his old officer friends.

Emma gave the letter back to him; then, at dinner, for the sake of appearances, she pretended to have no appetite. But when he insisted, she resolutely forced herself to eat while Charles, across the table, sat motionless and dejected.

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

“I would have liked to see him again!”

She said nothing. Finally, seeing that she had to make some reply:

“How old was he, your father?”

“Fifty-eight!”

“Ah!”

And that was all.

Fifteen minutes later he added:

“And my poor mother? What will become of her now?”

She made a gesture signifying she didn’t know.

Seeing her so taciturn, Charles assumed she was emotionally overcome, which touched him, and he forced himself to say nothing more, for fear of making her grieving worse. And then, shaking off his own sadness:

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

“Yes.”

When the tablecloth was removed, Bovary remained sitting, as did Emma; and the longer she looked at him, the monotony of the spectacle banished bit by bit all the pity from her heart. She thought he seemed puny, weak, a nobody—in short, an impoverished man in every respect. How could she get rid of him? What an interminable evening! Something as stupefying as opium fumes came over her.

They heard the sharp sound of a stick on the floor in the entry. It was Hippolyte, bringing Madame’s bags in. In order to set them down, he painfully executed a ninety-degree turn with his stump.

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

Bovary was trying to find a coin in the bottom of his purse; and without appearing to comprehend what humiliation there was for him simply in the presence of the man standing there, like the personification of his incurable ineptitude:

“Say, that’s a pretty bouquet you have!” he said, noticing on the mantel the violets Léon had given her.

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

Charles picked up the violets, refreshing his red, tearful eyes against them, and inhaled their scent delicately. She quickly pulled them out of his hand and went off to put them in a glass of water.

The next day, Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept a great deal. Emma, on the pretext of having chores to do, disappeared.

The next day, they had to discuss the mourning details. Taking their workboxes, they went to sit in the arbor near the riverside.

Charles was thinking about his father, and he was surprised to be feeling so much affection for the man who, up until now, he would have said meant little to him. Madame Bovary senior was thinking about her husband. The worst days of the past now seemed enviable to her. Everything was erased under the instinctive regret of such a long habit of life; and from time to time, while she was working with her needle, a big tear would descend along her nose and hang there suspended for a moment. Emma was thinking that scarcely forty-eight hours before, they were together, far from this world, totally intoxicated with each other, unable to get enough of each other. She tried to recall the smallest details of that vanished day. But the presence of the mother-in-law and the husband got in the way. She would have liked to hear nothing and see nothing in order to preserve the memory of her love, which was fading, no matter how hard she tried, beneath external sensations.

She was taking out the lining of a dress, the pieces of which were strewn around her; Charles’ mother was working with her scissors without looking up, and Charles, with his cloth slippers and the old brown jacket that served him as a dressing gown, stood there with his hands in his pockets, saying nothing; near them, Berthe, in a little white apron, was scraping at the sand in the path with a little spade.

Suddenly they saw Monsieur Lheureux, the dry-goods merchant, coming in through the gate.

He came to offer his services, with regard to these tragic circumstances. Emma replied that she thought they wouldn’t need anything from him. The merchant did not accept this as a defeat.

“I do apologize,” he said, “but I wanted to talk about something privately with you.”

Then, in a lowered voice:

“It’s about that business … you understand?”

Charles reddened to the tips of his ears.

“Oh—yes! Of course.”

And in some confusion, turning to his wife:

“Do you think you could … my dear?”

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

“It’s nothing! Probably just some little household matter.”

He by no means wanted her to know about the promissory note, fearing what she would say about it.

When he and Emma were alone, Monsieur Lheureux began by openly congratulating her on her inheritance, and then went on to talk about inconsequential things, the fruit trees, the harvest, his own state of health, which, he said, was always just up and down, sometimes good, sometimes not. But to tell her the truth, he was working like five hundred devils, and even so, no matter what people thought about him, he could barely afford to butter his bread.

Emma let him talk on. She had been so massively bored these last two days!

“And everything is better with you?” he continued. “Good lord, I saw your husband in quite a state! He’s a good sort, even though he and I had some difficulties.”

She asked him which ones, because Charles had concealed from her their dispute over her purchases.

“You know perfectly well, don’t you?” said Lheureux. “It was about your little whims, all that traveling gear.”

He had shaded his eyes with his hat, and now, his hands behind his back, smiling and making a whistling sound, he looked her right in the face in an insolent manner. Did he suspect something? She stood there, paralyzed by all sorts of anxieties. But finally he went on:

“We’ve made up, and I came to propose another arrangement to him.”

This was to renew the promissory note Bovary had signed. Naturally, the doctor would do what seemed best to him; but he needn’t torture himself over it, especially now when he was going to have all sorts of other problems.

“And it might be even better for him to give it all over to someone else— you for example; with a power of attorney, it would be easy enough, and then you and I could take care of our own little dealings together …”

She didn’t understand. He said no more. And then, returning to his business, Lheureux declared that Madame simply couldn’t do without buying something from him. He would send her some black barège, about twelve meters, enough to make a dress.

“The one you have there is fine for the house. But you need another one for paying visits. I noticed it the minute I came in. I’ve got the American eye!”²

He didn’t send the material; he brought it himself. Then he came back to take the measurements; he came back on other pretexts, always trying to make himself amiable, helpful, being her vassal, as Homais would have said, and always slipping in a few words to Emma about the power of attorney. He didn’t say a word about the promissory note. She never thought about it; at the beginning of her convalescence, Charles had told her something about it, but there was so much confusion in her head then that she didn’t remember it anymore. Besides, she was very careful not to bring up any topics related to money; this was a surprise to Charles’ mother, who attributed the change in her personality to the religious sentiments she had developed when she was sick.

But as soon as she was gone, Emma wasted no time in making Bovary marvel at her good practical sense. It would be necessary for them to acquire information, verify mortgages, see if there should be an auction or a liquidation. She threw technical terms around almost randomly, pronouncing grand-sounding terms like ‘order,’ ‘the future,’ and ‘foresight,’ and she always exaggerated the complexity of the inheritance: so much so that one day she showed him the template for a general authorization “to manage and administer his business concerns, oversee all loans, sign and endorse all bills, pay all sums due,” et cetera. She had profited from Lheureux’s lessons.

Charles naively asked where the form had come from.

“From Monsieur Guillaumin.”

And with all the coolness in the world, she added:

“I personally don’t trust him all that much. Notaries have such a bad reputation! Maybe we should consult … But we only know … well, nobody!”

“Except for Léon … ,” Charles replied thoughtfully.

But it would be difficult to make it all clear through letters. Then she offered to make the trip herself. He thanked her but refused to let her go to all that trouble. She insisted. It was a virtual battle of politenesses. At last, she exclaimed in a tone of playful rebellion:

“No, please, I will go!”

“You’re so good!” he said, kissing her on the forehead.

The very next day, she was in the Hirondelle on her way to Rouen to consult with Monsieur Léon; and she stayed there three days.

1. Homais combines two adages: “it is in making that one becomes a maker,” that is, the craftsman becomes proficient through practice; and “do what you must do.”

2. To have “the American eye” (l’oeil américain) is to have a sharp eye, not to miss a thing. The idiom came from the popularity, in France, of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels and their depiction of the Native American’s hunting and tracking prowess.

CHAPTER 3

They were three full, exquisite, splendid days, a real honeymoon.

They stayed at the Hotel de Boulogne, on the harbor. And they stayed in, curtains shut, doors closed, with flowers on the floor and iced syrups, which they had delivered in the mornings.

Toward evening, they took a covered boat and went to have their dinner on one of the islands.

It was the time of evening when the shipyards echo with the sound of caulking mallets striking against ships’ hulls. Smoke from the tar escaped upward through the trees, and there were large, fat drops of tar on the river, undulating on the water in the purple of sunset, looking like floating plaques of Florentine bronze.

Their boat moved down among the moored vessels, whose long slanting cables grazed the bottom of theirs.

The sounds of the city gradually faded away—the wheels of the carts, the uproar of shouting voices, the yapping dogs on the decks of the ships. She untied her bonnet, and they landed on their island.

They sat down in the low-ceilinged room of a tavern, which had black fishnets hanging at the door. They ate fried smelts, and cream and cherries. They lay down on the grass; they kissed in the shade, under the poplars; and they would have liked, like two Robinson Crusoes, to live forever on this little island, which seemed to them, in their bliss, to be the most beautiful place on earth. It was not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows, that they heard water flowing and the wind rustling the leaves— but they had certainly never before admired all these things in this way, as if nature had not existed before, or as if it had only begun to be beautiful since the fulfillment of their desires.

At night, they returned. Their boat hugged the islands’ shorelines. They remained in the back, both of them hidden in shadow, without speaking. The squared oars resounded in the iron oarlocks; and in the stillness, the sound seemed to mark time like a beating metronome, while the rudder trailing behind never ceased its gentle splashing in the water.

Once, the moon appeared; it didn’t take long before they were making fine phrases, finding the orb melancholy and filled with poetry; Emma even began to sing:

“One night, do you recall, when we were sailing,” et cetera.¹

Her harmonious but weak voice was lost among the waves; and the wind carried off the trills that Léon heard passing by him, like the beating of wings.

She sat facing him, leaning on the partition, the moonlight coming in through one of the open shutters. Her black dress, spread out fan-like around her, made her thinner, made her taller. Her head was raised, her hands joined, her eyes fixed on the sky. Sometimes the shadow of the willow trees would hide her completely, and then she would reappear suddenly, like a vision, in the light of the moon.

Léon, sitting on the floor next to her, found a scarlet silk ribbon under his hand.

The boatman looked at it and concluded:

“Ah! Maybe it’s from the party I was rowing the other day. A whole group of jokers, gentlemen and ladies, with cakes, champagne, instruments, and everything you could imagine. There was one of them especially, a tall, good-looking man with a small moustache, who was really funny! And they all were saying:

“‘Come on, tell us another one … , Adolphe … , Dodolphe,’ I think it was.”

She shuddered.

“Is something wrong?” Léon said, drawing closer to her.

“Oh, it’s nothing! Probably just the cool night air.”

“And he sure didn’t lack for lady friends either,” the old boatman added quietly, thinking he was paying the stranger a compliment.

Then, spitting in his hands, he took up the oars again.

Still they had to part! Their good-byes were sorrowful. He should send his letters to her care of Madame Rolet; and she gave him such precise instructions about the double envelope that he greatly admired her shrewdness as a lover.

“So, you can promise me that everything’s all right?” she said during their final kiss.

“Yes, of course it is!”

“But why,” he thought afterwards, as he was walking back through the streets alone, “is she so anxious to get that power of attorney?”

1. From Lamartine’s poem, “Le Lac” (1820), usually cited as one of the essential, formative texts of French Romanticism.

CHAPTER 4

Léon soon began to adopt a superior attitude around his friends, avoiding their company, and he began to neglect his work completely.

He waited for her letters; he reread them. He wrote to her. He called her image up in his mind with all the strength of his desire and of his memories. His desire to see her again, rather than diminishing in her absence, grew so much that on Saturday morning he escaped from the office.

When, from the summit of the hill, he saw the church spire in the valley below with its tin flag turning in the wind, he felt that delight combining triumphant vanity and egotistical sentimentality that millionaires must feel when they return to visit their old village.

He went to prowl around her house. A light was shining in the kitchen. He looked for her shadow behind the curtains. No one was there.

Madame Lefrançois, when she saw him, let out a series of loud exclamations, and she thought he was “taller and thinner,” while Artémise, on the contrary, found him “stouter and darker.”

He ate in the little room just as he used to, but alone, without the tax collector; for Binet, sick and tired of waiting for the Hirondelle’s arrival, had definitively moved his dinner time up by an hour, and now, though he dined precisely at five o’clock, he still often complained that the miserable old clock was slow.

Léon, however, eventually made up his mind; he went to knock on the doctor’s door. Madame was in her room, and didn’t come down for a quarter of an hour. Monsieur seemed thrilled to see him; but he didn’t leave the house all evening, nor the next day either.

He saw her alone, that next evening, very late, behind the garden, in the lane—in the lane, where she met the other one! It was storming, and they talked beneath an umbrella, in the flashing of the lightning.

Their separation was becoming intolerable.

“I’d rather die!” Emma said.

She was writhing in his arms, weeping.

“Farewell! … Farewell! … When will I see you again?”

They turned back and embraced each other again; and that was when she promised him she would somehow find a permanent way of seeing him freely, at least once a week, she was certain of it. Emma was full of hope: some money was going to be coming to her.

And so she bought a pair of yellow curtains with wide stripes for her bedroom, which Monsieur Lheureux had declared were a bargain; she thought about a new carpet, and Lheureux, affirming that “it was the easiest thing in the world,” politely took it upon himself to get her one. She couldn’t bring herself to say no to his offers anymore. She sent for him twenty times a day, and he dropped whatever he was doing without so much as a murmur. No one could understand at all why Madame Rolet had breakfast with her every day and even came to visit her privately.

This was the period—that is, around the beginning of winter—when she was taken with a grand passion for music.

One evening when Charles was listening to her play, she restarted the same piece four times in a row, becoming more annoyed each time, while he, unable to tell the difference, cried:

“Bravo! … Very good! … There’s nothing wrong with that! Go on!”

“Oh! No, it’s terrible! My fingers are rusty.”

The next day, he begged her to play him something again.

“Very well, to please you!”

And Charles admitted that she had regressed a bit. She hit wrong notes, smeared notes together; then, stopping short:

“Oh, that’s enough! I really ought to take lessons; but …”

She bit her lips, and added:

“At twenty francs a time, that’s too much!”

“Yes, actually … a bit … ,” Charles said with a stupid giggle. “But it seems to me that a person might be able to do it for less; because there are some teachers who aren’t famous as artists but who are often better than the celebrities.”

“Find them,” said Emma.

The next day when he came back home, he gave her a cunning look, and couldn’t keep himself from saying to her:

“You can be so stubborn sometimes! I was at Barfeuchères today. Well! Madame Liégeard assured me that her three daughters, at Miséricorde,¹ are taking lessons for fifty sous a time, and from a well-known teacher to boot!”

She shrugged her shoulders, and did not open her piano any more.

But whenever she passed by it (if Bovary were nearby), she would sigh:

“Ah, my poor piano!”

And when visitors came to see her, she never failed to inform them that she had given up music and couldn’t take it up again now for important reasons. Then they would pity her. What a shame it was! She had such a fine talent! They even spoke about it to Bovary. They shamed him, especially the pharmacist:

“You’re making a mistake! Natural talents should never be allowed to lie fallow! And besides, think, my friend, that by engaging your wife in study, you’ll be saving money later on your child’s musical education! I’ve always believed mothers ought to instruct their children themselves. It’s an idea of Rousseau’s, perhaps a little too modern still,² but it will be triumphant in the end, I’m sure of it, like maternal breastfeeding, and vaccination.”

So Charles once again raised the question of the piano. Emma responded bitterly, saying it would be better to sell it. That old piano, which had so pleased her vanity and given her so much satisfaction in the past—for Bo-vary, seeing it go was like seeing some part of her commit suicide.

“If you wanted … ,” he said, “to take a lesson from time to time, it might not be all that ruinous after all.”

“But lessons,” she replied, “are only worthwhile if you follow through with them.”

And that is how she came to obtain permission from her husband to go to the city once a week to meet her lover. At the end of a month, everyone noticed that she had made considerable progress.

1. La Miséricorde was a convent school in Rouen.

2. Homais again cites Rousseau’s Émile (1762) as an avant-garde text. The passage concerning mothers’ musical education of their daughters occurs in Book V, 403–5, of Barbara Foxley’s translation (London: J. M. Dent, 1995).

CHAPTER 5

It was Thursday. She got up, and she dressed herself silently to avoid waking Charles, who would have made some objections that she was getting ready too early. Then she paced up and down; she placed herself at the window and kept an eye on the square. The early dawn was creeping in among the pillars of the marketplace, and she could begin to read the large block letters of the sign on the pharmacist’s house, its shutters still closed.

When the clock read seven-fifteen, she went to the Golden Lion, where Artémise, yawning, came to open the door for her. She also swept out the ashes from the fire for Madame. Emma stayed in the kitchen alone. From time to time, she would walk out. Hivert, without hurrying, was harnessing his horses while listening to Madame Lefrançois who, poking her night-capped head out through the grill, was giving him a list of errands and instructions that would have befuddled any other man. Emma tapped the soles of her boots against the courtyard’s paving stones.

At last, after he had eaten his soup, put on his driving cloak, lit his pipe, and taken hold of his whip, he would calmly get up into his seat.

The Hirondelle started off at a slow pace and, for the first mile or so, stopped repeatedly to pick up the travelers who were standing behind their gates by the roadside, watching for it. Those who had reserved a place the night before kept it waiting; some were even still in bed inside their houses; Hivert would call them, shout, curse, and then get down from his seat and go knock loudly on their doors. The wind whistled through the cracked windows.

But when the four benches were filled, the coach rolled off, the rows of apple trees passed by, and the road, between its two long ditches filled with yellow water, climbed up continually and stretched out to the horizon.

Emma knew it from one end to the other; she knew that after the meadow there was a signpost, then an elm tree, a barn, the hut for the road repairman; sometimes she would close her eyes for a time to try to surprise herself. But she never lost her clear sense of exactly how much distance remained.

At last the brick houses grew closer together, the earth sounded different beneath the wheels, the Hirondelle slipped between gardens where, through openings, she could see statues, a periwinkle, some clipped yew trees and a swing. Then, all of a sudden, the city appeared.

Sloping downward like an amphitheater and drowned in the fog, it stretched out confusedly beyond the bridges. Then, open countryside ascended from it in a monotonous stretch until, in the far distance, it touched the vague line of the pale sky. Seen from above like this, the landscape was motionless as a painting; the ships at anchor were massed in one corner; the river made a round curve around the foot of the green hills, and the islands, oblong shaped, seemed like great black fish fixed motionless on the water. The factory chimneys pushed immense brown plumes up and out, plumes that dissolved in the wind at their tops. The rumbling noise of the foundries mixed with the sharp chimes ringing from the churches rising up through the mist. The leafless trees on the boulevards formed patches of violet undergrowth amid the houses, and the roofs, all gleaming with rain, gave off unequal reflections, depending on the height of the buildings in that section of town. Sometimes a gust of wind would carry the clouds off toward Saint-Catherine’s Hill, like aerial waves silently breaking against a cliff.

There was something dizzying for her in the thought of those lives massed below, and her heart swelled greatly, as if the hundred and twenty thousand hearts beating down there had sent forth all at once the hot breath of the passions she attributed to them. Her love grew larger in the face of this vastness, and it expanded itself to encompass the tumult of that vague humming sound rising up toward her. She poured it out on the squares, the public walks, the streets; and the old Norman city enlarged before her eyes into a boundless capital, like a Babylon she was about to enter. She leaned out the coach window, holding on with both hands, and breathed in the breeze; the three horses broke into a gallop. The stones made grating sounds in the mud, the coach swayed, and Hivert from afar hailed the carts on the road, while the townsfolk who had spent the night in the Bois Guillaume were descending the hill sedately in their small family carriages.

They came to a stop at the city gate; Emma took off her overshoes, put on a different pair of gloves, adjusted her shawl, and twenty paces farther on, she got down from the Hirondelle.

The city was just then awakening. Clerks in caps were cleaning the shop windows, and women with baskets on their hips were rhythmically hawking their wares on street corners. She walked along, eyes to the ground, staying close to the walls and smiling with pleasure under her lowered black veil.

For fear of being seen, she did not ordinarily take the shortest route. She plunged into dark alleys, and she emerged, sweating, at the bottom of the Rue Nationale, near the fountain there. This is the theater quarter, the district for taverns and whores. Often a wagon would pass near her, carrying some shaky piece of scenery. Waiters in aprons were scattering sand over the flagstones, between green shrubs. The area smelled of absinthe, cigars, and oysters.

She turned a corner; she recognized him by the curled hair escaping from beneath his hat.

Léon, on the sidewalk, would continue walking. She would follow him to the hotel; he would go up the steps, he would open the door, he would go in … and then, what an embrace!

And then words, after the kisses, would pour out. They would narrate all the irritations of their week, their fears, their anxieties over the letters; but now, all that was forgotten, and they would look at each other face to face, with sensuous laughter and tender names.

