Madame Bovary_ A Tale of Provincial Life_ Vol. 1 (of 2) Gustave Flaubert 2519 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Madame Bovary: A Tale of
Provincial Life, Vol. 1 (of 2)
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.

Title: Madame Bovary: A Tale of Provincial Life, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Author: Gustave Flaubert

Release date: December 20, 2008 [eBook #27575]
Most recently updated: April 9, 2014

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27575

Credits: Produced by Thierry Alberto, Henry Craig and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADAME
BOVARY: A TALE OF PROVINCIAL LIFE, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***

Transcriber's Note: Amendments can be read by placing cursor over words
with a dashed underscore like this.

MADAME BOVARY
A TALE OF PROVINCIAL LIFE

BY

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

WITH A
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
BY

FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE

Of the French Academy

AND A
BIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE
BY

ROBERT ARNOT, M. A

VOLUME I.

SIMON P. MAGEE,

PUBLISHER,
CHICAGO, ILL.

Copyright, 1904, by
M. WALTER DUNNE
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London

CONTENTS
PAGE
PART I.
I. The New Boy 1
II. A Good Patient 13
III. A Lonely Widower 23
IV. Consolation 31
V. The New Ménage 38
VI. A Maiden's Yearnings 43
VII. Disillusion 50
VIII. Glimpses Of The World 58
IX. Idle Dreams 71

PART II.
I. A New Field 85
II. New Friends 98
III. Added Cares 107
IV. Silent Homage 121
V. Smothered Flames 126
VI. Spiritual Counsel 138
VII. A Woman's Whims 154
VIII. A Village Festival 165

IX. A Woodland Idyll 193
X. Lovers' Vows 206
XI. An Experiment And A Failure 217
XII. Preparations For Flight 233
XIII. Deserted 251
XIV. Religious Fervor 264
XV. A New Delight 278

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Domi mansit, lanam fecit: "He remained at home and wrote," is the first
thing that should be said of Gustave Flaubert. This trait, which he shares
with many of the writers of his generation,—Renan, Taine, Leconte de Lisle
and Dumas fils,—distinguishes them and distinguishes him from those of
the preceding generation, who voluntarily sought inspiration in disorder and
agitation,—Balzac and George Sand, for instance (to speak only of romance
writers), and the elder Dumas or Eugène Sue. Flaubert, indeed, had no
"outward life;" he lived only for his art.
A second trait of his character, and of his genius as a writer, is that of seeing
in his art only the art itself—and art alone, without the mingling of any
vision of fortune or success. A competency,—which he had inherited from
the great surgeon, his father,—and moderate tastes, infinitely more
bourgeois than his literature,—permitted him to shun the great stumbling-
block of the professional man of letters, which, in our day, and doubtless in
the United States as well as in France, is the temptation to coin money with
the pen. Never was writer more disinterested than Flaubert; and the story is
that Madame Bovary brought him 300 francs—in debts.
A third trait, which helps not only to characterise but to individualise him, is
his subordination not only of his own existence, but of life in general, to his
conception of art. It is not enough to say that he lived for his art: he saw
nothing in the world or in life but material for that art,—Hostis quid aliud
quam perpetua materia gloriæ?—and if it be true that others have died of

their ambition, it could literally be said of Flaubert that he was killed by his
art.
It is this point that I should like to bring out in this Introduction,—where we
need not speak of his Norman origin, or (as his friend Ducamp has written
in his Literary Souvenirs with a disagreeable persistence, and so uselessly!)
of his nervousness and epilepsy; of his loves or his friendships, but solely of
his work. We know, in fact, to-day, that if all such details are made clear in
the biography of a great writer, in no way do they explain his work. The
author of Gil Blas, Alain René Lesage, was a Breton, like the author of
Atala; the Corneille brothers had almost nothing in common. Of all our
great writers, the one nearest, perhaps, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who died
a victim to delirium from persecution, was Madame Sand, who had, without
doubt, the sanest and best balanced temperament.
Other writers have sought,—for instance, our great classical authors, Pascal,
Bossuet and perhaps Corneille,—to influence the thought of their time;
some, like Molière, La Fontaine, and La Bruyère, to correct customs.
Others still,—such as our romantic writers, Hugo or De Musset,—desired
only to express their personal conception of the world and of life. And then
Balzac, whose object,—almost scientific,—was to make a "natural history,"
a study and description, of the social species, as an animal or vegetable
species is described in zoology or botany. Gustave Flaubert attempted only
to work out his art, for and through the love of art. Very early in life, as we
clearly see from his correspondence, his consideration for art was not even
that of a social but of a sacred function, in which the artist was the priest.
We hear sometimes, in metaphor and not without irony, of the "priesthood"
of the artist and the "worship" of art. These expressions must be taken
literally in Flaubert's case. He was cloistered in his art as a monk in his
convent or by his discipline; and he truly lived only in meditation upon that
art, as a Mystic in contemplation of the perfections of his God. Nothing
outside of art truly interested him, neither science, nor things political or
religious, nor men, nor women, nor anything in the world; and if,
sometimes, it was his duty to occupy himself with them, it was never in a
degree greater than could benefit his art. "The accidents of the world"—this
is his own expression—appeared to him only as things permitted for the
sake of description, so much so that his own existence, even, seemed to him
to have no other excuse.

It is that which explains the mixture of "romanticism," "naturalism," and I
will add, of "classicism"—which has been pointed out more than once in
Flaubert's work. Madame Bovary is the masterpiece of naturalistic romance
and has not been surpassed by the studies of Zola or the stories of De
Maupassant. On the other hand, there is nothing in Hugo, even, more
romantic than The Temptation of Saint Antony. But it is necessary to look
for many things in romanticism; and the romanticism of Hugo, which was
one of the delights of Flaubert, did not resemble that of De Musset, (Lord
de Musset, as Flaubert called him) which he strongly disliked. What he
loved in romanticism was the "colour," and nothing but the colour. He loved
the romanticism of the Orientals, of Hugo and Chateaubriand, that plastic
romanticism, whose object is to substitute in literature "sensations of art"
for the "expression of ideas," or even of sentiments. It is precisely here that
naturalism and romanticism—or at least French naturalism, which is very
different from that of the Russians or the English—join hands. In the one
case, as in the other, the attempt is made to "represent"—as he himself puts
it; and when one represents nothing except the vulgar, the common, the
mediocre, the everyday, commonplace, or grotesque, he is a "naturalist,"
like the author of Madame Bovary; but one is a "romanticist" when, like the
author of Salammbô, he makes this world vanish, and recreates a strange
land filled with Byzantine or Carthaginian civilization, with its barbaric
luxury, its splendour of corruption, immoderate appetites, and monstrous
deities.
We have done wrong in considering Flaubert a naturalist impeded by his
romanticism, or a romanticist impenitent, irritated with himself because of
his tendency to naturalism. He was both naturalist and romanticist. And in
both he was an artist, so much of an artist (I say this without fear of
contradiction) that he saw nothing in his art but "representation," the telling
of the truth in all its depth and fidelity. Les Fileuses and La Reddition de
Bréda are always by Velasquez; but the genius of the painter has nothing in
common with the subject he has chosen or the circumstances that inspired
him.
From this source proceeds that insensibility in Flaubert with which he has
so often been reproached, not without reason, and which divides his
naturalism from that of the author of Adam Bede or that of the author of
Anna Karenina by an abyss. Honest, as a man, a good citizen, a good son, a

good brother, a good friend, Flaubert was indifferent, as an artist, to all that
did not belong to his art. "I believe that it is necessary to love nothing," he
has written somewhere, and even underscored it—that is to say, it is
necessary to hover impartially above all objective points. And, in fact, as
nothing passed before his eyes that he considered did not lie within the
possibility of representation, he made it a law unto himself to look nothing
in the face except from this point of view.
In this regard one may compare his attitude in the presence of his model to
that of his contemporaries, Renan, for example, or Taine, in the presence of
the object of their studies. With them also critical impartiality resembles not
only indifference but insensibility. Not only have they refused to confound
their emotions with their judgments, but their judgments have no value in
their eyes except as they separate them from their emotions,—as they
emancipate themselves from them or even place themselves in opposition to
them. In like manner did Flaubert. The first condition of an exact
representation of things is to dominate them; and in order to dominate them,
is it not necessary to begin by detaching yourself from them? We see dimly
through tears, and we are too much absorbed in that which gives us pleasure
to be good judges of it. "An ideal society would be one where each
individual performed his duty according to his ability. Now, then, I do my
duty as best I can; I am forsaken.... No one pities my misfortunes; those of
others occupy their attention! I give to humanity what it gives to me—
indifference!" Is not the link between Flaubert's "indifference" and his
conception of art evident here?
But Flaubert said besides: "Living does not concern me! It is only necessary
to shun suffering." Should we not change the name of this to "egotism" or
"insensibility?" We might, indeed, did we not know that this egotism
germinated in Flaubert as a means of discipline. The object of this
discipline was to concentrate, for the profit of his art, those qualities or
forces which the ordinary man dissipates in the pursuit of useless pleasures,
or squanders in intensity of life.
We may take account at the same time of the nature of his pessimism. For
there are many ways of being a pessimist, and Flaubert's was not at all like
that of Schopenhauer or Leopardi. His pessimism, real and sincere,
proceeded neither from personally grievous experiences of life, as did that

of the recluse of Recanati, nor from a philosophic or logical view of the
conditions of existence in which humanity is placed, like the pessimism of
the Frankfort philosopher. Flaubert was rather a victim of what Théophile
Gautier, in his well-known Emaux et Camées, calls by the singularly happy
name of "the Luminous Spleen of the Orient." To tell the truth, what
Flaubert could not pardon in humanity was that it did not make enough of
art, and so his pessimism was a consequence of his æstheticism. "As lovers
of the beautiful," he tells us, "we are all outlaws! Humanity hates us; we do
not serve it; we hate it because it wounds us! Let us love, then, in art, as the
Mystics love their God; and let all pale before this love."
These lines are dated 1853, before he had published anything. Therefore,
Flaubert did not express himself thus because he was not successful. His
self-love was not in question! No one had yet criticised or discussed him.
But he felt that his ideal of art, an art which he could not renounce, was
opposed to the ideal methods, if they are ideal, held by his contemporaries;
and the vision of the combats that he must face at once exalted and
exasperated him. His pessimism was of the élite, or rather the minority of
one who feels himself, or at least believes himself to be, superior, and who,
knowing well that he will always be in the minority, fears, and rightly too,
that he will not be recognised. It is a form of pessimism less rare in our day
than one would think, and Taine, among others, said practically the same
thing when he averred that "one writes only for one or two hundred people
in Europe, or in the world." It may be that this is too individual a case! A
more liberal estimate would be that we write for all those who can
comprehend us; that style has for its first object the increase of such a
number; and, after that, if there still be those who cannot comprehend us, no
reason for despair exists on our part or on theirs.
Let us follow, now, the consequences of this principle in Flaubert's work,
and see successively all that his work means, and the dogma of art which
proceeds from it.
At first you are tempted to believe that Flaubert's work is diverse, though
inconsiderable in volume; and, primarily do not see clearly the threads
which unite the Education Sentimentale with the Tentation de Saint Antoine
or Salammbô with Madame Bovary.

On the one side Christian Egypt, and on the other the France of 1848,
Madame Arnoux, Rosanette, and Frederick Moreau, the Orleanist carnival,
and the "underwood" of Fontainebleau. Here, Carthage, Hamilcar,
Hannibal, Narr' Havas, the Numidian hero, and Spendius, the Greek slave,
the lions in bondage, the pomegranate trees which they sprinkled with
silphium, the whole a strange and barbaric world; then Charles Bovary, the
chemist Homais, his son Napoléon and his daughter Athalie, provincial life
in the time of the Second Empire; bourgeois adultery, diligences and
notaries' clerks. Then again Herodias, Salome, Saint Jean-Baptiste, or Saint
Julien l'Hospitalier, the middle ages and antiquity,—all, at first sight, seem
far removed, one from the other. At first one must admire, in such a contrast
of subjects and colors, the extraordinary skill, let us say the virtuosité, of
the artist. But, if we look more closely, we shall not be slow to perceive that
no work is more homogeneous than that of Flaubert, and that, in truth, the
Education Sentimentale, differs from Salammbô only as a Kermesse of
Rubens, for example, or a Bacchante of Poussin differs from the apotheoses
or the Church pictures of the painters themselves. The making is the same,
and you immediately recognise the hand. The difference is in the choice of
subjects, which is of no importance, since Flaubert is only attempting to
"represent" something, and in the choice of material, when he is
"representing," he is no longer free. That is the reason why, if one seek for
lessons in "naturalism" in Salammbô, he will find them, and will also find
all the "romanticism" he seeks in the Education Sentimentale and in
Madame Bovary.
From the other lessons that flow from this work, I find some in rhetoric, in
art, in invention, in composition, and two or three of great import, eloquent
in their bearing upon the history of contemporary French literature.
A master does not mingle or engage his personality in his subject; but, as a
God creates from the height of his serenity, without passion, if without love,
so the poet or the artist expands the thing he touches, and, on each occasion,
brings to bear upon it all the faculties that are his by toil but not innate.
Nothing is demanded of the workers, and they make no confessions or
confidences. Literature and art are not, nor should be, the expression of
men's emotions, and still less the history of their lives. That is the reason
why, while from reading René, for example, or Fraziella, Delphine,
Corinne, Adolphe, Indiana, Volupté, or some of the romances of Balzac—

La Muse du Departement, or Un Grand Homme de Province à Paris,—you
could induct Balzac's entire psychology, or Sainte-Beuve's, or Madame
Sand's, Benjamin Constant's, Madame de Staël's or Chateaubriand's, you
would find in Madame Bovary or Salammbô nothing of Flaubert, except his
temperament, his taste, and his ideals as an artist. Let us suppose another
Flaubert, who did not live at Rouen, whose life is not that related in his
correspondence, who was not the friend of Maxime Ducamp or of Louise
Colet, and the Education Sentimentale or the Tentation de Saint Antoine
would not be in the least different from what they are now, nor should we
see one line of change to be made. This is a triumph in objective art. "I do
not wish to consider art as an overflow of passion," he wrote once, a little
brutally. "I love my little niece as if she were my daughter, and I am
sufficiently active in her behalf to prove that these are not empty phrases.
But may I be flayed alive rather than exploit that kind of thing in style!" It
has been but a short hundred years since, as he expressed it, romanticism
"exploited its emotions in style," and made art from the heart.
"Ah! strike upon the heart, 'tis there that genius lies!" But, for a whole
generation, Madame Bovary, Salammbô and Education Sentimentale have
been teaching the contrary. "The author in his work should be like God in
the universe, everywhere present but nowhere visible. Art being second
nature, the creator of this nature should act through analogous procedure.
He must be felt in each atom, under every aspect, concealed but infinite; the
effect upon the spectator should be a kind of amazement." Furthermore, he
remarks that this principle was the core of Greek art. I know not, or at least
I do not recall, whether he had observed (as he should, since Anglo-Saxons
have been quick to notice it) that this "principle" underlies the art of
Shakespeare.
To realize this principle in work you must proceed scientifically, and, in this
connection, we may notice that Flaubert's idea is that of Leconte de Lisle in
the preface to his Poèmes Antiques, and of Taine in his lectures upon
L'Idéal dans l'art.
Romanticism had confounded the picturesque with the anecdotal; character
with accident; colour with oddity. Han d'Islande, Nôtre-Dame de Paris and
some romances of Balzac, the first and poorest, not signed with his name,
may serve as an example. The classic writers on their side, had not always

distinguished very profoundly the difference between the general and the
universal, the principal and the accessory, the permanent and the superficial.
We see this in the French comedies of the eighteenth century, even in some
of Molière's—in his L'Avare and his Le Misanthrope, for example. Flaubert
believed that a means of terminating this conflict is to be found in method;
and that is the reason why, if we confine ourselves wholly to the
consideration of the medium in his works, we shall find the Tentation de
Saint Antoine entirely romantic; while, as a retaliation, nothing is more
classic than Madame Bovary.
The reason for this is, that in his subject, whatever it was, Carthaginian or
low Norman, refined or bourgeois, modern or antique, he saw only the
subject itself, with the eyes and after the manner of a naturalist, who is
concerned only in knowing thoroughly the plant or the animal under
observation. There is no sentiment in botany or in chemistry, and in them
the desideratum is truth. Singleness of aim is the primary virtue in a savant.
Things are what they are, and we demand of him that he show them to us as
they are. We accuse him of lying if he disguises, weakens, alters or
embellishes them.
Likewise the artist! His function is ever to "represent:" and in order to
accomplish this, he should, like the savant, mirror only the facts. After this,
what do the names "romanticism" or "classicism" signify? Their sole use is
to indicate the side taken; they are, so to speak, an acknowledgment that the
writer is adorning the occurrence he is about to represent. He may make it
more universal or more characteristic than nature! But, inversely, if all art is
concentrated upon the representation, what matters the subject? Is one
animal or plant more interesting than another to the naturalist? Does a name
matter? All demand the same attention. Art can make exception in its
subjects no more than science.
If we ask in what consists the difference between science and art, on this
basis, Flaubert, with Leconte de Lisle and with Taine, will tell us that it is in
the beauty which communicates prestige to the work, or in the power of
form.
"What I have just written might be taken for something of Paul de Kock's,
had I not given it a profoundly literary form," wrote Flaubert, while he was

at work on Madame Bovary; "but how, out of trivial dialogue, produce
style? Yet it is absolutely necessary! It must be done!" He went further still,
and persuaded himself that style had a value in itself, intrinsic and absolute,
aside from the subject. In fact, if the subject had no importance of its own,
and if there were no personal motives for choosing one subject rather than
another, what reason would there be for writing Madame Bovary or
Salammbô? One alone: and that to "make something out of nothing," to
produce a work of art from things of no import. For though everyone has
some ideas, and everyone has had experience in some kind of life, it is
given to few to be able to express their experience or their ideas in terms of
beauty. This, precisely, is the goal of art.
Form, then, is the great preoccupation of the artist, since, if he is an artist, it
is through form, and in the perfection or originality of that form, that his
triumph comes. Nothing stands out from the general mediocrity except by
means of form; nothing becomes concrete, assuming immortality, save
through form. Form in art is queen and sovereign. Even truth makes itself
felt only through the attractiveness of form. And further, we cannot part one
from the other; they are not opposed to each other; they are at one; and art
in every phase consists only in this union. It is the end of art to give the
superior life of form to that which has it not; and finally, this superior life of
form, this magic wand of style, rhythmic as verse and terse as science, by
firmly establishing the thing it touches, withdraws it from that law of
change, constant in its inconstancy, which is the miserable condition of
existence.

All passes; art in its strength
Alone remains to all eternity;
The bust
Survives the city.

This it is that makes up the charm, the social dignity, and the lasting
grandeur of art.
This is not the place to discuss the "æsthetic" quality, and I shall content
myself with indicating briefly some of the objections it has called forth.

Has form indeed all the importance in literature that Flaubert claimed for it?
And what importance has it in sculpture, for example, or in painting? Let us
grant its necessity. Colour and line, which are, so to speak, the primal
elements in the alphabet of painting and of sculpture, have not in
themselves determined and precise significance. Yellow and red, green and
blue are only general and confused sensations. But words express particular
sentiments and well-defined ideas, and have a value that does not depend
upon the form or the quality of the words. You cannot, then, in using them,
distinguish between significance and form, or combine them independently
of the idea they are intended to convey, as is possible with colours and with
lines, solely for the beauty that results from combination. If literary art is a
"representation," it is also something more; and the lapse in Flaubert, as in
all those who have followed him in the letter, lies in having missed this
distinction. You cannot write merely to represent; you write also to express
ideas, to determine or to modify convictions; you write that you may act, or
impel others to act: these are effects beyond the power of painting or of
sculpture. A statue or a picture never brought about a revolution; a book, a
pamphlet, nay, a few fiery words, have overturned a dynasty.
It is no longer true, as a whole generation of writers has believed, that art
and science may be one and the same thing; or that the first, as Taine has
said, may be an "anticipation of the second." We could not in the presence
of our fellow-creatures and their suffering affect the indifference of a
naturalist before the plant or the animal he is studying. Whatever the nature
of "human phenomena" may be, we in our quality as man can only look at
them with human eyes, and could temptation make us change our point of
view, it would properly be called inhuman.
One might add that, if it is not certain that nature was made for man, and if,
for that reason, science is wholly independent of conscience, as we take it,
it is otherwise with art. We know that man was not made for art, but that art
was made for man. We forget each time we speak of "art for art's sake" that
there is need precisely to define the meaning of the expression and to recall
that but for truth art could not have for its object the perfecting of political
institutions, the uplifting of the masses, the correction of customs, the
teachings of religion, and that although this may lead finally to the
realization of beauty, it nevertheless remains the duty of man, and

consequently, is human in its origin, human in its development, and human
in its aim.
Upon all these points, it is only necessary to think sensibly, as also upon the
question—which we have not touched upon,—of knowing under what
conditions, in what sense, and in what degree the person of the artist can or
should remain foreign to his work.
But a peculiarity of Flaubert's,—and one more personal, which even most
of the naturalists have not shared with him, neither the Dutch in their
paintings, nor the English in the history of romance (the author of Tom
Jones or of Clarissa Harlowe), nor the Russians, Tolstoi or Dostoiefski,—is
to despise the rôle of irony in art. "My personages are profoundly repugnant
to me," he wrote, à propos of Madame Bovary. But they were not always
repugnant to him, at least not all of them, and, in verification of this, we
find that he has not for Spendius, Matho, Hamilcar, and Hanno, the
boundless scorn that he affects for Homais or for Bournisien, for Bouvard
or for Pecuchet.
We recognise here the particular and special form of Flaubert's pessimism.
That there could be people in the world, among his contemporaries, who
were not wholly absorbed and preoccupied with art, surpassed his
comprehension, and when this indifference did not arouse an indignation
which exasperated him even to blows, it drew from him a scornful laughter
that one might call Homeric or Rabelaisian, since it incited more to anger
than to gaiety. And this is the reason why Madame Bovary, Education
Sentimentale, Un Cœur Simple, and Bouvard et Pecuchet would be more
truly named were they called satires and not representations.
The exaggeration of the principle here recoils upon itself. That
disinterestedness, that impartiality, that serenity which permitted him to
"hover impartially above all objects" deserted him. A satirist, or to be more
exact, a caricaturist, awoke within the naturalist. He raged at his own
characters. He railed at them and mocked them. The interest of the
representation had undergone a change. He was no longer in the attitude of
mere fidelity to facts, but in a state of scorn and violent derision. Homais
and Bournisien are no longer studies in themselves, but a burden to
Flaubert. His Education Sentimentale, in spite of him, became, to use his

own expression, an overflow of rancour. In Bouvard et Pecuchet he gave
way to his hatred of humanity; here, as a favour, and under the mask of
irony, he brings himself into his work, and, like a simple Madame Sand, or
a vulgar De Musset, we perceive Flaubert himself, bull-necked and ruddy,
with the moustaches of a Gallic chief, agonizing at each turn in the
romance.
It is not necessary to exaggerate Flaubert's influence. In his time there were
ten other writers, none of whom equalled him,—Parnassians in poetry,
positivists in criticism, realists in romance or in dramatic writing,—who
laboured at the same work. His æstheticism is not his alone, yet Madame
Bovary and Salammbô shot like unexpected meteors out of a grey sky, the
dull, low sky of the Second Empire. In 1860 the sky was not so grey or so
low; and the Poèmes Antiques of Leconte de Lisle, the Études d'histoire
religieuse of Renan, and the Essais de Critique of Taine, are possibly not
unworthy to be placed in parallel or comparison with the first writings of
Flaubert. An exquisite judge of things of the mind, J. J. Weiss, very clearly
saw at that time what there was in common in all these works, in the glory
of which he was not deceived when he added the Fleurs du Mai by Charles
Baudelaire, and the first comedies of Alexandre Dumas fils. But the truth is,
not one of these works was marked with signs of masterly maturity in like
degree with Madame Bovary.
It is, then, natural that, from day to day, Flaubert should become a guide,
and here, if we consider the nature of the lessons he gives, we cannot deny
their towering excellence.
If there was need to agitate against romanticism, Madame Bovary
performed the duty; and if in this agitation there was need to save what was
worth salvation, Salammbô saved it. If it was fitting to recall to poets and to
writers of romance, to Madame Sand herself and Victor Hugo, that art was
not invented as a public carrier for their confidences, it is still Flaubert who
does it. He taught the school of hasty writers that talent, or even genius, is
in need of discipline,—the discipline of a long and painful prenticehood in
the making and unmaking of their work. He has widened, and especially
has he hollowed and deepened, the notion that romanticism was born of
nature, and, in doing this, has brought art back to the fountain-head of
inspiration. His rhetoric and æstheticism brought him face to face with

Nature, enabled him to see her, a gift as rare as it is great, and to "represent"
her—the proof of the preceding. It is the artist that judges the model. Poets
and romance-writers, like painters, we value only in as much as they
represent life—by and for the fidelity, the originality, the novelty, the depth,
the distinction, the perfection with which they represent it. It is the rule of
rules, the principle of principles! And if Flaubert had no other merit than to
have seen this better than any other writer of his age, it would be enough to
assure for him a place, and a very exalted place, in the Pantheon of French
Literature.

BIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE

Gustave Flaubert was born at Rouen, December 12, 1821. His father was a
physician, who later became chief surgeon in the Hôtel Dieu of that city,
and his mother, Anne-Justine-Carline Fleuriot, was of Norman extraction.
Fourth of a family of six children, as a child Flaubert exhibited marked
fondness for stories, and, with his favourite sister, Caroline, would invent
them for pastime. As a youth, he was exceedingly handsome, tall, broad-
shouldered and athletic, of independent turn of mind, fond of study, and
caring little for the luxuries of life. He attended the college of Rouen, but
showed no marked characteristic save a pronounced taste for history. After
graduating, he went to Paris to read law, at the École de Droit. At this time
disease, the nature of which he always endeavored to conceal from the
world, attacked him and compelled a return to Rouen. The complaint, as
revealed after his death by Maxime Ducamp, was epilepsy, and the constant
fear of suffering an attack in public led Flaubert to live the life of a recluse.
The death of his father occurring at this critical period, Flaubert abandoned
the study of law, which he had begun only in obedience to the formally

expressed wish of his family. Having a comfortable income, he turned his
thoughts to literature, and from that time all other work was distasteful. He
read and wrote incessantly, although at this period he never completed
anything. Among his papers were found several fragments written between
his eighteenth and twentieth years. Some bear the stamp of his individuality,
if not in the substance, which is romantic,—at least in the form, which is
peculiarly lucid and concise,—for instance, the slight, romantic,
autobiographic sketch entitled Novembre.
Flaubert wrote neither for money nor for fame. To him, art was religion, and
to it he sacrificed his life. Perfection of style was his goal; and unremitting
devotion to his ideal slew him. That he was never satisfied with what he
wrote, his letters show; and all who knew him marvelled at his laborious
and pathetic application to his work. He settled first in Croisset, near
Rouen, with his family, but shortly afterwards went to Brittany with
Maxime Ducamp. On his return he planned La Tentation de Saint Antoine,
which grew out of a fragmentary sketch entitled Smarh (a mediæval
Mystery, the manuscript tells us), written in early youth. La Tentation
proved a source of labor, for he never ceased revising it until it appeared in
book form in 1874. In 1847, he wrote a modern play, entitled Le Candidat,
produced in 1874 at the Vaudeville. It was not his first dramatic effort, as he
had already written a sort of lyric fairy-play, Le Château des Cœurs, which
was published in his Œuvres Posthumes.
In 1849 Flaubert visited Greece, Egypt, and Syria, again accompanied by
his friend Maxime Ducamp. After his return he planned a book of
impressions similar to Par les Champs et par les Grèves, which was the
result of the trip to Brittany; but the beginning only was achieved. Still he
gathered many data for his future great novel, Salammbô. The year 1851
found him back in Croisset, working at La Tentation de Saint Antoine,
which he dropped suddenly, when half finished, for an entirely different
subject—Madame Bovary, a novel of provincial life, published first in 1857
in the Revue de Paris. For this Flaubert was prosecuted, on the charge of
offending against public morals, but was acquitted after the remarkable
defense offered by Maître Senard.
Flaubert's fame dates from Madame Bovary, which was much discussed by
press and public. Many, including his friend, Maxime Ducamp, condemned

it, but Sainte-Beuve gave it his decisive and courageous approval. It was
generally considered, however, as the starting point of a new phase in
letters, frankly realistic, and intent on understanding and expressing
everything. Such success might have influenced Flaubert's artistic
inclinations but did not, for while Madame Bovary was appearing in the
Revue de Paris, the Artiste was publishing fragments of La Tentation de
Saint Antoine.
In 1858 Flaubert went to Tunis, visited the site of ancient Carthage, and
four years afterwards wrote Salammbô, a marvellous reconstitution, more
than half intuitive, of a civilisation practically unrecorded in history. This
extraordinary book did not call forth the enthusiasm that greeted Madame
Bovary. Flaubert, in whom correctness of detail was a passion, was
condemned, even by Sainte-Beuve, for choosing from all history a
civilisation of which so little is known. The author replied, and a lengthy
controversy ensued, but it was not a subject that could be settled definitely
in one way or another.
In L'Education Sentimentale, roman d'un jeune homme, published in 1869,
Flaubert returns momentarily to the style which brought him such rapid and
deserved celebrity. In 1877 appeared Trois Contes, three short stories
written in the impersonal style of Salammbô, contrasting strangely with La
Legende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier and Herodias, wherein Flaubert
shows himself supreme in the art of word-painting.
Death came to him on May 8, 1880, as he was writing the last chapters of a
new work, Bouvard et Pecuchet, which was published in part after he died
and later appeared in book form (1881).
At the age of twenty-five, Flaubert met the only woman who in any way
entered his sentimental life. She was an author, the wife of Lucien Colet,
and the "Madame X" of the Correspondence. Their friendship lasted eight
years and ended unpleasantly, Flaubert being too absorbed by his worship
for art to let passion sway him.
He remained unmarried because his love for his mother and family made
calls upon him that he would not neglect. He was indifferent to women,
treated them with paternal indulgence, and often avowed that "woman is the
undoing of the just." Yet a warm friendship existed between him and

George Sand, and many of his letters are addressed to her, touching upon
various questions in art, literature, and politics.
The misanthropy which haunted Flaubert, of which so much has been said,
was not innate, but was acquired through the constant contemplation of
human folly. It was natural for him to be cheerful and kind-hearted, and of
his generosity and disinterestedness not enough can be said. At the close of
his life financial difficulties assailed him, for he had given a great part of
his fortune to the support of a niece, restricting his own expenses and living
as modestly as possible. In 1879, M. Jules Ferry, then Minister of Public
Instruction, offered him a place in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, but the
appointment was not confirmed.
Flaubert's method of production was slow and laborious. Sometimes weeks
were required to write a few pages, for he accumulated masses of notes and,
it must be said, so much erudition as at times to impede action. He thought
no toil too great, did it but aid him in his pursuit of literary perfection, and
when the work that called for such expenditure of strength and thought was
finished, he looked for no reward save that of a satisfied soul. Alien to
business wisdom, he believed that to set a price upon his work disparaged
it.
In Flaubert, a Romanticist and a Naturalist at first were blended. But the
latter tendency was fostered and acknowledged, while the former was
repressed. He was an ardent advocate of the impersonal in art, declaring
that an author should not in a page, a line, or a word, express the smallest
part of an opinion. To him a writer was a mirror, but a mirror that reflected
life while adding that divine effulgence which is Art. Of him a French
Romanticist still living says:
"Imagination was espoused by Unremitting-Toil-in-Faith and
bore Flaubert. France fed the child, but Art stepped in and gave
him to the Nations as a Beacon for the worshippers of Truth-in-
Letters-and-in-Life."
The city of Rouen reared a monument to Flaubert's memory, but on the spot
where he breathed his last are reared the chimneys and the buildings of a
factory, a tribute—possibly unconscious—to reality in life.