The bed was large, mahogany, boat-shaped. The heavy red silk curtains hung from the ceiling were bunched low by the headboard—and there was nothing in the world so beautiful as her dark hair and white skin set off against that deep red when, in a modest gesture, she would cross her naked arms and hide her face behind her hands.

The warm room with its discreet, muffling carpet, its playful ornaments, and its tranquil light seemed perfectly suited to passionate intimacy. The curtain rods ending in little arrows, their brass pegs, and the oversized balls on the andirons would flash and gleam when the sun came in. On the chimney, between the candelabra, there were two of those big pink shells in which you can hear the sea, when you hold them to your ear.

How they loved that good room full of joy, despite its somewhat faded splendor! They always found the furniture in its rightful place, and sometimes they found the hairpins that she had forgotten the previous Thursday, beneath the clock’s pedestal. They would eat by the fireside, on a little table inlaid with rosewood. Emma would carve, serve him bits on his plate with every kind of flirtatious gesture; and she would give a loud, libertine laugh when the champagne foam overflowed the glass onto the rings on her fingers. They were so completely lost in the possession of each other that they thought of the place as their own home, the place in which they would live on until they died, like two spouses eternally young. They would say “our room,” “our carpet,” “our armchairs,” and she even said “my slippers,” referring to a gift from Léon in response to a whim of hers. The slippers were pink satin, with swan’s-down borders. When she sat on his knees, her leg was too short to reach the floor, and it would dangle in the air; and the dainty little backless slipper would be held on only by the toes of her bare foot.

He was savoring for the first time in his life the inexpressible delicacies of feminine elegance. He had never encountered this refined language, this understated elegance of clothing, these poses like a sleeping dove. He marveled at the exaltation of her soul and the lace on her petticoat. And besides, was this not a woman of the world, and a married woman? In short, a real mistress?

Through her changing moods—by turns mystical or joyous, talkative, taciturn, exultant, nonchalant—she awakened in him a thousand desires, calling up instincts or memories. She was the woman in love from a thousand novels, the heroine of every drama, the vague she of all the volumes of poetry. On her shoulders, he found the amber coloring of the odalisque bathing;¹ she had the long waist of medieval chatelaines; she also resembled the pale woman of Barcelona,² but above all these, she was an Angel!

Often, as he gazed at her, it seemed to him that his soul was escaping toward her, spreading, wavelike, around the contours of her face, and then descending, being pulled down into the whiteness of her breast.

He would sit on the floor in front of her; and with both his elbows on her knees, his face upturned, he would smile at her.

She would bend down toward him and murmur, as if suffocating in her passion:

“Oh, don’t move! Don’t speak! Look at me! There’s something so sweet in your eyes, and it does me so much good!”

She would call him child:

“Child, do you love me?”

And she would scarcely hear his answer in the rush of his lips upward to her mouth.

On the clock there was a small bronze Cupid with a simpering smile, his arm crooked beneath a gilded garland. They had laughed at it many times; but when it was time for them to part, everything became serious.

Standing motionless, facing each other, they would repeat:

“Until Thursday! … Until Thursday!”

Suddenly she would take his head in her hands, kiss him quickly on the forehead while exclaiming “Farewell!” and then hurry to the stairs.

She would go to a hairdresser in the Rue de la Comédie to have her hair put in order. Night would be falling, and they would be lighting the gas lamps in the shop.

She could hear the theater bell calling the actors for the performance; and she could see, across the street, men with white faces and women in faded gowns going in the stage door.

It was hot in that little, cramped room, where the stove hummed amid the wigs and the pomades. The smell of the curling irons, along with the greasy hands handling her head, soon made her tired, and she would doze a little in her robe. Often, the man doing her hair would offer her tickets to the masked ball.

And then she would be on her way! She walked back up the streets; she arrived at the Red Cross inn; she would put her overshoes back on (which she had hidden under a bench that morning), and she would sink into her place among the impatient travelers. Some of them got out at the foot of the hill. She would remain alone in the coach.

At every bend, she could see the city lights more and more completely, as they formed a luminous vapor around the obscured houses. She would kneel on the cushions, and she would let her gaze wander over that dazzling light. She would sob, call Léon’s name, and send tender phrases out to him, along with kisses that were lost in the wind.

There was, on the hillside, a poor devil who wandered around with his cane, coming right up to the coaches. A pile of rags covered his shoulders, and a beat-up old beaver hat, round like a bowl, hid his face; but when he pulled it off, he revealed two blank, bloody orbits where there should have been eyelids. The flesh on his face peeled in red strips; and it oozed liquid matter that hardened into green scales as far down as his nose, whose black nostrils sniffed convulsively. To speak to you, he would throw his head back with an idiot’s grin—and then the bluish pupils of his eyes, constantly rolling, would beat up against his temples, at the edge of an open wound.

He would sing a little song while he followed the coaches:

Often the warmth of a beautiful day

Makes a young girl dream of love.³

And all the rest was birds, sunshine, and foliage.

Sometimes, he would appear suddenly right behind Emma, his head bared. She would recoil with a cry. Hivert would joke with him. He would suggest he open a booth at the Saint-Romain fair, or he would ask him with a laugh how his girlfriend was doing.

Often, they were moving along when his hat would fly into the coach through the window while he clung with his other arm to the footboard between the wheels spattering mud. His voice, feeble and quavering at first, would become shrill. It would echo through the night, like an indistinct lamentation over some vague distress; and coming to her across the ringing of bells, the murmur of the trees, and the rumblings of the empty vehicle, it had a far-off sound that overwhelmed Emma. It drove down into the depths of her soul like a whirlwind into an abyss and carried her along with it into a borderless, melancholy region. But Hivert, sensing a weight behind him, would lash the blind man off with sharp blows from his whip. The thong would slash into his wounds, and he would fall off into the mud with a howl.

Then the Hirondelle passengers would settle into sleep, some with their mouths open, some with their chins lowered, leaning against their neighbors’ shoulders, or with their arm passed through the strap, swaying regularly with the jolting of the coach; and the reflection of the lantern, swinging outside, above the rumps of the horses, would penetrate the interior through the chocolate-colored calico curtains, casting blood-red shadows over all the motionless people. Emma, overwhelmed with sorrow, shivered beneath her clothing and felt her feet grow colder and colder, with death in her soul.

At home, Charles would be waiting; the Hirondelle was always late on Thursdays. At last, Madame arrived! She scarcely kissed the child. Dinner was not ready—but it didn’t matter! She made excuses for the servant. Everything, it seemed, was now permitted to the girl.

Often her husband, noticing how pale she was, would ask if she didn’t feel ill.

“No,” Emma would say.

“But,” he would continue, “you seem strange this evening.”

“Oh, it’s nothing! It’s nothing!”

There were even some days when she would go directly up to her room immediately after arriving; and Justin, who happened to be there, walked around on tiptoes, more ingenious in serving her than the most excellent of maids. He would set out the matches, the candle, a book, lay out her nightdress, turn down the covers.

“Enough!” she would say. “That’s fine; run along.”

For he would remain standing there, his hands hanging and his eyes wide open, as if he were enmeshed in the complex web of some sudden reverie.

The next day was horrible, and the following ones even more intolerable as Emma’s impatience to recapture her happiness grew—a bitter lust, inflamed by remembered images that would, on the seventh day, erupt under Léon’s caresses. As for his ardors, they were concealed beneath outbursts of wonder and gratitude. Emma savored this love in a discreet but intense way, nourishing it with all the artifices of tenderness she knew, and trembling a little at the thought of losing it eventually.

She would often say to him, in a sweet, melancholic voice:

“Ah, you’ll leave me, you will! … You’ll get married! … You’ll be like all the others.”

“What others?”

“I mean men in general,” she said.

Then she added, pushing him away with a languid gesture:

“You’re all vile!”

One day when they were talking philosophically about earthly disillusionments, she said—perhaps to explore how jealous he would be, or perhaps out of too great a need to open her heart—that in the past, before him, she had loved someone. “But not like you!” she quickly added, swearing on her daughter’s head that nothing had happened.

The young man believed it, but nonetheless questioned her to find out who it had been.

“He was a ship’s captain, my dear.”

Was this not a means of preventing further inquiry, and at the same time a way of elevating herself, through this imaginary fascination that she had exercised over a man who must have been both aggressive and accustomed to dominating women?

The clerk then sensed the weakness of his position; he envied epaulettes, crosses of honor, titles. All that would surely please her; her expensive habits proved it.

Even so, Emma concealed a great many of her expensive fantasies, such as the desire to have a blue tilbury coach to take her to Rouen, drawn by an English horse, and driven by a groom with top-boots. It was Justin who had inspired this particular whim, by begging her to hire him on as her valet; and if having no tilbury in no way lessened the pleasure of her arrival at each rendezvous, it certainly did augment the bitterness of her return.

Often, when they were speaking together about Paris, she would end by murmuring:

“Ah! How happy we would be living there!”

“But aren’t we happy now?” the young man gently asked, passing his hand over her hair.

“Oh, yes, that’s true,” she would say. “I’m being foolish. Kiss me!”

For her husband, she was more charming than ever, making him pistachio creams and playing him waltzes after dinner. So he thought of himself as the happiest of mortals, and so Emma lived without any anxieties—until suddenly, one night:

“It’s Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn’t it, who gives you your lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Well! I saw her today,” Charles replied, “at Madame Liégeard’s. I talked about you to her: she doesn’t know you.”

This was like a lightning bolt. But she replied in a natural tone:

“Oh, she’s probably forgotten my name!”

“But couldn’t there be,” the doctor said, “several Mademoiselle Lempereurs in Rouen, all of them piano teachers?”

“It’s possible!”

Then, quickly:

“I’ve got her receipts here. Take a look at them!”

And she went over to the desk, rummaged through the drawers, confused all the papers and at last lost her head so completely that Charles begged her not to take so much trouble over those miserable receipts.

“Oh, I’ll find them!” she said.

In fact, on the following Friday, when Charles was putting on his boots in the dark room where his clothes were kept, he felt a piece of paper between his sock and the shoe leather; he took it out and read:

“Received, for three months of lessons and miscellaneous supplies, the sum of sixty-five francs. FÉLICIE LEMPEREUR, music teacher.”

“How the devil did this get into my boot?”

“It must have fallen out of the old box of bills, up on the edge of the shelf.”

From that moment on, her existence was nothing more than a long tissue of lies, in which she enveloped her love as if under a veil, to keep it hidden.

It was a need, a mania, a pleasure, to the point where, if she said she walked down the right side of the street yesterday, you would have to believe that she had gone down the left.

One morning when she had just left lightly dressed as she usually did, snow suddenly began to fall; and as Charles watched it out the window, he saw Monsieur Bournisien sitting in the chaise of Monsieur Tuvache, who was taking him to Rouen. So he went down and gave the cleric a thick shawl to give to Emma as soon as he arrived at the Red Cross. As soon as he got to the inn, Bournisien asked where the doctor’s wife from Yonville was. The landlady replied that she rarely came in to her establishment. That evening, when he met Madame Bovary in the Hirondelle, he told her about his problem, without seeming to attach any importance to it; for he began to praise a preacher who was doing great things at the cathedral, and who all the ladies were rushing to hear.

But no matter—if he had not asked for any explanations, others later on might be less discreet. So she thought it would be useful to get out each morning at the Red Cross, so that the good people from her village, seeing her on the staircase, would suspect nothing.

One day, however, Monsieur Lheureux met her leaving the Hotel de Boulogne on Léon’s arm; and she felt fear, imagining that he would gossip about it. He was not that stupid.

But three days later, he came into her room, closed the door, and said:

“I’m going to need some money.”

She said she couldn’t give him any. Lheureux burst into groans and reminded her of all the kindnesses he had done for her.

In fact, of the two notes signed by Charles, Emma so far had paid only one. As for the second, the merchant, at her entreaty, had agreed to replace it with two others, which had been renewed for a long period again. Then he took out of his pocket a list of goods she hadn’t paid for, to wit: the curtains, the carpet, the material for the armchairs, a number of dresses, and various clothing items, the value of which amounted to the sum of about two thousand francs.

She lowered her head; he went on:

“But if you don’t have the cash, you do have property.”

And he mentioned a miserable hovel located in Barneville, near Aumale, that brought in very little income. It had formerly been part of a little farm sold by Charles’ father—for Lheureux knew everything, from the number of acres to the names of the neighbors.

“If I were in your situation,” he said, “I’d get rid of it, and I’d have money left over.”

She objected that it would be difficult to find a buyer; he suggested he might be able to find one; but she asked him how she would be able to sell it.

“Don’t you have the power of attorney?” he replied.

The word struck her like a gust of fresh air.

“Leave me your bill,” Emma said.

“Oh! It’s not worth the trouble!” Lheureux said.

He came back the following week, boasting of having found, after a lot of trouble, a man named Langlois, who had had an eye on the property for a long time, though he hadn’t specified a price.

“The price doesn’t matter!” she cried.

On the contrary, they should wait and feel the fellow out. The thing was worth a trip there, and since she couldn’t go, he offered to go over himself to discuss it with Langlois. When he returned, he announced that the buyer proposed a price of four thousand francs.

Emma lit up at the news.

“Frankly,” he added, “it’s a good price.”

She drew out half the sum right away, and when she offered to pay off her debt, the merchant said to her:

“It pains me, word of honor, to see you deprive yourself all at once of a sum as consequential as that.”

Then she gazed at the bank notes; and, dreaming of the number of lovers’ meetings that those two thousand francs represented:

“What! What!” she stammered.

“Oh,” he replied, laughing in a good-natured tone, “you can put any numbers you like on the sales receipts! Don’t you think I know all about household management?”

And he looked at her fixedly, while he held in his hand two long sheets of paper, sliding his nails over them. At last, opening his pocketbook, he spread out on the table four promissory notes, of a thousand francs each.

“Sign these for me,” he said, “and you can keep it all.”

She cried out, shocked.

“But if I give you the surplus,” Monsieur Lheureux replied shamelessly, “isn’t that doing you a service?”

And taking a pen, he wrote at the bottom of the account: “Received from Madame Bovary, four thousand francs.”

“What is there to worry about, since you’ll get the remaining payment on your cottage in six months, and I’ll set up your due date for after that?”

Emma was growing a little confused by these calculations, and her ears were ringing as if the gold pieces had burst out of their sacks and were jingling all around her on the floor. Then Lheureux explained that he had a friend, Vinçart, a banker in Rouen, who would discount the four notes, and then he would remit to Madame the surplus of the real debt.

But, instead of two thousand francs, he brought her only eighteen hundred, because friend Vinçart had taken two hundred for his commission and expenses (as was only fair).

Then he nonchalantly asked for a receipt.

“You understand … in business … sometimes. And with the date, please, the date.”

A horizon then opened up before Emma, of fantasies she could now make come true. She had enough prudence to set aside three thousand francs, with which the first three notes were paid, when they matured; but the fourth, by chance, came to the house on a Thursday, and Charles, stunned, waited patiently for his wife to return and give him some explanation.

The only reason she had not told him about this bill was to spare him from domestic worries; she sat on his knees, caressed him, cooed, and gave him a long list of all the essential things that had been purchased on credit.

“When it’s all said and done, you have to admit that, considering the quantity of things, it really wasn’t too expensive.”

Charles, at his wits’ end, soon had recourse to the inevitable Lheureux, who assured him he could smooth everything out if Monsieur would sign two notes, one of which was for seven hundred francs, payable in three months. In order to be able to meet this, he wrote a pathetic letter to his mother. Instead of mailing a reply, she came in person; and when Emma asked him if he had managed to get anything out of her:

“Yes,” he replied. “But she wants to see the account.”

The next day at dawn, Emma ran to Lheureux’s to beg him to make out another note, of no more than a thousand francs; because, in order to show the one for four thousand, she would have to say she had paid two thirds of it, and that would entail her having to tell them that she had sold the property, a business deal carried out so quietly by the merchant that it didn’t come to light until later.

Despite the low prices paid for each individual article purchased, Madame Bovary senior did not fail to point out the extravagance of it all.

“Couldn’t she do without a carpet? Why did the armchairs have to be recovered? In my day, a house had one armchair, for elderly people—at least that’s the way it was at my mother’s, and she was an honest woman, I can assure you.—Everybody can’t be rich! No fortune can survive wastefulness! I would blush if I pampered myself the way you do! And look at me, I’m an old woman, I need attention … And here! Here, alterations, frills! What! Silk for linings for two francs!—when you can get cotton for ten sous, or even eight sous, and it will do perfectly well!”

Emma, lying on the couch, replied in as tranquil a tone as possible:

“Oh, Madame! Enough! Enough!”

The other continued to lecture her, predicting that they would all end up in the poorhouse. Besides, it was all Bovary’s fault. Fortunately, though, he had promised to destroy that power of attorney …

“What?”

“Ah! He promised me,” the good woman replied.

Emma opened the window, called Charles in, and the poor man was obliged to admit that his mother had forced him to promise.

Emma disappeared, then quickly came back in, majestically holding out a thick sheet of paper to her.

“Thank you,” said the old woman.

And she threw the power of attorney into the fire.

Emma began to laugh a shrill, piercing, prolonged laugh: she was having a nervous attack.

“Oh, my God!” Charles cried. “It’s your fault too! You come here just to make scenes!”

His mother, shrugging her shoulders, insisted that all this was just playacting.

But Charles, rebelling for the first time, took up his wife’s defense, so strongly that Madame Bovary senior wanted to leave. She left the next morning, and when, on the threshold, he tried to make her stay, she replied:

“No, no! You love her more than me, and that’s the way it should be; it’s natural. As for everything else, so much the worse! You’ll see! Good day to you—because I’m not going to stay, as you put it, just to make scenes.”

This did not make Charles any the less sheepish around Emma, who by no means hid the resentment she felt toward him for lacking trust in her; and it took him a great deal of begging before she would consent to signing another power of attorney, and he even accompanied her to Monsieur Guillaumin’s to have a second one drawn up, just like the first.

“I can understand this,” said the notary. “A man of science can’t let himself be bothered with the practical details of life.”

And Charles was soothed by this unctuous observation, which lent to his weakness the flattering appearance of a preoccupation with higher things.

What an outburst, the next Thursday, at the hotel, in their room, with Léon! She laughed, wept, sang, danced, had sherbets sent up, wanted to smoke cigarettes—and she seemed excessive to him, but adorable, superb.

He did not know what reaction was at work within her that made her throw her whole being into the pleasures of life. She was becoming irritable, gluttonous, and voluptuous; and she would walk out with him in the streets, head held high, unafraid, she would declare, of compromising herself. Sometimes, however, she would shudder at the sudden thought of encountering Rodolphe; for it seemed to her, though they had separated forever, that she was not entirely free of her attachment to him.

One evening, she did not return at all to Yonville. Charles lost his head, and little Berthe, not wanting to go to bed without her mama, sobbed as if her heart were breaking. Justin had gone out to wander aimlessly along the road. Monsieur Homais even left his pharmacy.

Finally, at eleven o’clock, Charles harnessed up his chaise, leaped in, whipped his horse, and arrived at about two in the morning at the Red Cross inn. No one. He thought that perhaps the clerk had seen her; but where did he live? Luckily, Charles remembered the address of his employer. He raced there.

Day was beginning to break. He made out the sign over a door; he knocked. Someone, without opening the door, shouted out the information he asked for, while adding to it a number of curses on the kind of people who bothered others during the night.

The house where the clerk lived had neither a bell, nor a knocker, nor a porter. Charles banged loudly on the shutters with his fists. A policeman passed by; then he was afraid, and he left.

“I’m insane,” he said to himself. “They must have kept her after dinner at Monsieur Lormeaux’s house.”

The Lormeaux family no longer lived in Rouen.

“She must have stayed to care for Madame Dubreuil. Oh! Madame Dubreuil has been dead for ten months! Where is she?”

An idea struck him. He asked in a café for the Annuaire directory, and quickly found the name of Mademoiselle Lempereur, who lived at 74 Rue de la Renelle-des-Maroquiniers.

Just as he turned into that street, Emma herself appeared at the other end; he did not so much embrace her as throw himself upon her, crying:

“What kept you yesterday?”

“I was sick.”

“Sick? What was it? Where?”

She passed her hand over her forehead and answered:

“At Mademoiselle Lempereur’s.”

“I knew it! I was just going there.”

“Oh, it’s not worth the trouble,” said Emma. “She has just gone out; but in the future, calm yourself down. How can I be free, don’t you understand, if being the slightest bit late throws you into such a state?”

This was a way of giving herself permission not to trouble herself about her escapades. And she made full and free use of it. Whenever she felt a desire to see Léon, she left under any pretext at all, and if it was on a day he wasn’t expecting her, she would go seek him out at his office.

This was a great pleasure, the first few times; but soon he no longer hid the truth from her: that his employer complained vigorously about these interruptions.

“Bah! Come along,” she would say.

And he would slip away.

She wanted him to dress all in black and to grow a pointed beard, so as to look like the portraits of Louis XIII. She wanted to see his lodgings, and found them mediocre; he blushed, she took no notice of it, and then she advised him to buy some curtains like her own, and when he objected to the expense:

“Ah, ah! You’re holding on tight to your little francs!” she said, laughing.

Every time, Léon had to tell her everything he had done since their last meeting. She asked for a poem, a poem for her, a love poem in her honor; he could never find a rhyme for the second line, and ultimately he copied out a sonnet from a keepsake book.

This was less out of vanity than for the sole aim of pleasing her. He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he became her mistress more than she was his. She had tender words and kisses that swept his soul away. But where had she learned this corruption, so profound and so deeply disguised that it seemed almost spiritual?

1. The odalisque bathing probably refers to Ingres’ painting, La Grande Odalisque (1814), but similar Orientalized nudes were popular in the era.

2. As with the odalisque bathing, Flaubert seems deliberately to have Léon use an incorrect, or rather a generalized title: the reference here is to Alfred de Musset’s 1830 poem, “L’Andalouse.”

3. Flaubert adapts “Edmond’s Song” (“La Chanson d’Edmond”) by Restif de la Bretonne (1734–1806). Restif’s works—novels, poetry, social commentary, and autobiography—often involve an argument for greater sexual freedom.

CHAPTER 6

On the trips he made to see her, Léon often dined at the pharmacist’s, and he felt obliged, out of politeness, to invite him in return.

“Gladly!” Monsieur Homais had replied. “Anyway, I really ought to dip my toe into the outside world a bit, because I’m getting into a rut here. We’ll go to the theater, to a restaurant, we’ll get a little wild!”

“Oh, my dear,” Madame Homais murmured tenderly, feeling fearful of the vague perils he was proposing to risk.

“Well, what? Don’t you think I’m endangering my health by living every day with the emanations in this pharmacy? There you have it, the character of women: they’re jealous of Science, but at the same time they’re opposed to the most legitimate distractions. But never mind: you can count on me; one of these days I’ll roll into Rouen, and we’ll go out and throw some money around!”

The pharmacist would normally have taken care never to use such an expression: but now he wanted to sound frolicsome and Parisian, which he thought to be in the best of taste; and like Madame Bovary, his neighbor, he questioned the clerk curiously about the customs in the capital, and he even talked enough slang to dazzle—at least, to dazzle the bourgeois of Yonville, saying turne, bazar, chicard, chicandard, Breda-Street,¹ and “I’m cutting out,” to mean I’m leaving.

So one Thursday, Emma was surprised to encounter Monsieur Homais in the Golden Lion’s kitchen, wearing traveler’s clothes, that is to say, covered in an old cloak no one had seen before, carrying a valise in one hand and the pharmacy’s foot warmer in the other. He had told no one about his planned trip, out of concern that the public might be uneasy if they knew he was out of town.

The idea of revisiting the places where he had spent his youth was no doubt a thrill for him, because he didn’t stop talking for the entire journey; and then, as soon as they arrived, he leaped out of the coach to go in search of Léon; the clerk’s protests were in vain, as Monsieur Homais dragged him to the big Normandie café, which he entered with a stately air, without removing his hat, thinking it too provincial to be seen bareheaded in a public place.

Emma waited for Léon for three-quarters of an hour. Finally she ran to his office; and then, confusedly proposing every sort of explanation to herself, accusing him inwardly of indifference to her, reproaching herself for her weakness, she passed the afternoon with her head pressed against the windowpanes.

At two o’clock, the two men were still sitting across from each other at the table. The large dining room was emptying out; the stove pipe, designed to look like a palm tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling; near them, through the café window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain of water gurgled in a marble basin where, among the watercress and the asparagus, three somnolent lobsters were stretching their claws toward the quail, piled in a heap on both sides of them.

Homais was enjoying himself. Although he was more drunk from the luxury than from the rich fare, the Pomard wine nonetheless had overstimulated his brain a bit, and by the time the omelet au rhum arrived, he was propounding immoral theories about women. The one thing above all others that always seduced him was chic. He adored an elegantly dressed woman in the setting of a beautifully furnished apartment, and as to the physical aspects, he wouldn’t say no to a nice piece.

Léon watched the clock in despair. The pharmacist continued to drink, eat, talk.

“You must feel pretty deprived,” he suddenly said, “here in Rouen. But after all, your lover doesn’t live that far away.”

And, when the other blushed:

“Come on, tell the truth! Would you deny that in Yonville …”

The young man began to stammer.

“At Madame Bovary’s, you weren’t courting … ?”

“Who was I courting?”

“The maid!”

He wasn’t joking; but his vanity overcoming his prudence, Léon, despite himself, protested. And anyway, he only liked brunettes.

“I approve,” the pharmacist said. “They’re more passionate.”²

And bending toward his friend’s ear, he listed the symptoms by which one could recognize a passionate woman. He even launched into an ethnographic digression: German women were nervous, French ones libertine, Italians hot-tempered.

“And Negresses?” asked the clerk.

“Artists like them,” said Homais. “Waiter! Two demitasses!”

“Shall we leave?” Léon impatiently said at last.

“Yes,” Homais said in English.

But before leaving, he wanted to see the manager of the establishment and offer him a few compliments.

Then the young man, in order to be left alone, claimed that he had some business to attend to.

“Ah! I’ll go along with you!” Homais said.

And as he walked along the streets with him, he talked about his wife, his children, their future, and his pharmacy, describing the decayed state it used to be in and the point of perfection to which he had now raised it.

Arriving in front of the Hotel de Boulogne, Léon brusquely left him, raced up the stairs, and found his mistress in a highly emotional state.

At the pharmacist’s name, she flew into a rage. However, he listed a series of good reasons; it wasn’t his fault, didn’t she know Monsieur Homais? Could she possibly believe he preferred his company? But she turned away from him; he drew her back; and sinking down on his knees, he put both arms around her waist in a languorous pose that combined sensuality and supplication.

She was standing up; her great flashing eyes glared at him intensely, almost frighteningly. Then tears clouded them, her reddened eyelids lowered, she held her hands out to him, and Léon was bringing them up to his mouth when a servant appeared, saying that Monsieur was being asked for.

“You’re going to come back?” she said.

“Yes.”

“But when?”

“Right away.”

“It’s a trick,” the pharmacist said when he saw Léon. “I wanted to interrupt this visit, because I could tell it annoyed you. Let’s go to Bridoux’s and have a glass of garus³ to settle our stomachs.”

Léon swore that he had to get back to his office. Then the pharmacist made jokes about paper-pushers and the law.

“Leave Cujas and Barthole⁴ for a while, what the devil! What’s to stop you? Have some backbone! Let’s go to Bridoux’s; you’ll get to see his dog. It’s extremely curious!”

And when the clerk continued to insist:

“All right, I’ll come along with you. I’ll read a paper while I wait for you, or maybe I’ll leaf through a law book.”

Léon, stunned by Emma’s anger, the chatter of Monsieur Homais, and perhaps the heavy lunch, remained undecided, almost as if he were under a spell cast by the pharmacist, who kept repeating:

“Let’s go to Bridoux’s! It’s just a few steps from here, on the Rue Malpalu.”

Then, whether out of cowardice, or out of stupidity, or out of that inexplicable feeling that leads us into doing the things we least want to do, he let himself be taken to Bridoux’s; and they found him in his small courtyard, overseeing three workmen who were panting as they turned the big wheel of a machine for making seltzer water. Homais gave them some advice; he embraced Bridoux; they had their drinks. Twenty times, Léon wanted to leave; but the other would seize him by the arm, saying:

“In a minute! I’m leaving. We’ll go to the Rouen Lantern to see the gentlemen there. I’ll introduce you to Thomassin.”

But he managed to get rid of him and ran immediately to the hotel. Emma was no longer there.

She had just left, infuriated. She hated him now. This failure to keep his word about their rendezvous seemed an insult to her, and she was trying to think of other reasons to break it off with him: he was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spineless than a woman, a tightwad besides, and cowardly.

Then, when she calmed down, she decided that she had in fact slandered him unjustly. But when we disparage those we love, we begin to detach ourselves from them a little. Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.

They gradually began to talk more often of things other than their love; and in the letters Emma sent him, it was always a matter of flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, all the naïve resources that a weakening passion employs in trying to revive itself through external props. She always promised herself that her next trip would bring her a profound happiness; but then she would have to admit that she had felt nothing extraordinary. The disillusionment would be erased by a new hope, and Emma would return to him more impassioned, more ardent. She would undress brutally, tearing off the thin laces of her corset, which would hiss like a snake as it slipped over her hips. She would tiptoe, barefoot, to check once more that the door was locked, and then, with a single gesture, she would throw all her clothes off—and pale, unspeaking, unsmiling, she would throw herself against his chest with a long shudder.

But upon that forehead with its droplets of cold sweat, on those quivering lips, within those wild eyes, in the embrace of those arms, there was something extreme, something indefinite and mournful that Léon felt subtly slipping between them, as if to separate them.

He dared not question her; but perceiving how experienced she was, he said to himself that she must have known every excess of pain and pleasure. What had at first charmed him now frightened him a little. Moreover, he was rebelling against the way her personality, more and more every day, was absorbing his own. He resented Emma’s permanent dominance. He forced himself to care less about her; then, at the creaking of her boots, he felt his cowardice return, the way drunkards do at the sight of hard liquor.

But it is true too that she never failed to lavish every kind of attention on him, from the fine foods she chose, to the flirtatious clothes she wore, to the languorous looks she cast at him. She brought roses from Yonville, holding them next to her breast, and she would toss them at his face; she showed great concern over his health, gave him advice on how to conduct himself, and in order to keep her hold over him—perhaps in the hope that heaven would step in—she put a medal of the Virgin around his neck. Like a virtuous mother, she asked about his friends. She said to him:

“Don’t see them, don’t go out, think only of us, love me!”

She wanted to be able to keep a close watch on his life, and she considered the idea of having him followed in the streets. There was always a kind of tramp near the hotel who accosted the travelers, and he would probably agree to it … But her pride revolted at this finally.

“Well, so what then! Let him cheat on me, what’s the difference! Why should I care?”

One day when they had parted early, and she was walking back alone on the boulevard, she saw the outer walls of her old convent school; she sat down on a bench, in the shade of the elm trees. How peaceful those days were! How she missed those ineffable feelings about love that she had tried to imagine from books!

The first months of her marriage, horseback rides through the forest, the Viscount who waltzed with her, and Lagardy singing, all of it passed before her eyes … And Léon suddenly appeared to her, but just as far away as the others.

“But I do love him!” she said to herself.

What does it matter! She was not happy, had never been. Where did it come from, this insufficiency in life, this immediate corruption of everything she tried to lean on? But if there really existed somewhere a strong, beautiful being, brave and capable of both exaltation and refinement, with the heart of a poet in the form of an angel, a lyre whose ethereal strings sang out elegiac nuptial songs to the heavens—why, why could she not find him? Oh, how impossible it all was! Nothing was worth all the struggle of such a search; everything was a lie! Every smile hid beneath it a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, every pleasure its disgust, and the finest kisses only left on your lips the impossible desire for an even greater sensuality.

A metallic groan sounded through the air, and the convent clock rang out four strokes. Four o’clock! And she felt that she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. But we can feel an infinity of passions in a moment, like a crowd in a little space.

Emma lived wholly preoccupied with her own passions, and she bothered no more about money than an archduchess.

One time, however, a scrawny looking man, ruddy and bald, came into her home, saying he had been sent by Monsieur Vinçart from Rouen. He removed the pins that held together the side pocket of his long green coat, stuck them in his cuff, and politely handed her a paper.

It was a bill for seven hundred francs, signed by her, which Lheureux had passed on to Vinçart despite all her objections.

She sent a servant to fetch him. He could not come.

Then the stranger, who had remained standing and looking around curiously to the right and the left, though his glances were partly hidden by his thick blonde eyebrows, asked innocently:

“What reply should I take to Monsieur Vinçart?”

“All right!” Emma answered. “Tell him … that I don’t have it … It will be next week … Ask him to wait … yes, next week.”

And the man went off without saying a word.

But the next day at noon, she received a formal protest of nonpayment; and the sight of the stamped paper, on which was written several times in large letters, “Maître Hareng, bailiff of Buchy,” so frightened her that she ran as fast as she could to the dry-goods merchant.

She found him in his shop, in the process of tying up a parcel.

“Your servant!” he said. “I’m all yours.”

But Lheureux nevertheless did not stop what he was doing, assisted by a girl of around thirteen years of age, slightly hunchbacked, who worked as both his clerk and his cook.

Then, making his clogs clomp loudly across the shop floor, he led Madame up to the second floor, and brought her into a narrow office where a pine desk held several ledgers, protected by a crosswise padlocked iron bar. Against the wall, beneath some calico samples, was a safe so unusually large that it had to contain something other than bills and money. Monsieur Lheureux was in fact also something of a pawnbroker, and it was there that he kept Madame Bovary’s gold chain, along with the earrings of poor old Tellier, who, having finally been forced to sell out, had bought a tiny grocery store in Quincampoix, where he was currently dying of his catarrh among candles less yellow than his own face.

Lheureux seated himself on his large cane armchair, saying:

“What’s the news?”

“Look.”

And she handed him the paper.

“Well! What can I do about it?”

At that, she flew into a rage, reminding him of his promise not to sell her promissory notes; he admitted it.

“But I was forced to do it; the knife was at my throat.”

“And what’s going to happen now?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s very simple: a legal judgment, then a seizure of goods, and then—nothing more to it!”

Emma had to restrain herself from striking him. She quietly asked if there wasn’t some way to calm Vinçart down.

“Oh, sure! Calm Vinçart down; you don’t know him; he’s fiercer than an Arab.”

Still, Monsieur Lheureux simply had to help her out.

“Look, it seems to me that, up to now, I’ve been good enough to you!”

And, opening up his ledger:

“Look at this!”

Then, running his finger up the page:

“Let’s see … Let’s see … August 3rd, two hundred francs … June 17th, a hundred and fifty … March 23rd, forty-six … In April …”

He stopped, as if afraid of being at all imprecise.

“And I’m not even mentioning the notes signed by Monsieur, one for seven hundred francs, another for three hundred! As for your little payments, with interest, there’s no end to them, they’d completely confuse a person. I’ll have nothing more to do with it!”

She wept, she even called him “my good Monsieur Lheureux.” But he kept referring to “that bulldog Vinçart.” In any case, he himself didn’t have a centime; nobody was paying him; they were stealing the clothes off his back; a poor shopkeeper like him couldn’t be advancing money to people.

Emma said nothing; and Monsieur Lheureux, who was chewing on the feathers of his quill, evidently grew uneasy with her silence, for he continued:

“At least, if one of these days I had some cash coming in … I could …”

“Besides, once the rest of the Barneville payments …”

“What?”

And when he learned that Langlois had not yet paid in full, he seemed very surprised. Then, in a honeyed voice:

“And we can agree, you say …”

“Oh! Anything you want!”

Then he closed his eyes to think, wrote down a few figures, and declaring that all this was very bad for him, that the whole thing was very complicated and that people were bleeding him, he wrote out four notes of two hundred and fifty francs apiece, their due dates spaced out at one per month.

“Provided that Vinçart will be willing to listen to me! But otherwise, it’s all settled. I don’t play games. I’m as straight as an arrow.”

He then went on nonchalantly to show a few new items he had for sale, none of which, in his opinion, was worthy of Madame.

“When I think that this is supposedly dress quality at seven sous a meter, and guaranteed to be colorfast! And they’ll believe it! Of course, I don’t tell them what it really is, you understand”—intending, by this confession of his dishonesty to others, to convince her of his honesty toward her.

Then he called her back, to show her three yards of lace that he had recently come across “at a sale.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Lheureux said. “People use this nowadays to protect armchairs; it’s quite in style.”

And as swiftly as a juggler, he wrapped the lace up in blue paper and put it into Emma’s hands.

“But at least tell me … ”

“Oh! Some other time,” he said, turning away.

That evening, she pressed Bovary to write to his mother so that she would send them the rest of the inheritance quickly. The mother-in-law replied that there was nothing more: the liquidation was finished, and all that remained, apart from Barneville, was six hundred francs in rents, which she would send to them punctually.

Madame then sent bills to three or four of Charles’ patients, and soon was using this method frequently, as it had some success. She was always careful to add as a postscript: “Don’t mention this to my husband, for you know how proud he is … Please pardon me … Your servant …” There were a few complaints; she intercepted them.

To raise money, she began to sell her old gloves, her old hats, old household items; and she bargained ruthlessly—her peasant blood coming to her aid. Then, in her trips to the city, she would pick up trinkets that Monsieur Lheureux, if no one else, would surely buy from her. She bought some ostrich feathers, some Chinese porcelain, some chests; she borrowed from Félicité, from Madame Lefrançois, from the innkeeper at the Red Cross, from everybody, no matter where. With the money that she finally got for Barneville, she paid off two of the notes; the other fifteen hundred francs flew away. She renewed the notes, and so it went on!

Sometimes, it’s true, she tried to do some calculations, but the sums she came up with were so exorbitant that she couldn’t believe they were correct. Then she would try again, quickly become confused, stop trying, and think no more about it.

The house was sad enough, nowadays! Tradesmen were seen leaving it with angry looks on their faces. There were handkerchiefs left lying on the stoves, and little Berthe, to the great scandal of Madame Homais, was wearing stockings with holes in them. If Charles timidly ventured some remark about it, she would respond brutally that it wasn’t her fault!

Why these fits of anger? He attributed it all to her old nervous illness; and reproaching himself for having taken her infirmities for faults, he accused himself of egoism, and felt like running over to embrace her.

“Oh, no,” he would say to himself, “I’d only annoy her.”

And he stayed where he was.

After dinner, he would walk alone in the garden; he would put little Berthe on his knees and, using his medical journal, try to teach her to read. The child, who never had any schooling, lost no time in opening her big sad eyes wide and beginning to cry. Then he would comfort her; he would go fill her watering can so she could make rivers in the sand, or break off branches from the privet hedge to plant little trees in the flower beds—none of which did the garden any harm, overgrown with weeds as it had become; they owed too much back pay to Lestiboudois! Then the child would feel cold and ask for her mother.

“Call your nanny,” Charles would say. “You know, little one, that Mama doesn’t like to be disturbed.”

Autumn began, and already the leaves were falling—it’s been two years since her illness! When will all this end! And he would continue to pace, his hands behind his back.

Madame was in her room. No one went up there. She stayed there all day long, drowsing, half-dressed, and from time to time burning incense that she had bought in Rouen, in an Algerian’s shop. To rid herself of that man who slept stretched out next to her every night, she complained long enough that she got him to move up to the third floor; and she would stay up all night reading extravagant books depicting orgies and bloody events. Sometimes a sudden terror would seize her, and she would cry out. Charles would come running.

“Oh, go away!” she would say.

Or, at other times, burning more intensely from that inner, intimate flame that adultery had awakened in her, breathless and impassioned and filled with desire, she would open her window, breathe in the cool air, shake her too-heavy hair loose in the wind, and looking up at the stars, wish for the love of a prince. She thought of him, of Léon. At such a moment she would have given everything for just one of those meetings that sated her.

Those were her gala days. She wanted them to be splendid! And when he wasn’t able to pay for everything, she made up the difference liberally, which happened just about every time. He tried to make her understand that they would do just as well elsewhere, in some more modest hotel; but she always found objections.

One day she took six small silver spoons out of her bag (they were a wedding present from her father, Rouault), and begged him to take them right away, for her, to a pawnshop; and Léon obeyed, even though he disliked the task. He feared compromising himself.

Later, upon reflection, he considered that his mistress’ behavior was becoming too strange, and that perhaps the people who wanted him to leave her were not so wrong.