Before writing Madame Bovary Flaubert had tested himself, and an idea of
the scope and variety of his ideas may be gained from the following list of
inedited and unfinished fragments:
HISTORICAL
The Death of the Due de Guise, 1835
Norman Chronicle of the Tenth Century, 1836
Two Hands on a Crown, or, During the Fifteenth Century, 1836.
Essay on the Struggle between Priesthood and Empire, 1838.
Rome and the Cæsars, 1839.
TRAVELS
Various notes on Travels to the Pyrenean Mountains, Corsica,
Spain and the Orient, from 1840 to 1850.
TALES AND NOVELS
The Plague in Florence, 1836
Rage and Impotence, 1836
The Society Woman, fantastic verses, 1836
Bibliomania, 1836
An Exquisite Perfume, or, The Buffoons, 1836.
Dreams of the Infernal Regions, 1837
Passion and Chastity, 1837
The Funeral of Dr. Mathurin, or, During the XVth Century,
1839.
Frenzy and Death, 1843
Sentimental Education (not the novel published under same
title). 1843.
PLAYS
Louis XI, Drama, 1838
Discovery of Vaccination, a parody of tragic style; one act only
was written.
CRITICISMS

On Romantic Literature in France
MISCELLANY
Quidquid volueris? A psychological study, 1837.
Agony (Sceptical Thoughts), 1838
Art and Commerce, 1839.
Several nameless sketches.
Unfortunately, nearly all the works of Flaubert's youth were mere sketches,
laid aside by him. Their publication would have added nothing to his fame.
Still, the loss of some would have been deplorable, to wit, such gems as
Novembre, The Dance of Death, Rabelais, and the travels, Over Strand and
Field. These sketches will be found in this edition.

MADAME BOVARY
PART I.

I.

The New Boy.

E WERE in class when the head-master came in, followed
by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a

school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been
asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his
work.
The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-
master, he said to him in a low voice:
"Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care; he'll be
in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one
of the upper classes, as becomes his age."
The "new fellow," standing in the corner behind the door so that he could
hardly be seen, was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us.
His hair was cut square on his forehead like a village chorister's; he looked
reliable, but very ill at ease. Although he was not broad-shouldered, his
short school jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have been tight
about the armholes, and showed at the opening of the cuffs red wrists
accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, looked out from
beneath yellow trousers, drawn tight by braces. He wore stout, ill-cleaned,
hobnailed boots.
We began repeating the lesson. He listened with all his ears, as attentive as
if at a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and
when at two o'clock the bell rang, the master was obliged to tell him to fall
into line with the rest of us.
When we came back to work, we were in the habit of throwing our caps on
the floor so as to have our hands more free; we used from the door to toss
them under the form, so that they hit against the wall and made a lot of dust:
it was "the thing."
But, whether he had not noticed the trick, or did not dare to attempt it, the
"new fellow" was still holding his cap on his knees even after prayers were
over. It was one of those head-gears of composite order, in which we can
find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton
nightcap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths
of expression, like an imbecile's face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it
began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet
and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort of bag that ended in

a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung,
at the end of a long, thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the manner of a
tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone.
"Rise," said the master.
He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh. He stooped to
pick it up. A neighbor knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it
up once more.
"Get rid of your helmet," said the master, who was a bit of a wag.
There was a burst of laughter from the boys, which so thoroughly put the
poor lad out of countenance that he did not know whether to keep his cap in
his hand, leave it on the floor, or put it on his head. He sat down again and
placed it on his knee.
"Rise," repeated the master, "and tell me your name."
The new boy articulated in a stammering voice an unintelligible name.
"Again!"
The same sputtering of syllables was heard, drowned by the tittering of the
class.
"Louder!" cried the master; "louder!"
The "new fellow" then took a supreme resolution, opened an inordinately
large mouth, and shouted at the top of his voice as if calling some one the
word, "Charbovari."
A hubbub broke out, rose in crescendo with bursts of shrill voices (they
yelled, barked, stamped, repeated "Charbovari! Charbovari!"), then died
away into single notes, growing quieter only with great difficulty, and now
and again suddenly recommencing along the line of a form whence rose
here and there, like a damp cracker going off, a stifled laugh.
However, amid a rain of impositions, order was gradually re-established in
the class; and the master having succeeded in catching the name of "Charles
Bovary," having had it dictated to him, spelt out, and re-read, at once

ordered the poor devil to go and sit down on the punishment form at the
foot of the master's desk. He got up, but before going hesitated.
"What are you looking for?" asked the master.
"My c-a-p," timidly said the "new fellow," casting troubled looks round
him.
"Five hundred verses for all the class!" shouted in a furious voice, stopped,
like the Quos ego, a fresh outburst "Silence!" continued the master
indignantly, wiping his brow with his handkerchief, which he had just taken
from his cap. "As to you, 'new boy,' you will conjugate 'ridiculus sum'
twenty times." Then, in a gentler tone, "Come, you'll find your cap again; it
hasn't been stolen."
Quiet was restored. Heads bent over desks, and the "new fellow" remained
for two hours in an exemplary attitude, although from time to time some
paper pellet flipped from the tip of a pen came bang in his face. But he
wiped his face with one hand and continued motionless, his eyes lowered.
In the evening, at preparation, he pulled out his pens from his desk,
arranged his small belongings, and carefully ruled his paper. We saw him
working conscientiously, looking out every word in the dictionary, and
taking the greatest pains. Thanks, no doubt, to the willingness he showed,
he had not to go down to the class below. But though he knew his rules
passably, he had little finish in composition. It was the curé of his village
who had taught him his first Latin; his parents, from motives of economy,
having sent him to school as late as possible.
His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Bartolomé Bovary, retired assistant-
surgeon-major, compromised about 1812 in certain conscription scandals,
and forced at that time to leave the service, had then taken advantage of his
fine figure to get hold of a dowry of sixty thousand francs that offered in the
person of a hosier's daughter who had fallen in love with his good looks. A
fine man, a great talker, making his spurs ring as he walked, wearing
whiskers that ran into his moustache, his fingers always garnished with
rings, and dressed in loud colors, he had the dash of a military man with the
easy air of a commercial traveller. Once married, he lived for three or four
years on his wife's fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking long porcelain

pipes, not coming in at night till after the theater, and haunting cafés. The
father-in-law died, leaving little; he was indignant at this, "went in for the
business," lost some money in it, then retired to the country, where he
thought he would make money. But, as he knew no more about farming
than calico, as he rode his horses instead of sending them to plough, drank
his cider in bottle instead of selling it in cask, ate the finest poultry in his
farmyard, and greased his hunting-boots with the fat of his pigs, he was not
long in finding out that he would do better to give up all speculation.
For two hundred francs a year he managed to live on the border of the
provinces of Caux and Picardy, in a kind of place half farm, half private
house; and here, soured, eaten up with regrets, cursing his luck, jealous of
every one, he shut himself up at the age of forty-five, sick of men, he said,
and determined to live in peace.
His wife had adored him once on a time; she had bored him with a thousand
servilities that had only estranged him the more. Lively once, expansive and
affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine
that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She
had suffered so much without complaint at first, when she had seen him
going after all the village drabs, and when a score of bad houses sent him
back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk. Then her pride revolted. After
that she was silent, burying her anger in a dumb stoicism that she
maintained till her death. She was constantly going about looking after
business matters. She called on the lawyers, the president, remembered
when bills fell due, got them renewed, and at home, ironed, sewed, washed,
looked after the workmen, paid the accounts, while he, troubling himself
about nothing, eternally besotted in sleepy sulkiness, whence he only
roused himself to say disagreeable things to her, sat smoking by the fire and
spitting into the cinders.
When she had a child, it had to be sent out to nurse. When he came home,
the lad was spoiled as if he were a prince. His mother stuffed him with jam;
his father let him run about barefoot, and, playing the philosopher, even said
he might as well go about quite naked like the young of animals. As
opposed to the maternal ideas, he had a certain virile idea of childhood on
which he sought to mould his son, wishing him to be brought up hardily,
like a Spartan, to give him a strong constitution. He sent him to bed without

any fire, taught him to drink off large draughts of rum, and to jeer at
religious processions. But, peaceable by nature, the lad answered only
poorly to his notions. His mother always kept him near her; she cut out
cardboard for him, told him tales, entertained him with endless monologues
full of melancholy gaiety and charming nonsense. In her life's isolation she
centered on the child's head all her shattered, broken little vanities. She
dreamed of high station; she already saw him, tall, handsome, clever, settled
as an engineer or in the law. She taught him to read, and even on an old
piano she had taught him two or three little songs. But to all this Monsieur
Bovary, caring little for letters, said: "It is not worth while. Shall we ever
have the means to send him to a public school, to buy him a practice, or to
start him in business? Besides, with cheek a man always gets on in the
world." Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child knocked about the
village.
He went after the laborers, drove away with clods of earth the ravens that
were flying about. He ate blackberries along the hedges, minded the geese
with a long switch, went haymaking during harvest, ran about in the woods,
played hop-scotch under the church porch on rainy days, and at great fêtes
begged the beadle to let him toll the bells, that he might hang all his weight
on the long rope and feel himself borne upward by it in its swing.
Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong of hand, fresh of color.
When he was twelve years old his mother had her own way; he began his
lessons. The curé took him in hand; but the lessons were so short and
irregular that they could not be of much use. They were given at spare
moments in the sacristy, standing up, hurriedly, between a baptism and a
burial; or else the curé, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil after the
Angelus. They went up to his room and settled down; the flies and moths
fluttered round the candle. It was close, the child fell asleep and the good
man, beginning to doze with his hands on his stomach, was soon snoring
with his mouth wide open. On other occasions, when Monsieur le Curé, on
his way back after administering the viaticum to some sick person in the
neighborhood, caught sight of Charles playing about the fields, he called
him, lectured him for a quarter of an hour, and took advantage of the
occasion to make him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree. The rain
interrupted them or an acquaintance passed. All the same he was always
pleased with him, and even said the "young man" had a very good memory.

Charles could not go on like this. Madame Bovary took strong steps.
Ashamed, or rather tired out, Monsieur Bovary gave in without a struggle,
and they waited one year longer, so that the lad should take his first
communion.
Six months more passed, and the year after Charles was finally sent to
school at Rouen, whither his father took him towards the end of October, at
the time of the St. Romain fair.
It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him.
He was a youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in
school-hours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well
in the refectory. He had in loco parentis a wholesale ironmonger in the Rue
Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays after his shop was
shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the boats, and then brought
him back to college at seven o'clock before supper. Every Thursday evening
he wrote a long letter to his mother with red ink and three wafers; then he
went over his history note-books, or read an old volume of "Anarchasis"
that was knocking about the study. When we went for walks he talked to the
servant who, like himself, came from the country.
By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once
even he got a certificate in natural history. But at the end of his third year
his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study medicine,
convinced that he could even take his degree by himself.
His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer's she knew,
overlooking the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his board, got
him furniture, a table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree
bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with the supply of
wood that was to warm the poor child. Then at the end of a week she
departed, after a thousand injunctions to be good, now that he was going to
be left to himself.
The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him: lectures on
anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on
pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics,
without counting hygiene and materia medica—all names of whose

etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to
sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.
He understood nothing of it all; it was all very well to listen—he did not
follow. Still he worked; he had bound note-books, he attended all the
courses, never missed a single lecture. He did his little daily task like a mill-
horse, who goes round and round with his eyes bandaged, not knowing
what work he is doing.
To spare him expense his mother sent him every week by the carrier a piece
of veal baked in the oven, on which he lunched when he came back from
the hospital, while he sat kicking his feet against the wall. After this he had
to run off to lectures, to the operation-room, to the hospital, and return to
his home at the other end of the town. In the evening, after the poor dinner
of his landlord, he went back to his room and set to work again in his wet
clothes, that smoked as he sat in front of the hot stove.
On the fine summer evenings, at the time when the close streets are empty,
when the servants are playing shuttlecock at the doors, he opened his
window and leaned out. The river, that makes of this quarter of Rouen a
wretched little Venice, flowed beneath him, between the bridges and the
railings, yellow, violet, or blue. Working men, kneeling on the banks,
washed their bare arms in the water. On poles projecting from the attics,
skeins of cotton were drying in the air. Opposite, beyond the roofs, spread
the pure heaven with the red sun setting. How pleasant it must be at home!
How fresh under the beech-tree! And he expanded his nostrils to breathe in
the sweet odors of the country which did not reach him.
He grew thin, his figure became taller, his face took a saddened look that
made it almost interesting. Naturally, through indifference, he abandoned all
the resolutions he had made. Once he missed a lecture; the next day all the
lectures; and, enjoying his idleness, little by little he gave up work
altogether. He got into the habit of going to the public-house, and had a
passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every evening in the dirty public
room, to push about on marble tables the small sheep-bones with black
dots, seemed to him a fine proof of his freedom, which raised him in his
own esteem. It was beginning to see life, the sweetness of stolen pleasures;
and when he entered, he put his hand on the door-handle with a joy almost

sensual. Then many things hidden within him come out; he learnt couplets
by heart and sang them to his boon companions, became enthusiastic about
Béranger, learnt how to make punch, and, finally, how to make love.
Thanks to these preparatory labors, he failed completely in his examination
for an ordinary degree. He was expected home the same night to celebrate
his success. He started on foot, stopped at the beginning of the village, sent
for his mother, and told her all. She excused him, threw the blame of his
failure on the injustice of the examiners, encouraged him a little, and took
upon herself to set matters straight. It was only five years later that
Monsieur Bovary knew the truth; it was old then, and he accepted it.
Moreover, he could not believe that a man born of him could be a fool.
So Charles set to work again and crammed for his examination, ceaselessly
learning all the old questions by heart. He passed pretty well. What a happy
day for his mother! They gave a grand dinner.
Where should he go to practise? To Tostes, where there was only one old
doctor. For a long time Madame Bovary had been on the look-out for his
death, and the old fellow had barely been packed off when Charles was
installed, opposite his place, as his successor.
But it was not everything to have brought up a son, to have had him taught
medicine, and discovered Tostes, where he could practise it; he must have a
wife. She found him one—the widow of a bailiff at Dieppe, who was forty-
five and had an income of twelve hundred francs. Though she was ugly, as
dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds,
Madame Dubuc had no lack of suitors. To attain her ends Madame Bovary
had to oust them all, and she even succeeded in very cleverly baffling the
intrigues of a pork-butcher backed up by the priests.
Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would
be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was
master; he had to say this and not say that in company, to fast every Friday,
dress as she liked, harass at her bidding those patients who did not pay. She
opened his letters, watched his comings and goings, and listened at the
partition-wall when women came to consult him in his surgery.

She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She
constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of
footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her;
if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles returned in
the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets,
put them round his neck, and having made him sit down on the edge of the
bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he was neglecting her, he loved
another. She had been warned she would be unhappy; and she ended by
asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love.

II.

A Good Patient.

NE night toward eleven o'clock they were awakened by the
noise of a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant
opened the garret-window and parleyed for some time with
a man in the street below. He came for the doctor, had a
letter for him. Nastasie came downstairs shivering and undid
the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left his horse, and, following
the servant, suddenly came in behind her. He pulled out from his wool cap
with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in a rag and presented it gingerly to
Charles, who rested his elbow on the pillow to read it. Nastasie, standing
near the bed, held the light. Madame in modesty had turned to the wall and
showed only her back.
This letter, sealed with a small seal in blue wax, begged Monsieur Bovary
to come immediately to the farm of the Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now
from Tostes to the Bertaux was a good eighteen miles across country by
way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. It was a dark night; Madame Bovary
junior was afraid of accidents for her husband. So it was decided the stable-
boy should go on first; Charles would start three hours later when the moon

rose. A boy was to be sent to meet him, and show him the way to the farm,
and open the gates for him.
Towards four o'clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his cloak,
set out for the Bertaux. Still sleepy from the warmth of his bed, he let
himself be lulled by the quiet trot of his horse. When it stopped of its own
accord in front of those holes surrounded with thorns that are dug on the
margin of furrows, Charles awoke with a start, suddenly remembered the
broken leg, and tried to call to mind all the fractures he knew. The rain had
stopped, day was breaking, and on the branches of the leafless trees birds
roosted motionless, their little feathers bristling in the cold morning wind.
The flat country stretched as far as eye could see, and the tufts of trees
round the farms at long intervals seemed like dark violet stains on the vast
gray surface, that on the horizon faded into the gloom of the sky, Charles
from time to time opened his eyes, his mind grew weary, and sleep coming
upon him, he soon fell into a doze wherein his recent sensations blending
with memories, he became conscious of a double self, at once student and
married man, lying in his bed as but now, and crossing the operation theater
as of old. The warm smell of poultices mingled in his brain with the fresh
odor of dew; he heard the iron rings rattling along the curtain-rods of the
bed, and saw his wife sleeping. As he passed Vassonville he came upon a
boy sitting on the grass at the edge of a ditch.
"Are you the doctor?" asked the child.
And on Charles's answer he took his wooden shoes in his hands and ran on
in front of him.
The general practitioner, riding along, gathered from his guide's talk that
Monsieur Rouault must be one of the well-to-do farmers. He had broken his
leg the evening before on his way home from a Twelfth-night feast at a
neighbor's. His wife had been dead for two years. There was only his
daughter, who helped him to keep house, with him.
The ruts were becoming deeper; they were approaching the Bertaux. The
little lad, slipping through a hole in the hedge, disappeared; then he came
back to the end of a courtyard to open the gate. The horse slipped on the
wet grass; Charles had to stoop to pass under the branches. The watchdogs

in their kennels barked, dragging at their chains. As he entered the Bertaux
the horse took fright and stumbled.
It was a substantial-looking farm. In the stables, over the top of the open
doors, one could see great cart-horses quietly feeding from new racks. Right
along the outbuildings extended a large dunghill, from which manure liquid
oozed, while amidst fowls and turkeys five or six peacocks, a luxury in
Chauchois farmyards, were foraging on the top of it. The sheepfold was
long, the barn high, with walls smooth as your hand. Under the cart-shed
were two large carts and four ploughs, with their whips, shafts, and
harnesses complete, whose fleeces of blue wool were getting soiled by the
fine dust that fell from the granaries. The courtyard sloped upwards, planted
with trees set out symmetrically, and the chattering noise of a flock of geese
was heard near the pond.
A young woman in a blue merino dress with three flounces came to the
threshold of the door to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she led to the
kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The servants' breakfast was boiling
beside it in small pots of all sizes. Some damp clothes were drying inside
the chimney-corner. The shovel, tongs, and the nozzle of the bellows, all of
colossal size, shone like polished steel, while along the walls hung many
pots and pans in which the clear flame of the hearth, mingling with the first
rays of the sun coming in through the window, was mirrored fitfully.
Charles went up to the first floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed,
sweating under his bed-clothes, having thrown his cotton nightcap far away
from him. He was a fat little man of fifty, with white skin and blue eyes, the
fore part of his head was bald, and he wore ear-rings. Near him on a chair
stood a large decanter of brandy, whence he poured himself out a little from
time to time to keep up his spirits; but as soon as he caught sight of the
doctor his elation subsided, and instead of swearing, as he had been doing
for the last twelve hours, he began to groan feebly.
The fracture was a simple one, without any kind of complication. Charles
could not have hoped for an easier case. Then calling to mind the devices of
his masters at the bedside of patients, he comforted the sufferer with all
sorts of kindly remarks, those caresses of the surgeon that are like the oil
they put on bistouries. In order to make some splints a bundle of laths was

brought up from the cart-house. Charles selected one, cut it into two pieces
and planed it with a fragment of window-pane, while the servant tore up
sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads.
As she was a long time before she found her workcase, her father grew
impatient; she did not answer, but as she sewed she pricked her fingers,
which she then put to her mouth to suck. Charles was much surprised at the
whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips, more polished
than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not
beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles;
besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines. Her real
beauty was in her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the
lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness.
The bandaging over, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to
"pick a bit" before he left.
Charles went down into the room on the ground-floor. Knives and forks and
silver goblets were laid for two on a little table at the foot of a huge bed that
had a canopy of printed cotton with figures representing Turks. There was
an odor of iris-root and damp sheets that escaped from a large oak chest
opposite the window. On the floor in corners were sacks of flour stuck
upright in rows. These were the overflow from the neighboring granary, to
which three stone steps led. By way of decoration for the apartment,
hanging to a nail in the middle of the wall, whose green paint had scaled off
from the effects of saltpeter, was a crayon head of Minerva in a gold frame,
underneath which was written in Gothic letters "To dear Papa."
First they spoke of the patient, then of the weather, of the great cold, of the
wolves that infested the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not at all
like the country, especially now that she had to look after the farm almost
alone. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate. This showed
something of her full lips, that she had a habit of biting when silent.
Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two
black folds seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was parted
in the middle by a delicate line that curved slightly with the curve of the
head; and, just showing the tip of the ear, it was joined behind in a thick
chignon, with a wavy movement at the temples that the country doctor saw

now for the first time in his life. The upper part of her cheek was rose-
colored. She had, like a man, thrust in between two buttons of her bodice a
tortoise-shell eyeglass.
When Charles, after bidding farewell to old Rouault, returned to the room
before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the window,
looking into the garden, where the bean props had been knocked down by
the wind. She turned round.
"Are you looking for anything?" she asked.
"My whip, if you please," he answered.
He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had
fallen to the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma
saw it, and bent over the flour sacks. Charles, out of politeness, made a dash
also, and as he stretched out his arm, at the same moment felt his breast
brush against the back of the young girl bending beneath him. She drew
herself up, scarlet, and looked at him over her shoulder as she handed him
his whip.
Instead of returning to the Bertaux in three days as he had promised, he
went back the very next day, then regularly twice a week, without counting
the visits he paid now and then as if by accident.
Everything, moreover, went well; the patient progressed favorably; and
when, at the end of forty-six days, old Rouault was seen trying to walk
alone in his "den," Monsieur Bovary began to be looked upon as a man of
great capacity. Old Rouault said that he could not have been cured better by
the first doctor of Yvetot, or even of Rouen.
As to Charles, he did not stay to ask himself why it was a pleasure to him to
go to the Bertaux. Had he done so, he would, no doubt, have attributed his
zeal to the importance of the case, or perhaps to the money he hoped to
make by it. Was it for this, however, that his visits to the farm formed a
delightful exception to the meagre occupations of his life? On these days he
rose early, set off at a gallop, urging on his horse, then got down to wipe his
boots in the grass and put on black gloves before entering. He liked going
into the courtyard, and noticing the gate turn against his shoulder, the cock
crow on the wall, the lads run to meet him. He liked the granary and the

stables; he liked old Rouault, who pressed his hand and called him his
savior; he liked the small wooden shoes of Mademoiselle Emma on the
scoured flags of the kitchen—her high heels made her a little taller; and
when she walked in front of him, the wooden soles springing up quickly
struck with a sharp sound against the leather of her boots.
She always reconducted him to the first step of the stairs. When his horse
had not yet been brought round she stayed there. They had said "Good-
bye;" there was no more talking. The open air wrapped her round, playing
with the soft down on the back of her neck, or blew to and fro on her hips
her apron-strings, that fluttered like streamers. Once, during a thaw, the
bark of the trees in the yard was oozing, the snow on the roofs of the
outbuildings was melting; she stood on the threshold, and went to fetch her
sunshade and opened it. The sunshade, of silk of the color of pigeons'
breasts, through which the sun shone, lighted up with shifting hues the
white skin of her face. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of
water could be heard falling one by one on the stretched silk.
During the first period of Charles's visits to the Bertaux, Madame Bovary,
junior, never failed to inquire after the invalid, and she had even chosen in
the book that she kept on a system of double entry a clean blank page for
Monsieur Rouault. But when she heard he had a daughter, she began to
make inquiries, and she learnt that Mademoiselle Rouault, brought up at the
Ursuline Convent, had received what is called "a good education;" and so
knew dancing, geography, drawing, how to embroider and play the piano.
That was the last straw.
"So it is for this," she said to herself, "that his face beams when he goes to
see her, and that he puts on his new waistcoat at the risk of spoiling it with
the rain. Ah! that woman! that woman!"
And she detested her instinctively. At first she solaced herself by allusions
that Charles did not understand, then by casual observations that he let pass
for fear of a storm, finally by open apostrophes to which he knew not what
to answer. "Why did he go back to the Bertaux now that Monsieur Rouault
was cured and that these folks hadn't paid yet? Ah! it was because a young
lady was there, some one who knew how to talk, to embroider, to be witty.
That was what he cared about; he wanted town misses." And she went on:

"The daughter of old Rouault a town miss! Get out! Their grandfather was a
shepherd, and they have a cousin who was almost had up at the assizes for a
nasty blow in a quarrel. It is not worth while making such a fuss, or
showing herself at church on Sundays in a silk gown, like a countess.
Besides, the poor old chap, if it hadn't been for the colza last year, would
have had much ado to pay up his arrears."
For very weariness Charles left off going to the Bertaux. Héloise made him
swear, his hand on the prayer-book, that he would go there no more, after
much sobbing and many kisses, in a great outburst of love. He obeyed then,
but the strength of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct;
and he thought, with a kind of naïve hypocrisy, that this interdict to see her
gave him a sort of right to love her. And then the widow was thin; she had
long teeth; wore in all weathers a little black shawl, the edge of which hung
down between her shoulder-blades; her bony figure was sheathed in her
clothes as if they were a scabbard; they were too short, and displayed her
ankles with the laces of her large boots crossed over gray stockings.
Charles's mother came to see them from time to time, but after a few days
the daughter-in-law seemed to put her own edge on her, and then, like two
knives, they scarified him with their reflections and observations. It was
wrong of him to eat so much. Why did he always offer a glass of something
to every one who came? What obstinacy not to wear flannels!
In the spring it came about that a notary at Ingouville, the holder of the
widow Dubuc's property, one fine day went off, taking with him all the
money in his office. Héloise, it is true, still possessed, besides a share in a
boat valued at six thousand francs, her house in the Rue St. François; and
yet, with all this fortune that had been so trumpeted abroad, nothing,
excepting perhaps a little furniture and a few clothes, had appeared in the
household. The matter had to be gone into. The house at Dieppe was found
to be eaten up with mortgages to its foundations; what she had placed with
the notary God only knew, and her share in the boat did not exceed one
thousand crowns. She had lied, the good lady! In his exasperation,
Monsieur Bovary the elder, smashing a chair on the flags, accused his wife
of having caused the misfortune of their son by harnessing him to such a
harridan, whose harness wasn't worth her hide. They came to Tostes.
Explanations followed. There were scenes. Héloise in tears, throwing her

arms about her husband, conjured him to defend her from his parents.
Charles tried to speak up for her. They grew angry and left the house.
But the blow had struck home. A week after, as she was hanging up some
washing in her yard, she was seized with a spitting of blood, and the next
day, while Charles had his back turned to her drawing the window-curtain,
she said, "O God!" gave a sigh and fainted. She was dead! What a surprise!
When all was over at the cemetery, Charles went home. He found no one
downstairs; he went up to the first floor to their room; saw her dress still
hanging at the foot of the alcove; then, leaning against the writing-table, he
stayed until the evening, buried in a sorrowful reverie. She had loved him,
after all!