In fact, someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter, letting her know that her son was ruining himself with a married woman; and the good woman, immediately seeing before her that eternal specter of respectable families, that is to say that vague, pernicious creature the siren, the fantastical monster that lurks in the depths of love, wrote off to Maître Dubocage, his employer, who played his role perfectly. He lectured him for three-quarters of an hour, trying to open his eyes, to warn him away from the abyss. Such an intrigue eventually would do damage to his future. He begged him to break with her, and if he wouldn’t make this sacrifice for his own self-interest, would he please do it for him, for Dubocage!

Léon finally swore not to see Emma again; and he reproached himself for not keeping his word, considering all the difficulties and the sermons that seeing this woman could draw down upon him, not to mention the jokes his friends made as they sat around the stove every morning. Besides, he was about to be made chief clerk: this was the time to get serious. And so he gave up his flute, his exalted feelings, his poetic imaginings— for every bourgeois, in the heat of his youth, has believed himself capable of immense passions and high enterprises, even if only for a day or a minute. The cheapest libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary carries within himself the debris of a poet.

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob against his chest; and his heart—like those people who can only endure a certain amount of music—slept, indifferent now to the frantic sounds made by a love whose subtle delights he no longer noticed.

They knew each other too well by now for any of those sensual surprises that multiply the joy of possession. She was as disgusted with him as he was tired of her. Emma was discovering in adultery all the dreary monotonies of marriage.

But how to get rid of him? For even though she felt humiliated by the baseness of such happiness, she still hung on to it, whether out of habit or out of corruption; and every day she clung to it even more, withering up every joy by wishing it were a greater joy. She blamed Léon for her disappointed hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even wished for some catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she lacked the courage to act on it herself.

Nevertheless she continued to write him love letters, on the principle that a woman must always write to her lover.

But in writing to him, she pictured another man, a phantom made up of her most ardent memories, her most beautiful books, her most powerful desires; and he became in the end so real, so accessible that she trembled with wonder, though she was unable to picture him clearly, so lost was he, like a god, under the abundance of his attributes. He inhabited that bluish country where silk ladders sway from balconies, in the soft breath of the flowers, in the bright moonlight. She felt him close to her; he was going to come and sweep her away entirely in a kiss. Then she fell back to the flat earth, broken; for these vague ecstasies of love fatigued her more than actual debauchery.

She now was feeling a constant ache all over her. Often, she received summonses on stamped, official paper, and she would scarcely glance at them. She wanted to be done with living, or to sleep endlessly.

On the day of Mid-Lent, she did not return to Yonville; she went that evening to a masked ball. She went wearing velvet trousers and red stockings, with a pony-tailed wig and a cocked hat tilted over one ear. She danced all night to the raging sound of the trombones; people formed a circle around her; and in the morning she found herself in front of the theater’s entrance among five or six partiers in masks, women dressed like longshoremen or sailors, some of Léon’s friends, who were talking about going to find something to eat.

The nearby cafés were full. They found one of the most mediocre restaurants on the harbor, where the proprietor opened up a little room for them on the fifth floor.

The men were whispering in a corner, no doubt consulting about money. There was a clerk, two medical students, and a shop worker: what company for her! As for the women, Emma quickly perceived that they were almost all of the lowest order of society. She felt fear then, pushed herself back in her chair, and cast down her eyes.

The others began to eat. She did not eat; her forehead was on fire, her eyelids were stinging, and her skin felt as cold as ice. She felt, within her head, the floorboards at the dance, rebounding under the rhythmic pulses of a thousand dancing feet. And soon the smell of the punch together with the cigar smoke made her dizzy. She fainted: they carried her over to the window.

Day was breaking, and a large smear of purple was widening in the white sky over Saint-Catherine’s Hill. The pale river shimmered in the wind; there was no one on the bridges; the streetlights were going out.

Meanwhile, she revived, and began to think of Berthe, who was sleeping far away, in the maid’s room. But a cart carrying long strips of iron passed by, making a deafening metallic vibration against the walls.

She abruptly slipped out, getting rid of her costume, saying to Léon that she had to go back, and finally was alone at the Hotel de Boulogne. Everything, including herself, was unendurable. She wished she could escape like a bird, go somewhere and recover her youth, somewhere far away in the immaculate regions.

She went out, crossed the boulevard, the Place Cauchoise and the outskirts of the city, as far as an open street that overlooked some gardens. She walked swiftly, the fresh air calming her: and little by little the faces in the crowd, the masks, the quadrilles, the lights, the supper, those women, all disappeared like a fog carried off by the wind. Then, returning to the Red Cross, she threw herself in her bed, in the little room on the third floor with the pictures of the Tour de Nesle. At four o’clock, Hivert awakened her.

When she got back home, Félicité showed her a gray paper document hidden behind the clock:

“By virtue of the seizure, following the legal judgment …”

What judgment? The previous day, in fact, they had delivered another document that she hadn’t seen; and she was stupefied by these words:

“By the order of the king, the law, and justice, to Madame Bovary …”

Then, skipping down several lines, she read:

“Within twenty-four hours without delay.” But what? “To pay the total sum of eight thousand francs.” And then, farther down: “She shall be constrained thereunto by the power of the law, and specifically by the seizure of her furniture and effects.”

What to do? It said within twenty-four hours: tomorrow! Lheureux, she thought, was trying to frighten her again; for she could see right through all his maneuvers, see the real goal of all his kind indulgences. The one thing that reassured her was the exaggerated sum.

However, as a result of all her buying and not paying, her borrowing, her signing promissory notes and then renewals of them that grew larger every time, she had ended up building up a nice capital sum for Lheureux, who was patiently awaiting the payout on his speculations.

She arrived at his shop with a casual air.

“Do you know what’s happened to me? It must be some kind of joke!”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

He turned away from her slowly, and folding his arms, said to her:

“Did you think, my little lady, that I was going to be your provider and banker till the end of time, and all for the love of God? I have to get back what I’ve laid out, let’s be fair!”

She protested the amount of the debt.

“Oh, that’s too bad! The court has recognized it! There’s a judgment against you! You’ve been notified! And anyway, it isn’t me, it’s Vinçart.”

“But can’t you …”

“Oh no—nothing at all.”

“But surely … let’s discuss it.”

And she began to flail about; she hadn’t known … it was a surprise …

“Whose fault is that?” said Lheureux, bowing to her ironically. “Look at me: all the time I’m slaving away like a Black while you’re out having fine times.”

“Oh, don’t lecture me!”

“It wouldn’t hurt,” he replied.

She turned cowardly, she begged him; and she even laid her pretty white hand on the merchant’s knees.

“Leave me alone! A person would think you wanted to seduce me.”

“You’re terrible!” she cried.

“Oh, my, how you do carry on!” he answered with a laugh.

“I’ll tell people what you are. I’ll tell my husband …”

“Fine! As for me, I have something to show your husband!”

And Lheureux pulled out of his safe a receipt for eighteen hundred francs, which she had given him when Vinçart discounted the note.

“Do you really think,” he added, “that he won’t understand this little theft of yours, the poor dear man?”

She sank back, more stunned than if he had struck her with a club. He was walking back and forth between the window and the desk, repeating to himself:

“Oh yes, I’ll show it all to him … I’ll show it all to him …”

Then he came over to her and said, in a more gentle voice:

“I know, it isn’t pleasant; but after all, nobody’s died, and since this is the only way you have to get me my money …”

“But where am I going to find it?” said Emma, wringing her hands.

“Bah! When a person has friends like you do!”

And he gave her such a knowing and such a terrible look that she shuddered to the depths of her being.

“I promise you,” she said, “that I’ll sign …”

“I’ve had enough of your signatures!”

“I’ll sell …”

“Come on!” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “You don’t have anything left to sell.”

And he called through the peephole that looked down into the shop:

“Annette! Don’t forget those three samples of number 14.”

The servant appeared; Emma understood, and asked, “how much money it would take to stop all these proceedings.”

“It’s too late!”

“But if I were to bring you several thousand francs, a quarter of the sum, a third, almost all of it?”

“No, no, it’s a waste of time.”

He pushed her gently toward the staircase.

“I beg you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few more days!”

She was sobbing.

“Oh of course, tears now!”

“You’re making me desperate!”

“I couldn’t care less!” he said, closing the door on her.

1. Most of Homais’ terms are obsolete slang, but turne is still informal slang for a room, and bazar is still sometimes used to refer to a mess; chicard and chicandard are noun versions of “chic”; Breda-Street is an anglicized way (because most things English were chic in mid-century France) of referring to the Rue Breda in Montmartre, then a bohemian district. The final obsolete French phrase, translated here as “I’m cutting out,” is “je me la casse,” or literally, “I’m breaking it.”

2. Much of Homais’ conversation in this sequence is riddled with the inane clichés that Flaubert collected for his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (Dictionnaire des idées recues). There, under “Brunettes,” we read “Hotter than blonds. (See Blonds).” Under “Blonds,” we read “Hotter than brunettes” (The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, trans. Jacques Barzun [NY: New Directions, 1968]).

3. Garus elixir is an alcohol-based tonic.

4. Cujas and Barthole were virtually synonyms for eternally arguing lawyers. Barthole (Bartolo de Sassoferrato) was a fourteenth-century Italian legal thinker, and Jacques Cujas was a sixteenth-century French one who argued eloquently against the earlier writer’s ideas. The Cujas/Barthole allusion was another cliché included in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

CHAPTER 7

She was stoical the next day when Maître Hareng, the bailiff, along with his two witnesses, arrived at her house to draw up the inventory for the seizure.

They began with Bovary’s consulting room, but didn’t note down the phrenological head, which was considered an instrument of his profession; but they did go into the kitchen and count the plates, the saucepans, the chairs, the candlesticks, and all the trinkets on the shelves in the bedroom. They examined her dresses, the linen, the dressing room; and her whole existence, right down to its most intimate details, was spread out before these three men like a corpse for an autopsy.

Maître Hareng, buttoned up in his thin black coat, with a white cravat and very tight bootstraps, repeated from time to time:

“With your permission, Madame? With your permission?”

Often, he made little exclamations:

“Charming! … How pretty!”

Then he would return to writing, dipping his pen into the inkwell he carried in his left hand.

When they had finished with the rooms, they went up to the attic.

She kept a desk up there, in which she had hidden Rodolphe’s letters. It had to be opened.

“Ah! A correspondence,” Maître Hareng said with a discreet smile. “But, permit me! Because I must be sure the box contains nothing else.”

And he tilted the letters, lightly, as if to make gold coins fall out of them. At that point she was seized with indignation, watching that fat hand with its red fingers, as soft as slugs, touching the pages that had made her heart throb.

At last they left! Félicité came back in. Emma had sent her out to keep an eye out for Bovary; and they quickly installed the bailiff’s watchman in the attic, where he promised to remain.

Emma thought that Charles seemed worried that evening. She watched him with an anguished look, thinking she could see accusations in the lines of his face. Then, when her eyes fell upon the mantel piece with the ornamental Chinese screens, upon the thick curtains, upon the armchairs, upon all those things that had sweetened the bitterness of her life, she was overcome with remorse, or rather with an immense regret that, rather than suppressing her passion, only stoked it. Charles poked the fire placidly, resting his feet on the andirons.

There was a moment when the bailiff’s watchman, probably bored in his hiding place, made a little noise.

“Is somebody walking up there?” said Charles.

“No!” she answered. “It’s an open window, rattling in the wind.”

She left for Rouen on the next day, Sunday, to try all the bankers whose names she knew. They were all in the countryside or off on trips. But she was not discouraged, and with the ones that she did see, she asked them for money, insisting that she needed it, and that she would pay it back. Some laughed in her face; all of them refused.

At two o’clock, she ran to Léon’s and knocked on his door. No one opened. Finally, he appeared.

“What brings you here?”

“I’m bothering you!”

“No … But …”

And he admitted that his landlord didn’t like for the tenants to receive “women” in their rooms.

“I have to speak with you,” she went on.

He reached for his key. She stopped him.

“Oh, no! Down there, at our place.”

And they went to their room in the Hotel de Boulogne.

As soon as they went in she drank a large glass of water. She was very pale. She said to him:

“Léon, you have to do me a favor.”

And shaking him by his two hands, which she was gripping tightly, she added:

“Listen, I need eight thousand francs!”

“You must be mad!”

“Not yet!”

And soon, narrating the story of the seizure, she explained her desperation to him; because Charles knew nothing of it: her mother-in-law detested her, her father Rouault could do nothing for her; but he, Léon, he could exert himself to find this crucial sum …

“What do you think I … ?”

“What a coward you are!” she exclaimed.

Then he said, stupidly:

“You’re exaggerating how bad it is. Maybe a few thousand would calm your man down.”

All the more reason to try everything they could; it simply wasn’t possible that they could fail to come up with three thousand francs. Besides, Léon could sign the notes instead of her.

“Go! Try! It’s essential! Run! … Oh, try, try! I’ll love you so!”

He went out, and returned after an hour, saying with a solemn expression:

“I’ve tried three people … It’s no use.”

They remained seated and facing each other, at the two corners of the fireplace, motionless, not speaking. Then Emma shrugged her shoulders and stamped her feet. He could hear her muttering:

“If I were in your place, I’d know where to find it!”

“Where?”

“At your office!”

And she stared at him.

An infernal boldness was emanating from her burning eyes, and the eyelids narrowed in what was both a lascivious and encouraging manner— so much so that the young man felt himself weakening under the mute will of this woman who was counseling him into crime. And then he was afraid, and to avoid entering into any understanding with her, he slapped his forehead and exclaimed:

“Morel is coming back tonight! He won’t refuse me, I hope”—this was one of his friends, the son of a very rich businessman—“and I’ll bring it to you tomorrow,” he added.

Emma didn’t seem to receive this hope of his with as much joy as he had expected. Did she suspect he was lying? He continued, his face reddening:

“But, if you don’t see me by three o’clock, don’t wait for me, dearest. I have to go now, pardon me. Farewell!”

He squeezed her hand, but he felt it was entirely inert. Emma no longer had enough energy for any kind of feeling.

Four o’clock struck; and she got up to return to Yonville, as obedient to the force of habit as an automaton.

It was a beautiful day; it was one of those clear, crisp March days when the sun glistens in a completely white sky. Some citizens of Rouen in their Sunday clothes were out walking, seeming happy. She came to the Place du Parvis. People were coming out of vespers; the crowd was streaming out of the three doors, like a river through the three arches of a bridge, and in the midst of them, more motionless than a rock, stood the verger.

Then she remembered that day when, all anxious and filled with hope, she had entered into that great nave that extended out before her so deeply, but not as deeply as her love; and she continued walking, weeping behind her veil, dizzy, staggering, close to fainting.

“Careful!” cried a voice coming out of a courtyard gate that was opening.

She stopped to let a black horse pass, pawing the ground between the traces of a tilbury, carrying a gentleman dressed in sable fur. Who was that? She knew him … The vehicle shot forward and disappeared.

It was him, the Viscount! She turned around; the street was deserted. And she was so overcome, so sorrowful, that she had to lean against a wall to keep from falling down.

But then she thought she was mistaken. Besides, she wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Everything, both within her and outside of her, was abandoning her. She felt herself lost and falling beyond control into indefinable abysses; and it was almost with joy that she caught sight of the good Homais when she reached the Red Cross inn; he was overseeing a large box of pharmaceutical supplies being loaded onto the Hirondelle; in his hand he held six cheminots for his wife, wrapped up in a handkerchief.

Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy turban-shaped loaves of bread that people ate with salted butter during Lent—a last vestige of medieval food, dating back to the century of the Crusades, on which the robust Normans of old gorged themselves, imagining that they saw on the table, in the light of yellow torches, between their tankards of mead and their enormous cuts of meat, the heads of Saracens waiting to be devoured. The pharmacist’s wife chewed them as they did, heroically, despite the foul state of her teeth; and so, every time Homais made a trip to the city, he never failed to bring some back to her, always purchasing them at the big bakery on the Rue Massacre.

“Delighted to see you!” he said, offering Emma his hand to help her into the Hirondelle.

He then hung up his cheminots on the baggage rack’s strap, and he remained bareheaded, his arms crossed, in a pensive, Napoleonic pose.

But when the blind man appeared, as usual, at the foot of the hill, he exclaimed:

“I cannot understand why the authorities continue to tolerate such begging! They ought to lock up these miserable people and force them to do some work. My word, Progress moves at a turtle’s pace! We are floundering into downright barbarism!”

The blind man held out his hat, which flopped on the edge of the window, as if it were a loose piece of upholstery.

“Now there,” said the pharmacist, “is a scrofulous infection!”

And although he was completely familiar with the poor devil, he pretended to be seeing him for the first time, muttering words like cornea, opaque cornea, sclerotic, facies; and then he asked in a paternal tone:

“Have you suffered a long time, my friend, from this frightful infirmity? Instead of getting drunk in bars, you’d do much better to follow a prescribed diet.”

He urged him to take only good wine, good beer, and good meats. The blind man continued singing; he appeared, in fact, to be almost an idiot. Finally, Monsieur Homais opened his purse.

“Look, here’s a sou; give me half of it back in change: and don’t forget to follow my advice; you’ll be the better for it.”

Hivert permitted himself to express some doubts about the efficacy of Homais’ advice. But the pharmacist insisted that he could cure him himself, with an antiphlogistic salve of his own making, and he gave his address:

“Monsieur Homais, near the marketplace, I’m well known.”

“And now,” said Hivert, “to reward us for all this trouble, you should show us your act.”

The blind man sank down on his haunches, and his head thrown back, rolling his greenish eyes and sticking out his tongue, he rubbed his stomach with both hands while he emitted a sort of low howl like a starving dog. Emma, filled with disgust, tossed him a five-franc piece over her shoulder. It was the entirety of her fortune. It seemed a fine thing to her, throwing it away like that.

The coach had started off again when, suddenly, Monsieur Homais leaned out of the window and shouted back:

“No farinaceous foods, and no dairy products! Wear wool next to your skin, and expose the diseased parts to the smoke of juniper berries!”

Bit by bit, the sight of familiar objects drifting past her eyes distracted Emma from her present troubles. An overwhelming fatigue came over her, and she arrived at home dazed, discouraged, almost asleep.

“What will be will be!” she said to herself.

And after all, who knows? Why couldn’t something extraordinary happen at any moment? Lheureux himself could even die.

At nine the next morning, she was awakened by the sound of voices in the square. A crowd had gathered in the market to read a large poster affixed to one of the poles, and she saw Justin climb up onto a stone in order to tear it down. But just at that moment, the village policeman grabbed him by the collar. Monsieur Homais came out of the pharmacy, and Madame Lefrançois, in the midst of the crowd, seemed to be making a speech.

“Madame! Madame!” cried Félicité as she ran in: “It’s horrible!”

And the poor girl, very upset, handed her a sheet of yellow paper she had just torn off the door. Emma read, in a single glance, that all her furniture was up for sale.

Then they looked at each other in silence. They had, servant and mistress, no secrets from each other. At last Félicité sighed:

“If I were you, Madame, I’d go see Monsieur Guillaumin.”

“You think so?”

The question meant:

“You know their house through their servant: does the master ever speak about me?”

“Yes, go; you’ll do well.”

She dressed herself, putting on her black dress and her hood with jet beads; and, so that no one would see her (the crowd was still in the square), she took the river path, circling around the village.

When she reached the notary’s gate, she was out of breath; the sky was dark, and a little snow was falling.

At the sound of the bell, Théodore, wearing a red vest, appeared on the steps; he came and opened the door almost familiarly, as he would for an acquaintance, and showed her into the dining room.

A large porcelain stove was humming below a cactus that occupied a niche in the wall, and in black frames, hanging against the oak-grained wallpaper, were Steuben’s Esmeralda and Schopin’s Potiphar.¹ The table was set, and the two silver warming dishes, the crystal doorknobs, the floor, the furniture— everything gleamed with a meticulous, English tidiness; the windows were ornamented with stained glass in their corners.

“This is the kind of dining room,” Emma thought, “that I ought to have.”

The notary came in, pressing his dressing gown patterned with palm trees tightly against his chest with one hand; with the other, he rapidly raised and then replaced his cap of brown velvet, tilted pretentiously to the right side, from which hung three blond strands of hair, drawn forward from the back and contoured around his bald head.

After offering her a seat, he sat down to eat, while making many excuses for his impoliteness.