III.

A Lonely Widower.

NE morning old Rouault brought Charles the money for
setting his leg—seventy-five francs in forty-sou pieces, and
a turkey. He had heard of his loss, and consoled him as well
as he could.
"I know what it is," said he, clapping him on the shoulder; "I've been
through it. When I lost my dear departed, I went into the fields to be quite
alone. I fell at the foot of a tree; I cried; I called on God; I talked nonsense
to him. I wanted to be like the moles that I saw on the branches, their
insides swarming with worms, dead, and an end of it. And when I thought
that there were others at that very moment with their nice little wives
holding them in their embrace, I struck great blows on the earth with my
stick. I was pretty well mad with not eating; the very idea of going to a café
disgusted me—you wouldn't believe it. Well, quite softly, one day following
another, a spring on a winter, and an autumn after a summer, this wore
away, piece by piece, crumb by crumb; it passed away, it is gone, I should

say it has sunk; for something always remains at the bottom, as one would
say—a weight here, at one's heart. But since it is the lot of all of us, one
must not give way altogether, and, because others have died, want to die
too. You must pull yourself together, Monsieur Bovary. It will pass away.
Come to see us; my daughter thinks of you now and again, d'ye know, and
she says you are forgetting her. Spring will soon be here. We'll have some
rabbit-shooting in the warrens to amuse you a bit."
Charles followed his advice. He went back to the Bertaux. He found all as
he had left it, that is to say, as it was five months ago. The pear trees were
already in blossom, and Farmer Rouault, on his legs again, came and went,
making the farm more full of life.
Thinking it his duty to heap the greatest attention upon the doctor because
of his sad position, he begged him not to take his hat off, spoke to him in an
undertone as if he had been ill, and even pretended to be angry because
nothing rather lighter had been prepared for him than for the others, such as
a little clotted cream or stewed pears. He told stories. Charles found himself
laughing, but the remembrance of his wife suddenly coming back to him
depressed him. Coffee was brought in; he thought no more about her.
He thought less of her as he grew accustomed to living alone. The new
delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable. He could now
change his meal-times, go in or out without explanation, and when he was
very tired stretch himself full length on his bed. So he nursed and coddled
himself and accepted the consolations that were offered him. On the other
hand, the death of his wife had not served him ill in his business, since for a
month people had been saying, "The poor young man! what a loss!" His
name had been talked about, his practice had increased; and, moreover, he
could go to the Bertaux just as he liked. He had an aimless hope, and was
vaguely happy; he thought himself better looking as he brushed his
whiskers before the looking-glass.
One day he got there about three o'clock. Everybody was in the fields. He
went into the kitchen, but did not at once catch sight of Emma; the outside
shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across
the flooring long fine rays that were broken at the corners of the furniture
and trembled along the ceiling. Some flies on the table were crawling up the

glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the
dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of
the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders.
Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu;
he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.
After the fashion of country folks she asked him to have something to
drink. He said no; she insisted and at last laughingly offered to have a glass
of liqueur with him. So she went to fetch a bottle of curaçoa from the
cupboard, reached down two small glasses, filled one to the brim, poured
scarcely anything into the other, and, after clinking their glasses, carried
hers to her mouth. As it was almost empty she bent back to drink, her head
thrown back, her lips pouting, her neck on the strain. She laughed at getting
none of it, while with the tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth
she licked drop by drop the bottom of her glass.
She sat down again and took up her work, a white cotton stocking she was
darning. She worked with her head bent down; she did not speak, nor did
Charles. The air coming in under the door blew a little dust over the flags;
he watched it drift along, and heard nothing but the throbbing in his head
and the faint clucking of a hen that had laid an egg in the yard. Emma from
time to time cooled her cheeks with the palms of her hands, and cooled
these again on the knobs of the huge fire-dogs.
She complained of suffering since the beginning of the season from
giddiness; she asked if sea-baths would do her any good; she began talking
of her convent, Charles of his school; words came to them. They went up
into her bedroom. She showed him her old music-books, the little prizes she
had won, and the oak-leaf crowns, left at the bottom of a cupboard. She
spoke to him, too, of her mother, of the country, and even showed him the
bed in the garden where, on the first Friday of every month, she gathered
flowers to put on her mother's tomb. But their gardeners had understood
nothing about it; servants were so careless. She would have dearly liked, if
only for the winter, to live in town, although the length of the fine days
made the country perhaps even more wearisome in the summer. And,
according to what she was saying, her voice was clear, sharp, or, on a
sudden, all languor, lingering out in modulations that ended almost in
murmurs as she spoke to herself; now joyous, opening big, naïve eyes, then

with her eyelids half closed, her look full of boredom, her thoughts
wandering.
Going home at night, Charles went over her words, one by one, trying to
recall them, to fill out their sense, that he might piece out the life she had
lived before he knew her. But he never saw her in his thoughts other than he
had seen her the first time, or as he had just left her. Then he asked himself
what would become of her—if she would be married, and to whom? Alas!
old Rouault was rich, and she!—so beautiful! But Emma's face always rose
before his eyes, and a monotone, like the humming of a top, sounded in his
ears, "If you should marry, after all! if you should marry!" At night he could
not sleep; his throat was parched; he was athirst. He got up to drink from
the water-bottle and opened the window. The night was covered with stars,
a warm wind blowing in the distance; the dogs were barking. He turned his
head toward the Bertaux.
Thinking that, after all, he should lose nothing, Charles promised himself to
ask her in marriage as soon as occasion offered, but each time such
occasion did offer the fear of not finding the right words sealed his lips.
Old Rouault would not have been sorry to be rid of his daughter, who was
of no use to him in the house. In his heart he excused her, thinking her too
clever for farming, a calling under the ban of Heaven, since one never saw a
millionaire in it. Far from having made a fortune by it, the good man was
losing every year; for if he was good in bargaining, in which he enjoyed the
dodges of the trade, on the other hand, agriculture properly so called, and
the internal management of the farm, suited him less than most people. He
did not willingly take his hands out of his pockets, and did not spare
expense in all that concerned himself, liking to eat well, to have good fires,
and to sleep well. He liked old cider, underdone legs of mutton, glorias[1]
well beaten up. He took his meals in the kitchen alone, opposite the fire, on
a little table brought to him all ready laid, as on the stage.
When, therefore, he perceived that Charles's cheeks grew red if near his
daughter, which meant that he would propose for her one of these days, he
chewed the cud of the matter beforehand. He certainly thought him a little
meagre, and not quite the son-in-law he would have liked, but he was said
to be well-conducted, economical, very learned, and no doubt would not

make too many difficulties about the dowry. Now, as old Rouault would
soon be forced to sell twenty-two acres of "his property," as he owed a good
deal to the mason, to the harness-maker, and as the shaft of the cider-press
wanted renewing, "If he asks for her," he said to himself, "I'll give her to
him."
At Michaelmas Charles went to spend three days at the Bertaux. The last
had passed like the others, in procrastinating from hour to hour. Old
Rouault was seeing him off; they were walking along the road full of ruts;
they were about to part. This was the time. Charles gave himself as far as to
the corner of the hedge, and at last, when past it:
"Monsieur Rouault," he murmured, "I should like to say something to you."
They stopped. Charles was silent.
"Well, tell me your story. Don't I know all about it?" said old Rouault,
laughing softly.
"Monsieur Rouault—Monsieur Rouault," stammered Charles.
"I ask nothing better," the farmer went on. "Although, no doubt, the little
one is of my mind, still we must ask her opinion. So you get off—I'll go
back home. If it is 'yes,' you needn't return because of all the people about,
and besides it would upset her too much. But so that you mayn't be eating
your heart, I'll open wide the outer shutter of the window against the wall;
you can see it from the back by leaning over the hedge."
And he went off.
Charles fastened his horse to a tree; he ran into the road and waited. Half-
an-hour passed, then he counted nineteen minutes by his watch. Suddenly a
noise was heard against the wall; the shutter had been thrown back; the
hook was still swinging.
The next day by nine o'clock he was at the farm. Emma blushed as he
entered, and she gave a little forced laugh to keep herself in countenance.
Old Rouault embraced his future son-in-law. The discussion of money
matters was put off; moreover, there was plenty of time before them, as the

marriage could not decently take place till Charles was out of mourning,
that is to say, about the spring of the next year.
The winter passed waiting for this. Mademoiselle Rouault was busy with
her trousseau. Part of it was ordered at Rouen, and she made herself
chemises and nightcaps after fashion-plates that she borrowed. When
Charles visited the farmer, the preparations for the wedding were talked
over; they wondered in what room they should have dinner; they dreamed
of the number of dishes that would be wanted, and what should be the
entrées.
Emma would, on the contrary, have preferred to have a midnight wedding
with torches, but old Rouault could not understand such an idea. So there
was a wedding at which forty-three persons were present, at which they
remained sixteen hours at table, began again the next day, and to some
extent on the days following.
[1]A mixture of coffee and spirits.—Trans.

IV.

Consolation.

HE guests arrived early in carriages, in one-horse chaises,
two-wheeled cars, old open gigs, wagonettes with leather
hoods, and the young people from the nearer villages in
carts, in which they stood up in rows, holding on to the sides
so as not to fall, going at a trot and well shaken up. Some
came from a distance of thirty miles, from Goderville, from Normanville,

and from Cany. All the relatives of both families had been invited, quarrels
between friends arranged, acquaintances long since lost sight of written to.
From time to time one heard the crack of a whip behind the hedge; then the
gates opened, a chaise entered. Galloping up to the foot of the steps, it
stopped short and emptied its load. They got down from all sides, rubbing
knees and stretching arms. The ladies wearing bonnets, had on dresses in
the town fashion, gold watch chains, pelerines with the ends tucked into
belts, or little colored fichus fastened down behind with a pin, that left the
back of the neck bare. The lads, dressed like their papas, seemed
uncomfortable in their new clothes (many that day handselled their first pair
of boots), and by their sides, speaking never a word, wearing the white
dress of their first communion lengthened for the occasion, were some big
girls of fourteen or sixteen, cousins or elder sisters no doubt, rubicund,
bewildered, their hair greasy with rose-pomade, and very much afraid of
soiling their gloves. As there were not enough stable-boys to unharness all
the carriages, the gentlemen turned up their sleeves and set about it
themselves. According to their different social positions, they wore tail-
coats, overcoats, shooting-jackets, cutaway-coats: fine tail-coats, redolent of
family respectability, that came out of the wardrobe only on state occasions;
overcoats with long tails flapping in the wind and round capes and pockets
like sacks; shooting-jackets of coarse cloth, usually worn with a cap with a
brass-bound peak; very short cutaway-coats with two small buttons in the
back, close together like a pair of eyes, the tails of which seemed cut out of
one piece by a carpenter's hatchet. Some, too (but these, you may be sure,
would sit at the bottom of the table), wore their best blouses—that is to say,
with collars turned down to the shoulders, the back gathered into small
plaits and the waist fastened very far down with a worked belt.
And the shirts stood out from the chests like cuirasses! Every one had just
had his hair cut; ears stood out from the heads; they had been close-shaven;
a few, even, who had had to get up before daybreak, and not been able to
see to shave, had diagonal gashes under their noses or cuts the size of a
three-franc piece along the jaws, which the fresh air en route had inflamed,
so that the great, white, beaming faces were mottled here and there with red
dabs.

The mairie was a mile and a half from the farm, and they went thither on
foot, returning in the same way after the ceremony in the church. The
procession, first united like one long colored scarf that undulated across the
fields, along the narrow path winding amid the green corn, soon lengthened
out, and broke up in different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler
walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons in its pegs. Then came the
married pair, the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell; the children
stayed behind amusing themselves plucking the bell-flowers from oat-ears,
or playing among themselves unseen. Emma's skirt, too long, trailed a little
on the ground; from time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then
delicately, with her gloved hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the
thistledowns, while Charles, empty handed, waited till she had finished. Old
Rouault, with a new silk hat and the cuffs of his black coat covering his
hands up to the nails, gave his arm to Madame Bovary, senior. As to
Monsieur Bovary senior, who, heartily despising all these folk, had come
simply in a frock-coat of military cut with one row of buttons—he was
passing compliments of the bar to a fair young peasant. She bowed,
blushed, and did not know what to say. The other wedding guests talked of
their business or played tricks behind each other's backs, egging one
another on in advance to be jolly. Those who listened could always catch
the squeaking of the fiddler, who went on playing across the fields. When
he saw that the rest were far behind he stopped to take breath, slowly
rosined his bow, so that the strings should sound more shrilly, then set off
again, by turns lowering and raising his neck, the better to mark time for
himself. The noise of the instrument drove the little birds far away.
The table was laid under the cart-shed. On it were four sirloins, six chicken
fricassées, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and in the middle a fine roast
sucking-pig, flanked by four chitterlings with sorrel. At the corners were
decanters of brandy. Sweet bottled-cider frothed round the corks, and all the
glasses had been filled to the brim with wine beforehand. Large dishes of
yellow cream, that trembled with the least shake of the table, had designed
on their smooth surface the initials of the newly wedded pair in nonpareil
arabesques. A confectioner of Yvetot had been intrusted with the tarts and
sweets. As he had only just set up in the place, he had taken great trouble,
and at dessert he himself brought in a set dish that evoked loud cries of
wonderment. To begin with, at its base was a square of blue cardboard,

representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and stucco statuettes all
round, and in the niches were constellations of gilt paper stars; on the
second stage was a dungeon of Savoy cake, surrounded by many
fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of oranges;
and finally, on the upper layer was a green field with rocks set in lakes of
jam, nutshell boats, and a small Cupid balancing himself in a chocolate
swing, whose two uprights ended in real roses for balls at the top.
Until night they ate. When any of them were too tired of sitting, they went
out for a stroll in the yard, or for a game with corks in the granary, and then
returned to table. Toward the finish some went to sleep and snored. But
with the coffee every one woke up. Then they began songs, showed off
tricks, raised heavy weights, performed feats with their fingers, then tried
lifting carts on their shoulders, made broad jokes, kissed the women. At
night when they left, the horses, stuffed up to the nostrils with oats, could
hardly be got into the shafts; they kicked, reared, the harness broke, their
masters laughed or swore; and all night in the light of the moon along
country roads there were runaway carts at full gallop plunging into the
ditches, jumping over yard after yard of stones, clambering up the hills,
with women leaning out from the tilt to catch hold of the reins.
Those who stayed at the Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen.
The children had fallen asleep under the seats.
The bride had begged her father to be spared the usual marriage
pleasantries. However, a fishmonger, one of their cousins (who had even
brought a pair of soles for his wedding present), began to squirt water from
his mouth through the keyhole, when old Rouault came up just in time to
stop him, and explain to him that the distinguished position of his son-in-
law would not allow of such liberties. The cousin all the same did not give
in to these reasons readily. In his heart he accused old Rouault of being
proud, and he joined four or five other guests in a corner, who having,
through mere chance, been several times running served with the worst
helps of meat, also were of opinion they had been badly used, and were
whispering about their host, and with covered hints hoping he would ruin
himself.

Madame Bovary, senior, had not opened her mouth all day. She had been
consulted neither as to the dress of her daughter-in-law nor as to the
arrangement of the feast; she went to bed early. Her husband, instead of
following her, sent to Saint-Victor for some cigars, and smoked till
daybreak, drinking kirsch-punch, a mixture unknown to the company. This
added greatly to the consideration in which he was held.
Charles, who was not of a facetious turn, did not shine at the wedding. He
answered feebly to the puns, doubles entendres, compliments, and chaff that
it was felt a duty to let off at him as soon as the soup appeared.
The next day, on the other hand, he seemed another man. It was he who
might rather have been taken for the virgin of the evening before, whilst the
bride gave no sign that revealed anything. The shrewdest did not know what
to make of it, and they looked at her when she passed near them with an
unbounded concentration of mind. But Charles concealed nothing. He
called her "my wife," tutoyéd her, asked for her of every one, looked for her
everywhere, and often he dragged her into the yards where he could be seen
from afar, among the trees putting his arm round her waist, and walking half
bending over her, ruffling the chemisette of her bodice with his head.
Two days after the wedding the married pair left. Charles, on account of his
patients, could not be away longer. Old Rouault had them driven back in his
cart, and himself accompanied them as far as Vassonville. Here he
embraced his daughter for the last time, got down, and went his way. When
he had gone about a hundred paces he stopped, and as he saw the cart
disappearing, its wheels turning in the dust, he gave a deep sigh. Then he
remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he,
too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to
his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for
it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by
one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of
her Cauchois head-dress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and
when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy
face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands
she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their
son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing
on the road. He felt dreary as an empty house; and tender memories

mingling with the sad thoughts in his brain, addled by the fumes of the
feast, he felt inclined for a moment to take a turn towards the church. As he
was afraid, however, that this sight would make him yet more sad, he went
directly home.
Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived at Tostes about six o'clock. The
neighbors came to the windows to see their doctor's new wife.
The old servant presented herself, curtsied to her, apologised for not having
dinner ready, and suggested that madame, in the meantime, should look
over her house.

V.

The New Ménage.

HE brick front was just in a line with the street, or rather the
road. Behind the door hung a cloak with a small collar, a
bridle, and a black leather cap, and on the floor in a corner,
were a pair of leggings still covered with dry mud. On the
right was the one apartment that was both dining and sitting
room. A canary-yellow paper, relieved at the top by a garland of pale
flowers, was puckered everywhere over the badly-stretched canvas; white
calico curtains with a red border hung crosswise the length of the window;
and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with a head of Hippocrates shone
resplendent between two plate candlesticks under oval shades. On the other
side of the passage was Charles's consulting-room, a little room about six
paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office-chair. Volumes of the
"Dictionary of Medical Science," uncut, but the binding rather the worse for

the successive sales through which they had gone, occupied almost alone
the six shelves of a deal bookcase. The smell of melted butter penetrated the
thin walls when he saw patients, just as in the kitchen one could hear the
people coughing in the consulting-room and recounting their whole
histories. Then, opening on the yard, where the stable was, came a large
dilapidated room with a stove, now used as a wood-house, cellar, and
pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements past
service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to guess.
The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud walls with espaliered
apricots, to a hawthorn hedge that separated it from the field. In the middle
was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal; four flower-beds with eglantines
surrounded symmetrically the more useful kitchen-garden bed. At the
bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a curé in plaster reading his breviary.
Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second,
which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red
drapery. A shell-box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary near
the window a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin ribbons
stood in a bottle. It was a bride's bouquet; it was the other one's. She looked
at it. Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it up to the attic, while Emma,
seated in an armchair (they were putting her things down around her)
thought of her bridal flowers packed up in a bandbox, and wondered,
dreaming, what would be done with them if she were to die.
During the first days she occupied herself in thinking about changes in the
house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wall-paper put up,
the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the sundial; she
even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain and fishes.
Finally, her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out, picked up a
second-hand dog-cart, which, with new lamps and a splash-board in striped
leather, looked almost like a tilbury.
He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together, a walk
in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her hair, the
sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and many another
thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now made up the
endless round of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, by her side, on the

pillow, he watched the sunlight sinking into the down on her fair cheek, half
hidden by the lappets of her nightcap. Seen thus closely, her eyes looked to
him enlarged, especially when, on waking up, she opened and shut them
rapidly many times. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they
had, as it were, depths of different colors, that, darker in the center, grew
paler toward the surface of the eye. His own eyes lost themselves in these
depths; he saw himself in miniature down to the shoulders, with his
handkerchief round his head and the top of his shirt open. He rose. She
came to the window to see him off, and stayed leaning on the sill between
two pots of geranium, clad in her dressing-gown hanging loosely about her.
Charles in the street buckled his spurs, his foot on the mounting stone,
while she talked to him from above, picking with her mouth some scrap of
flower or leaf that she blew out at him. Then this, eddying, floating,
described semicircles in the air like a bird, and was caught before it reached
the ground in the ill-groomed mane of the old white mare standing
motionless at the door. Charles from horseback threw her a kiss; she
answered with a nod; she shut the window, and he set off. And then along
the highroad, spreading out its long ribbon of dust, along the deep lanes that
the trees bent over as in arbors, along paths where the corn reached to the
knees, with the sun on his back and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart
full of the joys of the past night, his mind at rest, his flesh at ease, he went
on, re-chewing his happiness, like those who after dinner taste again the
truffles which they are digesting.
Until now what good had he had of his life? His time at school, when he
remained shut up within the high walls, alone, in the midst of companions
richer than he or cleverer at their work, who laughed at his accent, who
jeered at his clothes, and whose mothers came to the school with cakes in
their muffs? Or later, when he studied medicine, and never had his purse
full enough to treat some little work-girl who would have become his
mistress? Afterwards, he had lived fourteen months with the widow, whose
feet in bed were cold as icicles. But now he had for life this beautiful
woman whom he adored. For him the universe did not extend beyond the
circumference of her petticoat, and he reproached himself with not loving
her. He wanted to see her again; he turned back quickly, ran up the stairs
with a beating heart. Emma, in her room, was dressing; he came up on
tiptoe, kissed her back; she gave a cry.

He could not keep from continually touching her comb, her rings, her fichu;
sometimes he gave her great sounding kisses with all his mouth on her
cheeks, or else little kisses in a row all along her bare arm from the tip of
her fingers up to her shoulder, and she put him away half-smiling, half-
vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you.
Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should
have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been
mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the
words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in
books.

VI.

A Maiden's Yearnings.

HE had read "Paul and Virginia," and she had dreamed of the
little bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidèle, but
above all the sweet friendship of some dear little brother,
who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or
who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest.
When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town to place her in
the convent. They stopped at an inn in the St. Gervais quarter, where, at
their supper, they used painted plates that set forth the story of
Mademoiselle de la Vallière. The explanatory legends, chipped here and
there by the scratching of knives, all glorified religion, the tendernesses of
the heart, and the pomps of court.

Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took pleasure in the society
of the good sisters who, to amuse her, took her to the chapel, which one
entered from the refectory by a long corridor. She played very little during
recreation hours, knew her catechism well, and it was she who always
answered Monsieur le Vicaire's difficult questions. Living thus, without
ever leaving the warm atmosphere of the class-rooms, and amid these pale-
faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she was softly lulled by
the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes of the altar, the freshness of the
holy water, and the lights of the tapers. Instead of attending to mass, she
looked at the pious vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she
loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor
Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries. She tried, by way of
mortification, to eat nothing a whole day. She puzzled her head to find some
vow to fulfill.
When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she might
stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined, her face against
the grating beneath the whispering of the priest. The comparisons of
betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that recur in
sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness.
In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the
study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the Lectures
of the Abbé Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the "Génie du
Christianisme," as a recreation. How she listened at first to the sonorous
lamentations of its romantic melancholies re-echoing through the world and
eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the shop-parlor of some
business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart to those lyrical
invasions of Nature, which usually come to us only through translation in
books. But she knew the country too well; she knew the lowing of cattle,
the milking, the plow. Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on
the contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of
its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. She wanted
to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that
did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a
temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not
landscapes.

At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to
mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an
ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution, she dined in the
refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit of chat
with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped out from
the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love-songs of the last
century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away. She told stories,
gave them news, went errands in the town, and on the sly lent the big girls
some novel, that she always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of
which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her
work. They were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in
lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on
every page, somber forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little
skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, "gentlemen" brave as
lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed,
and weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of
age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries. With
Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old
chests, guardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old
manor-house, like those long-waisted châtelaines who, in the shade of
pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching
a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant
fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic
veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc, Héloise, Agnès
Sorel, the beautiful Ferronnière, and Clémence Isaure stood out to her like
comets in the dark immensity of heaven, where also were seen, lost in
shadow and all unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard,
some cruelties of Louis XI, a little of St. Bartholomew's, the plume of the
Béarnais, and always the remembrance of the plates painted in honor of
Louis XIV.
In the music-class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but little
angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes, gondoliers;—mild
compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse athwart the obscurity of
style and the weakness of the music of the attractive phantasmagoria of
sentimental realities. Some of her companions brought "keepsakes" given
them as New Year's gifts to the convent. These had to be hidden; it was

quite an undertaking; they were read in the dormitory. Delicately handling
the beautiful satin bindings, Emma looked with dazzled eyes at the names
of the unknown authors, who had signed their verses for the most part as
counts or viscounts.
She trembled as she blew back the tissue paper over the engraving and saw
it folded in two and fall gently against the page. Here behind the balustrade
of a balcony was a young man in a short cloak, holding in his arms a young
girl in a white dress wearing an alms-bag at her belt; or there were nameless
portraits of English ladies with fair curls, who looked at you from under
their round straw hats with their large clear eyes. Some there were lounging
in their carriages, gliding through parks, a greyhound bounding along in
front of the equipage, driven at a trot by two small postilions in white
breeches. Others, dreaming on sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon
through a slightly open window half draped by a black curtain. The naïve
ones, a tear on their cheeks, were kissing doves through the bars of a Gothic
cage, or, smiling, their heads on one side, were plucking the leaves of a
marguerite with their taper fingers, that curved at the tips like peaked shoes.
And you too were there, Sultans with long pipes, reclining beneath arbors in
the arms of Bayadères; Djiaours, Turkish sabers, Greek caps; and you
especially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that often show us at once
palm-trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on
the horizon; the whole framed by a very neat virgin forest, and with a great
perpendicular sunbeam trembling in the water, where, standing out in relief
like white excoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about.
And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall above Emma's head
lighted up all these pictures of the world, that passed before her one by one
in the silence of the dormitory, to the distant noise of some belated carriage
rolling over the Boulevards.
When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had a funeral
picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter sent to the
Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried some day in
the same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill, and came to see her.
Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare
ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself glide
along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the

songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves, the pure virgins ascending
to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She
wearied of it, would not confess it, continued from habit, and at last was
surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than
wrinkles on her brow.
The good nuns, who had been so sure of her vocation, perceived with great
astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping from them.
They had indeed been so lavish to her of prayers, retreats, novenas, and
sermons, they had so often preached the respect due to saints and martyrs,
and given so much good advice as to the modesty of the body and the
salvation of her soul, that she did as tightly reined horses: she pulled up
short and the bit slipped from her teeth. This nature, positive in the midst of
its enthusiasms, that had loved the church for the sake of the flowers, and
music for the words of the songs, and literature for its passional stimulus,
rebelled against the mysteries of faith as it grew irritated by discipline, a
thing antipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her from school,
no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior even thought that she
had latterly been somewhat irreverent to the community.
Emma at home once more, first took pleasure in looking after the servants,
then grew disgusted with the country and missed her convent. When
Charles came to the Bertaux for the first time, she thought herself quite
disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing more to feel.
But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the disturbance caused
by the presence of this man, had sufficed to make her believe that she at last
felt that wondrous passion which, till then, like a great bird with rose-
colored wings, had hung in the splendor of the skies of poesy; and now she
could not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness she had
dreamed.

VII.

Disillusion.

HE thought sometimes that, after all, this was the happiest
time of her life—the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste
the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary
doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names where
the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In
post-chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep roads,
listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with
the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the
shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon-trees; then in the evening
on the villa-terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans
for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring
happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why
could not she lean over balconies in Swiss châlets, or enshrine her
melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet
coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills?
Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to some one. But
how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the
winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.
If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but once
met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have gone out
from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as
the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that
separated her from him.
Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and every
one's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting
emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while
he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could

neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some
term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel.
A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold
activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life,
all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing.
He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene
heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.
Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand
there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes half-
closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers, little
bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers glided over it
the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb, and ran from top
to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old
instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the
village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing
along the highroad bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his
sheet of paper in his hand.
Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house. She sent the
patients' accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of a bill.
When they had a neighbor to dinner on Sundays, she managed to have some
dainty dish—piled up pyramids of green-gages on vine leaves, served up
preserves turned out into plates—and even spoke of buying finger-glasses
for dessert. From all this, much consideration was extended to Bovary.
Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife. He
showed with pride in the sitting-room two small pencil sketches by her that
he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the wall-paper
by long green cords. People returning from mass saw him at his door in his
wool-work slippers.
He came home late—at ten o'clock, at midnight sometimes. Then he asked
for something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited on
him. He took off his coat to dine more at his ease. He told her, one after the
other, the people he had met, the villages where he had been, the
prescriptions he had written, and, well pleased with himself, he finished the
remainder of the boiled beef and onions, picked pieces off the cheese,

munched an apple, emptied his water-bottle, and then went to bed, and lay
on his back and snored.
As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps, his handkerchief
would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was all
tumbled pell-mell about his face and whitened with the feathers of the
pillow, whose strings came untied during the night. He always wore thick
boots that had two long creases over the instep running obliquely towards
the ankle, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight line as if
stretched on a wooden foot. He said that was "quite good enough for the
country."
His mother approved of his economy, for she came to see him as formerly
when there had been some violent scene at her place; and yet Madame
Bovary senior seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She thought
"her ways too fine for their position;" the wood, the sugar, and the candles
disappeared as at "a grand establishment," and the amount of firing in the
kitchen would have been enough for twenty-five courses. She put her linen
in order for her in the presses, and taught her to keep an eye on the butcher
when he brought the meat. Emma put up with these lessons. Madame
Bovary was lavish of them; and the words "daughter" and "mother" were
exchanged all day long, accompanied by little quiverings of the lips, each
one uttering gentle words in a voice trembling with anger.
In Madame Dubuc's time the old woman felt that she was still the favorite;
but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her
tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's
happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at
people dining in his old house. She recalled to him as remembrances her
troubles and her sacrifices, and, comparing these with Emma's negligence,
came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to adore her so
exclusively.
Charles knew not what to answer: he respected his mother, and he loved his
wife infinitely; he considered the judgment of the one infallible, and yet he
thought the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madame Bovary had
gone he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or two of the

more anodyne observations he had heard from his mamma Emma proved to
him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his patients.
And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she desired to make
herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all the
passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many
melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after this as before, and
Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.
When she had thus for a while struck the flint of her heart without getting a
spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as
of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms, she
persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles's passion was nothing very
exorbitant. His outbursts became regular; he embraced her at certain fixed
times. It was one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked
forward to after the monotony of dinner.
A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had given
madame a little Italian greyhound; she took her out walking, for she went
out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her
eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far as the beeches of
Banneville, near the deserted pavilion which forms an angle of the wall on
the side of the country. Amid the vegetation of the ditch there are long reeds
with leaves that cut.
She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last she
had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and
wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the
patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed,
were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first,
wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round and round in the
fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or
nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then gradually her ideas
took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods
of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, "Good heavens! why did I
marry?"
She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would not have
been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would

have been these unrealized events, this different life, this unknown husband.
All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty,
distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old companions of the
convent had married. What were they doing now? In town, with the noise of
the streets, the buzz of the theaters, and the lights of the ball-room, they
were living lives where the heart expands, the senses bourgeon out. But she
—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer-window looks on the north,
and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every
corner of her heart. She recalled the prize-days, when she mounted the
platform to receive her little crowns, with her hair in long plaits. In her
white frock and open prunella shoes she had a pretty way, and when she
went back to her seat, the gentlemen bent over her to congratulate her; the
courtyard was full of carriages; farewells were called to her through their
windows; the music-master with his violin-case bowed in passing by. How
far off all this! How far away!
She called Djali, took her between her knees, and smoothed the long,
delicate head, saying, "Come, kiss mistress; you have no troubles."
Then noting the melancholy face of the graceful animal, who yawned
slowly, she softened, and comparing her to herself, spoke to her aloud as to
somebody in trouble whom one is consoling.
Occasionally there came gusts of wind, breezes from the sea rolling in one
sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to
these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the
branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly
swaying, kept up a deep murmur. Emma drew her shawl round her
shoulders and rose.
In the avenue a green light dimmed by the leaves lighted the short moss that
crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was setting; the sky showed red
between the branches, and the trunks of the trees, uniform, and planted in a
straight line, seemed a brown colonnade standing out against a background
of gold. A fear took hold of her; she called Djali, and hurriedly returned to
Tostes by the highroad, threw herself into an armchair, and for the rest of
the evening did not speak.

But towards the end of September something extraordinary fell upon her
life; she was invited by the Marquis d'Andervilliers to Vaubyessard.
Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, anxious to re-enter
political life, set about preparing for his candidature to the Chamber of
Deputies long beforehand. In the winter he distributed a great deal of wood,
and in the Conseil Général always enthusiastically demanded new roads for
his arrondissement. During the dog-days he had suffered from an abscess,
which Charles had cured as if by miracle by giving a timely little touch with
the lancet. The steward sent to Tostes to pay for the operation reported in
the evening that he had seen some superb cherries in the doctor's little
garden. Now cherry-trees did not thrive at Vaubyessard; the Marquis asked
Bovary for some slips; made it his business to thank him personally; saw
Emma; thought she had a pretty figure, and that she did not bow like a
peasant; so that he did not think he was going beyond the bounds of
condescension, nor, on the other hand, making a mistake, in inviting the
young couple.
One Wednesday at three o'clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, seated in
their dog-cart, set out for Vaubyessard, with a great trunk strapped on
behind and a bonnet-box in front on the apron. Besides these Charles held a
bandbox between his knees.
They arrived at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park were being lighted to
show the carriage-drive.

VIII.

Glimpses of the World.

HE château, a modern building in Italian style, with two
projecting wings and three flights of steps, lay at the foot of
an immense green-sward, on which some cows were grazing
among groups of large trees set out at regular intervals, while
large beds of arbutus, rhododendron, syringas, and guelder
roses bulged out their irregular clusters of green along the curve of the
gravel path. A river flowed under a bridge; through the mist one could
distinguish buildings with thatched roofs scattered over the field bordered
by two gently-sloping well-timbered hillocks, and in the background amid
the trees rose in two parallel lines the coach-houses and stables, all that was
left of the ruined old château.
Charles's dog-cart pulled up before the middle flight of steps; servants
appeared; the Marquis came forward, and offering his arm to the doctor's
wife, conducted her to the vestibule.
It was paved with marble slabs, was very lofty, and the sound of footsteps
and that of voices re-echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a
straight staircase, and on the left a gallery overlooking the garden led to the
billiard-room, through whose door one could hear the click of the ivory
balls. As she crossed it to go to the drawing-room, Emma saw standing
round the table men with grave faces, their chins resting on high cravats.
They all wore orders, and smiled silently as they made their strokes. On the
dark wainscoting of the walls large gold frames bore at the bottom names
written in black letters. She read:

"Jean-Antoine d'Andervilliers d'Yverbonville, Count de la
Vaubyessard and Baron de la Fresnaye, killed at the battle of
Coutras on the 20th of October 1587."
And on another:
"Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d'Andervilliers de la Vaubyessard,
Admiral of France and Chevalier of the Order of St. Michael,
wounded at the battle of the Hougue-Saint-Vaast on the 29th of
May 1692; died at Vaubyessard on the 23rd of January 1693."
One could hardly make out those that followed, for the light of the lamps
lowered over the green cloth threw a dim shadow round the room.
Burnishing the horizontal pictures, it broke up against these in delicate lines
where there were cracks in the varnish, and from all these great black
squares framed in with gold stood out here and there some lighter portion of
the painting—a pale brow, two eyes that looked at you, perukes flowing
over and powdering red-coated shoulders, or the buckle of a garter above a
well-rounded calf.
The Marquis opened the drawing-room door; one of the ladies (the
Marchioness herself) came to meet Emma. She made her sit down by her on
an ottoman, and began talking to her as amicably as if she had known her a
long time. She was about forty years old, with fine shoulders, a hook nose,
a drawling voice, and on this evening she wore over her brown hair a
simple guipure fichu that fell in a point at the back. A fair young woman
was by her side in a high-backed chair, and gentlemen with flowers in their
buttonholes were talking to ladies round the fire.
At seven dinner was served. The men, who were in the majority, sat down
at the first table in the vestibule; the ladies at the second in the dining-room
with the Marquis and Marchioness.
Emma, on entering, felt herself wrapped round by the warm air, a blending
of the perfume of flowers and of the fine linen, of the fumes of the viands,
and the odor of the truffles. The silver dish-covers reflected the lighted wax
candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal covered with light steam reflected
pale rays from one to the other; bouquets were placed in a row the whole
length of the table; and in the large-bordered plates each napkin, arranged

after the fashion of a bishop's miter, held between its two gaping folds a
small oval-shaped roll. The red claws of lobsters hung over the dishes; rich
fruit in open baskets was piled up on moss; there were quails in their
plumage; smoke was rising; and in silk stockings, knee-breeches, white
cravat, and frilled shirt, the steward, grave as a judge, offered ready-carved
dishes between the shoulders of the guests, and with a touch of the spoon
gave the piece chosen. On the large stove of porcelain inlaid with copper
baguettes the statue of a woman, draped to the chin, gazed motionless on
the room full of life.
Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in their
glasses.
But at the upper end of the table, alone among all those women, bent over
his full plate, with his napkin tied round his neck like a child, an old man
sat eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes were
bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with a black ribbon. He was the
Marquis's father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdière, once on a time favorite
of the Count d'Artois, in the days of the Vaudreuil hunting-parties at the
Marquis de Conflans', and had been, it was said, the lover of Queen Marie
Antoinette, between Monsieur de Coigny and Monsieur de Lauzun. He had
lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had
squandered his fortune and frightened all his family. A servant behind his
chair named aloud to him in his ear the dishes that he pointed to,
stammering, and constantly Emma's eyes turned involuntarily to this old
man with hanging lips, as to something extraordinary. He had lived at court
and slept in the bed of queens!
Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold
in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pine-apples. The
powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere.
The ladies afterward went to their rooms to prepare for the ball.
Emma made her toilet with the fastidious care of an actress on her début.
She did her hair according to the directions of the hairdresser, and put on
the barège dress spread out upon the bed. Charles's trousers were tight
across the belly.

"My trouser-straps will be rather awkward for dancing," he said.
"Dancing?" repeated Emma.
"Yes!"
"Why, you must be mad! They would make fun of you; keep your place.
Besides, it is more becoming for a doctor," she added.
Charles was silent. He walked up and down waiting for Emma to finish
dressing.
He saw her from behind in the glass between two lights. Her black eyes
seemed blacker than ever. Her hair, undulating toward the ears, shone with a
blue luster; a rose in her chignon trembled on its mobile stalk, with artificial
dewdrops on the tips of the leaves. She wore a gown of pale saffron
trimmed with three bouquets of pompon roses mixed with green.
Charles came and kissed her on her shoulder.
"Let me alone!" she said; "you are tumbling me."
One could hear the flourish of the violin and the notes of a horn. She went
downstairs restraining herself from running.
Dancing had begun. Guests were arriving. There was some crushing. She
sat down on a form near the door.
The quadrille over, the floor was occupied by groups of men standing up
and talking and servants in livery bearing large trays. Along the line of
seated women painted fans were fluttering, bouquets half-hid smiling faces,
and gold-stoppered scent-bottles were turned in partly-closed hands, whose
white gloves outlined the nails and tightened on the flesh at the wrists. Lace
trimmings, diamond brooches, medallion bracelets trembled on bodices,
gleamed on breasts, clinked on bare arms. The hair, well smoothed over the
temples and knotted at the nape, bore crowns, or bunches, or sprays of
myosotis, jasmine, pomegranate blossoms, ears of corn, and cornflowers.
Calmly seated in their places, mothers with forbidding countenances were
wearing red turbans.

Emma's heart beat rather faster when, her partner holding her by the tips of
the fingers, she took her place in a line with the dancers, and waited for the
first note to start. But her emotion soon vanished, and, swaying to the
rhythm of the orchestra, she glided forward with slight movements of the
neck. A smile rose to her lips at certain delicate phrases of the violin, that
sometimes played alone while the other instruments were silent; one could
hear the clear clink of the louis-d'or that were being thrown down upon the
card-tables in the next room; then all struck in again, the cornet-à-piston
uttered its sonorous note, feet marked time, skirts swelled and rustled,
hands touched and parted; the same eyes falling before you met yours
again.
A few men (some fifteen or so), of twenty-five to forty, scattered here and
there among the dancers or talking at the doorways, distinguished
themselves from the crowd by a certain air of breeding, whatever their
differences in age, dress, or face.
Their clothes, better made, seemed of finer cloth, and their hair, brought
forward in curls towards the temples, glossy with more delicate pomades.
They had the complexion of wealth,—that clear complexion that is
heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the veneer of
old furniture, and that an ordered regimen of exquisite nurture maintains at
its best. Their necks moved easily in their low cravats, their long whiskers
fell over their turned-down collars, they wiped their lips upon
handkerchiefs, with embroidered initials, that gave forth a subtle perfume.
Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was
something mature in the faces of the young. In their unconcerned looks was
the calm of passions daily satiated, and through all their gentleness of
manner pierced that peculiar brutality, the result of a command of half-easy
things, in which force is exercised and vanity amused—the management of
thoroughbred horses and the society of loose women.
A few steps from Emma a gentleman in a blue coat was talking of Italy with
a pale young woman wearing a parure of pearls.
They were praising the breadth of the columns of St. Peter's, Tivoli,
Vesuvius, Castellamare, and Cassines, the roses of Genoa, the Coliseum by
moonlight. With her other ear Emma was listening to a conversation full of

words she did not understand. A circle gathered round a very young man
who the week before had beaten "Miss Arabella" and "Romulus," and won
two thousand louis jumping a ditch in England. One complained that his
racehorses were growing fat; another of the printers' errors that had
disfigured the name of his horse.
The atmosphere of the ball was heavy; the lamps were growing dim. Guests
were flocking to the billiard-room. A servant got upon a chair and broke the
window-panes. At the crash of the glass Madame Bovary turned her head
and saw in the garden the faces of peasants pressed against the window
looking in at them. Then the memory of the Bertaux came back to her. She
saw the farm again, the muddy pond, her father in a blouse under the apple-
trees, and she saw herself again as formerly, skimming with her finger the
cream off the milk-pans in the dairy. But in the refulgence of the present
hour her past life, so distinct until then, faded away completely, and she
almost doubted having lived it. She was there; beyond the ball was only
shadow overspreading all the rest. She was just eating a maraschino ice that
she held with her left hand in a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, and the
spoon between her teeth.
A lady near her dropped her fan. A gentleman was passing.
"Would you be so good," said the lady, "as to pick up my fan that has fallen
behind the sofa?"
The gentleman bowed, and as he moved to stretch out his arm, Emma saw
the hand of the young woman throw something white, folded in a triangle,
into his hat. The gentleman picking up the fan, offered it to the lady
respectfully; she thanked him with an inclination of the head, and began
smelling her bouquet.
After supper, where were plenty of Spanish and Rhine wines, soups à la
bisque and au lait d'amandes, puddings à la Trafalgar, and all sorts of cold
meats with jellies that trembled in the dishes, the carriages one after the
other began to drive off. Raising the corner of the muslin curtain, one could
see the light of their lanterns glimmering through the darkness. The seats
began to empty, some card-players were still left; the musicians were
cooling the tips of their fingers on their tongues. Charles was half asleep,
his back propped against a door.

At three o'clock the cotillion began. Emma did not know how to waltz.
Every one was waltzing, Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers herself and the
Marquis only the guests staying at the castle were still there about a dozen
persons.
One of the waltzers, however, who was familiarly called Viscount, and
whose low cut waistcoat seemed moulded to his chest, came a second time
to ask Madame Bovary to dance, assuring her that he would guide her, and
that she would get through it very well.
They began slowly, then went more rapidly. They turned; all around them
was turning—the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like a disc
on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma's dress caught
against his trousers. Their legs commingled; he looked down at her; she
raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They started again,
and with a more rapid movement; the Viscount, dragging her along,
disappeared with her to the end of the gallery, where, panting, she almost
fell, and for a moment rested her head upon his breast. And then, still
turning, but more slowly, he guided her back to her seat. She leant back
against the wall and covered her eyes with her hands.
When she opened them again, in the middle of the drawing-room three
waltzers were kneeling before a lady sitting on a stool. She chose the
Viscount, and the violin struck up once more.
Every one looked at them. They passed and re-passed, she with rigid body,
her chin bent down, and he always in the same pose, his figure curved, his
elbow rounded, his chin thrown forward. That woman knew how to waltz!
They kept up a long time, and tired out all the others.
Then they talked a few moments longer, and after the good-nights, or rather
good-mornings, the guests of the château retired to bed.
Charles dragged himself up by the balusters. His knees were going up into
his body. He had spent five consecutive hours standing bolt upright at the
card-tables, watching them play whist, without understanding anything
about it, and it was with a deep sigh of relief that he pulled off his boots.
Emma threw a shawl over her shoulders, opened the window, and leant out.

The night was dark; some drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the
damp wind that refreshed her eyelids. The music of the ball was still
murmuring in her ears, and she tried to keep herself awake in order to
prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to give
up.
Day began to break. She looked long at the windows of the château, trying
to guess which were the rooms of all those she had noticed the evening
before. She would fain have known their lives, have penetrated, blended
with them. But she was shivering with cold. She undressed, and cowered
down between the sheets against Charles, who was asleep.
There were a great many people to luncheon. The repast lasted ten minutes;
no liqueurs were served, which astonished the doctor. Next, Mademoiselle
d'Andervilliers collected some pieces of roll in a small basket to take them
to the swans on the ornamental waters, and they went to walk in the hot-
houses, where strange plants, bristling with hairs, rose in pyramids under
hanging vases, whence, as from overfilled nests of serpents, fell long green
cords interlacing. The orangery, which was at the other end, led by a
covered way to the outhouses of the château. The Marquis, to amuse the
young woman, took her to see the stables. Above the basket-shaped racks
porcelain slabs bore the names of the horses in black letters. Each animal in
its stall whisked its tail when any one went near and said "Tchk! tchk!" The
boards of the harness-room shone like the flooring of a drawing-room. The
carriage harness was piled up in the middle against two twisted columns,
and the bits, the whips, the spurs, the curbs, were ranged in a line all along
the wall.
Charles, meanwhile, went to ask a groom to put his horse to. The dog-cart
was brought to the foot of the steps, and all the parcels being crammed in,
the Bovarys paid their respects to the Marquis and Marchioness and set out
again for Tostes.
Emma watched the turning wheels in silence. Charles, on the extreme edge
of the seat, held the reins with his two arms wide apart, and the little horse
ambled along in the shafts that were too big for him. The loose reins
hanging over his crupper were wet with foam, and the box fastened on
behind the chaise gave great regular bumps against it.

They were on the heights of Thibourville when suddenly some horsemen
with cigars between their lips passed, laughing. Emma thought she
recognized the Viscount, turned back, and caught on the horizon only the
movement of the heads rising or falling with the unequal cadence of the trot
or gallop.
A mile farther on they had to stop to mend with some string the traces that
had broken.
But Charles, giving a last look to the harness, saw something on the ground
between the horse's legs, and he picked up a cigar-case with a green silk
border and blazoned in the center like the door of a carriage.
"There are even two cigars in it," said he; "they'll do for this evening after
dinner."
"Why, do you smoke?" she asked.
"Sometimes, when I get a chance."
He put his find in his pocket and whipped up the nag.
When they reached home the dinner was not ready. Madame lost her
temper. Nastasie answered rudely.
"Leave the room!" said Emma. "You are forgetting yourself. I give you
warning."
For dinner there was onion soup and a piece of veal with sorrel. Charles,
seated opposite Emma, rubbed his hands gleefully.
"How good it is to be at home again!"
Nastasie could be heard crying. He was rather fond of the poor girl. She had
formerly, during the wearisome time of his widowerhood, kept him
company many an evening. She had been his first patient, his oldest
acquaintance in the place.
"Have you given her warning for good?" he asked at last.
"Yes. Who is to prevent me?" she replied.

Then they warmed themselves in the kitchen while their room was being
made ready. Charles began to smoke. He smoked with his lips protruded,
spitting every moment, recoiling at every puff.
"You'll make yourself ill," she said scornfully.
He put down his cigar and ran to swallow a glass of cold water at the pump.
Emma seizing hold of the cigar-case threw it quickly to the back of the
cupboard.
The next day was a long one. She walked above her little garden, up and
down the same walks, stopping before the beds, before the espalier, before
the plaster curate, looking with amazement at all these things of once-on-a-
time that she knew so well. How far off the ball seemed already! What was
it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and
the evening of to-day? Her journey to Vaubyessard had made a hole in her
life, like one of those great crevasses that a storm will sometimes make in
one night in mountains. Still she was resigned. She devoutly put away in
her closets her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose sole were
yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like
these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could
not be effaced.
The memory of this ball, then, became an occupation for Emma. Whenever
the Wednesday came round she said to herself as she awoke, "Ah! I was
there a week—a fortnight—three weeks ago." And little by little the faces
grew confused in her remembrance. She forgot the tune of the quadrilles;
she no longer saw the liveries and appointments so distinctly; some details
escaped her, but the regret remained with her.

IX.

Idle Dreams.

FTEN when Charles was out she took from the cupboard,
between the folds of the linen where she had left it, the
green silk cigar-case. She looked at it, opened it, and even
smelt the odor of the lining—a mixture of verbena and
tobacco. Whose was it? The Viscount's? Perhaps it was a
present from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some rosewood
frame, a pretty little thing, hidden from all eyes, that had occupied many
hours, and over which had fallen the soft curls of the pensive worker. A
breath of love had passed over the stitches on the canvas; each prick of the
needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and all those interwoven threads
of silk were but the continuity of the same silent passion. And then one
morning the Viscount had taken it away with him. Of what had they spoken
when it lay upon the wide-manteled chimneys between flower-vases and
Pompadour clocks? She was at Tostes; he was at Paris now, far away! What
was this Paris like? What a vague name! She repeated it in a low voice, for
the mere pleasure of it; it rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it shone
before her eyes, even on the labels of her pomade-pots.
At night, when the carriers passed under her windows in their carts singing
the "Marjolaine," she awoke, and listened to the noise of the iron-bound
wheels, which, as they gained the country road, was soon deadened by the
soil. "They will be there to-morrow!" she said to herself.
And she followed them in thought up and down the hills, traversing
villages, gliding along the highroads by the light of the stars. At the end of
some indefinite distance there was always a confused spot, into which her
dream died.
She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map she
walked about the capital. She went up the boulevards, stopping at every
turning, between the lines of the streets, in front of the white squares that
represented the houses. At last she would close the lids of her weary eyes,

and see in the darkness the gas jets flaring in the wind and the steps of
carriages lowered with much noise before the peristyles of theatres.
She took in "La Corbeille," a lady's journal, and the "Sylphe des Salons."
She devoured, without skipping a word, all the accounts of first nights,
races, and soirées, took an interest in the début of a singer, in the opening of
a new shop. She knew the latest fashions, the addresses of the best tailors,
the days of the Bois and the Opera. In Eugène Sue she studied descriptions
of furniture; she read Balzac and George Sand, seeking in them imaginary
satisfaction for her own desires. Even at table she had her book by her, and
turned over the pages while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of
the Viscount always returned as she read. Between him and the imaginary
personages she made comparisons. But the circle of which he was the
centre gradually widened round him, and the aureole that he bore, fading
from his form, broadened out beyond, lighting up her other dreams.
Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma's eyes in an
atmosphere of vermilion. The many lives that stirred amid this tumult were,
however, divided into parts, classed as distinct pictures. Emma perceived
only two or three that hid from her all the rest, and in themselves
represented all humanity. The world of ambassadors moved over polished
floors in drawing-rooms lined with mirrors, round oval tables covered with
velvet and gold-fringed cloths. There were skirts with trains; deep
mysteries, anguish hidden beneath smiles. Then came the society of the
duchesses; all were pale; all got up at four o'clock; the women, poor angels,
wore English point on their petticoats; and the men, unappreciated geniuses
under a frivolous outward seeming, rode horses to death at pleasure parties,
spent the summer season at Baden, and towards the forties married
heiresses. In the private rooms of restaurants, where one sups after midnight
by the light of wax candles, laughed the motley crowd of men of letters and
actresses. They were prodigal as kings, full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic
frenzy. This was an existence outside that of all others, between heaven and
earth, in the midst of storms, having something of the sublime. For the rest
of the world it was lost, with no particular place, and as if non-existent. The
nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from
them. All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-
class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a
peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched as far as

eye could see an immense land of joys and of passions. She confused in her
desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart, elegance of
manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like Indian plants, need a
special soil, a particular temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces,
tears flowing over yielded hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors
of tenderness could not be separated from the balconies of great castles full
of indolence, from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-
filled flower-stands, a bed on a raised dais, nor from the flashing of
precious stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries.
The lad from the posting-house, who came to groom the mare every
morning, passed through the passage with his heavy wooden shoes; there
were holes in his blouse; his feet were bare in list slippers. And this was the
groom in knee-breeches with whom she had to be content! His work done,
he did not come back again all day, for Charles on his return put up his
horse himself, unsaddled him and put on the halter, while the servant-girl
brought a bundle of straw and threw it as best she could into the manger.
To replace Nastasie (who left Tostes shedding torrents of tears) Emma took
into her service a young girl of fourteen, an orphan with a sweet face. She
forbade her wearing cotton caps, taught her to address her in the third
person, to bring a glass of water on a plate, to knock before coming into a
room, to iron, starch, and to dress her,—tried to make a lady's-maid of her.
The new servant obeyed without a murmur, so as not to be sent away; and,
as madame usually left the key in the sideboard, Félicité every evening took
a small supply of sugar that she ate alone in her bed after she had said her
prayers.
Sometimes in the afternoon she went to chat with the postilions. Madame
was in her room upstairs. She wore an open dressing-gown, that showed
between the shawl facings of her bodice a pleated chemisette with three
gold buttons. Her belt was a corded girdle with great tassels, and her small
garnet-colored slippers had a large knot of ribbon that fell over her instep.
She had bought herself a blotting-book, writing-case, pen-holder, and
envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her what-not,
looked at herself in the glass, picked up a book, and then, dreaming
between the lines, let it drop on her knees. She longed to travel or to go
back to her convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.

Charles in snow and rain trotted across country. He ate omelettes on
farmhouse tables, poked his arm into damp beds, received the tepid spurt of
blood-lettings in his face, listened to death-rattles, examined basins, turned
over a good deal of dirty linen; but every evening he found a blazing fire,
his dinner ready, easy-chairs, and a well-dressed woman, charming with an
odor of freshness, though no one could say whence the perfume came, or if
it were not her skin that made odorous her chemise.
She charmed him by numerous attentions; now it was some new way of
arranging paper sconces for the candles, a flounce that she altered on her
gown, or an extraordinary name for some very simple dish that the servant
had spoilt, but that Charles swallowed with pleasure to the last mouthful. At
Rouen she saw some ladies who wore a bunch of charms on their watch-
chains; she bought some charms. She wanted for her mantelpiece two large
blue glass vases, and some time after an ivory nécessaire with a silver-gilt
thimble. The less Charles understood these refinements the more they
seduced him. They added something to the pleasure of the senses and to the
comfort of his fireside. It was like a golden dust sanding all along the
narrow path of his life.
He was well, looked well; his reputation was firmly established. The
country-folk loved him because he was not proud. He petted the children,
never went to the public-house, and, moreover, his morals inspired
confidence. He was specially successful with catarrhs and chest complaints.
Being much afraid of killing his patients, Charles, in fact, prescribed only
sedatives, from time to time an emetic, a footbath, or leeches. It was not
that he was afraid of surgery; he bled people copiously like horses, and for
the taking out of teeth he had the "devil's own wrist."
Finally, to keep up with the times, he took in "La Ruche Médicale," a new
journal whose prospectus had been sent him. He read it a little after dinner,
but in about five minutes, the warmth of the room added to the effect of his
dinner sent him to sleep; and he sat there, his chin on his two hands and his
hair spreading like a mane to the foot of the lamp. Emma looked at him and
shrugged her shoulders. Why, at least, was not her husband one of those
men of taciturn passions who work at their books all night, and at last, when
about sixty, the age when rheumatism sets in, wear a string of orders on
their ill-fitting black coats? She could have wished this name of Bovary,

which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers',
repeated in the newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no
ambition. An Yvetot doctor whom he had lately met in consultation had
somewhat humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, before the
assembled relatives. When, in the evening, Charles told her this anecdote,
Emma inveighed loudly against his colleague. Charles was much touched.
He kissed her forehead with a tear in his eyes. But she was angered with
shame; she felt a wild desire to strike him; she went to open the window in
the passage and breathed in the fresh air to calm herself.
"What a man! what a man!" she said in a low voice, biting her lips.
Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him. As he grew older his
manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut the corks of the empty bottles; after
eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a
gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter, the puffed-
out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up to the temples.
Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-vest into his
waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw away the soiled gloves he was
going to put on; and this was not, as he fancied, for himself; it was for
herself, by a diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation. Sometimes, too, she
told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play,
or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after
all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, an ever-ready approbation.
She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the
logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock.
At bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen.
Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of
her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did
not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, toward
what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker,
laden with anguish or full of bliss to the port-holes. But each morning, as
she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound,
sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always
more saddened, she longed for the morrow.

Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when the pear-trees began
to blossom, she suffered from dyspnœa.
From the beginning of July she counted how many weeks there were to
October, thinking that perhaps the Marquis d'Andervilliers would give
another ball at Vaubyessard. But all September passed without letters or
visits.
After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once more remained empty,
and then the same series of days recommenced. So now they would thus
follow one another, always the same, immovable, and bringing nothing.
Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some event. One
adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences, and the scene
changed. But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so! The future was
a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast.
She gave up music. What was the good of playing? Who would hear her?
Since she could never, in a velvet gown with short sleeves, striking with her
light fingers the ivory keys of an Erard at a concert, feel the murmur of
ecstasy envelop her like a breeze, it was not worth while boring herself with
practising. Her drawing cardboard and her embroidery she left in the
cupboard. What was the good? what was the good? Sewing irritated her. "I
have read everything," she said to herself. And she sat there making the
tongs red-hot, or looked at the rain falling.
How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded! She listened with dull
attention to each stroke of the cracked bell. A cat slowly walking over some
roof put up his back in the pale rays of the sun. The wind on the highroad
blew up clouds of dust. Afar off a dog sometimes howled; and the bell,
keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing that died away over the
fields.
But the people came out from church. The women in waxed clogs, the
peasants in new blouses, the little bareheaded children skipping along in
front of them, all were going home. And till nightfall, five or six men,
always the same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door of the
inn.