“Monsieur,” she said, “I would like to ask you …”

“What, Madame? I’m listening.”

She began to explain her situation to him.

Maître Guillaumin knew it all already, being secretly in league with the dry-goods merchant, from whom he could always get the capital he needed for the mortgages he was asked to arrange.

Thus, he knew (and better than she did) the long history of those promissory notes, minimal at first, endorsed by various people, with their due dates broadly spaced out and endlessly renewed, right up to the day when the merchant, gathering all his bills together, had his friend Vinçart begin the proceedings in his name, not wanting to appear quite such a predator in the eyes of his fellow citizens.

She mixed recriminations against Lheureux into her story, recriminations to which the notary responded from time to time with a noncommittal word. Eating his cutlet and drinking his tea, he lowered his chin into his sky-blue cravat, which was fastened with two diamond pins linked with a golden chain, and he smiled an odd smile, in an overly sweet, ambiguous manner. But seeing that her feet were damp:

“Come closer to the stove … put them higher up … against the porcelain.”

She was afraid of getting it dirty. The notary replied gallantly:

“Beautiful things never do any harm.”

She then tried to get him emotionally involved in her plight, and becoming emotional herself, she started telling him about how tight things were in her home, her worries, her needs. He understood all that: a woman of elegance! And without interrupting his dinner, he turned himself completely around toward her, so that his knee brushed against her boot, its sole curling and steaming slightly from the stove.

But when she asked him for three thousand francs, he pursed his lips, and then declared himself to be most sorry that he had not been in charge of managing her fortune, because there were a hundred very easy ways, even for a lady, to have made her money work for her. In the Grumesnil peat bogs, for instance, or in the building developments in Le Havre, she could have invested very safely and profitably; and he let her seethe in rage at the thought of the fantastic sums she would have certainly earned.

“Why was it,” he continued, “that you didn’t come to me?”

“I just don’t know,” she said.

“But why? Did I frighten you? I’m the one, really, who ought to be complaining! We know each other so little! And yet I’m so devoted to you: you don’t doubt that any more, do you?”

He reached out his hand and took hers, covered it with a voracious kiss, and then held it on his knee; and he played delicately with her fingers, while he uttered a stream of compliments.

His insipid voice rustled like a running brook; a gleam in his eyes shone though his glasses, and his hands advanced into Emma’s sleeve, so as to finger her arm. She felt the panting of his breath against her cheek. This man was making her horribly uncomfortable.

She sprang up abruptly and said to him:

“Monsieur, I’m waiting!”

“For what?” said the notary, who had suddenly gone extremely pale.

“That money.”

“But …”

Then, giving way to the eruption of a desire too strong to check:

“All right, yes!”

He dragged himself toward her on his knees, with no concern for his dressing gown.

“Please, stay! I love you!”

He seized her around the waist.

A purple flush raced up Madame Bovary’s face. She recoiled with a terrible expression, crying out:

“You’re trying to profit from my distress, Monsieur! I’m to be pitied, not to be sold!”

And she left.

The notary remained there astounded, his eyes fixed on his beautifully embroidered slippers. They were a lover’s gift. The sight of them consoled him. And besides, he reflected that such an affair would have gotten him more involved than he wanted.

“What a monster! What a boor! … How contemptible!” she said to herself, rushing along nervously beneath the aspens lining the road. The disappointment over her failure reinforced the indignation she felt over her outraged honor; it seemed to her as if Providence was deliberately hunting her down; her pride swelled up again, and she had never had so much esteem for herself nor so much contempt for others. Something warrior-like was transporting her. She would have liked to strike men, spit in their faces, crush them all; and she continued walking swiftly straight ahead, pale, trembling, enraged, casting her tear-filled gaze all around the empty horizon, almost delighting in the hatred that was suffocating her.

When she caught sight of her house, a numbness came over her. She couldn’t go any farther; but she had to; and anyway, where could she run to?

Félicité was waiting for her at the door.

“Well?”

“No!” said Emma.

And for a quarter of an hour, the two of them discussed the different people in Yonville who might be disposed to help her. But every time Félicité mentioned someone, Emma would reply:

“It’s impossible! They wouldn’t!”

“And Monsieur will be coming home!”

“I know, I know … Leave me alone.”

She had tried everything. There was nothing more to do now; and when Charles appeared, she was, therefore, going to have to say to him:

“Go back. The carpet you’re standing on is no longer ours. You don’t own a single piece of furniture in your house, not a pin, not a straw, and I’m the one who has ruined you, you poor man!”

This would lead to a great sob, then he would cry abundantly, and finally, once the surprise of it had passed, he would forgive her.

“Yes,” she muttered through clenched teeth, “he will forgive me, he who couldn’t purchase my forgiveness for having known me if he had a million … Never! Never!”

The idea of Bovary being superior to her infuriated her. And then, whether she confessed or not, soon, very soon, tomorrow, he would know the whole catastrophe anyway; so she had to await that terrible scene and bow down under the weight of his magnanimity. She felt an urge to return to Lheureux’s: but what for? Then, to write to her father: it was too late; and it may be that now she repented for not having given in to that man who—when she heard the sound of a horse in the lane. It was him, he was opening the gate, he was whiter than the plaster on the wall. Rushing down the stairs, she escaped swiftly into the square; and the mayor’s wife, who was chatting in front of the church with Lestiboudois, saw her go into the tax collector’s.

She ran to tell Madame Caron. The two women went up into the attic; and, hidden behind some linen hanging on clothes racks, they posted themselves comfortably so as to be able to see directly into Binet’s house.

He was alone, in his attic room, in the process of imitating, with his wood carving, one of those indescribable ivory shapes composed of crescents, of spheres dug one inside the other, the whole forming a sort of obelisk and having no function whatsoever; and he was entering upon the final phase— he was finally approaching his goal! In the dim light of his studio, the yellowish dust was flying from his tool, like a shower of sparks under the iron shoes of a galloping horse; the two wheels were turning, rumbling; Binet was smiling, his chin lowered, his nostrils flaring, seeming to be lost in one of those moments of utter happiness that occur, no doubt, only in the lower professions, where the intelligence is amused by easy difficulties, and is entirely satisfied, blissfully unaware of any larger sphere beyond it.

“Ah! There she is!” said Madame Tuvache.

But it was hardly possible, with the sound of the lathe, to hear what it was that she was saying.

At last, though, the two ladies thought they could make out the word francs, and Madame Tuvache whispered quietly:

“She’s pleading with him, for more time to pay her taxes.”

“So it seems!” replied the other.

They saw her walk up and down the room, examining the walls with all the napkin rings, the candle holders, the newel posts, while Binet caressed his beard with evident satisfaction.

“Is she going to order something from him?” said Madame Tuvache.

“But he doesn’t sell any of his things!” her neighbor objected.

The tax collector seemed to be listening, his eyes widening as if he didn’t understand. She continued in what seemed to be a gentle, suppliant manner. She drew close to him; her breast heaved; they spoke no more.

“Is she making advances to him?” said Madame Tuvache.

Binet blushed to the tips of his ears. She took his hands in hers.

“Oh, this is too much!”

And no doubt she was proposing some abomination; because the tax collector—but he was a brave man, he had fought at Bautzen and Lutzen, served in the French campaign,² and had even been recommended for the cross of the Legion of Honor—suddenly, as if he had seen a snake, jumped back and cried out:

“Madame! What are you thinking?”

“They ought to whip women like that!” said Madame Tuvache.

“Where did she go?” replied Madame Caron.

For she had disappeared as those words were being spoken; then, catching sight of her going down the main road and turning right as if headed for the cemetery, they lost themselves in conjectures.

“Madame Rolet,” she said on reaching the wet nurse’s house, “I’m choking! Unlace me.”

She threw herself on the bed; she sobbed. Madame Rolet covered her with a petticoat and remained standing beside her. When Emma didn’t respond to her, the nurse walked away, sat down at her wheel, and began spinning flax.

“Oh! Stop it!” she muttered, thinking she heard Binet’s lathe.

“What’s bothering her?” the nurse asked herself. “What’s she doing here?”

She had run there, impelled by some terror that had driven her out of her house.

Lying on her back, immobile, her eyes fixed, she could perceive her surroundings only vaguely, though she tried—with an idiotic persistence— to make things out. She stared at the scales of peeling plaster on the wall, at two smoking sticks in the fire, burning end to end, and at a large spider walking up above her head, in a crack in the rafter. Finally, she began to collect her thoughts. She remembered … One day, with Léon … Oh, how long ago that was! … The sun was glinting on the river, and clematis scent filled the air … And then, carried away by her memories as if on a raging torrent, she soon arrived at the day before.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Madame Rolet went outside, lifted the fingers of her right hand toward the spot where the sky was brightest, and ambled slowly back inside, saying:

“Just about three o’clock.”

“Ah! Thank you, thank you!”

Because he was going to come: she was sure of it! He would have found the money. But maybe he would go down there, not suspecting that she was here; and she ordered the nurse to run to her house and bring him.

“Hurry!”

“My dear lady, I’m going! I’m going!”

Now she was surprised that she hadn’t thought of him right away; yesterday, he had given her his word, and he wouldn’t fail; and she could already picture herself at Lheureux’s, spreading out the three bank notes on his desk. Then she would have to invent some story to explain everything to Bovary. What should she say?

Meanwhile, the nurse was taking a long time in returning. But since there was no clock in the cottage, Emma feared she might be exaggerating the length of time. She went out and walked around the garden slowly, step by step; she went down the path all along the hedge, and then hurried back in hopes that the woman would have returned by another route. Finally, tired of waiting and assailed by suspicions that she tried to keep at bay, no longer sure whether she had been there for a century or a moment, she sat down in a corner and closed her eyes, covering her ears with her hands. Then the gate squeaked: she jumped up; before she could speak, Madame Rolet said to her:

“There’s nobody at your house!”

“What?”

“No, nobody! And Monsieur is crying. He’s calling for you. Everyone’s looking for you.”

Emma didn’t respond. Her breath turned heavy, and her eyes rolled, while the peasant instinctively drew back, frightened by what she saw in her face, thinking she had gone mad. Suddenly she slapped her forehead and cried out, for the memory of Rodolphe had just penetrated her soul, like a great flash of lightning across a dark night sky. He was so good, so delicate, so generous! And besides, even if he did hesitate to do her this kindness, she knew very well that she could force him to, in the blink of an eye, by reminding him of their lost love. So she left for La Huchette, without perceiving that she was now hurrying to offer the very thing that had so horrified her earlier that same day, nor did she suspect in the least that she was prostituting herself.

1. Charles de Steuben (1788–1856) produced a number of works depicting the character Esmeralda from Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris; his paintings were often highly sensual. Henri-Frédéric Schopin (1804–88) primarily is known for his paintings of literary subjects, though he seems not to have done a Potiphar; he was, incidentally, the composer Chopin’s brother. Potiphar, in the Book of Genesis, buys Joseph as a slave and later has him cast into prison on the false charge of having tried to seduce his wife.

2. Bautzen and Lutzen were two battles won by Napoléon in 1813; the “French campaign” (la campagne de France) was Napoléon’s final attempt (January–April 1814) to keep his throne and avoid an invasion by the coalition of Russians, Austrians, Prussians, and English.

CHAPTER 8

As she walked, she asked herself: “What am I going to say? Where will I start?” And the farther along she walked, the more she recognized the bushes, the trees, the rushes growing on the hillside, the chateau below. She found herself reliving the sensations of her first tender affections, and her poor shrunken heart felt itself expanding with the memory of love. A warm wind was blowing against her face; the snow, melting, was falling drop by drop from the buds onto the grass.

She went in, just as she used to do, through the little park gate, then came to the courtyard, bordered by a double row of densely planted lime trees. They swayed, rustling their long branches. The dogs in the kennels were all barking, and the sounds of their voices echoed, though no one came out.

She ascended the large, straight staircase with wooden balustrades, which led to the hallway paved with dusty stone; a row of rooms opened onto it, as in monasteries or inns. His was all the way at the end, on the left. When she came to put her fingers on the lock, all her strength suddenly abandoned her. She was afraid he wasn’t there, almost wished for it, even though this was her only hope, her last chance for salvation. She collected herself for a moment, and reviving her courage in the feeling of how urgent her present need was, she entered.

He was in front of the low fire, both feet up on the chimneypiece, in the process of smoking a pipe.

“What! It’s you!” he said, jumping up quickly.

“Yes, it’s me! … I wanted, Rodolphe, to ask you for some advice.”

But despite all her efforts, it was impossible for her to open her mouth.

“You haven’t changed, you’re as charming as ever!”

“Oh,” she replied bitterly, “they must be pitiful charms, my friend, since you were able to reject them.”

Then he began to explain his behavior, excusing himself in vague terms, unable to come up with any better ones.

She let his words work on her, and then his voice even more, and then, even more, the sight of him; so much so that she pretended to believe, or perhaps did believe, in his pretext for their rupture; this was, evidently, a secret on which a third person’s honor and even life depended.

“It doesn’t matter!” she said, looking at him sadly. “I’ve suffered enough!”

He replied in a philosophical tone:

“Such is life!”

“Has it at least,” Emma replied, “been good for you since our separation?”

“Oh—neither good … nor bad.”

“It might have been better if we hadn’t parted.”

“Yes—maybe so!”

“Do you think so?” she said, drawing closer to him.¹

And she sighed:

“Oh, Rodolphe! If you only knew! … I’ve loved you so much!”

At this point she took his hand, and they stayed a while with their fingers interlaced—as on the very first day, at the Agricultural Fair! Out of a sense of pride, he struggled against the feeling of tenderness. But, sinking down against his breast, she said to him:

“How did you think I could live without you? A person can’t just drop the habit of being happy! I was desperate! I thought I would die! I’ll tell you all about it, you’ll see! And you, you ran away from me! …”

For in fact, during those three years he had very carefully avoided her, out of that natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex; and Emma continued, gently nodding her head, as affectionate as an amorous kitten:

“You’ve been in love with others, admit it. Oh, I understand that, of course! I forgive them; you will have seduced them the way you seduced me. You’re a man, after all! You have everything it takes to make yourself loved. But we’ll begin again, won’t we? We’ll love each other! Look, I’m laughing, I’m happy! … Say something!”

And she was ravishing to look at, with those eyes in which a tear still trembled, like the water from a storm cupped in a blue flower.

He pulled her onto his knees, and with the back of his hand he caressed the smooth bands of her hair, where, in the light of the dusk, a last ray of the sun flashed like a golden arrow. She bent her forehead down; he kissed her on the eyelids, very gently, with the tips of his lips.

“But you’ve been crying!” he said. “Why?”

She burst into sobs. Rodolphe believed it was the outpouring of her love; as she said nothing, he took her silence for one last gesture of modesty, and then he exclaimed:

“Oh, forgive me! You’re the only one I really care for! I was an imbecile, and mean! I love you, I’ll always love you! What’s wrong? Tell me!”

He was kneeling down beside her.

“All right! … I’m ruined, Rodolphe. You have to give me three thousand francs!”

“But … But … ,” he said, slowly getting back up, while his face took on a more serious expression.

“You know,” she went on quickly, “that my husband has entrusted his entire fortune to a notary; he’s run away. We’ve had to borrow; the patients don’t pay us. But the liquidation of the estate isn’t finished; we’ll have money later on. But today, if we don’t get three thousand francs, they’re going to seize our property; it’s going on right now, this very minute; and I’ve come here, counting on your friendship.”

“Ah!” Rodolphe thought, becoming very pale very quickly. “So that’s why she’s come!”

At last he said, in a very calm tone:

“I don’t have it, my dear Madame.”

He was not at all lying. If he had had it, he probably would have given it to her, even though he generally found such noble gestures disagreeable: out of all the winds that blow against love, a request for money is the coldest, the one most likely to uproot it.

She stood still a few minutes, looking at him.

She repeated several times:

“You don’t have it! … I should have spared myself this last humiliation. You never loved me! You’re no better than all the others!”

She was betraying herself, losing control.

Rodolphe interrupted her, insisting that he himself was “hard up” at the moment.

“Oh, I feel sorry for you!” Emma said. “Yes, very much.”

And, her eyes pausing on a damascened carbine that glinted in the gun rack:

“But when a person is that poor, he doesn’t have silver on the butt of his rifle! He doesn’t buy a clock inlaid with tortoiseshell!” she went on, pointing out a Boulle clock; “nor silver-gilt whistles for his whips”—she touched them!—“nor charms for his watch chain. Oh, he lacks for nothing! Right down to a liquor stand in his bedroom; because you love yourself, you live very well, with your chateau, your farms, your forests; you hunt with hounds, you travel to Paris … Oh! And even these,” she cried, picking up a pair of cufflinks from the mantel, “the least of these little stupid things! You could turn any of this into money! … Oh, but I don’t want it! Keep it!”

And she threw the cufflinks as hard as she could across the room, so their gold chain broke as they hit the wall.

“But me, I would have given you everything! I would have sold everything, I would have worked with my hands, I would have begged on the roadsides, for a smile, for a look, to hear you say ‘thank you.’ And you sit there calmly in your armchair, as if you haven’t already made me suffer enough! If it hadn’t been for you, and you know it perfectly well, I could have had a happy life! What drove you to do it? Was it a bet? But you loved me, you said so … And again just now … Oh, you would have done better to chase me away! My hands are still warm with your kisses, and look, there’s the place on the carpet where you swore, at my knees, an eternity of love. You made me believe it: for two years, you led me along through the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! … Well? And our plans for our trip, you remember? Oh! Your letter, that letter! It tore my heart out! And then, when I come back to him, to him, and he’s rich, happy, free!—to beg for some help, the kind of help that a total stranger would offer, a supplicant, bringing to him all my tenderness, he repulses me, because it would cost him three thousand francs!”

“I haven’t got it!” Rodolphe replied, with that perfect calm that acts like a shield covering angry resignation.

She left. The walls were trembling, the ceiling crushing down upon her; and she went back down the long lane, slipping on the heaps of dead leaves the wind was scattering around. At last she reached the ditch in front of the gate; she was so anxious to open it that she broke her fingernails against the lock. Then, a hundred paces on, out of breath, ready to collapse, she stopped. And turning back, she looked one more time at the impassive chateau, with its park, its gardens, its three courtyards, and all the windows on its façade.

She remained, lost in a stupor, her only awareness of herself being the pulsing in her arteries, which seemed to have escaped from her and to have become a muffled, rhythmic music that filled the entire countryside. The ground under her feet was as soft as a wave, and the furrows in the fields looked to her like immense brown billows breaking around her. Everything that she had held in her mind—memories, thoughts—slipped out all at once, like a thousand fireworks going off. She saw her father, Lheureux’s office, their hotel room down there, another landscape. Madness seized her, she was afraid, and she succeeded in getting hold of herself, but in fact only in a confused way; for she could not at all remember the cause of her terrifying state—that is, the money issue. Her only suffering was from her love, and she could feel her soul slipping away from her in that memory, like the mortally injured who feel their lives leaving them through their bleeding wound.

Night was falling, crows were flying.

It seemed to her suddenly that globes the color of fire were bursting in the air like bullets being fired and turning, turning, to melt at last into the snow, between the branches of the trees. In the middle of one of them, Rodolphe’s face appeared. They multiplied, and they closed in upon her, penetrated her; everything disappeared. She recognized again the lights of the houses, shining far off through the fog.

Then her situation presented itself to her, like an abyss. She panted hard enough to burst her chest. Then, in a heroic exaltation that made her almost joyful, she ran down the hillside, crossed the cow bridge, the path, the lane, the marketplace, and arrived in front of the pharmacist’s shop.

No one was there. She was going to enter; but the sound of the bell might make someone come out; and slipping in by the gate, holding her breath, feeling her way along the walls, she came almost to the door of the kitchen, where a candle was burning on the stove. Justin, in his shirtsleeves, was carrying out a dish.

“Ah! They’re having their dinner. Wait.”

He came back in. She rapped on the window. He came out to her.

“The key! The one for upstairs, where the …”

“What?”

And he looked at her, startled by how pale her face was, a white slash against the black background of the night. She seemed extraordinarily beautiful to him, and as majestic as a phantom; without understanding what she wanted, he had a presentiment of something terrible.

But she repeated quickly, her voice low, her voice sweet, melting:

“I want it! Give it to me.”

Because the partition was so thin, they could hear the forks scraping against plates in the dining room.