The winter was severe. The windows every morning were covered with
rime, and the light shining through them, dim as through ground-glass,
sometimes did not change the whole day long. At four o'clock the lamp had
to be lighted.
On fine days she went down into the garden. The dew had left on the
cabbages a silver lace with long transparent threads spreading from one to
the other. No birds were to be heard; everything seemed asleep, the espalier
covered with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent under the coping
of the wall, along which, on drawing near, one saw the many-footed
woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the hedgerow, the curé in the three-
cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right foot, and the very
plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white scabs on his face.
Then she went up again, shut her door, put on coals, and fainting with the
heat of the hearth, felt her boredom weigh more heavily than ever. She
would have liked to go down and talk to the servant, but a sense of shame
restrained her.
Every day at the same time the schoolmaster in a black skull-cap opened the
shutters of his house, and the rural policeman, wearing his sabre over his
blouse, passed by. Night and morning the post-horses, three by three,
crossed the street to water at the pond. From time to time the bell of a
public-house door rang, and when it was windy one could hear the little
brass basins that served as signs for the hairdresser's shop creaking on their
two rods. This shop had as decoration an old engraving of a fashion-plate
stuck against a window-pane and the wax bust of a woman with yellow
hair. He, too, the hairdresser, lamented his wasted calling, his hopeless
future, and dreaming of some shop in a big town—at Rouen, for example,
overlooking the harbor, near the theater—he walked up and down all day
from the mairie to the church, sombre, and waiting for customers. When
Madame Bovary looked up, she always saw him there, like a sentinel on
duty, with his skull-cap over his ears and his waistcoat of lasting.
Sometimes in the afternoon, outside the window of her room, the head of a
man appeared, a swarthy head with black whiskers, smiling slowly, with a
broad, gentle smile that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately began,
and on the organ, in a little drawing-room, dancers the size of a finger,

women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in jackets, monkeys in frock-coats,
gentlemen in knee-breeches, turned and turned between the sofas, the
consoles, multiplied in the bits of looking-glass held together at their
corners by a piece of gold paper. The man turned his handle, looking to the
right and left, and up at the windows. Now and again, while he shot out a
long squirt of brown saliva against the milestone, with his knee he raised
his instrument, whose hard straps tired his shoulder; and now, doleful and
drawling, or gay and hurried, the music escaped from the box, droning
through a curtain of pink taffeta under a brass claw in arabesque. They were
airs played in other places at the theaters, sung in drawing-rooms, danced to
at night under lighted lustres, echoes of the world that reached even to
Emma. Endless sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indian
dancing-girl on the flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leaped with the notes,
swung from dream to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had
caught some coppers in his cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth,
hitched his organ on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She
watched him going.
But it was above all the meal-times that were unbearable to her, in this
small room on the ground-floor, with its smoking stove, its creaking door,
the walls that sweated, the damp flags; all the bitterness of life seemed
served up on her plate, and with the smoke of the boiled beef arose from her
secret soul whiffs of sickliness. Charles was a slow eater; she played with a
few nuts, or, leaning on her elbow, amused herself with drawing lines along
the oil-cloth table-cover with the point of her knife.
She now let everything in her household take care of itself, and Madame
Bovary senior, when she came to spend part of Lent at Tostes, was much
surprised at the change. She who was formerly so careful, so dainty, now
passed whole days without dressing, wore gray cotton stockings, and burnt
tallow candles. She kept saying they must be economical since they were
not rich, adding that she was very contented, very happy, that Tostes pleased
her very much, with other speeches that closed the mouth of her mother-in-
law. Besides, Emma no longer seemed inclined to follow her advice; once
even, Madame Bovary having thought fit to maintain that mistresses ought
to keep an eye on the religion of their servants, she had answered with so
angry a look and so cold a smile that the good woman did not mention it
again.

Emma was growing difficile, capricious. She ordered dishes for herself,
then she did not touch them; one day drank only pure milk, and the next
cups of tea by the dozen. Often she persisted in not going out, then, stifling,
threw open the windows and put on light frocks. After she had well scolded
her servant, she gave her presents or sent her out to see the neighbors, just
as she sometimes threw beggars all the silver in her purse, although she was
by no means tender-hearted or easily accessible to the feelings of others,
like most country-bred people, who always retain in their souls something
of the horny hardness of the paternal hands.
Toward the end of February old Rouault, in memory of his cure, himself
brought his son-in-law a superb turkey, and stayed three days at Tostes.
Charles being with his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in
the room, spat on the fire-dogs, talked farming, calves, cows, poultry, and
municipal council, so that when he left she closed the door on him with a
feeling of satisfaction that surprised even herself. Moreover, she no longer
concealed her contempt for anything or anybody, and at times she set
herself to express singular opinions, finding fault with that which others
approved, and approving things perverse and immoral, all which made her
husband open his eyes widely.
Would this misery last forever? Would she never issue from it? Yet she was
as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen duchesses
at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she
execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls to weep;
she envied lives of stir; longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures, with
all the wildness, that she did not know, but that these must surely yield.
She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart. Charles
prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only
seemed to irritate her the more.
On certain days she chattered with feverish rapidity, and this over-
excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which she
remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was
pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms.
As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her
illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea, began

to think seriously of setting up elsewhere.
From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp little cough, and
completely lost her appetite.
It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and
when he was "beginning to get on there." Yet if it must be! He took her to
Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous complaint: change of air was
needed.
After looking about him on this side and on that, Charles learnt that in the
Neufchâtel arrondissement there was a considerable market-town called
Yonville l'Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a week
before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask the number of the
population, the distance from the nearest doctor, what his predecessor had
made a year, and so forth; and the answer being satisfactory, he made up his
mind to move towards the spring, if Emma's health did not improve.
One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer,
something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding-bouquet. The
orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver-bordered satin
ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more
quickly than dry straw. Then it was like a red bush in the cinders, slowly
devoured. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire
twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shrivelled paper corollas, fluttering
like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney.
When they left Tostes in the month of March, Madame Bovary was
pregnant.

PART II.

I.

A New Field.

ONVILLE-L'ABBAYE (so called from an old Capuchin
abbey of which not even the ruins remain) is a market-town
twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville and
Beauvais roads, at the foot of a valley watered by the Rieule,
a little river that runs into the Andelle after turning three
water-mills near its mouth, where there are a few trout that the lads amuse
themselves by fishing for on Sundays.
We leave the highroad at La Boissière and keep straight on to the top of the
Leux hill, whence the valley is seen. The river that runs through it makes of
it, as it were, two regions with distinct physiognomies,—all on the left is
pasture land, all on the right arable. The meadow stretches under a bulge of
low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while
on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as
eye can follow its blond cornfields. The water, flowing by the grass, divides
with a white line the color of the roads and of the plains, and the country is
like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe
of silver.
Before us, on the verge of the horizon, lie the oaks of the forest of Argueil,
with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills scarred from top to bottom with red
irregular lines; they are rain-tracks, and these brick-tones standing out in
narrow streaks against the gray color of the mountain are due to the quantity
of iron springs that flow beyond in the neighboring country.
Here we are on the confines of Normandy, Picardy, and the Île-de-France, a
bastard land, whose language is without accent as its landscape is without
character. It is there that they make the worst Neufchâtel cheeses of all the
arrondissement; and, on the other hand, farming is costly because so much
manure is needed to enrich this friable soil full of sand and flints.
Up to 1835 there was no practicable road for getting to Yonville, but about
this time a cross-road was made which joins that of Abbeville to that of

Amiens, and is occasionally used by the Rouen wagoners on their way to
Flanders. Yonville-l'Abbaye has remained stationary in spite of its "new
outlet." Instead of improving the soil, they persist in keeping up the pasture
lands, however depreciated they may be in value, and the lazy borough,
growing away from the plain, has naturally spread riverwards. It is seen
from afar sprawling along the banks like a cowherd taking a siesta by the
waterside.
At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with
young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the place.
These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards full of
straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds, and distilleries scattered
under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to the branches.
The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a
third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the
middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall, diagonally
crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree sometimes leans, and the ground
floors have at their door a small swing-gate, to keep out the chicks that
come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the
courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences
disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a
broomstick; there is a blacksmith's forge and then a wheelwright's, with two
or three new carts outside that partly block up the way. Then across an open
space appears a white house beyond a grass mound ornamented by a Cupid,
his finger on his lips; two brass vases are at each end of a flight of steps;
scutcheons[2] blaze upon the door. It is the notary's house, and the finest in
the place.
The church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces farther down, at
the entrance of the square. The little cemetery that surrounds it, closed in by
a wall breast-high, is so full of graves that the old stones, level with the
ground, form a continuous pavement, on which the grass of itself has
marked out regular green squares. The church was rebuilt during the last
years of the reign of Charles X. The wooden roof is beginning to rot from
the top, and here and there has black hollows in its blue color. Over the
door, where the organ should be, is a loft for the men, with a spiral staircase
that reverberates under their wooden shoes.

The daylight coming through the plain glass windows falls obliquely upon
the pews ranged along the walls, which are adorned here and there with a
straw mat bearing beneath it the words in large letters, "Monsieur So-and-
so's pew." And at the spot where the building narrows, the confessional
forms a pendant to a statuette of the Virgin, clothed in a satin robe, coifed
with a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars, and with red cheeks, like an idol
of the Sandwich Islands; and, finally, a copy of the "Holy Family, presented
by the Minister of the Interior," overlooking the high altar, between four
candlesticks, closes in the perspective. The choir stalls, of deal wood, have
been left unpainted.
The market, that is to say, a tiled roof supported by some twenty posts,
occupies of itself about half the public square of Yonville. The town hall,
constructed "from the designs of a Paris architect," is a sort of Greek temple
that forms the corner next to the chemist's shop. On the ground floor are
three Ionic columns, and on the first floor a semicircular gallery, while the
dome that crowns it is occupied by a Gallic cock, resting one foot upon the
"Charte" and holding in the other the scales of Justice.
But that which most attracts the eye is, opposite the Lion d'Or inn, the
chemist's shop of Monsieur Homais. In the evening especially its argand
lamp is lighted, and the red and green jars that embellish his shop-front
throw far across the street their two streams of color; then across them, as if
in Bengal lights, is seen the shadow of the chemist leaning over his desk.
His house from top to bottom is placarded with inscriptions written in large
hand, round hand, printed hand: "Vichy, Seltzer, Barège waters, blood
purifiers, Raspail patent medicine, Arabian racahout, Darcet lozenges,
Regnault paste, trusses, baths, hygienic chocolate," &c. And the signboard,
which takes up all the breadth of the shop, bears in gold letters, "Homais,
Chemist." Then at the back of the shop, behind the great scales fixed to the
counter, the word "Laboratory" appears on a scroll above a glass door,
which about half-way up once more repeats "Homais" in gold letters on a
black ground.
Beyond this there is nothing to see at Yonville. The street (the only one) a
gunshot in length, and flanked by a few shops on either side, stops short at
the turn of the highroad. If it is left on the right hand and the foot of the
Saint-Jean hills followed, the cemetery is soon reached.

At the time of the cholera, in order to enlarge this, a piece of wall was
pulled down, and three acres of land by its side purchased; but all the new
portion is almost tenantless; the tombs, as heretofore, continue to crowd
together toward the gate. The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and
church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has
taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From
year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an
epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or regret the
burials.
"You live on the dead, Lestiboudois!" the curé at last said to him one day.
This grim remark made him reflect; it checked him for some time; but to
this day he carries on the cultivation of his little tubers, and even maintains
stoutly that they grow naturally.
Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed at
Yonville. The tin tricolor flag still swings at the top of the church-steeple;
the two chintz streamers still flutter in the wind from the linendraper's; the
chemist's fœtuses, like lumps of white amadou, rot more and more in their
turbid alcohol, and above the big door of the inn the old golden lion, faded
by rain, still shows passers-by its poodle mane.
On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow
Lefrançois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated great
drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was market-day. The meat
had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and coffee made.
Moreover, she had the boarders' meals to see to, and that of the doctor, his
wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with bursts of
laughter; three millers in the small parlor were calling for brandy; the wood
was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen table,
amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the
shaking of the block on which the spinach was being chopped. From the
poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls which the servant was
chasing in order to wring their necks.
A man slightly marked with small-pox, in green leather slippers, and
wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was warming his back at the
chimney. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he appeared

to take life as calmly as the goldfinch suspended over his head in its wicker
cage: this was the chemist.
"Artémise!" shouted the landlady, "chop some wood, fill the water bottles,
bring some brandy, look sharp! If only I knew what dessert to offer the
guests you are expecting! Good heavens! Those furniture-movers are
beginning their racket in the billiard-room again; and their van has been left
before the front door! The 'Hirondelle' might run into it when it draws up.
Call Polyte and tell him to put it up. Only to think, Monsieur Homais, that
since morning they have had about fifteen games, and drunk eight jars of
cider! Why, they'll tear my cloth for me," she went on, looking at them from
a distance, her strainer in her hand.
"That wouldn't be much of a loss," replied Monsieur Homais. "You would
buy another."
"Another billiard-table!" exclaimed the widow.
"Since that one is coming to pieces, Madame Lefrançois. I tell you again
you are doing yourself harm, much harm! And besides, players now want
narrow pockets and heavy cues. Hazards aren't played now; everything is
changed! One must keep pace with the times! Just look at Tellier!"
The hostess reddened with vexation. The chemist went on:
"You may say what you like; his table is better than yours; and if one were
to think, for example, of getting up a patriotic pool for Poland or the
sufferers from the Lyons floods"—
"It isn't beggars like him that'll frighten us," interrupted the landlady,
shrugging her fat shoulders. "Come, come, Monsieur Homais; as long as the
'Lion d'Or' exists people will come to it. We've feathered our nest; while one
of these days you'll find the 'Café Français' closed with a big placard on the
shutters. Change my billiard-table!" she went on, speaking to herself, "the
table that comes in so handy for folding the washing, and on which, in the
hunting season, I have slept six visitors! But that dawdler, Hivert, doesn't
come!"
"Are you waiting for him for your gentlemen's dinner?"

"Wait for him! And what about Monsieur Binet? As the clock strikes six
you'll see him come in, for he hasn't his equal under the sun for punctuality.
He must always have his seat in the small parlor. He'd rather die than dine
anywhere else. And so squeamish as he is, and so particular about the cider!
Not like Monsieur Léon; he sometimes comes at seven, or even half-past,
and he doesn't so much as look at what he eats. Such a nice young man!
Never speaks a rough word!"
"Well, you see, there's a great difference between an educated man and an
old carabineer who is now a tax-collector."
Six o'clock struck. Binet came in.
He wore a blue frock-coat falling in a straight line round his thin body, and
his leather cap, with its lappets knotted over the top of his head with string,
showed under the turned-up peak a bald forehead, flattened by the constant
wearing of a helmet. He wore a black cloth waistcoat, a hair collar, gray
trousers, and, all the year round, well-blacked boots, that had two parallel
swellings due to the sticking out of his big toes. Not a hair stood out from
the regular line of fair whiskers, which encircling his jaws, framed, after the
fashion of a garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and
the nose hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good hunter, and writing a
fine hand, he had at home a lathe, and amused himself by turning napkin-
rings, with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an artist and
the egotism of a bourgeois.
He went to the small parlor, but the three millers had to be got out first, and
during the whole time necessary for laying the cloth, Binet remained silent
in his place near the stove. Then he shut the door and took off his cap in his
usual way.
"It isn't with saying civil things that he'll wear out his tongue," said the
chemist, as soon as he was alone with the landlady.
"He never talks more," she replied. "Last week two travelers in the cloth
line were here—such clever chaps, who told such jokes in the evening, that
I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood there like a dab fish and never said
a word."

"Yes," observed the chemist; "no imagination, no sallies, nothing that
makes the society man."
"Yet they say he has parts," objected the landlady.
"Parts!" replied Monsieur Homais; "he parts! In his own line it is possible,"
he added in a calmer tone. And he went on—
"Ah! that a merchant, who has large connections, a juris-consult, a doctor, a
chemist, should be thus absent-minded, that they should become whimsical
or even peevish, I can understand; such cases are cited in history. But at
least it is because they are thinking of something. Myself, for example, how
often has it happened to me to look on the bureau for my pen to write a
label, and to find, after all, that I had put it behind my ear?"
Madame Lefrançois just then went to the door to see if the "Hirondelle"
were not coming. She started. A man dressed in black suddenly came into
the kitchen. By the last gleam of the twilight one could see that his face was
rubicund and his form athletic.
"What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curé?" asked the landlady, as she
reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with
their candles in a row. "Will you take something? A thimbleful of cassis? A
glass of wine?"
The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that he had
forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking Madame
Lefrançois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the evening, he left for
the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.
When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the square,
he thought the priest's behavior just now very unbecoming. This refusal to
take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy; all priests
tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days of the tithe.
The landlady took up the defense of her curé.
"Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year he
helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six trusses at
once, he is so strong."

"Bravo!" said the chemist. "Now just send your daughters to confess to
fellows with such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I'd have the
priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrançois, every month—a good
phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals."
"Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you've no religion."
The chemist answered: "I have a religion, my religion, and I even have
more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling. I adore
God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever
he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as
citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss
silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who
live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field,
or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is
the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and Béranger! I am for the
profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of
'89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden
with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies
uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in
themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which
proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in torpid
ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them."
He ceased looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the
chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town council.
But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a distant
rolling. One could distinguish the noise of a carriage mingled with the
clattering of loose horseshoes that beat against the ground, and at last the
"Hirondelle" stopped at the door.
It was a yellow box on two large wheels, that, reaching to the tilt, prevented
travelers from seeing the road and soiled their shoulders. The small panes of
the narrow windows rattled in their sashes when the coach was closed, and
retained here and there patches of mud amid the old layers of dust, that not
even storms of rain had altogether washed away. It was drawn by three
horses, the first a leader, and when it came down-hill its bottom jolted
against the ground.

Some of the inhabitants of Yonville came out into the square; they all spoke
at once, asking for news, for explanations, for hampers. Hivert did not
know whom to answer. It was he who did the errands of the place in town.
He went to the shops and brought back rolls of leather for the shoemaker,
old iron for the farrier, a barrel of herrings for his mistress, caps from the
milliner's, locks from the hairdresser's, and all along the road on his return
journey he distributed his parcels, which he threw, standing upright on his
seat and shouting at the top of his voice, over the enclosures of the yards.
An accident had delayed him. Madame Bovary's greyhound had run across
the field. They had whistled for him a quarter of an hour; Hivert had even
gone back a mile and a half expecting every moment to catch sight of her;
but it had been necessary to go on. Emma had wept, grown angry; she had
accused Charles of this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a draper, who
happened to be in the coach with her had tried to console her by a number
of examples of lost dogs recognizing their masters at the end of long years.
One, he said, had been told of who had come back to Paris from
Constantinople. Another had gone one hundred and fifty miles in a straight
line, and swam four rivers; and his own father had possessed a poodle,
which, after twelve years of absence, had all of a sudden jumped on his
back in the street as he was going to dine in town.
[2]The panonceaux that have to be hung over the doors of notaries.—Trans.

II.

New Friends.

MMA got out first, then Félicité, Monsieur Lheureux, and a
nurse, and they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where
he had slept soundly since night set in.
Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to
Madame and his respects to Monsieur; said he was charmed to have been
able to render them some slight service, and added with a cordial air that he
had ventured to invite himself, his wife being away.
When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney. With
the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the knee, and having thus
pulled it up to her ankle, held out her foot in its black boot to the fire above
the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lit up the whole of her, penetrating
with a crude light the woof of her gown, the fine pores of her fair skin, and
even her eyelids, which she blinked now and again. A great red glow passed
over her with the blowing of the wind through the half-open door. On the
other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watched her silently.
As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was a clerk at the
notary's, Monsieur Guillaumin Monsieur Léon Dupuis (it was he who was
the second habitué of the "Lion d'Or") frequently put back his dinner-hour
in the hope that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom he could
chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done early, he had, for
want of something else to do, to come punctually, and endure from soup to
cheese a tête-à-tête with Binet. It was therefore with delight that he
accepted the landlady's suggestion that he should dine in company with the
newcomers, and they passed into the large parlor where Madame
Lefrançois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the table laid for four.
Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza;
then turning to his neighbor—
"Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in our
'Hirondelle.'"
"That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I like
change of place."

"It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the same
places."
"If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in the
saddle"—
"But," Léon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, it
seems to me, is more pleasant—when one can," he added.
"Moreover," said the chemist, "the practice of medicine is not very hard
work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us the use of
gigs, and generally, as the farmers are well off, they pay pretty well. We
have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis,
bilious affections, etc., now and then a few intermittent fevers at harvest-
time; but on the whole, little of a serious nature, nothing special to note,
unless it be a great deal of scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable
hygienic conditions of our peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many
prejudices to combat, Monsieur Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with
which all the efforts of your science will daily come into collision; for
people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than
come straight to the doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not,
truth to tell, bad, and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The
thermometer (I have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees
and in the hottest season rises to 25 or 30 degrees Centigrade at the outside,
which gives us 24 degrees Réaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54
degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a matter of fact, we
are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side,
from the west winds by the St. Jean range on the other; and this heat,
moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapors given off by the river
and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know,
exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen (no,
nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which sucking up into itself the humus
from the ground, mixing together all those different emanations, unites
them into a stack, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused
through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long run, as in
tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata,—this heat, I say, finds
itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it
should come—that is to say, the southern side—by the south-eastern winds,

which, having cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us
sometimes all at once, like breezes from Russia."
"At any rate, you have some walks in the neighborhood?" continued
Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.
"Oh, very few," he answered. "There is a place they call La Pâture, on the
top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and
stay there with a book, watching the sunset."
"I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets," she resumed; "but
especially by the side of the sea."
"Oh, I adore the sea!" said Monsieur Léon.
"And then, does it not seem to you," continued Madame Bovary, "that the
mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of
which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?"
"It is the same with mountainous landscapes," continued Léon. "A cousin of
mine who traveled in Switzerland last year told me that one could not
picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the
gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of incredible size across
torrents, cottages suspended over precipices, and, a thousand feet below
one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such spectacles must stir to
enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I no longer marvel at that
celebrated musician who, the better to inspire his imagination, was in the
habit of playing the piano before some imposing site."
"You play?" she asked.
"No, but I am very fond of music," he replied.
"Ah! don't you listen to him, Madame Bovary," interrupted Homais,
bending over his plate. "That's sheer modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the
other day in your room you were singing 'L'Ange Gardien' ravishingly. I
heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor."
Léon, in fact, lodged at the chemist's, where he had a small room on the
second floor, overlooking the Place. He blushed at the compliment of his
landlord, who had already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to

him, one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He was
telling anecdotes, giving information; the fortune of the notary was not
known exactly, and "there was the Tuvache household," who made a good
deal of show.
Emma continued, "And what music do you prefer?"
"Oh, German music; that which makes you dream."
"Have you been to the opera?"
"Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish reading
for the bar."
"As I had the honor of putting it to your husband," said the chemist, "with
regard to this poor Yanoda who has run away, you will find yourself, thanks
to his extravagance, in the possession of one of the most comfortable
houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience for a doctor is a door giving on
the Walk, where one can go in and out unseen. Moreover, it contains
everything that is agreeable in a household—a laundry, kitchen with offices,
sitting-room, fruit-room, etc. He was a gay dog, who didn't care what he
spent. At the end of the garden, by the side of the water, he had an arbor
built just for the purpose of drinking beer in summer; and if madame is fond
of gardening she will be able"—
"My wife doesn't care about it," said Charles; "although she has been
advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room reading."
"Like me," replied Léon. "And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's
fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the
window and the lamp is burning?"
"What, indeed?" she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon him.
"One thinks of nothing," he continued; "the hours slip by. Motionless we
traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the
fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It
mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating
beneath their costumes."
"That is true! that is true!" she said.

"Has it ever happened to you," Léon went on, "to come across some vague
idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from
afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?"
"I have experienced it," she replied.
"That is the reason why," he said, "I especially love the poets. I think verse
more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears."
"Still in the long run it is tiring," continued Emma. "Now I, on the contrary,
adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest
commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature."
"In fact," observed the clerk, "these works, not touching the heart, it seems
to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of
life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections,
and pictures of happiness. For myself, living here far from the world, this is
my one distraction; but Yonville affords so few resources."
"Like Tostes, no doubt," replied Emma; "and so I always subscribed to a
lending library."
"If madame will do me the honor of making use of it," said the chemist,
who had just caught the last words, "I have at her disposal a library
composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the
'Echo des Feuilletons;' and in addition I receive various periodicals, among
them the 'Fanal de Rouen' daily, having the advantage to be its
correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel, Yonville and
vicinity."
For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant Artémise,
carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags, brought one plate
after the other, forgot everything, and constantly left the door of the billiard-
room half open, so that it beat against the wall with its hooks.
Unconsciously, Léon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the bars
of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting. She wore a small blue
silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar, and with the
movements of her head the lower part of her face gently sunk into the linen
or came out from it. Thus, side by side, while Charles and the chemist

chatted, they entered into one of those vague conversations where the
hazard of all that is said brings you back to the fixed center of a common
sympathy. The Paris theaters, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world
they did not know; Tostes, where she had lived, and Yonville, where they
were; they examined all, talked of everything till to the end of dinner.
When coffee was served Félicité went away to get ready the room in the
new house, and the guests soon raised the siege. Madame Lefrançois was
asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was waiting to
show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home. Bits of straw stuck in
his red hair, and he limped with his left leg. When he had taken in his other
hand the curé's umbrella, they started.
The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the
earth was all gray as on a summer's night. But as the doctor's house was
only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost
immediately, and the company dispersed.
As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster fall
about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls were new and the wooden
stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish light passed
through the curtainless windows. She could catch glimpses of tree-tops, and
beyond, the fields, half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight
along the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were
scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses on the
chairs and basins on the floor,—the two men who had brought the furniture
had left everything about carelessly.
This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place. The first was
the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her arrival at Tostes; the
third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth. And each one had marked, as
it were, the inauguration of a new phase in her life. She did not believe that
things could present themselves in the same way in different places, and
since the portion of her life lived had been bad, no doubt that which
remained to be lived would be better.

IV.

Added Cares.

HE next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the
Place. She had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and
bowed. She nodded quickly and reclosed the window.
Léon waited all day for six o'clock in the evening to come,
but on going to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur Binet, already at
table. The dinner of the evening before had been a considerable event for
him; he had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a "lady."
How then had he been able to explain, and in such language, the number of
things that he could not have said so well before? He was usually shy, and
maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and
dissimulation. At Yonville he was considered "well-bred." He listened to the
arguments of the older people, and did not seem hot about politics—a
remarkable thing for a young man. Then he had some accomplishments; he
painted in water-colors, could read the key of G, and readily talked
literature after dinner when he did not play cards. Monsieur Homais
respected him for his education; Madame Homais liked him for his good-
nature, for he often took the little Homaises into the garden—little brats
who were always dirty, very much spoiled, and somewhat lymphatic, like
their mother. Besides the servant to look after them, they had Justin, the
chemist's apprentice, a second cousin of Monsieur Homais, who had been
taken into the house from charity, and who was useful at the same time as a
servant.
The chemist proved the best of neighbors. He gave Madame Bovary
information as to the tradespeople, sent expressly for his own cider

merchant, tasted the drink himself, and saw that the casks were properly
placed in the cellar; he explained how to set about getting in a supply of
butter cheap, and made an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the sacristan,
who, besides his sacerdotal and funereal functions, looked after the
principal gardens at Yonville by the hour or the year, according to the taste
of the customers.
The need of looking after others was not the only thing that urged the
chemist to such obsequious cordiality; there was a plan underneath it all.
He had infringed the law of the 19th Ventôse, year xi, article 1, which
forbade all persons not having a diploma to practice medicine; so that, after
certain anonymous denunciations, Homais had been summoned to Rouen to
see the procureur of the king in his own private room; the magistrate
receiving him standing up, ermine on shoulder and cap on head. It was in
the morning, before the court opened. In the corridors one heard the heavy
boots of the gendarmes walking past, and like a far-off noise great locks
that were shut. The chemist's ears tingled as if he were about to have an
apoplectic stroke: he saw the depths of dungeons, his family in tears, his
shop sold, all the jars dispersed; and he was obliged to enter a café and take
a glass of rum and seltzer to recover his spirits.
Little by little the memory of this reprimand grew fainter, and he continued,
as heretofore, to give anodyne consultations in his back-parlor. But the
mayor resented it, his colleagues were jealous, everything was to be feared;
gaining over Monsieur Bovary by his attentions was to earn his gratitude,
and prevent his speaking out later, should he notice anything. So every
morning Homais brought him "the paper," and often in the afternoon left his
shop for a few moments to have a chat with the Doctor.
Charles was dull: patients did not come. He remained seated for hours
without speaking, went into his consulting-room to sleep, or watched his
wife sewing. Then for diversion he employed himself at home as a
workman; he even tried to do up the attic with some paint which had been
left behind by the painters. But money matters worried him. He had spent
so much for repairs at Tostes, for madame's toilette, and for the moving, that
the whole dowry, over three thousand crowns, had slipped away in two
years. Then how many things had been spoilt or lost during their carriage

from Tostes to Yonville, without counting the plaster curé, who, falling out
of the coach at an over-severe jolt, had been dashed into a thousand
fragments on the pavement of Quincampoix!
A pleasanter trouble came to distract him, namely, the pregnancy of his
wife. As the time of her confinement approached he cherished her the more.
It was another bond of the flesh establishing itself, and, as it were, a
continued sentiment of a more complex union. When from afar he saw her
languid walk, and her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when
opposite one another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses
in her armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds; he got up, embraced
her, passed his hands over her face, called her little mamma, wanted to
make her dance, and, half-laughing, half-crying, uttered all kinds of
caressing pleasantries that came into his head. The idea of having begotten
a child delighted him. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human life from
end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity.
Emma at first felt a great astonishment; then was anxious to be delivered
that she might know what it was to be a mother. But not being able to spend
as much as she would have liked, to have a swing-bassinette with rose silk
curtains, and embroidered caps, in a fit of bitterness she gave up looking
after the trousseau, and ordered the whole of it from a village
needlewoman, without choosing or discussing anything. Thus she did not
amuse herself with those preparations that stimulate the tenderness of
mothers, and so her affection was from the very outset, perhaps, to some
extent attenuated.
As Charles, however, spoke of the boy at every meal, she soon began to
think of him more consecutively.
She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him
George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge
for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over
passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away
pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once inert and flexible, she
has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will,
like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is
always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains.

She was confined on a Sunday at about six o'clock, as the sun was rising.
"It is a girl!" said Charles.
She turned her head away and fainted.
Madame Homais, as well as Madame Lefrançois of the Lion d'Or, almost
immediately came running in to embrace her. The chemist, as a man of
discretion, offered only a few provisional felicitations through the half-open
door. He wished to see the child, and thought it well made.
While she was getting well she occupied herself much in seeking a name
for her daughter. First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such
as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde very well, and Yseult
or Léocadie still better. Charles wanted the child to be called after her
mother; Emma opposed this. They ran over the calendar from end to end,
and then consulted outsiders.
"Monsieur Léon," said the chemist, "with whom I was talking about it the
other day, wonders you do not choose Madeleine. It is very much in fashion
just now."
But Madame Bovary, senior, cried out loudly against this name of a sinner.
As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for all those that recalled some
great man, an illustrious fact, or a generous idea, and it was on this system
that he baptized his four children. Thus Napoléon represented glory and
Franklin liberty; Irma was perhaps a concession to romanticism, but Athalie
was a homage to the greatest masterpiece of the French stage. For his
philosophical convictions did not interfere with his artistic tastes; in him the
thinker did not stifle the man of sentiment; he could make distinctions,
make allowances for imagination and fanaticism. In this tragedy, for
example, he found fault with the ideas, but admired the style; he detested
the conception, but applauded all the details, and loathed the characters
while he grew enthusiastic over their dialogue. When he read the fine
passages he was transported, but when he thought that mummers would get
something out of them for their show, he was disconsolate; and in this
confusion of sentiments in which he was involved he would have liked at
once to crown Racine with both his hands and argue with him for a good
quarter of an hour.

At last Emma remembered that at the château of Vaubyessard she had heard
the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from that moment this name was
chosen; and as old Rouault could not come, Monsieur Homais was
requested to stand godfather. His gifts were all products from his
establishment, to wit: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three
cakes of marsh-mallow paste, and six sticks of sugar-candy, into the
bargain, that he had come across in a cupboard. On the evening of the
ceremony there was a grand dinner; the curé was present; there was much
excitement. Monsieur Homais toward liqueur-time began singing "Le Dieu
des bonnes gens." Monsieur Léon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary,
senior, who was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally,
M. Bovary, senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began
baptizing it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head. This
mockery of the first of the sacraments made the Abbé Bournisien angry; old
Bovary replied by a quotation from "La Guerre des Dieux;" the curé wished
to leave; the ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they succeeded in
making the priest sit down again, and he quietly went on with the half-
finished coffee in his saucer.
Monsieur Bovary, senior, stayed at Yonville a month, dazzling the natives
by a superb policeman's cap with silver tassels that he wore in the morning
when he smoked his pipe in the square. Being also in the habit of drinking a
good deal of brandy, he often sent the servant to the Lion d'Or to buy him a
bottle, which was put down to his son's account, and to perfume his
handkerchiefs he used up his daughter-in-law's whole supply of eau-de-
cologne.
The latter did not at all dislike his company. He had knocked about the
world, he talked about Berlin, Vienna, and Strasbourg, of his soldier times,
of the mistresses he had had, the grand luncheons of which he had partaken;
then he was amiable, and sometimes even, either on the stairs or in the
garden, would seize hold of her waist, crying, "Charles, look out for
yourself."
Then Madame Bovary, senior, became alarmed for her son's happiness, and
fearing that her husband might in the long run have an immoral influence
upon the ideas of the young woman, took care to hurry their departure.

Perhaps she had more serious reasons for uneasiness. Monsieur Bovary was
not the man to respect anything.
One day Emma was suddenly seized with the desire to see her little girl,
who had been put to nurse with the carpenter's wife, and without looking at
the almanac to see whether the six weeks of the Virgin were yet passed, she
set out for the Rollets' house, situated at the extreme end of the village,
between the highroad and the fields.
It was mid-day, the shutters of the houses were closed, and the slate roofs
that glittered beneath the fierce light of the blue sky seemed to strike sparks
from the crest of their gables. A heavy wind was blowing; Emma felt weak
as she walked; the stones of the pavement hurt her; she was doubtful
whether she would not go home again, or go in somewhere to rest.
At this moment Monsieur Léon came out from a neighboring door with a
bundle of papers under his arm. He came to greet her, and stood in the
shade in front of Lheureux's shop under the projecting gray awning.
Madame Bovary said she was going to see her baby, but that she was
beginning to grow tired.
"If—" said Léon, not daring to go on.
"Have you any business to attend to?" she asked.
And on the clerk's answer, she begged him to accompany her. That same
evening this was known in Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's
wife, declared in the presence of her servant that "Madame Bovary was
compromising herself."
To get to the nurse's it was necessary to turn to the left on leaving the street,
as if making for the cemetery, and to follow between little houses and yards
a small path bordered with privet hedges. They were in bloom, and so were
the speedwells, eglantines, thistles, and the sweetbriar that sprang up from
the thickets. Through openings in the hedges one could see into the huts,
some pig on a dung-heap, or tethered cows rubbing their horns against the
trunk of trees. The two, side by side, walked slowly, she leaning upon him,
and he restraining his pace, which he regulated by hers; in front of them a
swarm of midges fluttered, buzzing in the warm air.

They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it. Low, and
covered with brown tiles, outside it hung, beneath the dormer-window of
the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence
surrounded a bed of lettuces, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas
strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and
several indefinite rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large
sheet of coarse linen, were spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate
the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other
hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with
scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with
their business, left in the country.
"Go in," she said; "your little one is there asleep."
The room on the ground floor, the only one in the dwelling, had at its
farther end, against the wall, a large bed without curtains, while a kneading-
trough took up the side by the window, one pane of which was mended with
a piece of blue paper. In the corner behind the door, shining hobnailed shoes
stood in a row under the slab of the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a
feather stuck in its mouth; a Matthieu Laensberg lay on the dusty
mantelpiece amid gun-flints, candle-ends, and bits of amadou. Finally, the
last luxury in the apartment was a "Fame" blowing her trumpets, a picture
cut out, no doubt, from some perfumer's prospectus and nailed to the wall
with six wooden shoe-pegs.
Emma's child was asleep in a wicker-cradle. She took it up in the wrapping
that enveloped it and began singing softly as she rocked herself to and fro.
Léon walked up and down the room; it seemed strange to him to see this
beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this poverty.
Madame Bovary reddened, he turned away, thinking perhaps there had been
an impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the baby girl, who had
just vomited over her frock. The nurse at once came to dry her, protesting
that it wouldn't show.
"She gives me other doses," she said; "I am always a-washing of her. If you
would have the goodness to order Camus, the grocer, to let me have a little
soap; it would really be more convenient for you, as I needn't trouble you
then."

"Very well! very well!" said Emma. "Good morning, Madame Rollet," and
she went out, wiping her shoes at the door.
The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the
time of the trouble she had getting up of nights.
"I'm that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I'm sure you
might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that'd last me a month,
and I'd take it of a morning with some milk."
After submitting to her thanks, Madame Bovary left. She had gone a little
way down the path when, at the sound of wooden shoes, she turned round.
It was the nurse.
"What is it?"
Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an elm tree, began talking
to her of her husband, who with his trade and six francs a year that the
captain—
"Oh, be quick!" said Emma.
"Well," the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each word, "I'm afraid
he'll be put out seeing me have coffee alone; you know men—"
"But you are to have some," Emma repeated; "I will give you some. You
bother me!"
"Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see, in consequence of his wounds he
has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider weakens him."
"Do make haste, Mère Rollet!"
"Well," the latter continued, making a curtsey, "if it weren't asking too
much," and she curtsied once more, "if you would"—and her eyes begged
—"a jar of brandy," she said at last, "and I'd rub your little one's feet with it;
they're as tender as one's tongue."
Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took Monsieur Léon's arm. She walked
fast for some time, then more slowly, and looking straight in front of her,
her eyes rested on the shoulder of the young man, whose frock-coat had a

black-velvet collar. His brown hair fell over it, straight and carefully
arranged. She noticed his nails, which were longer than one wore them at
Yonville. It was one of the clerk's chief occupations to trim them, and for
this purpose he kept a special knife in his writing-desk.
They returned to Yonville by the waterside. In the warm season the bank,
wider than at other times, showed to its foot the garden walls, whence a few
steps led to the river. It flowed noiselessly, swift, and cold to the eye; long,
thin grasses huddled together in it as the current drove them, and spread
themselves upon the limpid water like streaming hair; sometimes at the top
of the reeds or on the leaf of a water-lily an insect with thin legs crawled or
rested. The sun pierced with a ray the small blue bubbles of the waves that,
breaking, followed each other; branchless old willows mirrored their gray
backs in the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was
the dinner-hour at the farms, and the young woman and her companion
heard nothing as they walked but the fall of their steps on the earth of the
path, the words they spoke, and the sound of Emma's skirts rustling around
her.
The walls of the gardens, with pieces of bottle on their coping, were as hot
as the glass windows of a conservatory. Wallflowers had sprung up between
the bricks, and with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary, as she
passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a yellow dust, or a
spray of overhanging honeysuckle and clematis caught in its fringe and
dangled for a moment over the silk.
They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected
shortly at the Rouen theatre.
"Are you going?" she asked.
"If I can," he answered.
Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of
more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial
phrases they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the
whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices.
Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of
speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like tropical

shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an
odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of
the horizon that we do not even know.
In one place the ground had been trodden down by the cattle; they had to
step on large green stones put here and there in the mud. She often stopped
a moment to look where to place her foot, and tottering on the stone that
shook, her arms outspread, her form bent forward with a look of indecision,
she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles of water.
When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the little
gate, ran up the steps and disappeared.
Léon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the
briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went out.
He went to La Pâture at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of the
forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and gazed at the
sky through his fingers.
"How bored I am!" he said to himself, "how bored I am!"
He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais for a
friend and Monsieur Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely absorbed by
his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red whiskers over a white
cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements, although he affected a
stiff English manner, which in the beginning had impressed the clerk.
As to the chemist's spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle as a
sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins, weeping for
others' woes, letting everything go in her household, and detesting corsets;
but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so common in
appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although she was
thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms next each other and he
spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might be a woman for another,
or that she possessed anything else of her sex than the gown.
And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers, two or three publicans,
the curé, and, finally, Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his two sons, rich,

crabbed, obtuse persons, who farmed their own lands and had feasts among
themselves, bigoted to boot, and quite unbearable companions.
But from the general background of all these human faces Emma's stood
out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to see a
vague abyss.
In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the druggist.
Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him again, and Léon
did not know what to do between his fear of being indiscreet and the desire
for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible.

IV.

Silent Homage.

HEN the first cold days set in Emma left her bedroom for the
sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in which
there was on the mantelpiece a large bunch of coral spread
out against the looking-glass. Seated in her armchair near the
window, she could see the villagers pass along the pavement.
Twice a day Léon went from his office to the Lion d'Or. Emma could hear
him coming from afar; she leant forward listening, and the young man
glided past the curtain, always dressed in the same way, and without turning
his head. But in the twilight, when, her chin resting on her left hand, she let
the embroidery she had begun fall on her knees, she often shuddered at the
apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding past. She would get up and order
the table to be laid.

Monsieur Homais called at dinner-time. Skull-cap in hand, he came in on
tiptoe, in order to disturb no one, always repeating the same phrase, "Good
evening, everybody." Then, when he had taken his seat at table between the
pair, he asked the doctor about his patients, and the latter consulted him as
to the probability of their payment. Next they talked of what was in the
paper. Homais by this hour knew it almost by heart, and he repeated it from
end to end, with the reflections of the penny-a-liners, and all the stories of
individual catastrophes that had occurred in France or abroad. But the
subject becoming exhausted, he was not slow in throwing out some remarks
on the dishes before him. Sometimes even, half-rising, he delicately pointed
out to Madame the tenderest morsel, or turning to the servant, gave her
some advice on the manipulation of stews and the hygiene of seasoning. He
talked aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatine in a bewildering manner.
Moreover, Homais, with his head fuller of recipes than his shop of jars,
excelled in making all kinds of preserves, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs; he
knew also all the last inventions in economic stoves, together with the art of
preserving cheeses and of curing sick wines.
At eight o'clock Justin came to fetch him to shut up the shop. Then
Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look, especially if Félicité was there, for
he had noticed that his apprentice was fond of the doctor's house.
"The young dog," he said, "is beginning to have ideas, and the devil take me
if I don't believe he's in love with your servant!"
But a more serious fault with which he reproached Justin was his constantly
listening to conversation. On Sunday, for example, one could not get him
out of the drawing-room, whither Madame Homais had called him to fetch
the children, who were falling asleep in the armchairs, and dragging down
with their backs calico chair-covers that were too large.
Not many people came to these soirées at the chemist's, his scandal-
mongering and political opinions having successively alienated various
respectable persons from him. The clerk never failed to be there. As soon as
he heard the bell he ran to meet Madame Bovary, took her shawl, and put
away under the shop-counter the thick list shoes that she wore over her
boots when there was snow.

First they played some hands at trente-et-un; next Monsieur Homais played
écarté with Emma; Léon behind her gave her advice. Standing up with his
hands on the back of her chair, he saw the teeth of her comb that bit into her
chignon. With every movement that she made to throw her cards the right
side of her bodice was drawn up. From her turned-up hair a dark color fell
over her back, and growing gradually paler, lost itself little by little in the
shade. Then her skirt fell on both sides of her chair, puffing out, full of
folds, and reaching the floor. When Léon occasionally felt the sole of his
boot resting on it, he drew back as if he had trodden upon some one.
When the game of cards was over, the druggist and the Doctor played
dominoes, and Emma, changing her place, leant her elbow on the table,
turning over the leaves of "L'Illustration." She had brought her ladies'
journal with her. Léon sat down near her; they looked at the engravings
together, and waited for each other at the bottom of the pages. She often
begged him to read her the verses; Léon declaimed them in a languid voice,
to which he carefully gave a dying fall in the love passages. But the noise of
the dominoes annoyed him. Monsieur Homais was strong at the game; he
could beat Charles and give him a double-six. Then, the three hundred
finished, they both stretched themselves out in front of the fire, and were
soon asleep. The fire was dying out in the cinders; the teapot was empty,
Léon was still reading. Emma listened to him, mechanically turning round
the lamp-shade, on the gauze of which were painted clowns in carriages,
and tight-rope dancers with their balancing-poles. Léon stopped, pointing
with a gesture to his sleeping audience; then they talked in low tones, and
their conversation seemed the more sweet to them because it was unheard.
Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce of
books and of romances. Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, did not
trouble himself about it.
On his birthday he received a beautiful phrenological head, all marked with
figures to the thorax, and painted blue. This was an attention of the clerk's.
He showed him many others, even to doing errands for him at Rouen; and
the book of a novelist having made the mania for cactuses fashionable,
Léon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on his knees in
the "Hirondelle," pricking his fingers with their stiff hairs.

She had a board with a balustrade fixed against her window to hold the
pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they saw each other
tending their flowers at their windows.
Of the windows of the village there was one yet more often occupied; for
on Sundays, from morning to night, and every morning when the weather
was bright, one could see at the dormer-window of a garret the profile of
Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could
be heard at the Lion d'Or.
One evening on coming home Léon found in his room a rug in velvet and
wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur
Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief; every one
wished to see this rug. Why did the doctor's wife give the clerk presents? It
looked queer. They decided that she must be in love with him.
He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and of
her wit; so much so, that Binet once roughly answered him:
"What does it matter to me since I'm not in her set?"
He tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to her,
and, always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the shame of
being such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire. Then he took
energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put it off to times that he
again deferred. Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but this
resolution soon deserted him in Emma's presence, and when Charles,
dropping in, invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some
patient in the neighborhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and
went out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her?
As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought,
must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,—a hurricane of
the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a
leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on
the terraces of houses lakes are formed when the pipes are choked, and she
would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a
rent in its wall.

V.

Smothered Flames.

T WAS a Sunday in February, an afternoon when the snow
was falling.
They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and
Monsieur Léon, gone to see a yarn-mill that was being built
in the valley a mile and half from Yonville. The druggist had taken
Napoléon and Athalie to give them some exercise, and Justin accompanied
them, carrying the umbrellas on his shoulder.
Nothing, however, could be less curious than this curiosity. A great piece of
waste ground, on which pell-mell, amid a mass of sand and stones, were a
few brake-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a quadrangular building
pierced by a number of little windows. The building was unfinished; the sky
could be seen through the joists of the roofing. Attached to the top-plank of
the gable a bunch of straw mixed with corn-ears fluttered its tricolored
ribbons in the wind.
Homais was talking. He explained to the company the future importance of
this establishment, computed the strength of the floorings, the thickness of
the walls, and regretted extremely not having a yard-stick such as Monsieur
Binet possessed for his own special use.
Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and she
looked at the sun's disc shedding afar through the mist his pale splendor.
She turned. Charles was there. His cap was drawn down over his eyebrows,
and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look of stupidity to his
face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating to behold, and she saw
written upon his coat all the platitude of the bearer.
While she was considering him thus, tasting in her irritation a sort of
depraved pleasure, Léon made a step forward. The cold that made him pale
seemed to add a more gentle languor to his face; between his cravat and his

neck the somewhat loose collar of his shirt showed the skin; the lobe of his
ear looked out from beneath a lock of hair, and his large blue eyes, raised to
the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those
mountain-lakes where the heavens are mirrored.
"Wretched boy!" suddenly cried the chemist.
And he ran to his son, who had just precipitated himself into a heap of lime
in order to whiten his boots. At the reproaches with which he was being
overwhelmed Napoléon began to roar, while Justin dried his shoes with a
wisp of straw. But a knife was wanted; Charles offered his.
"Ah!" she said to herself, "he carries a knife in his pocket like a peasant."
The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yonville.
In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbor's, and when
Charles had left and she felt herself alone, the comparison recurred with the
clearness of a sensation almost actual, and with that lengthening of
perspective which memory gives to things. Looking from her bed at the
clear fire that was burning, she still saw, as she had down there, Léon
standing up with one hand bending his cane, and with the other holding
Athalie, who was quietly sucking a piece of ice. She thought him charming;
she could not tear herself away from him; she recalled his other attitudes on
other days, the words he had spoken, the sound of his voice, his whole
person; and she repeated, pouting out her lips as if for a kiss—
"Yes, charming! charming! Is he not in love?" she asked herself; "but with
whom? With me?"
All the proofs arose before her at once; her heart leapt. The flame of the fire
threw a joyous light upon the ceiling; she turned on her back, stretching out
her arms.
Then began the eternal lamentation: "Oh, if Heaven had but willed it! And
why not? What prevented it?"
When Charles came home at midnight, she seemed to have just awakened,
and as he made a noise undressing, she complained of a headache, then
asked carelessly what had happened that evening.

"Monsieur Léon," he said, "went to his room early."
She could not help smiling, and she fell asleep, her soul filled with a new
delight.
The next day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lheureux, the
draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but
bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of the
Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a decoction of
liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the keen brilliance of his
small black eyes. No one knew what he had been formerly; a pedlar, said
some, a banker at Routot, according to others. What was certain was, that
he made complex calculations in his head that would have frightened Binet
himself. Polite to obsequiousness, he always held himself with his back
bent in the position of one who bows or who invites.
After leaving at the door his hat surrounded with crape, he put down a green
bandbox on the table, and began by complaining to madame, with many
civilities, that he should have remained till that day without gaining her
confidence. A poor shop like his was not made to attract a "fashionable
lady;" he emphasized the words; yet she had only to command, and he
would undertake to provide her with anything she might wish, either in
haberdashery or linen, millinery or fancy goods, for he went to town
regularly four times a month. He was connected with the best houses. You
could speak of him at the "Trois Frères," at the "Barbe d'Or," or at the
"Grand Sauvage;" all these gentlemen knew him as well as the insides of
their pockets. To-day, then, he had come to show madame, in passing,
various articles he happened to have, thanks to the most rare opportunity.
And he pulled out half-a-dozen embroidered collars from the box.
Madame Bovary examined them. "I do not require anything," she said.
Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited three Algerian scarves,
several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and, finally, four
eggcups in cocoa-nut wood, carved in open-work by convicts. Then, with
both hands on the table, his neck stretched out, his figure bent forward,
open-mouthed, he watched Emma's look, who was walking up and down
undecided amid these goods. From time to time, as if to remove some dust,
he filliped with his nail the silk of the scarves spread out at full length, and

they rustled with a little noise, making in the green twilight the gold
spangles of their tissue scintillate like little stars.
"How much are they?"
"A mere nothing," he replied, "a mere nothing. But there's no hurry;
whenever it's convenient. We are not Jews."
She reflected for a few moments, and ended by again declining Monsieur
Lheureux's offer. He replied quite unconcernedly:
"Very well. We shall understand each other by and by. I have always got on
with ladies—if I didn't with my own!"
Emma smiled.
"I wanted to tell you," he went on good-naturedly, after his joke, "that it
isn't the money I should trouble about. Why, I could give you some, if need
be."
She made a gesture of surprise.
"Ah!" said he quickly and in a low voice, "I shouldn't have to go far to find
you some, rely on that."
And he began asking after Père Tellier, the proprietor of the "Café
Français," whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending.
"What's the matter with Père Tellier? He coughs so that he shakes his whole
house, and I'm afraid he'll soon want a deal covering rather than a flannel
vest. He was such a rake as a young man! That sort of people, madame,
have not the least regularity; he's burnt up with brandy. Still it's sad, all the
same, to see an acquaintance go off."
And while he fastened up his box he discoursed about the doctor's patients.
"It's the weather, no doubt," he said, looking frowningly at the floor, "that
causes these illnesses. I, too, don't feel the thing. One of these days I shall
even have to consult the doctor for a pain I have in my back. Well, good-
bye, Madame Bovary. At your service; your very humble servant." And he
closed the door gently.

Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray by the fireside; she
was a long time over it; everything was well with her.
"How good I was!" she said to herself, thinking of the scarves.
She heard some steps on the stairs. It was Léon. She got up and took from
the chest of drawers the first of a pile of dusters to be hemmed. When he
came in she seemed very busy.
The conversation languished; Madame Bovary gave it up every few
minutes, while he himself seemed quite embarrassed. Seated on a low chair
near the fire, he turned round in his fingers the ivory thimble-case. She
stitched on, or from time to time turned down the hem of the cloth with her
nail. She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence, as he would
have been by her speech.
"Poor fellow!" she thought.
"How have I displeased her?" he asked himself.
At last, however, Léon said that he should have, one of these days, to go to
Rouen on some office business.
"Your music subscription is out; am I to renew it?"
"No," she replied.
"Why?"
"Because—"
And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of gray thread.
This work irritated Léon. It seemed to roughen the ends of her fingers. A
gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it.
"Then you are giving it up?" he went on.
"What?" she asked hurriedly. "Music? Ah! yes! Have I not my house to
look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, in fact, many duties
that must be considered first?"

She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then she affected anxiety. Two or
three times she even repeated, "He is so good!"
The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this tenderness in his behalf
astonished him unpleasantly; nevertheless he took up his praises, which he
said every one was singing, especially the chemist.
"Ah! he is a good fellow," continued Emma.
"Certainly," replied the clerk.
And he began talking of Madame Homais, whose very untidy appearance
generally made them laugh.
"What does it matter?" interrupted Emma. "A good housewife does not
trouble about her appearance."
Then she relapsed into silence.
It was the same on the following days; her talk, her manners, everything
changed. She took interest in the house-work, went to church regularly, and
looked after her servant with more severity.
She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called, Félicité brought her in,
and Madame Bovary undressed her to show off her limbs. She declared she
adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion, and she
accompanied her caresses with lyrical outbursts which would have
reminded any one but the Yonville people of Sachette in "Nôtre Dame de
Paris."
When Charles came home he found his slippers put to warm near the fire.
His waistcoat now never wanted lining, nor his shirt buttons, and it was
quite a pleasure to see in the cupboard the nightcaps arranged in piles of the
same height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking a turn in the
garden; what he proposed was always done, although she did not
understand the wishes to which she submitted without a murmur; and when
Léon saw him by his fireside after dinner, his two hands on his stomach, his
two feet on the fender, his cheeks red with feeding, his eyes moist with
happiness, the child crawling along the carpet, and this woman with the
slender waist who came behind his armchair to kiss his forehead:

"What madness!" he said to himself. "And how to reach her!"
And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him that he lost all
hope, even the faintest. But by this renunciation he placed her on an
extraordinary pinnacle. To him she stood outside those fleshly attributes
from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she rose ever, and
became farther removed from him after the magnificent manner of an
apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of those pure feelings that do not
interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose loss
would afflict more than their passion rejoices.
Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair,
her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now,
did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear
on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She was so sad and
so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that near her one felt oneself
seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of the
flowers mingling with the cold of the marble. The others even did not
escape from this seduction. The chemist said—
"She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn't be misplaced in a sub-
prefecture."
The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the poor
her charity.
But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. That dress with the
narrow folds hid a distracted heart, of whose torment those chaste lips said
nothing. She was in love with Léon, and sought solitude that she might with
the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his form troubled the
voluptuousness of this meditation. Emma thrilled at the sound of his step;
then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained to
her only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow.
Léon did not know that when he left her in despair, she rose after he had
gone to see him in the street. She concerned herself about his comings and
goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history to find an excuse
for going to his room. The chemist's wife seemed happy to her to sleep
under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centred upon this house,

like the "Lion d'Or" pigeons, who came there to dip their red feet and white
wings in its gutters. But the more Emma recognized her love, the more she
crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might make it less.
She would have liked Léon to guess it, and she imagined chances,
catastrophes that should facilitate this. What restrained her was, no doubt,
idleness and fear, and a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed
him too much, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then pride, the joy
of being able to say to herself, "I am virtuous," and to look at herself in the
glass taking resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she
believed she was making.
Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of
passion, all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of turning
her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and
seeking everywhere occasions for it. She was irritated by an ill-served dish
or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had not, the happiness she
had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow home.
What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish.
His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile
insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then, was
she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all
misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that buckled
her in on all sides?
On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted
from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this
useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed
still more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herself
made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies,
marriage tendernesses to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles
to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself
upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that
came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to
her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be
believed.

Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the temptation
to flee somewhere with Léon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm
full of darkness opened within her soul.
"Besides, he no longer loves me," she thought. "What is to become of me?
What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?"
She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with flowing
tears.
"Why don't you tell master?" the servant asked her when she came in during
these crises.
"It is the nerves," said Emma. "Do not speak to him of it; it would worry
him."
"Ah! yes," Félicité went on, "you are just like La Guérine, Père Guérin's
daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at Dieppe before I
came to you. She was so sad, so sad, that to see her standing upright on the
threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a winding-sheet spread out
before the door. Her illness, it appears, was a kind of fog that she had in her
head, and the doctors could not do anything, nor the priest either. When she
was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the seashore, so that the
customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face,
crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say."
"But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began."

VI.

Spiritual Counsel.

NE evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by
it, had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the
box, she suddenly heard the Angelus ringing.
It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in
bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the
gardens, like women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fêtes.
Through the bars of the arbor and away beyond, the river could be seen in
the fields, meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening
vapors rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a
violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart
their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor
their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept
up its peaceful lamentation.
With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost
themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered
the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the altar,
and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked to be once
more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here and there by the
stiff black hoods of the good sisters bending over their prie-Dieu. At mass
on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid
the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved; she felt herself
weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest,
and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, inclined to no
matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost
in it.
On the Place she met Lestiboudois on his way back, for, in order not to
shorten his day's labor, he preferred interrupting his work, then beginning it
again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own convenience. Besides, the
ringing over a little earlier warned the lads of catechism hour.
Already a few who had arrived were playing marbles on the stones of the
cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their legs, kicking with their clogs
the large nettles growing between the little enclosure and the newest graves.