She claimed she needed to kill some rats who were disturbing her sleep.

“I have to tell Monsieur.”

“No! Wait!”

Then, in an indifferent tone:

“Oh, it’s not worth the bother, I’ll tell him myself later. Let’s go, light the way for me!”

She entered the hallway that led to the laboratory. Against one wall hung a key labeled capharnaüm.

“Justin!” the pharmacist called, impatiently.

“Let’s go!”

And he followed her.

The key turned in the lock, and she went directly to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, picked up the blue jar, pulled out its cork, plunged her hand in, and pulling it out filled with a white powder, she began to eat.

“Stop!” he cried, throwing himself at her.

“Be quiet! Someone will come …”

He stood in despair, wanting to call out.

“Don’t say anything about this, or the blame will fall on your master!”

Then she turned around, suddenly feeling relieved, almost serene with the feeling of having completed a duty.

When Charles, shocked by the news of the household seizure, had come back home, Emma had just left. He cried out, wept, fainted, but she didn’t return. Where could she be? He sent Félicité to Homais’, to Monsieur Tuvache’s, to Lheureux’s, to the Golden Lion, everywhere; and in the intervals of his anxiety, he could see his reputation destroyed, their fortune lost, Berthe’s future ruined! For what reason? Not a word! He waited until six o’clock. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, and imagining that she had gone to Rouen, he went out on the highway, walked down it a mile, encountered no one, waited longer, and then returned home.

She had come back.

“What happened? … Why? … Explain it to me? …”

She sat at her desk and wrote a letter that she then slowly sealed, adding the date and the time. Then she said in a solemn voice:

“You’ll read this tomorrow; from now until then, I beg you, do not ask me a single question! … No, not one!”

“But …”

“Oh! Leave me alone!”

And she lay down full length on her bed.

A bitter taste in her mouth awakened her. She saw Charles, and she closed her eyes again.

She watched herself with curiosity, to discern whether she felt any pain. No! Nothing yet. She heard the ticking of the clock, the sound of the fire, and the breathing of Charles, standing close to her bed.

“Ah! Death isn’t such a difficult thing!” she thought to herself. “I’m going to go to sleep, and it will all be over!”

She drank a mouthful of water and turned toward the wall.

That awful taste, like ink, continued.

“I’m thirsty! …Oh, I’m so thirsty!” she sighed.

“What’s the matter?” said Charles, handing her a glass.

“It’s nothing! Open the window … I’m stifling!”

And she was seized by an attack of nausea, so sudden that she barely had the time to get her handkerchief from under the pillow.

“Take it away!” she said quickly. “Throw it out!”

He asked her questions; she didn’t respond. She was holding herself absolutely still, in the fear that the slightest movement would make her vomit. At the same time, she felt an icy cold rising from her feet up toward her heart.

“Ah! So now it’s starting,” she murmured.

“What did you say?”

She rolled her head from side to side, gently, but filled with anguish, and she kept opening her jaws, as if she felt something very heavy weighing on her tongue. At eight o’clock, the vomiting started again.

Charles, examining the basin, saw that there was a sort of white gritty substance sticking to the bottom of the porcelain.

“That’s strange! That’s extraordinary!” he repeated.

But she said loudly:

“No, you’re mistaken!”

Then, as delicately as a caress, he passed his hand over her stomach. She let out a piercing cry. He recoiled, very frightened.

Then she began to moan, weakly at first. A great shuddering started in her shoulders, and she became paler than the sheet her clenched fingers were digging themselves into. Her pulse was irregular, and almost imperceptible now.

Drops of sweat were oozing from her bluish face, which was stiffening now as if some metallic vapor were exhaling itself from inside her. Her teeth were chattering, her wide-open eyes were gazing vaguely all around her, and to every question her only reply was to nod her head; she even smiled two or three times. Bit by bit, her moans grew stronger. A low howl burst from her; she claimed that she was feeling better and that she would be getting up soon. But she was seized by convulsions; she cried out:

“Oh, it’s horrible, my God!”

He threw himself down on his knees against the bed.

“Speak! What did you eat? Answer me, in the name of God!”

And he looked at her with a tenderness in his eyes like nothing she had ever seen.

“All right, there … there!” she said in a faltering voice.

He ran to the desk, broke open the seal and read the letter out loud: No one should be blamed … He stopped, passed his hand over his eyes, and read it again.

“What? Help! Help me!”

And he could only repeat the word: “Poisoned! Poisoned!” Félicité ran to Homais’, who shouted it out as he crossed the square; Madame Lefrançois heard it in the Golden Lion; some got up to tell their neighbors, and all night the entire village was awake.

Desperate, stammering, ready to collapse, Charles paced back and forth in the bedroom. He bumped into the furniture, pulled at his hair, and the pharmacist had never thought he would see such a frightful spectacle.

He went back home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to Doctor Lariv-ière. He lost his head; he ruined more than fifteen drafts. Hippolyte set out for Neufchâtel, and Justin spurred Bovary’s horse on so hard that he was forced to leave it by the Bois-Guillaume Hill, exhausted and three-quarters dead.

Charles wanted to flip through his medical dictionary; he couldn’t see, the lines danced in front of his eyes.

“Stay calm!” said the pharmacist. “It’s just a matter of administering some powerful antidote. What was the poison?”

Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic.

“All right!” Homais replied. “We’ll have to do an analysis.”

Because he knew that for every case of poisoning, one must do an analysis; and the other, who didn’t understand, replied:

“Ah—do it! Do it! Save her …”

Then, coming back near her, he sank down upon the carpet, and he lay his head against the edge of her bed, sobbing.

“Don’t cry!” she said to him. “I won’t be tormenting you much longer!”

“But why? What made you do it?”

She replied:

“It had to be done, my friend.”

“But weren’t you happy? Was it my fault? But I did everything I could!”

“Yes, that’s true … You are good, you are!”

And she ran her hand through his hair, slowly. The sweetness of that sensation redoubled his grief; he felt his entire being crumbling in despair at the thought that he was going to have to lose her, just when she had avowed more love for him than she ever had before; and he couldn’t think of anything to do; he didn’t know, he didn’t dare, the urgent need for an immediate decision had overwhelmed him completely.

She was finished now, she thought, with all the betrayals, all the base-nesses and the innumerable lusts that had tortured her. She hated no one right now; a confusion like the dusk was settling over her thoughts, and out of all the sounds on the earth, Emma heard only the intermittent lamentation of that poor heart, sweet and indistinct, like the last fading echo of a symphony.

“Bring me the little one,” she said, rising up on one elbow.

“You aren’t feeling any worse, are you?” asked Charles.

“No! No!”

The child, serious and still half asleep, entered in the arms of the servant, in her long nightdress, from which her naked feet were poking out. She looked with astonishment at the disordered room and blinked her eyes, blinded by the candles burning on all the tables. They must have reminded her of the mornings of New Year’s Day or of Mid-Lent when, awakened early like this and amid similar candles, she would come to her mother’s bed to receive her present, because she began to say:

“Where is it, Mama?”

And when no one said anything:

“I don’t see my little slipper.”

Félicité bent her down over the bed, while she continued to look over toward the mantelpiece.

“Has Nurse taken it?” she asked.

And at that name, which brought back the memory of her adulteries and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned her head away, as if from a more disgusting poison than the one she had put in her mouth. But Berthe remained on the bed.

“Oh! Your eyes are so big, Mama! And you’re so pale! Look how you’re sweating!”

Her mother looked at her.

“I’m afraid!” said the little one, starting away from her.

Emma took her hand to kiss it, but she tried to pull it away.

“That’s enough! Take her away!” exclaimed Charles, who stood sobbing in the alcove.

At that point the symptoms stopped for a time; she appeared less agitated; and at every insignificant word, at every slightly calmer breath she took, he began to regain hope. Finally, when Canivet came in, he threw himself upon him, weeping.

“Oh, it’s you! Thank you! You’re so good! But everything is getting better. Here, have a look at her …”

His colleague was not at all of that opinion, and, preferring not to take half-measures, as he put it, he prescribed an emetic, in order to empty the stomach completely.

Very soon she was vomiting blood. Her lips were clenching more tightly. Her limbs were stiffening, her body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slid away underneath his fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp’s string about to break.

Then she began screaming, horribly. She cursed the poison, hurled abuse at it, implored it to hurry, and with her rigid arms she pushed away everything that Charles, in even more agony than she, was trying to make her drink. He was standing, his handkerchief to his lips, moaning, weeping, suffocating from the sobs that shook him all the way down to his heels; Félicité was running back and forth in the room; Homais, motionless, was letting out great sighs, and Monsieur Canivet, keeping his calm as always, was nonetheless beginning to feel troubled.

“The devil! … Still, she’s been purged, and as soon as the cause ceases …”

“The effect must cease,” said Homais; “it’s obvious.”

“But save her!” Bovary exclaimed.

So, without listening to the pharmacist, who was hazarding the hypothesis that “It may be a salutary paroxysm,” Canivet was beginning to administer an antidote, when they all heard the cracking of a whip; all the windows rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to their ears in mud, galloped around the corner of the marketplace. It was Doctor Larivière.

The apparition of a god could not have caused more excitement. Bovary raised his hands to heaven, Canivet stopped short what he was doing, and Homais removed his cap as soon as the doctor entered.

He belonged to that great surgical school begotten of Bichat,² to that generation, now disappeared, of philosophical practitioners who, cherishing their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with passion and with wisdom! In his hospital, everyone trembled when he got angry, and his students venerated him so much that the moment they were established, they set about imitating him as closely as possible; so that one would see them, in the towns all over the region, wearing the same long, comfortable merino coat and black frock jacket that he wore, whose unbuttoned sleeves came down slightly over his brawny hands, which never wore gloves, as if to be more ready to plunge themselves into human suffering. Scorning medals, titles, and academies—hospitable, generous, fatherly with the poor and practicing virtue without believing in it—he might have passed for a saint if the strength of his intellect didn’t make him feared like a demon. His gaze, more incisive than his scalpels, would penetrate right into your soul, right through every pretension and every reticence, and excise every lie hiding beneath. And so he went on through life, filled with that relaxed majesty that comes with the awareness of a great talent, of a solid fortune, and of forty years of hard-working, irreproachable life.

He frowned as soon as he entered the doorway, seeing Emma’s cadaverous face as she lay stretched out on her back, her mouth open. Then, while appearing to listen to Canivet, he rubbed his index finger under his nose, repeating:

“That’s fine, that’s fine.”

But he made a slight shrug with his shoulders. Bovary observed it; they looked at each other; and this man, so habituated to the sight of misery, could not restrain a tear from dropping and falling on his shirtfront.

He brought Canivet into the neighboring room. Charles followed.

“She’s very sick, isn’t she? What if we applied some mustard plasters? I don’t know what to do! Find something, you’ve saved so many!”

Charles put both arms around him, and he looked at him in a bewildered, supplicating way, half fainting against his breast.

“Come on, poor man, be brave! There’s nothing more to be done.”

And Doctor Larivière turned away.

“You’re leaving?”

“I’ll come back.”

He went out, as if to give orders to the postilion, along with Monsieur Canivet, who likewise had no desire to see Emma die under his hands.

The pharmacist joined them on the square. He was temperamentally incapable of separating himself from celebrated men. Thus, he begged Monsieur Larivière to do him the great honor of dining with him.

He immediately sent to the Golden Lion for some pigeons, to the butcher for every cutlet he had, to Tuvache for cream, to Lestiboudois for eggs; and the pharmacist himself helped in the preparations, while Madame Homais said, pulling the strings of her jacket:

“You must pardon us, Monsieur; for, in our poor village, unless one has a day’s warning …”

“Wine glasses!” hissed Homais.

“If we were in town, at least, we could have served you stuffed pig’s feet.”

“Be quiet! … Come to the table, Doctor!”

He thought it would be a good idea, after they had begun to eat, to furnish a few details about the catastrophe.

“We first observed a siccative pharynx, followed by intolerable epigastric pains, then superpurgation, then coma.”

“How did she poison herself?”

“I don’t know, Doctor, and I can hardly imagine where she could have procured that arsenious acid.”

Justin, who was carrying a pile of dishes, was suddenly 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 ground, with a great crash.

“Imbecile!” Homais exclaimed. “Clumsy oaf! Stupid donkey!”

But abruptly mastering himself:

“I wanted, Doctor, to try an analysis, and primo, I delicately introduced into a tube …”

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

His colleague said nothing, having just a moment before received a strong reprimand regarding his own emetic—so that the good Canivet, so arrogant and long-winded with the incident of the clubfoot, was very modest today; he never stopped smiling, with a look of approval on his face.

Homais was basking in the pride of playing host, and the thought of Bovary’s affliction contributed subtly to his own pleasure through an egoistic contrast with his own situation. And then the presence of the doctor positively transported him. He displayed his erudition, alluding almost at random to cantharides, upas, manchineel, adder …

“And I have even read that various people have become poisoned, Doctor, and virtually struck down by black puddings that have been over-smoked! At least, so it was reported in a fine paper composed by one of our leading pharmaceutical experts, the celebrated Cadet de Gassicourt!”

Madame Homais reappeared, carrying one of those shaky machines that have to be heated with a spirit lamp; for Homais insisted on making his coffee at the table, having roasted, ground, and blended it himself as well.

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

Then he had all his children come down, curious to have the surgeon’s opinion on their constitutions.

Finally, Monsieur Larivière was leaving when Madame Homais asked for some advice concerning her husband. He was thickening his blood by going to sleep every evening after dinner.

“Oh! I don’t think thick blood’s his problem.”

And, smiling a little at this joke that went over his listener’s head, the doctor opened the door. But the pharmacy was stuffed with people, and he had a great deal of trouble getting rid of, first, Monsieur Tuvache, who was afraid his wife would get her lungs inflamed from her habit of spitting into the fire; then of Binet, who suffered from sudden attacks of hunger; then of Madame Caron, who had tinglings; then of Lheureux, who had vertigo; then of Lestiboudois, who had rheumatism; then of Madame Lefrançois, who had heartburn. At last the three horses went off, and the general feeling was that he had not been at all helpful.

Their attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur Bournisien, who was walking through the marketplace with the holy oils.

Homais—out of duty to his principles—compared priests to crows attracted by the smell of the dead; the sight of a cleric was personally disagreeable to him, because cassocks reminded him of shrouds, and he cursed the one out of fear of the other.

Nevertheless, not slacking before what he termed his mission, he returned to Bovary’s in the company of Canivet—who had been strongly urged to stay on by Monsieur Larivière before he left. If it had not been for his wife’s objections, Homais would have brought his two sons along, in order to accustom them to difficult circumstances, as a lesson, an example, a solemn tableau that would remain in their heads afterward.

When they went in, the room was filled with mournful solemnity. On the worktable, covered over with a white napkin, there were five or six small cotton balls on a silver plate, near a large crucifix, between two burning candles. Emma lay with her chin sunk down upon her chest and her eyes unnaturally wide open: and her poor hands were dragging themselves over the covers, with that hideous, gentle gesture of the dying, who seem to be already drawing the shroud over them. Pale as a statue, his eyes red as coals, Charles, not crying now, was facing her from the foot of the bed while the priest, kneeling on one knee, was murmuring some words in a low voice.

She turned her face slowly and appeared to be seized with sudden joy at seeing the violet stole, no doubt rediscovering, in this moment of extraordinary calm, the lost pleasures of her first mystical flights, along with visions of the eternal beatitude that was now beginning.

The priest rose to pick up the crucifix; and she stretched out her neck like someone thirsting, and pressing her lips to the body of the Man-God with all her dying powers, she placed there the most loving kiss she had ever given. He went on to recite the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions: first upon the eyes, which had so lusted after earthly luxuries; then upon the nostrils, so fond of warm breezes and amorous scents; then upon the mouth, which had opened to lie, which had moaned with pride and cried out in sensuality; then upon the hands, which had delighted in lustful contact; and finally upon the soles of the feet, so swift in the past when she had run to satisfy her desires, and which now would never walk again.

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

As he completed his exhortations, he tried to place a blessed candle in her hands, a symbol of the celestial glories that would soon surround her. Emma, too weak, could not close her fingers, and the candle, but for Monsieur Bournisien, would have fallen to the ground.

But she was no longer quite so pale, and on her face was 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, sometimes, lengthened the lives of individuals when He thought it right for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, close to death then also, she had received Communion.

“Maybe there’s still room for hope,” he thought.

And in fact she looked all around her, slowly, like someone awakening from a dream, and then, in a clear voice, she asked for her mirror, and she remained bent over it for some time; until the moment when big tears began to fall from her eyes. Then she turned her head away with a sigh, and fell back on the pillow.

Her chest soon began to heave rapidly; her entire tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes were rolling as they grew dimmer, like two lamp globes about to die out, so that one might have thought she was already dead, except for the frightening heaving of her sides, shaking with violent breaths, as if the soul were leaping inside, trying to get itself free. Félicité knelt before the crucifix, and even the pharmacist flexed his knees a little, while Monsieur Canivet looked abstractedly outside at the square. Bournisien began to pray again, his face bowed against the edge of the bed, his long black cassock trailing behind him into the room. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms stretched out toward Emma. He had taken her hands and was holding them tightly, shuddering with every beat of her heart, as if at the aftershocks of a collapsing building. As the death-rattle grew stronger, the priest sped up his prayers; they mixed with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes every sound seemed to be lost, absorbed into the murmur of the Latin syllables, which tolled like a death-bell.

Abruptly, they could hear the sound of loud clogs outside on the sidewalk, and the rapping of a stick; and a voice rose up, a hoarse voice, that sang:

Often the warmth of a beautiful day

Makes a young girl dream of love.

Emma sprang up like a galvanized corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, gaping.

To glean with care the ears of corn

The scythe has all cut down,

My Nanette herself bends down

Toward the giving earth.

“The blind man!” she cried.

And Emma began to laugh, a horrible laugh, frenetic and despairing, believing she could see the hideous face of the beggar, standing out against the eternal shadows like a sudden terror.

The wind was plenty strong that day,

And up her short skirt blew!

A convulsion seized her and threw her back upon the mattress. They all drew closer to her. She was no longer living.

1. Only now does Emma dare to use the intimate tu form with Rodolphe.

2. Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) was an important figure in the history of medical practice; considered the founder of histology, he was a reformer who worked to put medicine on a practical rather than a theoretical basis, and he greatly influenced the practice of Flaubert’s father—who is the model for the character of Dr. Larivière.

CHAPTER 9

There is always a period of shock that sets in after someone’s death, so difficult it is to comprehend that visitation from nothingness, and to resign ourselves to believe in it. But even so, when Charles saw her completely motionless, he threw himself upon her, crying out:

“Farewell! Farewell!”

Homais and Canivet pulled him out of the bedroom.

“Control yourself!”

“Yes,” he said, struggling free of them, “I’ll be reasonable, I won’t do anything foolish. But leave me alone! I want to see her! She’s my wife!”

And he wept.

“Cry,” said the pharmacist. “Give nature a free rein; it will console you!”

As weak now as a child, Charles let himself be guided downstairs to the drawing room, and soon Monsieur Homais returned home.

Outside, on the square, he was accosted by the blind man who, having dragged himself to Yonville in hopes of getting the antiphlogistic salve, was asking every passerby where the pharmacist lived.

“Oh, fine! As if I didn’t have more important fish to fry right now! No, come back later.”

And he hurried into the pharmacy.

He had to write two letters, to make up a sedative potion for Bovary, to find some lie to cover up the poisoning, and to write up an article about it for the Lantern, not to mention all the people waiting for him in order to hear the news; and when the Yonvillians had all heard his story about the arsenic she had mistaken for sugar while making a vanilla cream, Homais, once again, returned to Bovary’s.

He found him alone (Monsieur Canivet having just left), sitting in the armchair near the window, staring at the floor with the expression of an idiot.

“You have to decide on the time for the ceremony,” said the pharmacist.

“Why? What ceremony?”

Then, stammering and afraid:

“Oh! No—not really? No, I want to keep her with me.”

Homais, to maintain his composure, picked up a carafe from the shelf to water the geraniums.

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

But he broke down again, suffocating under the abundance of memories that this gesture of the pharmacist’s brought back to him.

So, to distract him, Homais thought it would be wise to talk a bit of horticulture; plants needed humidity. Charles bowed his head in a sign of agreement.

“Besides, the good weather will be coming back soon.”