This was the only green spot. All the rest was but stones, always covered
with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom.
The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure made for
them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the humming of the
bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the great rope that,
hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on the ground. Swallows
flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the air with the edge of their wings,
and swiftly returned to their yellow nests under the tiles of the coping. At
the end of the church a lamp was burning, the wick of a night-light in a
glass hung up. Its light from a distance looked like a white stain trembling
in the oil. A long ray of the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken
the lower sides and the corners.
"Where is the curé?" asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was
amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it.
"He is just coming," he answered.
And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbé Bournisien appeared;
the children, pell-mell, fled into the church.
"These young scamps!" murmured the priest, "always the same!" Then,
picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with his foot, "They
respect nothing!" But as soon as he caught sight of Madame Bovary,
"Excuse me," he said; "I did not recognize you."
He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing the
heavy vestry key between his two fingers.
The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the lasting of
his cassock, shiny at the elbows, ravelled at the hem. Grease and tobacco
stains followed along his broad chest the lines of the buttons, and grew
more numerous the farther they were from his neckcloth, in which the
massive folds of his red chin rested; this was dotted with yellow spots, that
disappeared beneath the coarse hair of his greyish beard. He had just dined,
and was breathing noisily.
"How are you?" he added.

"Not well," replied Emma; "I am ill."
"Well, and so am I," answered the priest. "These first warm days weaken
one most remarkably, don't they? But, after all, we are born to suffer, as St.
Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?"
"He!" she said with a gesture of contempt.
"What!" replied the good fellow, quite astonished, "doesn't he prescribe
something for you?"
"Ah!" said Emma, "it is no earthly remedy I need."
But the curé from time to time looked into the church, where the kneeling
boys were shouldering one another, and tumbling over like packs of cards.
"I should like to know—" she went on.
"You look out, Riboudet," cried the priest in an angry voice; "I'll warm your
ears, you imp!" Then turning to Emma. "He's Boudet the carpenter's son;
his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he could learn
quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. And so sometimes for a joke I call
him Riboudet (like the road one takes to go to Maromme), and I even say
'Mon Riboudet.' Ha! ha! 'Mont Riboudet.' The other day I repeated that jest
to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he condescended to laugh at it. And how
is Monsieur Bovary?"
She seemed not to hear him. And he went on:
"Always very busy, no doubt; for he and I are certainly the busiest people in
the parish. But he is doctor of the body," he added with a thick laugh, "and I
of the soul."
She fixed her pleading eyes upon the priest. "Yes," she said, "you solace all
sorrows."
"Ah! don't talk to me of it, Madame Bovary. This morning I had to go to
Bas-Diauville for a cow that was ill; they thought it was under a spell. All
their cows, I don't know how it is—But pardon me! Longuemarre and
Boudet! Bless me! will you leave off?"

And with a bound he ran into the church.
The boys were just then clustering round the large desk, climbing over the
precentor's footstool, opening the missal; and others on tiptoe were just
about to venture into the confessional. But the priest suddenly distributed a
shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them by the collars of their coats, he
lifted them from the ground, and deposited them on their knees on the
stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant planting them there.
"Yes," said he, when he returned to Emma, unfolding his large cotton
handkerchief, one corner of which he put between his teeth, "farmers are
much to be pitied."
"Others, too," she replied.
"Assuredly. Town-laborers, for example."
"It is not they—"
"Pardon! I've there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I
assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread."
"But those," replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she
spoke, "those, Monsieur le Curé, who have bread and have no—"
"Fire in the winter," said the priest.
"Oh, what does that matter?"
"What! What does it matter? It seems to me that when one has firing and
food—for, after all—"
"My God! my God!" she sighed.
"Do you feel unwell?" he asked, approaching her anxiously. "It is
indigestion, no doubt? You must get home, Madame Bovary; drink a little
tea, that will strengthen you, or else a glass of fresh water with a little moist
sugar."
"Why?" And she looked like one awaking from a dream.

"Well, you see, you were putting your hand to your forehead. I thought you
felt faint." Then, bethinking himself, "But you were asking me something?
What was it? I really don't remember."
"I? Nothing! nothing!" repeated Emma.
And the glance she cast round her slowly fell upon the old man in the
cassock. They looked at one another face to face without speaking.
"Then, Madame Bovary," he said at last, "excuse me, but duty first, you
know; I must look after my good-for-nothings. The first communion will
soon be upon us, and I fear we shall be behind after all. So after Ascension
Day I keep them recta an extra hour every Wednesday. Poor children! One
cannot lead them too soon into the path of the Lord, as, moreover, he has
himself recommended us to do by the mouth of His Divine Son. Good
health to you, madame; my respects to your husband."
And he went into the church making a genuflexion as soon as he reached
the door.
Emma saw him disappear between the double row of forms, walking with
heavy tread, his head a little bent over his shoulder, and with his two hands
half-open behind him.
Then she turned on her heel with one movement, like a statue on a pivot,
and went homewards. But the loud voice of the priest, the clear voices of
the boys still reached her ears, and went on behind her.
"Are you a Christian?"
"Yes, I am a Christian?"
"What is a Christian?"
"He who, being baptized—baptized—baptized—"
She went up the steps of the staircase holding on to the banisters, and when
she was in her room threw herself into an armchair.
The whitish light of the window-panes fell with soft undulations. The
furniture in its place seemed to have become more immobile, and to lose

itself in the shadow as in an ocean of darkness. The fire was out, the clock
went on ticking, and Emma vaguely marvelled at this calm of all things
while within herself was such tumult. But little Berthe was there, between
the window and the work-table, tottering on her knitted shoes, and trying to
come to her mother to catch hold of the ends of her apron-strings.
"Leave me alone," said the latter, putting her from her with her hand.
The little girl soon came up closer against her knees, and leaning on them
with her arms, she looked up with her large blue eyes, while a small thread
of pure saliva dribbled from her lips on to the silk apron.
"Leave me alone," repeated the young woman quite irritably.
Her face frightened the child, who began to scream.
"Will you leave me alone?" she said, pushing her with her elbow.
Berthe fell at the foot of the drawers against the brass handle, cutting
against it her cheek, which began to bleed. Madame Bovary sprang to lift
her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the servant with all her might, and she
was just going to curse herself when Charles appeared. It was the dinner-
hour; he had come home.
"Look, dear!" said Emma, in a calm voice, "the little one fell down while
she was playing, and has hurt herself."
Charles reassured her; the case was not a serious one, and he went for some
sticking plaster.
Madame Bovary did not go downstairs to the dining-room; she wished to
remain alone to look after the child. Then, watching her sleep, the little
anxiety she felt gradually wore off, and she seemed very stupid to herself,
and very good to have been so worried just now at so little. Berthe, in fact,
no longer sobbed. Her breathing now imperceptibly raised the cotton
covering. Big tears lay in the corner of the half-closed eyelids, through
whose lashes one could see two pale sunken pupils; the plaster stuck on her
cheek drew the skin obliquely.
"It is very strange," thought Emma, "how ugly this child is!"

When at eleven o'clock Charles came back from the chemist's shop, whither
he had gone after dinner to return the remainder of the sticking-plaster, he
found his wife standing by the cradle.
"I assure you it's nothing," he said, kissing her on the forehead. "Don't
worry, my poor darling; you will make yourself ill."
He had stayed a long time at the chemist's. Although he had not seemed
much moved, Homais, nevertheless, had exerted himself to buoy him up, to
"keep up his spirits." Then they had talked of the various dangers that
threaten childhood, of the carelessness of servants. Madame Homais knew
something of it, having still upon her chest the marks left by a basin full of
soup that a cook had formerly dropped on her pinafore, and her good
parents took no end of trouble for her. The knives were not sharpened, nor
the floors waxed; there were iron gratings to the windows and strong bars
across the fireplace; the little Homaises, in spite of their spirit, could not stir
without some one watching them; at the slightest cold their father stuffed
them with pectorals; and until they were turned four they all, without pity,
had to wear wadded head-protectors. This, it is true, was a fancy of
Madame Homais's; her husband was inwardly afflicted at it. Fearing the
possible consequences of such compression to the intellectual organs, he
even went so far as to say to her, "Do you want to make Caribs or
Botocudos of them?"
Charles, however, had several times tried to interrupt the conversation. "I
should like to speak to you," he had whispered in the clerk's ear, who went
upstairs in front of him.
"Can he suspect anything?" Léon asked himself. His heart beat, and he
racked his brain with surmises.
At last, Charles, having shut the door, asked him to see himself what would
be the price at Rouen of a fine daguerreotype. It was a sentimental surprise
he intended for his wife, a delicate attention—his portrait in a frock-coat.
But he wanted first to know how much it would be. The inquiries would not
put Monsieur Léon out, since he went to town almost every week.
Why? Monsieur Homais suspected some "young man's affair" at the bottom
of it, an intrigue. But he was mistaken. Léon was after no love-making. He

was sadder than ever, as Madame Lefrançois saw from the amount of food
he left on his plate. To find out more about it she questioned the tax-
collector. Binet answered roughly that he wasn't paid by the police.
All the same, his companion seemed very strange to him, for Léon often
threw himself back in his chair, and stretching out his arms, complained
vaguely of life.
"It's because you don't take enough recreation," said the collector.
"What recreation?"
"If I were you I'd have a lathe."
"But I don't know how to turn," answered the clerk.
"Ah! that's true," said the other, rubbing his chin with an air of mingled
contempt and satisfaction.
Léon was weary of loving without any result; moreover, he was beginning
to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of life,
when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored with
Yonville and the Yonvillers, that the sight of certain persons, of certain
houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good fellow
though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet the
prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced him.
This apprehension soon changed into impatience, and then Paris from afar
sounded its fanfare of masked balls with the laugh of grisettes. As he was to
finish reading there, why not set out at once? What prevented him? And he
began making home preparations; he arranged his occupations beforehand.
He furnished in his head an apartment. He would lead an artist's life there!
He would take lessons on the guitar! He would have a dressing-gown, a
Basque cap, blue velvet slippers! He even already was admiring two
crossed foils over his chimney-piece, with a death's-head on the guitar
above them.
The difficulty was the consent of his mother; nothing, however, seemed
more reasonable. Even his employer advised him to go to some other
chambers where he could advance more rapidly. Taking a middle course,

then, Léon looked for some place as second clerk at Rouen; found none,
and at last wrote his mother a long letter full of details, in which he set forth
the reasons for going to live at Paris immediately. She consented.
He did not hurry. Every day for a month Hivert carried boxes, valises,
parcels for him from Yonville to Rouen and from Rouen to Yonville; and
when Léon had packed up his wardrobe, had his three armchairs restuffed,
bought a stock of cravats, in a word, had made more preparations than for a
voyage round the world, he put it off from week to week, until he received a
second letter from his mother urging him to leave, since he wanted to pass
his examination before the vacation.
When the moment for the farewells had come, Madame Homais wept,
Justin sobbed; Homais, as a man of nerve, concealed his emotion; he
wished to carry his friend's overcoat himself as far as the gate of the notary,
who was taking Léon to Rouen in his carriage. The latter had just time to
bid farewell to Monsieur Bovary.
When he reached the head of the stairs he stopped, he was so out of breath.
On his coming in, Madame Bovary rose hurriedly.
"It is I again!" said Léon.
"I was sure of it!"
She bit her lips, and a rush of blood flowing under her skin made her red
from the roots of her hair to the top of her collar. She remained standing,
leaning with her shoulder against the wainscot.
"The doctor is not here?" he went on.
"He is out." She repeated, "He is out."
Then there was silence. They looked one at the other, and their thoughts,
confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two throbbing
breasts.
"I should like to kiss Berthe," said Léon.
Emma went down a few steps and called Félicité.

He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the brackets, the
fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away everything. But she
returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was swinging a windmill
roof downward at the end of a string. Léon kissed her several times on the
neck.
"Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear little one! good-bye!"
And he gave her back to her mother.
"Take her away," she said.
They remained alone—Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed
against a window-pane; Léon held his cap in his hand, knocking it softly
against his thigh.
"It is going to rain," said Emma.
"I have a cloak," he answered.
"Ah!"
She turned round, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward. The light
fell on it as on a piece of marble to the curve of the eyebrows, without one's
being able to guess what Emma was seeing in the horizon or what she was
thinking within herself.
"Well, good-bye," he sighed.
She raised her head with a quick movement.
"Yes, good-bye—go!"
They advanced toward each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated.
"In the English fashion, then," she said, giving her own hand wholly to him,
and forcing a laugh.
Léon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being
seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their
eyes met again, and he disappeared.

When he reached the market-place, he stopped and hid behind a pillar to
look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds. He
thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the curtain,
sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it, slowly opened its
long oblique folds, that spread out with a single movement, and thus hung
straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Léon set off running.
From afar he saw his employer's gig in the road, and by it a man in a coarse
apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were talking.
They were waiting for him.
"Embrace me," said the chemist with tears in his eyes. "Here is your coat,
my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after yourself."
"Come, Léon, jump in," said the notary.
Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs, uttered
these three sad words:
"A pleasant journey!"
"Good-night," said Monsieur Guillaumin. "Give him his head."
They set out, and Homais went back.
* * * * *
Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and
watched the clouds. They were gathering round the sunset on the side of
Rouen, and swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great
rays of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy,
while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain. But a gust of
wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered against the
green leaves. Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows shook
their wings in the damp thickets, and the pools of water on the gravel as
they flowed away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia.
"Ah! how far off he must be already!" she thought.
Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner.

"Well," said he, "so we've sent off our young friend!"
"So it seems," replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair: "Any news at
home?"
"Nothing much. Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon. You know
women—a nothing upsets them, especially my wife. And we should be
wrong to object to that, since their nervous organization is much more
malleable than ours."
"Poor Léon!" said Charles. "How will he live at Paris? Will he get used to
it?"
Madame Bovary sighed.
"Get along!" said the chemist, smacking his lips. "The outings at
restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne—all that'll be jolly enough, I
assure you."
"I don't think he'll go wrong," objected Bovary.
"Nor do I," said Monsieur Homais quickly; "although he'll have to do like
the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit. And you don't know what a life those
dogs lead in the Latin Quarter with actresses. Besides, students are thought
a great deal of at Paris. Provided they have a few accomplishments, they are
received in the best society; there are even ladies of the Faubourg Saint-
Germain who fall in love with them, which subsequently furnishes them
opportunities for making very good matches."
"But," said the doctor, "I fear for him that down there—"
"You are right," interrupted the chemist; "that is the reverse of the medal.
And one is constantly obliged to keep one's hand in one's pocket there.
Thus, we will suppose you are in a public garden. An individual presents
himself, well dressed, even wearing an order, whom any one would take for
a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates himself; offers you a pinch
of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become more intimate; he takes
you to a café, invites you to his country-house, introduces you, between two
drinks, to all sorts of people; and three fourths of the time it's only to
plunder your watch or lead you into some pernicious step."

"That is true," said Charles; "but I was thinking especially of illnesses—of
typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the provinces."
Emma shuddered.
"Because of the change of regimen," continued the chemist, "and of the
perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the water
at Paris, don't you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the spiced food, end
by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever people may say of them,
a good soup. For my own part, I have always preferred plain living; it is
more healthful. So when I was studying pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a
boardinghouse; I dined with the professors."
And thus he went on, expounding his opinions generally and his personal
likings, until Justin came to fetch him for a mulled egg that was wanted.
"Not a moment's peace!" he cried; "always at it! I can't go out for a minute!
Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling. What
drudgery!" Then, when he was at the door, "By the way, do you know the
news?"
"What news?"
"That it is very likely," Homais went on, raising his eyebrows and assuming
one of his most serious expressions, "that the agricultural meeting of the
Seine-Inférieure will be held this year at Yonville-l'Abbaye. The rumor, at
all events, is going the round. This morning the paper alluded to it. It would
be of the utmost importance for our district. But we'll talk it over later on. I
can see, thank you; Justin has the lantern."

VII.

A Woman's Whims.

HE next day was a dreary one for Emma. Every thing seemed
to her enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly
over the exterior of things, and sorrow was engulphed within
her soul with soft shrieks such as the winter wind makes in
ruined castles. It was that reverie which we give to things that
will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after everything done; that pain,
in fine, that the interruption of every wonted movement, the sudden
cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings on.
As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in her
head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair. Léon
reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though
separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of the
house seemed to hold his shadow. She could not detach her eyes from the
carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had sat. The
river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks.
They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves, over the moss-
covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy afternoons they
had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He read aloud,
bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh wind of the
meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nasturtiums of the
arbor. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life, the only possible hope of
joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it came to her? Why not
have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees, when it was about to
flee from her? And she cursed herself for not having loved Léon. She

thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession of her to run after and rejoin
him, throw herself into his arms and say to him, "It is I; I am yours." But
Emma recoiled beforehand at the difficulties of the enterprise, and her
desires, increased by regret, became only the more acute.
Henceforth the memory of Léon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt
there more brightly than the fire travelers leave on the snow of a Russian
steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred
carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive
it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions,
what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires
that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind
like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tête-à-tête,
—she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for
her melancholy.
The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted
itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by little, was
quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this incendiary light
that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and faded by degrees. In
the supineness of her conscience she even took her repugnance towards her
husband for aspirations towards her lover, the burning of hate for the
warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still raged, and as passion burnt
itself down to the very cinders, and no help came, no sun rose, there was
night on all sides, and she was lost in the terrible cold that pierced her.
Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herself now far more
unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty that it would
not end.
A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself
certain whims. She bought a gothic prie-Dieu, and in a month spent
fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen for a
blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux's finest scarves, and wore
it knotted round her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with closed blinds
and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on a couch in this garb.
She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair à la Chinoise, in flowing
curls, in plaited coils; she parted it on one side and rolled it under like a

man's.
She wished to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and a
supply of white paper. She tried serious reading, history, and philosophy.
Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start, thinking he was being
called to a patient. "I'm coming," he stammered; and it was the noise of a
match Emma had struck to relight the lamp. But her reading fared like her
pieces of embroidery, all of which, only just begun, filled her cupboard; she
took it up, left it, passed on to other books.
She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any
folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she could
drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid enough to dare
her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.
In spite of her vaporish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them),
Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners
of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids,
and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all over, white as
a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at
you vaguely. After discovering three gray hairs on her temples, she talked
much of her old age.
She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed
round her showing his anxiety—
"Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?"
Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table,
sitting in an armchair at his bureau under the phrenological head.
Then he wrote to his mother to beg her to come, and they had many long
consultations together on the subject of Emma.
What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all
medical treatment?
"Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame Bovary, senior.
"She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she
were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have

these vapors, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her head,
and from the idleness in which she lives."
"Yet she is always busy," said Charles.
"Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against
religion, in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. But
all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Any one who has no religion
always ends by turning out badly."
So they decided to stop Emma from reading novels. The enterprise did not
seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through
Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had
discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply to the
police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous trade?
The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During the three
weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged half-a-dozen
words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at table and in
the evening before going to bed.
Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville.
The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on end
and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses from the
church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths, where cotton
checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold, together with harness
for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends fluttered in the wind.
The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground between pyramids of
eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky straw stuck out. Near the
corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks through the bars of flat
cages. The people, crowding in the same place and unwilling to move
thence, sometimes threatened to smash the shop-front of the chemist. On
Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and the people pushed in less to buy
drugs than for consultations, so great was Homais's reputation in the
neighboring villages. His robust aplomb had fascinated the rustics. They
considered him a greater doctor than all the doctors.
Emma was leaning out at the window; she was often there. The window in
the provinces replaces the theatre and the promenade, and she amused

herself with watching the crowd of boors, when she saw a gentleman in a
green velvet coat. He had on yellow gloves, although he wore heavy
gaiters; he was coming towards the doctor's house, followed by a peasant
walking with bent head and quite a thoughtful air.
"Can I see the doctor?" he asked Justin, who was talking on the doorsteps
with Félicité, and, taking him for a servant of the house: "Tell him that
Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette is here."
It was not from territorial vanity that the new arrival added "of La
Huchette" to his name, but to make himself the better known. La Huchette,
in fact, was an estate near Yonville, where he had just bought the château
and two farms that he cultivated himself, without, however, troubling very
much about them. He lived as a bachelor, and was supposed to have at least
fifteen thousand francs a year.
Charles came into the room. Monsieur Boulanger introduced his man, who
wanted to be bled because he felt "a tingling all over."
"That'll purge me," he urged as an objection to all reasoning.
So Bovary ordered a bandage and a basin, and asked Justin to hold it. Then
addressing the countryman, already pale—
"Don't be afraid, my lad."
"No, no, sir," said the other; "get on."
And with an air of bravado he held out his great arm. At the prick of the
lancet the blood spurted out, splashing against the looking-glass.
"Hold the basin nearer," exclaimed Charles.
"Lor!" said the peasant, "one would swear it was a little fountain flowing.
How red my blood is! That's a good sign isn't it?"
"Sometimes," answered the doctor, "one feels nothing at first, and then
syncope sets in, and more especially with people of strong constitution like
this man."

At these words the rustic let go the lancet-case he was twisting between his
fingers. A shudder of his shoulders made the chair-back creak. His hat fell
off.
"I thought as much," said Bovary, pressing his finger on the vein.
The basin was beginning to tremble in Justin's hands; his knees shook, he
turned pale.
"Emma! Emma!" called Charles.
With one bound she came down the staircase.
"Some vinegar," he cried. "O dear! two at once!"
And in his emotion he could hardly put on the compress.
"It is nothing," said Monsieur Boulanger quietly, taking Justin in his arms.
He seated him on the table with his back resting against the wall.
Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat. The strings of his shirt had got
into a knot, and she was for some minutes moving her light fingers about
the young fellow's neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her cambric
handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and then blew
upon them softly. The ploughman revived, but Justin's syncope still lasted,
and his eyeballs disappeared in their pale sclerotic like blue flowers in milk.
"We must hide this from him," said Charles.
Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the movement
she made in bending down, her skirt (it was a summer frock with four
flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread out around
her on the flags of the room; and as Emma, stooping, staggered a little as
she stretched out her arms, the stuff here and there gave with the inflections
of her bust. Then she went to fetch a bottle of water, and she was melting
some pieces of sugar when the chemist arrived. The servant had been to
fetch him in the tumult. Seeing his pupil with his eyes open he drew a long
breath; then going round him he looked at him from head to foot.
"Fool!" he said, "really a little fool! A fool in four letters! A phlebotomy's a
big affair, isn't it! And a fellow who isn't afraid of anything; a kind of

squirrel, just as he is who climbs to vertiginous heights to shake down nuts.
Oh, yes! you just talk to me, boast about yourself! Here's a fine fitness for
practising pharmacy later on; for under serious circumstances you may be
called before the tribunals in order to enlighten the minds of the
magistrates, and you would have to keep your head then, to reason, show
yourself a man, or else pass for an imbecile."
Justin did not answer. The chemist went on—
"Who asked you to come? You are always pestering the doctor and
madame. On Wednesday, moreover, your presence is indispensable to me.
There are now twenty people in the shop. I left everything because of the
interest I take in you. Come, get along! Sharp! Wait for me, and keep an eye
on the jars."
When Justin, who was rearranging his dress, had gone, they talked for a
little while about fainting-fits. Madame Bovary said she had never fainted.
"That is extraordinary for a lady," said Monsieur Boulanger; "but some
people are very susceptible. Thus, in a duel, I have seen a second lose
consciousness at the mere sound of the loading of pistols."
"For my part," said the chemist, "the sight of other people's blood doesn't
affect me at all, but the mere thought of my own flowing would make me
faint, if I reflected upon it too much."
Monsieur Boulanger, however, dismissed his servant, advising him to calm
himself, since his fancy was over.
"It procured me the advantage of making your acquaintance," he added, and
he looked at Emma as he said this. Then he put three francs on the corner of
the table, bowed negligently, and went out.
He was soon on the other side of the river (this was his way back to La
Huchette), and Emma saw him in the meadow, walking under the poplars,
slackening his pace now and then as one who reflects.
"She is very pretty," he said to himself; "she is very pretty, this doctor's
wife. Fine teeth, black eyes, a dainty foot, a figure like a Parisienne's.

Where the devil does she come from? Wherever did this fat fellow pick her
up?"
Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was thirty-four; he was of brutal
temperament and intelligent perspicacity, having, moreover, had much to do
with women, and knowing them well. This one had seemed pretty to him;
so he was thinking about her and her husband.
"I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty nails,
and hasn't shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his patients, she
sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would like to live in
town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman! She is gaping
after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table. With three words of
gallantry she'd adore one, I'm sure of it. She'd be tender, charming! Yes; but
how get rid of her afterwards?"
Then the difficulties of love-making seen in the distance made him by
contrast think of his mistress. She was an actress at Rouen, whom he kept;
and when he had pondered over this image, with which, even in
remembrance, he was satiated—
"Ah! Madame Bovary," he thought, "is much prettier, especially fresher.
Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat. She is so finikin with her
pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for prawns."
The fields were empty, and around him Rodolphe heard only the regular
beating of the grass striking against his boots, with the cry of the
grasshopper hidden at a distance among the oats. He again saw Emma in
her room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her.
"Oh, I will have her," he cried, striking a blow with his stick at a clod in
front of him. And he at once began to consider the political part of the
enterprise. He asked himself—
"Where shall we meet? By what means? We shall always be having the brat
on our hands, and the servant, the neighbors, the husband, all sorts of
worries. Pshaw! one would lose too much time over it."
Then he resumed, "She really has eyes that pierce one's heart like a gimlet.
And that pale complexion; I adore pale women!"

When he reached the top of the Argueil hills he had made up his mind. "It's
only finding the opportunities. Well, I will call in now and then. I'll send
them venison, poultry; I'll have myself bled, if need be. We shall become
friends; I'll invite them to my place. By Jove!" added he, "there's the
agricultural show coming on. She'll be there. I shall see her. We'll begin
boldly, for that's the surest way."

VIII.

A Village Festival.

T LAST it came, the famous agricultural show. On the
morning of the solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors
were chatting over the preparations. The pediment of the
townhall had been hung with garlands of ivy; a tent had been
erected in a meadow for the banquet; and in the middle of
the Place, in front of the church, a kind of bombarde was to announce the
arrival of the prefect and the names of the successful farmers who had
obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy (there was none at Yonville)
had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom Binet was captain. On that
day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and, tightly buttoned in his
tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless that the whole vital portion of
his person seemed to have descended into his legs; which rose in a cadence
of set steps with a single movement. As there was some rivalry between the
tax-collector and the colonel, both, to show off their talents, drilled their
men separately. One saw the red epaulettes and the black breastplates pass
and repass alternately; there was no end to it, and it continually began
again. There had never been such a display of pomp. Several citizens had

washed down their houses the evening before; tricolored flags hung from
half-open windows; all the public-houses were full; and in the lovely
weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the colored neckerchiefs
seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and relieved with their motley
colors the somber monotony of the frock-coats and blue smocks. The
neighboring farmers' wives, when they got off their horses, pulled out a
long pin that fastened round them their skirts, turned up for fear of mud; the
husbands, on the contrary, in order to save their hats, kept their
handkerchiefs round them, holding one corner between their teeth.
The crowd came into the main street from both ends of the village. People
poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the houses; and from time to time one
heard knockers banging against doors closing behind women with their
gloves, who were going out to see the fête. What was most admired were
two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that flanked a platform on
which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there were against the four
columns of the townhall four kinds of poles, each bearing a small standard
of greenish cloth, embellished with inscriptions in gold letters. On one was
written, "To Commerce;" on the other, "To Agriculture;" on the third, "To
Industry;" and on the fourth, "To the Fine Arts."
But the jubilation that brightened all faces seemed to darken that of
Madame Lefrançois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen-steps she
muttered to herself, "What rubbish! what rubbish! With their canvas booth!
Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down there under a tent like a
gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to the place! Then it wasn't
worth while sending to Neufchâtel for the keeper of a cookshop! And for
whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!"
The chemist was passing. He had on a frock-coat, nankeen trousers, beaver
shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a low crown.
"Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry." And as the fat widow asked
where he was going—
"It seems odd to you, doesn't it, to see me, who am always more cooped up
in my laboratory than the man's rat in his cheese, taking a holiday?"
"What cheese?" asked the landlady.

"Oh, nothing! nothing!" Homais continued. "I merely wished to convey to
you, Madame Lefrançois, that I usually live at home like a recluse. To-day,
however, considering the circumstances, it is necessary—"
"Oh, you're going down there!" she said contemptuously.
"Yes, I am going," replied the chemist, astonished. "Am I not a member of
the consulting commission?"
Mère Lefrançois looked at him for a few moments, and ended by saying
with a smile:
"That's another pair of shoes! But what does agriculture matter to you? Do
you understand anything about it?"
"Certainly I understand it, since I am a druggist,—that is to say, a chemist.
And the object of chemistry, Madame Lefrançois, being the knowledge of
the reciprocal and molecular action of all natural bodies, it follows that
agriculture is comprised within its domain. And, in fact, the composition of
the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the analyses of gases, and the
influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure
and simple?"
The landlady did not answer. Homais went on:
"Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled the
earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is necessary rather to know the
composition of the substances in question—the geological strata, the
atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the minerals, the waters, the
density of the different bodies, their capillarity, and what not. And one must
be master of all the principles of hygiene in order to direct, criticise the
construction of buildings, the feeding of animals, the diet of the domestics.
And, moreover, Madame Lefrançois, one must know botany, be able to
distinguish between plants, you understand, which are the wholesome and
those that are deleterious, which are unproductive and which nutritive, if it
is well to pull them up here and re-sow them there, to propagate some,
destroy others; in brief, one must keep pace with science by means of
pamphlets and public papers, be always on the alert to find out
improvements."