“Ah!” said Bovary.

The pharmacist, running out of ideas, began to draw back the small window curtains.

“Look, it’s Monsieur Tuvache going by.”

Charles repeated, like a machine:

“Monsieur Tuvache going by.”

Homais didn’t dare bring up the subject of the funeral preparations again; the cleric was the one who finally got him to resolve the issue.

He shut himself up in his consulting room, took a pen, and after having sobbed for a while, he wrote:

“I want her to be buried in her wedding dress, with white shoes and a wreath.Let them spread her hair out over her shoulders; three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. Let no one speak about it to me at all, I’ll be strong enough. Let a large sheet of green velvet be placed over everything. This is my will. Let it be done.”

The gentlemen were shocked by such romantic ideas coming from Bovary, and soon the pharmacist came to say to him:

“The velvet seems to me to be excessive. Besides, the expense …”

“Is it any of your business?” cried Charles. “Leave me alone! You didn’t love her! Go away!”

The cleric took him by the arm to make him take a walk in the garden. He discoursed upon the vanity of all earthly things. God was truly great, truly good; one had to submit to His decrees, and even to be thankful for them.

Charles burst out in blasphemy:

“I detest that God of yours!”

“The spirit of rebellion is still within you,” sighed the cleric.

Charles was already far away. He walked with great strides, along the wall, by the fruit trees, and he ground his teeth, and he looked upward, cursing the heavens; but not one single leaf stirred.

A light rain was falling. Charles, his shirt open, began to shiver; he went back inside and sat down in the kitchen

At six o’clock, the sound of clanking iron could be heard in the square: it was the Hirondelle arriving; and he leaned his head against the window, watching the travelers descend one after the other. Félicité spread out a mattress for him in the drawing room; he threw himself upon it and went to sleep.

Despite being a philosopher, Monsieur Homais respected the dead. Thus, without holding any grudge against poor Charles, he came back in the evening to sit up with the corpse, bringing three books along with him and a pocketbook for taking notes.

Monsieur Bournisien was already there, and two large candles were burning at the head of the bed, which had been taken out from the alcove.

Silence always weighed on the pharmacist, so he was not long in formulating some laments for the “unfortunate young woman”; and the priest answered that there was nothing to be done now except to pray for her.

“However,” Homais replied, “it has to be one of two possibilities: either she has died in a state of grace (as the Church terms it), in which case she has no need of our prayers; or she has died impenitent (which is, I believe, the ecclesiastical expression), and in that case …”

Bournisien interrupted, replying peevishly that prayer was necessary in any case.

“But,” the pharmacist objected, “since God knows all our needs, what’s the point of praying?”

“What!” exclaimed the cleric. “The point of prayer! So you aren’t a Christian?”

“Excuse me!” Homais said. “I admire Christianity. It has, to begin with, freed the slaves and introduced into the world a morality …”

“That’s not the point of it! All the texts …”

“Oh, oh! As for the texts, open up your history books; it’s well known that the texts have been falsified by the Jesuits.”

Charles came in and, moving toward the bed, slowly opened the curtains.

Emma’s head was bent toward her right shoulder. The corner of her mouth, which was open, looked like a black hole in the lower half of her face, and her two thumbs remained curled against the palms of her hands; a sort of white dust seemed to be sprinkled on her eyelashes, and her eyes were beginning to disappear behind a thick pallor that resembled a fine web, as if spiders had been spinning over them. The sheet sank down from her breasts to her knees, and then rose up again at the tips of her toes; and it seemed to Charles that some infinite mass, some enormous weight was pressing down upon her.

The church clock struck two o’clock. They could hear the river’s loud murmur, running past out there in the shadows, at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur Bournisien now and then would blow his nose loudly, and Homais’ pen would scratch on the paper.

“Come along, my friend,” he said, “get to bed; this sight is tearing you apart!”

Once Charles had gone, the pharmacist and the priest resumed their discussion.

“Read Voltaire!” said the one. “Read D’Holbach, read the Encyclopédie!”

“Read the Letters of Some Portuguese Jews!”¹ said the other. “Read the Reason of Christianity² by Nicolas, a retired judge!”

They grew heated; they grew red in the face; they talked over each other, without listening; Bournisien was shocked at the other’s audacity; Homais marveled at such stupidity; and the two of them were not far from exchanging open insults when Charles suddenly reappeared. A kind of fascination drew him back. He continually came back up the staircase.

He stood facing her, in order to see her better, and he lost himself in a contemplation of her so profound that he no longer felt his sorrow.

He remembered stories about catalepsy, about the miracles of magnetism; and he told himself that if he could will it intensely enough, he might be able to bring her back to life. Once he even bent toward her and called in a low voice, “Emma! Emma!” His breathing was so strong that it made the candle flames tremble against the wall.

At dawn, Madame Bovary senior arrived; when Charles embraced her, he burst into a new fit of weeping. She tried, as the pharmacist had, to make a few comments about the expenses of the burial. He flew into such a rage that she said no more, and he even ordered her to go into town at once to buy what was needed.

Charles remained alone all afternoon; Berthe had been taken to Madame Homais; Félicité stayed upstairs, in the bedroom, along with Madame Lefrançois.

In the evening, he received some visitors. He would get up, shake hands without being able to speak; then the guest would find a seat among the others, forming a big semicircle around the fireplace. Their faces lowered, their legs crossed, they would swing their legs and now and then give a sigh; and every one of them was bored beyond measure; but no one would leave.

Homais, when he returned at nine o’clock (he had been constantly running back and forth on the square for two days), was carrying a stock of camphor, benzene, and aromatic herbs. He also carried a vase full of chlorine to keep miasmas away. At just that moment, the maid, Madame Lefrançois, and Madame Bovary senior were working with Emma, finishing dressing her; and they drew down a long, stiff veil that covered her all the way down to her satin slippers.

Félicité was sobbing:

“Oh! My poor mistress! My poor mistress!”

“Look at her,” said the innkeeper with a sigh, “how pretty she still is! You’d swear she would be getting up any minute.”

Then they bent down to arrange the wreath on her head.

They had to lift the head a little, and at that a stream of black liquids came out of her mouth, as if she were vomiting.

“Oh! My God! Look out for the dress!” cried Madame Lefrançois. “Help us!” she said to the pharmacist. “You aren’t afraid, are you?”

“Me? Afraid?” he replied, with a shrug of his shoulders. “Hardly! I saw plenty of them at the Hôtel-Dieu, when I was studying pharmacy! We would make punch in the dissecting amphitheater! Nothingness holds no terrors for the philosopher; and I might add that I even plan to bequeath my body to the hospitals, in order to serve the cause of Science.”

When the priest arrived, he asked how Monsieur was holding up; and, when the pharmacist told him, he replied:

“The blow, you understand, is still too recent!”

Then Homais congratulated him on not having to worry, as everyone else did, about the eventual loss of a beloved; and from there the discussion turned to the celibacy of priests.

“Because,” the pharmacist said, “it just isn’t natural for a man to do without women! There have been crimes …”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” exclaimed the cleric. “How would you expect a married person to keep the secrets of the confessional, for example?”

Homais attacked confession. Bournisien defended it; he expounded on the acts of restitution that it brought about. He cited anecdotes about thieves who turned honest all of a sudden. Military men, when they approached the tribunal of penitence, had felt the scales falling from their eyes. And there was a minister in Fribourg …

His companion was asleep. Then, finding the air stuffy in the room, he opened the window, which awakened the pharmacist.

“Here, have a pinch of snuff!” he said to him. “Take it; it’ll clear your head.”

A continual barking could be heard somewhere off in the distance.

“Do you hear a dog howling?” asked the pharmacist.

“They say that they can sense death,” replied the cleric. “It’s like bees; they come flying out of their hives when a person passes away.” But Homais made no comment on these superstitions, because he had fallen asleep again.

Monsieur Bournisien, more robust, continued to move his lips quietly for a while; then, insensibly, his chin began to lower, his great black book fell, and he began to snore.

They were facing each other, stomachs protruding, faces puffy, seeming to frown: after all their discord, they were united at last in the same human weakness; and they moved no more than the corpse next to them, which seemed to be sleeping as well.

When Charles came in, he did not wake them. It was the final time. He had come to say his good-byes.

The aromatic herbs were still smoking, and little clouds of bluish vapor mingled, near the open window, with the morning fog that was entering. There were still a few stars out, and the night was gentle.

The wax from the candles dropped in big tears on the bed sheets. Charles watched the candles burn, wearying his eyes with the shine of their yellow flame.

The moiré texture on Emma’s satin dress shimmered, white as moonlight. Emma was disappearing beneath it; and it seemed to him that, spreading out beyond the boundaries of her self, she was confusedly lost and blended in the surrounding things, in the silence, in the night, in the passing wind, in the damp odors rising.

Then suddenly he saw her in the garden at Tostes, on the bench, against the thorn hedge, or again at Rouen, in the streets, in the doorway of their house, in the yard at Les Bertaux. He could hear again the boys laughing happily as they danced under the apple trees; the room was filled with the perfume of her hair, and her dress rustled in his arms with a crackling sound. It was the same one, this dress!

He stayed a long time remembering all the lost happy moments, her attitudes, her gestures, the sound of her voice. After one wave of despair, another came, and then another, unstoppable, like the waves of an overflowing sea.

He felt a terrible curiosity: slowly, with the tips of his fingers, trembling, he raised up her veil. But he cried out with horror, awakening the two others. They pulled him back downstairs to the parlor.

Then Félicité came to say that he was asking for a lock of her hair.

“Cut one!” replied the pharmacist.

And since she did not dare, he came over himself, the scissors in his hand. He was shaking so badly that he pricked the skin of her temples in several places. Finally, stiffening himself against his fears, Homais chopped two or three places at random, leaving white patches in that beautiful head of black hair.

The pharmacist and the priest plunged back into their preoccupations, not without dozing off from time to time, for which they mutually reproached each other upon awakening. Then Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled the room with holy water and Homais spread some chlorine on the floor.

Félicité had taken care to provide a bottle of brandy, some cheese, and a large roll for them, on the chest of drawers. Around four o’clock in the morning, the pharmacist could hold out no longer, sighing:

“Good lord, I could eat something!”

The cleric needed no persuading; he went out to say Mass and then returned; the two of them ate, clinking their glasses together, chuckling a little without knowing why, stimulated by that vague gaiety that comes over us after a sorrowful vigil; and, with the last glass, the priest said to the pharmacist, clapping him on the shoulder:

“You and I will end up being friends yet!”

Downstairs in the entryway they met the workmen as they arrived. Then for two hours Charles had to endure the sound of the hammer resounding on the wood planks. Next, they lowered her into her oak coffin, which was then put inside the other two; but since the outer one was too large, they had to fill up the gaps with wool from a mattress. Finally, when the three lids had been planed, nailed in place, and soldered, they set it outside the door; the house doors were opened wide, and the Yonville people began to gather around.

Old Rouault arrived. When he saw the black cloth, he fainted on the square.

1. The Abbé Antoine Guenée’s book of letters of converted Jews, arguing against Voltairean freethinking, was published in 1769.

2. Bournisien mistakes his author; the twelve-volume Raison du christianisme (1834– 35), an anthology of rational arguments for belief, was edited by Eugène de Genoude.

CHAPTER 10

He had not received the pharmacist’s letter until thirty-six hours after the event; and out of consideration for his feelings, Monsieur Homais had written it in such a way that it was impossible to tell what it was about.

First, the old man had collapsed as if struck by apoplexy. Then he reread, and decided she was not dead. But on the other hand, she might be … At last, he put on his smock, took his hat, put on his spurs, and rode off as quickly as he could go; and all along the route, old Rouault, panting, was tormented by anxiety. Once, he had to get down from the horse. He couldn’t see anymore, he was hearing voices around him, he thought he was going mad.

Day broke, and he saw three black hens sleeping in a tree; he shuddered, taking it as an omen. He promised the Holy Virgin he would buy three new chasubles for the church, and that he would walk barefoot from the cemetery at Les Bertaux to the Vassonville chapel.

He got to Maromme, calling out for innkeepers, pushed open the door with his shoulder, headed straight for the oat sack, poured a bottle of sweet cider into the feedbag, and leaped back onto his nag, whose hoofs struck sparks as it flew off.

He told himself that they would undoubtedly be able to save her; the doctors would surely come up with some remedy. He remembered all the miraculous cures he had heard people tell about.

But then he seemed to see her dead. There she was, in front of him, lying stretched out on her back, in the middle of the road. He pulled back on the reins, and the hallucination disappeared.

At Quincampoix, to give himself courage, he drank three cups of coffee, one after the other.

He imagined that they had got the name wrong. He searched for the letter in his pocket, found it, but didn’t dare open it.

He came to wonder if the whole thing hadn’t perhaps been a joke, someone’s revenge, the fantasy of someone who’d been drinking; and besides, if she had been dead, wouldn’t he have known it? But no! There was nothing unusual about the countryside: the sky was blue, the trees were swaying in the wind; a flock of sheep was passing by. He caught sight of the village; people saw him riding fast, bent forward on his horse, beating it with great blows, its flanks bleeding.

When he had regained consciousness, he fell weeping into Bovary’s arms:

“My daughter! Emma! My child! Tell me what happened … ?”

And the other replied, sobbing:

“I don’t know, I don’t know! It’s a curse!”

The pharmacist separated them.

“These terrible details aren’t important. I’ll tell Monsieur all about it. Here, everyone’s coming. Have some dignity, for goodness’ sake! Be philosophical!”

The poor boy wanted to seem strong, and he repeated several times:

“Yes … Be brave!”

“All right!” cried the old man. “I will, by God’s name! I’ll stay right with her up to the end.”

The bell tolled. Everything was ready. It was time to start.

And seated together in a choir stall, the one next to the other, they watched the three choristers pass back and forth in front of them continually, chanting. The musician playing the serpent made it blast as loudly as he could. Monsieur Bournisien, in his grandest vestments, was singing in a shrill voice; he bowed before the tabernacle, lifted up his hands, extended his arms. Lestiboudois circulated through the church with his whalebone staff; near the lectern, the coffin reposed, surrounded by four rows of candles. Charles felt an urge to get up and extinguish them.

But he tried to stimulate his sense of devotion, to throw himself into the hope of a future life in which he would see her again. He imagined that she had gone on a journey, far away, for a long time. But when he recalled that she was lying there, and that everything was over, that they would be taking her to lie in the ground, he felt a ferocious, black, desperate rage. At times, he thought he couldn’t feel anything; and he savored those intervals in his grief, while at the same time reproaching himself for doing so.

They could hear a sharp sound on the church floor, a metal-tipped cane rapping at regular intervals. It was coming from the back and stopped abruptly in the lower aisles of the church. A man in a coarse brown jacket kneeled down awkwardly. It was Hippolyte, the stable boy from the Golden Lion. He had put on his new leg.

One of the choristers was going around the nave to take up the collection, and heavy sou pieces, one after another, were clattering on the silver collection plate.

“Hurry up, will you! I can’t take any more of this!” Bovary cried, while angrily throwing him a five-franc piece.

The churchman thanked him with a long bow.

They sang, they knelt, they stood up again—this would never end! He remembered once, in their early days, they had both come to Mass, and they sat on the other side, on the right, against the wall. The bell began tolling again. There was a great movement of chairs. The pallbearers slipped their three poles under the coffin, and the crowd left the church.

Justin appeared, all alone, in the pharmacy doorway. He went right back in, pale and staggering.

People leaned out their windows to watch the funeral procession pass. Charles came first, his head erect. He was putting on a brave front, nodding to those who came out from the side streets or from their doorways, and stood among the crowd.

The six men, three on each side, walked slowly, panting a little. The priests, the choristers, and the two choir boys recited the De Profundis; and their voices carried out over the countryside, rising and falling in waves. Sometimes they disappeared at the turning of the path; but the big silver cross could always be seen among the trees.

The women followed, covered in black mantles with turned-down hoods; they each carried a thick, burning candle, and Charles thought he would collapse under this continued repetition of prayers and candles, under the sickly odors of wax and cassock. A cool breeze was blowing, the rye and the colza were turning green, little droplets of dew shimmered on the thorn hedges bordering the pathway. Every sort of joyful sound was filling the air: the clattering of a distant cart rolling along the rutted path, the repeated crowing of a cock, the galloping sound of a foal, running away under the apple trees. The pure sky was dotted with pink clouds; a bluish haze spread over the iris-covered cottages; Charles, as he passed, recognized the yards.

He was remembering mornings like this one when, after having visited some patient, he would come back outside and go home to her.

The black cloth, strewn with white, teardrop-shaped beads, lifted up from time to time, revealing the coffin. The fatigued pallbearers were slowing down; the coffin jerked forward continually, like a rowboat pitching with every wave.

They arrived.

The men continued onward, to a place in the grass where the hole had been dug.

They stood around it; and while the priest was speaking, the red soil thrown up on the edges rolled back in, quietly, continually.

Then, when the four ropes were arranged, they put the coffin atop them. He watched it being lowered. It went on forever.

At last they heard a thudding sound; the ropes, with a creak, were pulled back up. Then Bournisien took the spade that Lestiboudois handed him; sprinkling holy water with his right hand, with his left he vigorously pushed in a large spadeful of earth; and the coffin wood, struck by the pebbles, made that tremendous sound that seems to us to be the echo of eternity.

The cleric passed the holy water bottle to his neighbor. It was Monsieur Homais. He shook it solemnly, and then passed it to Charles, who collapsed on his knees onto the earth, and he threw in handfuls, crying out, “Farewell!” He threw her kisses; he dragged himself toward the open grave to be swallowed up along with her.

They pulled him away; and it wasn’t long before he grew calmer, perhaps feeling that same vague satisfaction they all felt at having it over.

Old Rouault, on the way back, began calmly smoking his pipe, which Homais inwardly judged to be inappropriate. He likewise observed that Monsieur Binet had not bothered to attend, that Tuvache had “run out” after the Mass, and that Théodore, the notary’s servant, had worn a blue suit, “as if a person couldn’t find a black one, which happens to be the custom— what the devil!” And to communicate his observations, he went from one group to another. Everyone deplored Emma’s death, and especially Lheureux, who had not failed to attend the burial.

“That poor little lady! What a tragedy for her husband!”

The pharmacist took up the subject:

“If it hadn’t been for me, believe me, who knows what harm he would have done to himself!”

“Such a good person she was! And to think it was just this last Saturday when she was in my shop!”

“I didn’t have the leisure,” Homais said, “to prepare a little speech that I might have delivered at the grave.”

When he got home, Charles changed his clothes, and old Rouault put his blue smock on again. It was new, and as he had often wiped his eyes with its sleeves on his way to Yonville, it had left dye stains on his face; and the traces of tears made little lines in the dust on the smock.

Madame Bovary senior was with them. All three of them were silent. Finally the old man sighed:

“Do you remember, my friend, that I came to Tostes once, when you had just lost your first deceased. I consoled you back then! I knew what to say; but now …”

Then, after a lengthy groan that lifted his entire chest:

“Ah, it’s the end for me, you know! I’ve seen my wife go … later on, my son … and now today, my daughter!”

He wanted to return to Les Bertaux right away, saying that he couldn’t sleep in that house. He even refused to see his granddaughter.

“No! No! It will be too sad. But you kiss her for me! Farewell! … You’re a good fellow! And you know, I’ll never forget,” he said, slapping his thigh. “Don’t worry: you’ll always get your turkey!”

But when he reached the summit of the hill, he turned around, just as he had turned around once long ago on the road to Saint-Victor, when she was leaving him. The windows of the village houses were all alit with the slanting rays of the sun, setting now over the meadows. He put his hand over his eyes, and he saw on the horizon a walled enclosure, with little black bunches of trees here and there like bouquets against the white stone; and then he continued on his way, but slowly, for his old horse was limping.

Charles and his mother, despite their fatigue, stayed up a long time that evening talking together. They talked about the past, and about the future. She would come to live in Yonville, she would manage the household for him, she would never leave him again. She was ingenious and comforting, and she rejoiced inwardly at having regained an affection that had escaped her for so many years. Midnight struck. The village was silent, as usual, and Charles, sleepless, thought constantly about her.

Rodolphe, who, to distract himself, had been hunting in the woods all day, was sleeping peacefully in his chateau; and Léon, farther away, was also asleep.

But there was one other who, at that particular hour, was not sleeping.

On the grave, among the pines, a boy was kneeling and crying, and his heart, broken with sobbing, throbbed in the darkness under the pressure of an immense regret, sweeter than the moon and deeper than the night. Suddenly the gate creaked. It was Lestiboudois; he had come to look for the spade he had forgotten earlier. He recognized Justin scaling the wall, and then he knew at last who the culprit was who had been stealing his potatoes.

CHAPTER 11

The next day, Charles had his little girl brought back home. She asked for her mother. They told her that she was gone, that she would be bringing toys back for her. Berthe spoke about her several more times; then, as time went by, she stopped thinking about her. The child’s cheerfulness saddened Bovary, and he also had to put up with the pharmacist’s intolerable consolations.

Soon, the money problems started up again, Monsieur Lheureux inciting his friend Vinçart all over again, and Charles signed notes for exorbitant sums; because he would never consent to selling the least of the household goods that belonged to her. This exasperated his mother. He waxed more indignant than she. He had changed entirely. She left the house.

Then everyone started trying to profit. Mademoiselle Lempereur billed him for six months of lessons, even though Emma had never taken a single one (despite that receipt she had shown Bovary): the two women had had an agreement; the bookseller billed for three years’ subscription; Madame Rolet billed for the postage for twenty letters, and when Charles asked for an explanation, she had the delicacy to reply:

“Ah, I don’t know anything about it! It was for her business matters.”

With every debt he paid, Charles thought he had come to an end of it. But there were always others, without end.

He billed his patients for past visits. They showed him the letters that his wife had sent them. Then he had to apologize.

Félicité was now wearing Madame’s dresses; not all of them, as he had kept back some of them, and he went to look at them in her dressing room, shutting himself in with them; Félicité was just about the same build, and sometimes Charles would catch sight of her from behind, and seized by the illusion, he would cry out:

“Oh! Stay! Stay!”

But at Pentecost, she ran away from Yonville, carried off by Théodore, and stealing everything that was left in the wardrobe.

It was about that time when the widow, old Madame Dupuis, had the honor to inform him of the “marriage of Monsieur Léon Dupuis, notary of Yvetot, to Mademoiselle Léocadie Leboeuf, of Bondeville.” Charles wrote him congratulations, including this sentence:

“How happy this news would have made my poor wife!”

One day when he was wandering aimlessly through the house, he went up into the attic, and he felt a piece of thin paper under his slipper. He opened it and he read: “Be brave, Emma! Be brave! I don’t want to be a curse upon your life.” It was Rodolphe’s letter, which had remained on the floor after falling between the boxes, and which the wind from the open window had blown over toward the door. And Charles stood motionless and agape in that place where once Emma, desperate and even paler than he was, had wanted to die. At length he discovered a small R at the bottom of the second page. Who was it? He remembered Rodolphe’s kindnesses, his abrupt disappearance and the constrained tone he adopted when they had met again, two or three times. But the letter’s respectful tone allowed him to delude himself:

“Perhaps they were platonic friends,” he said to himself.

In any case, Charles was not one of those who like to get to the bottom of things; he recoiled before the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his sorrow.

People must have adored her, he thought. Every man, you could be sure of it, desired her. It made her even more beautiful to him; and he conceived a permanent, limitless desire for her that only inflamed his despair, because it was now forever unachievable.

To please her—as if she were still alive—he adopted her tastes, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots, he began wearing white cravats. He put cosmetics on his mustache, and like her, he signed promissory notes. She was corrupting him from beyond the grave.

He was forced to sell off the silver, piece by piece, and then all the drawing-room furniture. All the rooms were emptied; but the bedroom, her own bedroom, was maintained just as it always had been. After his dinner, Charles would go up there. He would push the round table up close to the fire and bring her armchair up. He would sit down facing it. A candle would burn in one of the gilded candlesticks. Berthe, next to him, would color pictures.

He suffered, the poor man, at seeing her so badly dressed, her boots missing their laces, the armholes of her smock torn down to her hips, for the housekeeper paid no attention to her. But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her little head bent forward so gracefully, letting her blond hair tumble forward onto her pink cheeks, that an infinite delight penetrated him, a pleasure mixed with a bitterness, like those poorly-made wines that taste of resin. He would repair her toys, make puppets out of cardboard for her, or sew up the ripped stomach of her dolls. Then, if he happened to see a ribbon trailing out of the workbox, or even a pin lying in a crack in the table, he would begin to dream, and he looked so sad that she became just as sad as he was.

No one ever came to see them; for Justin had run off to Rouen, where he became a grocer’s assistant, and the pharmacist’s children saw the little girl less and less, Monsieur Homais not wishing them to continue the friendship, in view of their different social standings.

The blind man, whom he was never able to cure with his pomade, returned to the Bois-Guillaume hillside, where he narrated the pharmacist’s failure to so many travelers that Homais, when he went to the city, hid himself behind the Hirondelle’s curtains, to avoid being recognized. He hated him; and in the interests of his own reputation, wanting to rid himself of the problem at all costs, he waged a secret campaign against him—which revealed both the depth of his intelligence and the violence of his vanity. For six months running, one could read editorial items like this one in the Rouen Lantern:

“Anyone who travels to the fertile plains of Picardy will undoubtedly have noticed, on the Bois-Guillaume hillside, a beggar marked with a horrible facial wound. He bothers you, persecutes you, and levies a veritable tax on every traveler. Are we still living in the monstrous Middle Ages, when it was permissible for tramps to display, in our public places, the leprosy and scrofula they brought back from the Crusades?”

Or:

“Despite the laws against vagrancy, the approaches to our big cities continue to be infested with bands of poor beggars. Some of them can be seen wandering around alone, though this is perhaps no less dangerous. What are our local officials thinking about?”

Then, Homais went on to invent anecdotes:

“Yesterday, on the Bois-Guillaume hillside, a skittish horse …”

And this introduced a story about an accident caused by the blind man’s presence.

He worked all this so well that they jailed the beggar. But then he was released. He started up again, and Homais started up again too. It was a battle. Victory was his; for his enemy was condemned to life in an asylum.

This success emboldened him; and since then the district didn’t see a dog run over, a wife beaten, or a barn burned without his informing the public about it, always guided by his love of progress and his hatred of priests. He drew up comparisons between the public schools and those run by the frères ignorantins,¹ much to the detriment of the latter; when there was a question of a hundred-franc grant to the church, he brought up the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; he denounced abuses, and tossed off witticisms. That was his term for it. Homais was laying mines; he was becoming dangerous.

Meanwhile, the narrow limits of journalism were beginning to feel stifling to him, and soon he felt he had to produce a real work, a book! So he composed his General Statistics of the Canton of Yonville, Followed by Climatological Observations, and from statistics he was propelled toward philosophy. He busied himself with the big questions: social problems, improving the morality of the lower classes, fish farming, rubber manufacturing, railroads, et cetera. He came to blush at being a bourgeois. He affected the artistic style; he took up smoking! He bought two chic Pompadour statuettes to adorn his drawing room.

He by no means abandoned his pharmacy; on the contrary! He kept up with all the latest discoveries. He carefully followed the chocolate fad. He was the first to introduce both cho-ca and revalentia² to the district. He was an enthusiast for the Pulvermacher hydro-electric chain;³ he wore one himself; and when he took off his flannel vest at night, Madame Homais was dazzled by the golden spiral wound around him, and she felt her passion redoubled for this man more swathed up than a Scythian and as splendid as a Mage.

He had some fine ideas for Emma’s tomb. He first suggested a broken column with some drapery, then a pyramid, then a Vestal temple, a kind of rotunda … or perhaps “a pile of ruins.” But with all his plans, he refused to give up the weeping willow, which he considered the obligatory symbol of sorrow.

He and Charles took a trip to Rouen together to look at tombstones at a gravestone dealer’s—accompanied by an artist named Vaufrylard, a friend of Bridoux’s, who made puns constantly. Finally, after having examined a hundred designs, having ordered an estimate, and having made a second trip to Rouen, Charles decided upon a mausoleum with “a spirit holding an extinguished torch” on both sides.

As for the inscription, Homais could find nothing more beautiful than Sta viator, and he got stuck there; he wracked his brains for the next line; he repeated constantly, Sta viator …” At last, he came up with: amabilem conjugem calcas !—which was adopted.⁴

It was a strange thing that Bovary, in thinking continually about Emma, was forgetting her; and he felt desperate when he sensed her image slipping away from his memory despite all his efforts to retain it. But every night, he dreamed about her; it was always the same dream: he would come up close to her; but when he tried to embrace her, she turned into mere dust in his arms.

For about a week, he was seen going to church every evening. Monsieur Bournisien even came to visit him two or three times, then gave him up. Anyway, the fellow was becoming intolerant and fanatical, Homais said; he preached against the spirit of the age, and every other week in his sermon he always brought up the deathbed agony of Voltaire, who died eating his own excrement, as everyone knows.

Even though Bovary lived very sparingly, he was far from being able to clear his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any of his notes. A seizure was imminent. He then turned to his mother, who consented to let him take out a mortgage on her property, but not without expressing strong recriminations against Emma; and in recompense for her sacrifice, she asked for a shawl that had escaped the ravages of Félicité. Charles refused. They quarreled.

She made the first overtures toward a reconciliation, by suggesting to him that the child come and live with her, where she could help around the house. Charles agreed to it. But at the moment of departure, his courage failed him. And that was the definitive, complete rupture.

As his other relationships vanished, he clung even more tightly to the love of his child. She caused him anxiety, though, because she coughed sometimes, and there were red spots on her cheeks.

Directly across from him was the pharmacist’s family, flourishing and merry, and everything in the world seemed to contribute to their well-being. Napoléon helped out in the laboratory, Athalie embroidered a skullcap for her father, Irma cut out rounds of paper for labeling the preserves, and Franklin could recite the multiplication tables in a single breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men.

But not quite! One secret ambition devoured him: Homais desired the Cross of the Legion of Honor. He was not lacking in qualifications for it:

“(1) In the time of cholera, was distinguished by boundless devotion; (2) have published, and at my own expense, various works for the public good, such as [here he listed his memorandum titled On Cider, Its Manufacture and Its Effects; and his observations on the wool-bearing aphid, which were sent to the Academy; his volume on statistics; and even his thesis from pharmacy school]; not to mention that I am a member of several learned societies [he was a member of exactly one].”

“For that matter,” he cried as he pirouetted in excitement, “they could grant it to me for my service as a volunteer fireman alone!”

Then Homais turned himself toward the seats of Power. He secretly did great services for Monsieur the Prefect during the elections. In short, he sold himself; he prostituted himself. He even sent a petition to the Sovereign, in which he begged him to do justice to him; he addressed him as our good king, and compared him to Henri IV.

And every morning, the pharmacist pounced on the newspaper to see if his nomination would be in it: it was never there. Finally, able to endure it no longer, he had a little grass plot in his garden cut in the shape of the Cross of Honor, with two little grass strips running off it to suggest the ribbon. He would walk around it with his arms crossed, meditating on the ineptitude of the government and the ingratitude of men.

Out of respect, or out of a sort of laziness that made him proceed slowly in his investigations, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer in the rosewood desk that Emma had always used. Finally, one day he sat down in front of it, turned the key, and pushed the spring. All Léon’s letters were there. No more doubts this time! He read every single one of them, rummaged in all the corners, in all the furniture, all the drawers, behind the walls, sobbing, moaning, frantic, wild. He discovered a box and broke it open with a kick. Rodolphe’s portrait flew out, directly into his face, from among the overturned love letters.

People were surprised at his despondency. He never went out anymore, never had visitors, and even refused to go see his patients. Then people claimed that he had locked himself in to drink.

Sometimes, though, some curious person would pull himself up over the garden hedge and look with amazement at the man with the long beard, dressed in shabby clothes, savage-looking, who wept out loud as he paced.

In the evenings during the summer, he would take his little girl and walk with her to the cemetery. They would come back at nightfall, when the only light on in the square was from Binet’s attic.

However, he was unable to revel fully in his misery, because he had no one with whom he could share it; and he made visits to Madame Lefrançois in order to be able to speak about her. But the innkeeper only listened with one ear, having her own troubles, for Monsieur Lheureux had finally established his own coach service called Business Express, and Hivert, who enjoyed a solid reputation as a runner of errands, was asking for a raise and threatening to go over “to the competition.”

One day, when he had gone to the Argueil market to sell his horse—his last remaining asset—he ran into Rodolphe.

They both paled when they saw each other. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, stammered some excuses, then grew bolder and even confident enough (it was very hot, this being the month of August) to invite him for a bottle of beer at the tavern.

Leaning on the table and facing him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and Charles became lost in reverie, looking at this face that she had loved. It seemed to him that there was something of her in it. It was a marvel. He would have liked to be this man.

The other went on talking agriculture, animals, fertilizer, deftly employing banal phrases to plug up quickly any gap where there might have been an awkward allusion. Charles wasn’t listening; Rodolphe perceived this, and he was able to follow the passage of Charles’ memories by the movements of his face. It grew redder, moment by moment, the nostrils flared, the lips trembled; there was even an instant when Charles, filled with a somber rage, fixed his eyes upon Rodolphe, who, feeling a kind of fright, interrupted his talking. But soon the same look of mournful weariness reappeared on his face.

“I don’t blame you,” he said.

Rodolphe remained silent. And Charles, his head in his two hands, repeated lifelessly, with the resigned tone of infinite sorrow:

“No, I don’t blame you any more!”

He added one fine phrase, the only one he ever uttered:

“Fate is to blame!”

Rodolphe, who had been in charge of that particular fate, found him awfully easygoing for a man in his situation, comical even, and a bit cowardly.

The next day, Charles went to sit on the bench in the arbor. Rays of sunlight streamed through the trellis; the vine leaves threw their shadows on the sand path, the jasmine scented the air, the sky was blue, flies were buzzing around the lilies in bloom, and Charles was suffocating like an adolescent under the vague waves of love that were swelling his despondent heart.

At seven o’clock, little Berthe, who had not seen him all afternoon, went to find him for dinner.

His head was leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and his hands holding a long lock of black hair.

“Papa, come in!” she said.

And thinking he wanted to play, she pushed him gently. He fell to the ground. He was dead.

Thirty-six hours later, at the request of the pharmacist, Monsieur Canivet hurried over. He performed an autopsy and found nothing.

When everything was sold, there were twelve francs, seventy-five centimes left over to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary’s trip to her grandmother’s. The good old woman died that same year; old Rouault was paralyzed, and it was an aunt who took her in. She is poor, and she sends the girl to a cotton mill to earn a living.

Since Bovary’s death, three different doctors have followed him in Yonville without being able to succeed, so soundly does Homais defeat them. He has a hell of a practice; the authorities watch over him, and public opinion protects him.

He has just been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

1. The Frères Ignorantins were organized in the 1680s with the purpose of providing free education to poor children; they adopted the adjective “ignorant” because they specifically excluded theologians from joining their ranks. Anticlerical people, like Homais, easily mocked the name, as here, by omitting the capital letters.

2. Cho-ca was a kind of cocoa powder, and revalentia was a newly fashionable cure-all composed of diverse vegetables including lentils and beans.

3. The Pulvermacher chain was a hugely successful pseudoscientific device during the early 1850s; it was worn against the skin and was promised to cure or prevent many diseases.

4. The inscription means: Stop, traveler; you are walking on a beloved spouse.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography only lists items available in English. For those who can read French, an excellent resource is the Gustave Flaubert Web site maintained by the Centre Flaubert in Rouen: http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr. Among the many features at the site are transcriptions of Flaubert’s drafts for Madame Bovary, most of which have never been translated.

Biographies and Background

Bart, Benjamin F. Flaubert. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1967.

Brown, Frederick. Flaubert: A Biography. New York: Little, Brown, 2006. Brown is especially good at explaining the social and political contexts of Flaubert’s life.

Flaubert, Gustave. Early Writings. Translated by Robert Griffin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Griffin provides translations of eleven of Flaubert’s juvenile writings, including Passion and Virtue, the main character of which is an early version of Emma Bovary.

Goncourt, Edmond de, and Jules de Goncourt. Pages from the Goncourt Journals. Translated and edited by Robert Baldick. New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2007. The extensive diaries of the Goncourt brothers—with whom Flaubert was close—are a treasure trove of anecdotes about nearly every important French writer of the era.

Gray, Francine du Plessix. Rage and Fire: Louise Colet; Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert’s Muse. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Lottman, Herbert. Flaubert: A Biography. London: Methuen, 1989.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert. Translated by Carol Cosman. Five vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981–93. This daunting study combines biography, psychoanalysis, and Sartre’s most mature philosophy. The reader who attempts it is advised to have at hand Hazel Barnes’ helpful, lucid commentary on it, titled Sartre and Flaubert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Starkie, Enid. Flaubert: The Making of the Master. London: Wiedenfeld, 1967.

———. Flaubert the Master. London: Wiedenfeld, 1971.

Steegmuller, Francis. Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. From a scholarly point of view, Steegmuller’s book may seem a disappointment in that it is only lightly documented and is now out of date. Despite these limitations, it remains by far the outstanding biography of Flaubert and is highly recommended.

———. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. Like Steegmuller’s full-scale biography, this is a compulsively readable book; it offers a superb glimpse into Flaubert’s thinking and character as he prepared to write Madame Bovary.

Wall, Geoffrey. Flaubert: A Life. London: Faber, 2001. In addition to this biography, Wall has edited and translated Gustave Flaubert: Selected Letters (London: Penguin, 1997).

Studies

Bart, Benjamin F. “Flaubert’s Concept of the Novel.” PMLA 80, no. 1 (March 1965): 84–89.

Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect” [1968]. In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, 141–48. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.

———. “Flaubert and the Sentence” [1967]. In A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag, 296–304 [translator not listed]. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

Bersani, Leo. “Flaubert and Emma Bovary: The Hazards of Literary Fusion.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 16–28.

Brombert, Victor. The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Chaitin, Gilbert D. “Listening Power: Flaubert, Zola, and the Politics of Style Indirect Libre.” The French Review 72, no. 6 (May 1999): 1023–27.

Culler, Jonathan. “The Realism of Madame Bovary.” Modern Language Notes 122 (2007): 683–96.

———. Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty. 1974. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Diamond, Marie J. Flaubert: The Problem of Aesthetic Discontinuity. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975.

Fairlie, Alison. Flaubert: “Madame Bovary.” London: Arnold, 1962.

Gale, John E. “Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire on Madame Bovary.” The French Review 41, no. 1 (October 1967): 30–37.

Gans, Eric. “Madame Bovary”: The End of Romance. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.

Green, Anne. “France Exposed: Madame Bovary and the Exposition Universelle.” Modern Language Review 99, no. 4 (October 2004): 915–23.

Greif, Mark “Flaubert’s Aestheticism.” Raritan 24, no. 3 (March 2005): 51–75.

Hamilton, James F. “The Ideology of Place: Flaubert’s Depiction of Yonville-l’Abbaye.” The French Review 65, no. 2 (December 1991): 206–15.

Heath, Stephen. Flaubert: “Madame Bovary.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Kaplan, Louise. Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Knight, Diana. Flaubert’s Characters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

LaCapra, Dominick. “Madame Bovary” on Trial. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Lowe, Margaret. Towards the Real Flaubert: A Study of “Madame Bovary.” London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

Orr, Mary. Flaubert: Writing the Masculine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Paskow, Jacqueline Merriam. “Rethinking Madame Bovary’s Motives for Committing Suicide.” Modern Language Review 100, no. 2 (April 2005): 323–39.

Porter, Laurence M., ed. Critical Essays on Gustave Flaubert. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

———, ed. A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001.

Ramazani, Vaheed K. The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988.

Rancière, Jacques. “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed.” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008): 233–48.

Riffaterre, Michel. “Flaubert’s Presuppositions.” Diacritics 11, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 2–11.

Schehr, Lawrence R. Rendering French Realism. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Schor, Naomi. Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Schor, Naomi, and Henry F. Majewski, eds. Flaubert and Postmodernism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Unwin, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and “Madame Bovary.” Translated by Helen Lane. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.

Vinken, Barbara. “Loving, Reading, Eating: The Passion of Madame Bovary.” Modern Language Notes 122 (2007): 759–78.

Wall, Geoffrey. “The Invisible Man: An Essay on Flaubert and Celebrity.” Cambridge Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2006): 133–50.

Wood, James. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Modern Library, 2000.