The landlady never took her eyes off the "Café Français," and the chemist
went on:
"Would to God our agriculturists were chemists, or that at least they would
pay more attention to the counsels of science. Thus, lately I myself wrote a
considerable tract, a memoir of more than seventy-two pages, entitled,
'Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects, together with some New Reflections
on this Subject,' that I sent to the Agricultural Society of Rouen, and which
even procured me the honor of being received among its members—
Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological. Well, if my work had been given
to the public—" But the druggist stopped, Madame Lefrançois seemed so
preoccupied.
"Just look at them!" she said. "It's past comprehension! Such a cookshop as
that!" And with a shrug of the shoulders that stretched out over her breast
the stitches of her knitted bodice, she pointed with both hands at her rival's
inn, whence songs were heard issuing. "Well, it won't last long," she added;
"it'll be over before a week."
Homais drew back with stupefaction. She came down three steps and
whispered in his ear:
"What! you didn't know it? There'll be an execution in next week. It's
Lheureux who is selling him up; he has killed him with bills."
"What a terrible catastrophe!" cried the chemist, who always found
expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances.
Then the landlady began telling him this story, that she had heard from
Théodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, and although she detested Telher,
she blamed Lheureux. He was "a wheedler, a sneak."
"There!" she said. "Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to
Madame Bovary, who's got on a green bonnet. Why, she's taking Monsieur
Boulanger's arm."
"Madame Bovary!" exclaimed Homais. "I must go at once and pay her my
respects. Perhaps she'd be very glad to have a seat in the enclosure under
the peristyle." And, without heeding Madame Lefrançois, who was calling
him back to tell him more about it, the druggist walked off rapidly with a

smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing exuberantly right and left, and
taking up much room with the large tails of his frock-coat that fluttered
behind him in the wind.
Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from afar, hurried on, but Madame
Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more slowly, and, smiling at her, said
in a rough tone:
"It's only to get away from that fat fellow, you know, the druggist." She
pressed his elbow.
"What's the meaning of that?" he asked himself. And he looked at her out of
the corner of his eyes.
Her profile was so calm that one could guess nothing from it. It stood out in
the light from the oval of her bonnet, with pale ribbons on it like the leaves
of reeds. Her eyes with their long curved lashes looked straight before her,
and though wide open, they seemed slightly puckered by the cheekbones,
because of the blood pulsing gently under the delicate skin. A pink line ran
along the partition between her nostrils. Her head leaned towards her
shoulder, and the pearly tips of her white teeth were seen between her lips.
"Is she making fun of me?" thought Rodolphe.
Emma's gesture, however, had only been meant for a warning; for Monsieur
Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke now and again as if to enter
into the conversation.
"What a superb day! Everybody is out! The wind is east!"
And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe answered him, while at the
slightest movement made by them he drew near, saying, "I beg your
pardon!" and raised his hat.
When they reached the farrier's house, instead of following the road up to
the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him
Madame Bovary. He called out:
"Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently."
"How you got rid of him!" she said, laughing.

"Why," he went on, "allow oneself to be intruded upon by others? And as
to-day I have the happiness of being with you——"
Emma blushed. He did not finish his sentence. Then he talked of the fine
weather and of the pleasure of walking on the grass. A few daisies had
sprung up again.
"Here are some pretty Easter daisies," he said, "and enough of them to
furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the place." He added, "Shall I
pick some? What do you think?"
"Are you in love?" she asked, coughing a little.
"H'm, h'm! who knows?" answered Rodolphe.
The meadow began to fill, and the housewives, hustled one with their great
umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. One had often to get out of the
way of a long file of country folk, servant-maids with blue stockings, flat
shoes, and silver rings, who smelled of milk when one passed close to them.
They walked along holding one another by the hand, and thus they spread
over the whole field from the row of open trees to the banquet tent. But this
was the examination time, and the farmers one after the other entered a kind
of enclosure formed by a long cord supported on sticks.
The beasts were there, their noses toward the cord, and making a confused
line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in the earth
with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the cows, on knees
folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass, slowly chewing the cud,
and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats that buzzed round them.
Ploughmen with bare arms were holding by the halter prancing stallions
that neighed with dilated nostrils, looking toward the mares. These stood
quietly, stretching out their heads and flowing manes, while their foals
rested in their shadow, or now and then came and sucked them. And above
the long undulation of these crowded animals one saw some white mane
rising in the wind like a wave, or some sharp horns sticking out, and the
heads of men running about. Apart, outside the enclosure, a hundred paces
off, was a large black bull, muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, who
moved no more than if he had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding
him by a rope.

Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps,
examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One
who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he
walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de la
Panville. As soon as he recognized Rodolphe he came forward quickly, and
smiling amiably, said:
"What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?"
Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had
disappeared:
"Ma foi!" said he, "I shall not go. Your company is better than his."
And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily,
showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in front
of some fine beast which Madame Bovary did not at all admire. He noticed
this and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dresses; then he
apologized for the negligence of his own. He had that incongruity of
common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the
revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the
tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that
seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric shirt with plaited cuffs was
blown out by the wind in the opening of his waistcoat of gray ticking, and
his broad-striped trousers disclosed at the ankle nankeen boots with patent
leather gaiters. These were so polished that they reflected the grass. He
trampled on horses' dung with them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket
and his straw hat on one side.
"Besides," added he, "when one lives in the country——"
"It's waste of time," said Emma.
"That is true," replied Rodolphe. "To think that not one of these people is
capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!"
Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the
illusions lost there.
"And I too," said Rodolphe, "am drifting into depression."

"You!" she said in astonishment; "I thought you very light-hearted."
"Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to wear
the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the sight
of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were not
better to join those sleeping there!"
"Oh! and your friends?" she said. "You do not think of them."
"My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?" And he
accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips.
But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great pile of
chairs that a man was carrying behind them. He was so overladen with them
that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the ends of his two
outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, who was carrying
the church chairs about among the people. Alive to all that concerned his
interests, he had hit upon this means of turning the show to account; and his
idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew which way to turn. In fact, the
villagers, who were hot, quarreled for these seats, whose straw smelled of
incense, and they lent against the thick backs, stained with the wax of
candles, with a certain veneration.
Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe's arm; he went on as if speaking to
himself:
"Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! if I had some aim in
life, if I had met some love, if I had found some one! Oh, how I would have
spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted everything,
overcome everything!"
"Yet it seems to me," said Emma, "that you are not to be pitied."
"Ah! you think so?" said Rodolphe.
"For, after all," she went on, "you are free——" she hesitated, "rich——"
"Do not mock me," he replied.
And she protested that she was not mocking him, when the report of a
cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling one another pell-mell

toward the village.
It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed not to be coming, and the members
of the jury felt much embarrassed, not knowing if they ought to begin the
meeting or still wait.
At last at the end of the Place a large hired landau appeared, drawn by two
thin horses, whom a coachman in a white hat was whipping lustily. Binet
had only just time to shout, "Present arms!" and the colonel to imitate him.
All ran toward the enclosure; every one pushed forward. A few even forgot
their collars; but the equipage of the prefect seemed to anticipate the crowd,
and the two yoked jades, trapesing in their harness, came up at a little trot in
front of the peristyle of the town hall at the very moment when the National
Guard and firemen deployed, beating drums and marking time.
"Present!" shouted Binet.
"Halt!" shouted the colonel. "Left about, march."
And after presenting arms, during which the clang of the band, letting loose,
rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns were lowered.
Then were seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman in a short coat
with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft of hair at the back
of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most benign appearance. His
eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were half-closed to look at the
crowd, while at the same time he raised his sharp nose, and forced a smile
upon his sunken mouth. He recognized the mayor by his scarf, and
explained to him that the prefect was not able to come. He himself was a
councilor at the prefecture; then he added a few apologies. Monsieur
Tuvache answered them with compliments; the other confessed himself
nervous; and they remained thus, face to face, their foreheads almost
touching, with the members of the jury all round, the municipal council, the
notable personages, the National Guard and the crowd. The councilor
pressing his little cocked hat to his breast repeated his bows, while Tuvache,
bent like a bow, also smiled, stammered, tried to say something, protested
his devotion to the monarchy and the honor that was being done to Yonville.
Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the head of the horses from the
coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot, led them to the door of

the "Lion d'Or," where a number of peasants collected to look at the
carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen one by
one mounted the platform, where they sat down in red utrecht velvet
armchairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache.
All these people looked alike. Their fair flabby faces, somewhat tanned by
the sun, were the color of sweet cider, and their puffy whiskers emerged
from stiff collars, kept up by white cravats with broad bows. All the
waistcoats were of velvet, double-breasted; all the watches had, at the end
of a long ribbon, an oval cornelian seal; every one rested his two hands on
his thighs, carefully stretching the stride of his trousers, whose unsponged
glossy cloth shone more brilliantly than the leather of his heavy boots.
The ladies of the company stood at the back under the vestibule between the
pillars, while the common herd was opposite, standing up or sitting on
chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had brought thither all those that he
had moved from the field, and he even kept running back every minute to
fetch others from the church. He caused such confusion with this piece of
business that one had great difficulty in getting to the small steps of the
platform.
"I think," said Monsieur Lheureux to the chemist, who was passing to his
place, "that they ought to have put up two Venetian masts with something
rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would have been a very pretty
effect."
"To be sure," replied Homais; "but what can you expect? The mayor took
everything on his own shoulders. He hasn't much taste. Poor Tuvache! and
he is even completely destitute of what is called the genius of art."
Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary, had gone up to the first floor
of the townhall, to the "council-room," and as it was empty, he declared that
they could enjoy the sight there more comfortably. He fetched three stools
from the round table under the bust of the monarch, and having carried
them to one of the windows, they sat down by each other.
There was commotion on the platform, long whisperings, much parleying.
At last the councilor got up. They knew now that his name was Lieuvain,

and in the crowd the name was passed from one to the other. After he had
collated a few pages, and bent over them to see better, he began:
"Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on the
object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment, will, I am sure, be shared
by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the higher
administration, to the government, to the monarch, gentlemen, our
sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private
prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at once
so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils of a
stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well as
war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts."
"I ought," said Rodolphe, "to get back a little further."
"Why?" said Emma.
But at this moment the voice of the councilor rose to an extraordinary pitch.
He declaimed:
"This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined our
public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man
himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled lest
he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins, when
the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations."
"Well, some one down there might see me," Rodolphe resumed, "then I
should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad reputation
——"
"Oh, you are slandering yourself," said Emma.
"No! It is dreadful, I assure you."
"But, gentlemen," continued the councilor, "if, banishing from my memory
the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back to the actual
situation of our dear country, what do I see there? Everywhere commerce
and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means of communication, like
so many new arteries in the body of the state, establish within it new
relations. Our great industrial centers have recovered all their activity;

religion, more consolidated, smiles in all hearts; our ports are full,
confidence is born again, and France breathes once more!"
"Besides," added Rodolphe, "perhaps from the world's point of view they
are right."
"How so?" she asked.
"What!" said he. "Do you not know that there are souls constantly
tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions and
the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all sorts of
fantasies, of follies."
Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveler who has voyaged over
strange lands, and went on:
"We have not even this distraction, we poor women!"
"A sad distraction, for happiness isn't found in it."
"But is it ever found?" she asked.
"Yes; one day it comes," he answered.
"And this is what you have understood," said the councilor. "You farmers,
agricultural laborers! you pacific pioneers of a work that belongs wholly to
civilization! you men of progress and morality, you have understood, I say,
that political storms are even more redoubtable than atmospheric
disturbances!"
"It comes one day," repeated Rodolphe, "one day suddenly, and when one is
despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice cried, 'It is
here!' You feel the need of confiding the whole of your life, of giving
everything, sacrificing everything to this being. There is no need for
explanations; they understand one another. They have seen each other in
dreams!" He looked at her. "In fine, here it is, this treasure so sought after,
here before you. It glitters, it flashes; yet one still doubts, one does not
believe it; one remains dazzled, as if one went out from darkness into
light!"

And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word. He passed his
hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness. Then he let it fall on
Emma's. She took hers away.
"And who would be surprised at it, gentlemen? He only who was so blind,
so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so plunged in the prejudices of another
age as still to misunderstand the spirit of agricultural populations. Where,
indeed, is to be found more patriotism than in the country, greater devotion
to the public welfare, more intelligence, in a word? And, gentlemen, I do
not mean that superficial intelligence, vain ornament of idle minds, but
rather that profound and balanced intelligence that applies itself above all
else to useful objects, thus contributing to the good of all, to the common
amelioration and to the support of the state, born of respect for law and the
practice of duty——"
"Ah! again!" said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are
a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-
warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah!
by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not
accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon
us."
"Yet—yet——" objected Madame Bovary.
"No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one beautiful
thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of poetry, music,
the arts, of everything, in a word?"
"But one must," said Emma, "to some extent bow to the opinion of the
world and accept its moral code."
"Ah! but there are two," he replied. "The small, the conventional, that of
men, that which constantly changes, that brays out so loudly, that makes
such a commotion here below, of the earth earthy, like the mass of
imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the eternal, that is about us and
above, like the landscape that surrounds us, and the blue heavens that give
us light."
Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief.
He continued:

"And what should I do here, gentlemen, pointing out to you the uses of
agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who provides our means of
subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The agriculturist, gentlemen, who,
sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the country, brings forth
the corn, which, being ground, is made into a powder by means of
ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the name of flour, and from
there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered at the baker's, who makes
it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it not the agriculturist who
fattens, for our clothes, his abundant flocks in the pastures? For how should
we clothe ourselves, how nourish ourselves, without the agriculturist? And,
gentlemen, is it even necessary to go so far for examples? Who has not
frequently reflected on all the momentous things that we get out of that
modest animal, the ornament of poultry-yards, that provides us at once with
a soft pillow for our bed, with succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I
should never end if I were to enumerate one after the other all the different
products which the earth, well cultivated, like a generous mother, lavishes
upon her children. Here it is the vine, elsewhere the apple-tree for cider,
there colza, farther on cheeses and flax. Gentlemen, let us not forget flax,
which has made such great strides of late years, and to which I will more
particularly call your attention."
He had no need to call it, for all the mouths of the multitude were wide
open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache by his side listened to him with
starting eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time to time softly closed his
eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son Napoléon between his
knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose a syllable. The chins
of the other members of the jury went slowly up and down in their
waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the platform rested
on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with out-turned elbows, the
point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could hear, but certainly he could
see nothing, because of the visor of his helmet, that fell down on his nose.
His lieutenant, the youngest son of Monsieur Tuvache, had a bigger one, for
his was enormous, and shook on his head, and from it an end of his cotton
scarf peeped out. He smiled beneath it with a perfectly infantine sweetness,
and his pale little face, whence drops were running, wore an expression of
enjoyment and sleepiness.

The square as far as the houses was crowded with people. One saw folk
leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others standing at doors, and
Justin, in front of the chemist's shop, seemed quite transfixed by the sight of
what he was looking at. In spite of the silence Monsieur Lieuvain's voice
was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments of phrases, and interrupted
here and there by the creaking of chairs in the crowd; then you suddenly
heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the bleating of the lambs, who
answered one another at street corners. In fact, the cowherds and shepherds
had driven their beasts thus far, and these lowed from time to time, while
with their tongues they tore down some scrap of foliage that hung above
their mouths.
Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice,
speaking rapidly:
"Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single
sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest sympathies
are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do meet, all is so
organized that they cannot blend together. Yet they will make the attempt;
they will flutter their wings; they will call upon each other. Oh! no matter.
Sooner or later, in six months, ten years, they will come together, will love;
for fate has decreed it, and they are born one for the other."
His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face toward
Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes small
golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelled the perfume of
the pomade that made his hair glossy. Then a faintness came over her; she
recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his
beard exhaled like this hair an odor of vanilla and citron, and mechanically
she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But in making this
movement, as she leaned back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on
the line of the horizon, the old diligence the "Hirondelle," that was slowly
descending the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in
this yellow carriage that Léon had so often come back to her, and by this
route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him
opposite at his window; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it seemed
to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of the lusters
on the arm of the Viscount, and that Léon was not far away, that he was

coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent of Rodolphe's
head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced through her old
desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust of wind, eddied to and
fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which suffused her soul. She opened
wide her nostrils several times to drink in the freshness of the ivy round the
capitals. She took off her gloves, she wiped her hands, then fanned her face
with her handkerchief, while athwart the throbbing of her temples she heard
the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the councilor intoning his
phrases. He said:
"Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of routine, nor to the
over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism. Apply yourselves, above all, to
the amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the development of the
equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races. Let these shows be to you pacific
arenas, where the victor in leaving it will hold forth a hand to the
vanquished, and will fraternize with him in the hope of better success. And
you, aged servants, humble domestics, whose hard labor no Government up
to this day has taken into consideration, come hither to receive the reward
of your silent virtues, and be assured that the state henceforward has its eye
upon you; that it encourages you, protects you; that it will accede to your
just demands, and alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful
sacrifices."
Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning
another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councilor, but it
recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by more special
knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise of the
Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture more. He
showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had always
contributed to civilization. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was talking
dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of society, the
orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns in the heart of
woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had put on cloth, tilled the
soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and in this discovery was there not
more of injury than of gain? Monsieur Derozerays set himself this problem.
From magnetism little by little Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while
the president was citing Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian planting his
cabbages, and the emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of

seed, the young man was explaining to the young woman that these
irresistible attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.
"Thus we," he said, "why did we come to know one another? What chance
willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but
to unite, our special bents of mind had driven us toward each other."
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
"For good farming generally!" cried the president.
"Just now, for example, when I went to your house."
"To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix."
"Did I know I should accompany you?"
"Seventy francs."
"A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you—I remained."
"Manures!"
"And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!"
"To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!"
"For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a
charm."
"To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin."
"And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you."
"For a merino ram!"
"But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow."
"To Monsieur Belot of Nôtre-Dame."
"Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I not?"
"Porcine race; prizes—equal, to Messrs. Lehérissé and Cullembourg, sixty
francs!"

Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering like a
captive dove that tries to fly away; but, whether she was trying to take it
away or whether she was answering his pressure, she made a movement
with her fingers. He exclaimed—
"Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand
that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!"
A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the table, and
in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women were uplifted
by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering.
"Use of oil-cakes," continued the president. He was hurrying on: "Flemish
manure—flax-growing—drainage—long leases—domestic service."
Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme
desire made their dry lips tremble, and softly, without an effort, their fingers
intertwined.
"Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerrière, for fifty-four
years of service at the same farm, a silver medal—value, twenty-five
francs!"
"Where is Catherine Leroux?" repeated the councilor.
She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering:
"Go up!"
"Don't be afraid!"
"Oh, how stupid she is!"
"Well, is she there?" cried Tuvache.
"Yes; here she is."
"Then let her come up!"
Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid
bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she
wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her

pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered
russet apple, and from the sleeves of her red jacket hung down two large
hands with knotty joints. The dust of barns, the potash of washings, and the
grease of wools had so incrusted, roughened, hardened these, that they
seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and by dint of
long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble witness for
themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of monastic rigidity
dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale
look. In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and
their calm. It was the first time that she found herself in the midst of so
large a company, and inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the
gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the councilor, she stood
motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run away, nor why the
crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at her. Thus stood before
these radiant bourgeois this half-century of servitude.
"Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux!" said the
councilor, who had taken the list of prize-winners from the president; and,
looking at the piece of paper and the old woman by turns, he repeated in a
fatherly tone:
"Approach! approach!"
"Are you deaf?" said Tuvache, fidgeting in his armchair; and he began
shouting in her ear, "Fifty-four years of service. A silver medal! Twenty-five
francs! For you!"
Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude
spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her
muttering:
"I'll give it to our curé up home, to say some masses for me!"
"What fanaticism!" exclaimed the chemist, leaning across to the notary.
The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed, and now that the speeches had
been read, each one fell back into his place again, and everything into the
old grooves; the masters bullied the servants, and these struck the animals,
indolent victors, going back to the stalls, a green crown on their horns.

The National Guards, however, had gone up to the first floor of the townhall
with buns spitted on their bayonets, and the drummer of the battalion
carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe's arm; he saw
her home; they separated at her door; then he walked about alone in the
meadow while he waited for the time of the banquet.
The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the guests were so crowded that they
could hardly move their elbows; and the narrow planks used for forms
almost broke down under their weight. They ate hugely. Each one stuffed
himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every brow, and a whitish
steam, like the vapor of a stream on an autumn morning, floated above the
table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against the calico of
the tent, was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard nothing. Behind
him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty plates; his neighbors
were talking; he did not answer them; they filled his glass, and there was
silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing noise. He was dreaming of
what she had said, of the line of her lips; her face, as in a magic mirror,
shone on the plates of the shakos, the folds of her gown fell along the walls,
and days of love unrolled to all infinity before him in the vistas of the
future.
He saw her again in the evening during the fireworks, but she was with her
husband. Madame Homais, and the druggist, who was worrying about the
danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left the company to go and
give some advice to Binet.
The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache had, through an excess of
caution, been shut up in his cellar, and so the damp powder would not light,
and the principal set piece, that was to represent a dragon biting his tail,
failed completely. Now and then a meager Roman-candle went off; then the
gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the cry of the women,
whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma silently nestled
gently against Charles's shoulder; then, raising her chin, she watched the
luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe gazed at her in
the light of the burning lanterns.
They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few drops of rain began to
fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head.

At this moment the councilor's carriage came out from the inn. His
coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed off, and one could see from the
distance, above the hood, between the two lanterns, the mass of his body,
that swayed from right to left with the giving of the traces.
"Truly," said the chemist, "one ought to proceed most rigorously against
drunkenness! I should like to see written up weekly at the door of the
townhall on a board ad hoc the names of all those who during the week got
intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard to statistics, one would thus
have, as it were, public records that one could refer to in case of need. But
excuse me!"
And he once more ran off to the captain. The latter was going back to see
his lathe again.
"Perhaps you would not do ill," Homais said to him, "to send one of your
men, or to go yourself——"
"Leave me alone!" answered the tax-collector. "It's all right!"
"Do not be uneasy," said the chemist, when he returned to his friends.
"Monsieur Binet has assured me that all precautions have been taken. No
sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let us go to rest."
"Ma foi! I want it," said Madame Homais, yawning at large. "But never
mind; we've had a beautiful day for our fête."
Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with a tender look, "Oh, yes! very
beautiful."
And having bowed to one another, they separated.
Two days later, in the "Fanal de Rouen," there was a long article on the
show. Homais had composed it with verve the very next morning.
"Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this
crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical sun
pouring its heat upon our heads?"
Then he spoke of the condition of the peasants. Certainly the Government
was doing much, but not enough. "Courage!" he cried to it; "a thousand

reforms are indispensable; let us accomplish them!" Then touching on the
entry of the councilor, he did not forget "the martial air of our militia," nor
"our most merry village maidens," nor the "bald-headed old men like
patriarchs who were there, and of whom some, the remnants of our
immortal phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at the manly sound of the
drums." He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury, and he
even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais, chemist,
had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society. When he came to the
distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of the prize-winners in
dithyrambic strophes. "The father embraced the son, the brother the brother,
the husband his consort. More than one showed his humble medal with
pride; and no doubt when he got home to his good housewife, he hung it up
weeping on the modest walls of his cot.
"About six o'clock a banquet prepared in the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard
brought together the principal personages of the fête. The greatest cordiality
reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed. Monsieur Lieuvain, the King;
Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays, Agriculture;
Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters; Monsieur
Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant fireworks on a sudden
illumined the air. One would have called it a veritable kaleidoscope, a real
operatic scene; and for a moment our little locality might have thought itself
transported into the midst of a dream of the 'Thousand and One Nights.'
"Let us state that no untoward event disturbed this family meeting." And he
added: "Only the absence of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the priests
understand progress in another fashion. Just as you please, messieurs the
followers of Loyola!"

IX.

A Woodland Idyll.

IX weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last one

evening he appeared.
The day after the show he had said to himself:
"We mustn't go back too soon; that would be a mistake."
And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. After the hunting he had
thought he was too late, and then he reasoned thus:
"If from the first day she loved me, she must, from impatience to see me
again, love me more. Let's go on with it!"
And he knew that his calculation had been right when, on entering the
room, he saw Emma turn pale. She was alone. The day was drawing in. The
small muslin curtain along the windows deepened the twilight, and the
gilding of the barometer, on which the rays of the sun fell, shone in the
looking-glass between the meshes of the coral.
Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly answered his first
conventional phrases.
"I," he said, "have been busy. I have been ill."
"Seriously?" she cried.
"Well," said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a footstool, "no; it was
because I did not want to come back."
"Why?"
"Can you not guess?"
He looked at her again, but so hard that she lowered her head, blushing. He
went on:
"Emma!"
"Sir," she said, drawing back a little.
"Ah! you see," replied he in a melancholy voice, "that I was right not to
come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and that
escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! why all the world calls

you thus! Besides it is not your name; it is the name of another!" he
repeated, "of another!" And he hid his face in his hands. "Yes, I think of you
constantly. The memory of you drives me to despair. Ah! forgive me! I will
leave you! Farewell! I will go far away, so far that you will never hear of
me again; and yet—to-day—I know not what force impelled me toward
you. For one does not struggle against Heaven; one cannot resist the smile
of angels; one is carried away by that which is beautiful, charming,
adorable."
It was the first time that Emma had heard such words spoken to herself, and
her pride, like one who reposes bathed in warmth, expanded softly and fully
at this glowing language.
"But if I did not come," he continued, "if I could not see you, at least I have
gazed long on all that surrounds you. At night—every night—I arose; I
came hither; I watched your house, its roof glimmering in the moonlight,
the trees in the garden before your window, and the little lamp, a gleam
shining through the window-panes in the darkness. Ah! you never knew that
there, so near you, so far from you, was a poor wretch!"
She turned toward him with a sob.
"Oh, you are good!" she said.
"No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt that! Tell me—one word—
only one word!"
And Rodolphe imperceptibly glided from the footstool to the floor; but a
sound of wooden shoes was heard in the kitchen, and, he noticed the door
of the room was not closed.
"How kind it would be of you," he went on, rising, "if you would humor a
whim of mine." It was to go over her house; he wanted to know it; and
Madame Bovary seeing no objection to this, they both rose, when Charles
came in.
"Good morning, doctor," Rodolphe said to him.
The doctor, flattered at this unexpected title, launched out into obsequious
phrases. Of this the other took advantage to pull himself together a little.

"Madame was speaking to me," he then said, "about her health."
Charles interrupted him; he had indeed a thousand anxieties; his wife's
palpitations of the heart were beginning again. Then Rodolphe asked if
riding would not be good.
"Certainly! excellent! just the thing! There's an idea! You ought to follow it
up."
And as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered one.
She refused his offer; he did not insist. Then to explain his visit he said that
his ploughman, the man of the blood-letting, still suffered from giddiness.
"I'll call round," said Bovary.
"No, no! I'll send him to you; we'll come; that will be more convenient for
you."
"Ah! very good! I thank you."
And as soon as they were alone, "Why don't you accept Monsieur
Boulanger's kind offer?"
She assumed a sulky air, invented a thousand excuses, and finally declared
that perhaps it would look odd.
"Well, what the deuce do I care for that?" said Charles, making a pirouette.
"Health before everything! You are wrong."
"And how do you think I can ride when I haven't got a habit?"
"You must order one," he answered.
The riding-habit decided her.
When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his
wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature.
The next day at noon Rodolphe appeared at Charles's door with two saddle-
horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin side-saddle.

Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt she
had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with his
appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and white
corduroy breeches. She was ready; she was waiting for him.
Justin escaped from the chemist's to see her start, and the chemist also came
out. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger a little good advice.
"An accident happens so easily. Be careful! Your horses perhaps are
mettlesome."
She heard a noise above her; it was Félicité drumming on the window-
panes to amuse little Berthe. The child blew her a kiss; her mother answered
with a wave of her whip.
"A pleasant ride!" cried Monsieur Homais. "Prudence! above all,
prudence!" And he flourished his newspaper as he saw them disappear.
As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse set off at a gallop. Rodolphe
galloped by her side. Now and then they exchanged a word. Her figure
slightly bent, her hand well up, and her right arm stretched out, she gave
herself up to the cadence of the movement that rocked her in her saddle. At
the bottom of the hill Rodolphe gave his horse its head; they started
together at a bound, then at the top suddenly the horses stopped, and her
large blue veil fell about her.
It was early in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds hovered
on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent asunder, floated
up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of
sunshine, gleamed from afar the roofs of Yonville, with the gardens at the
water's edge, the yards, the walls, and the church steeple. Emma half closed
her eyes to pick out her house, and never had this poor village where she
lived appeared so small. From the height on which they were, the whole
valley seemed an immense pale lake sending off its vapor into the air.
Clumps of trees here and there stood out like black rocks, and the tall lines
of the poplars that rose above the mist were like a beach stirred by the wind.
Beside them, on the turf between the pines, a brown light shimmered in the
warm atmosphere. The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco, deadened

the noise of their steps, and with the edge of their shoes the horses as they
walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front of them.
Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt of the wood. She turned
away from time to time to avoid his look, and then she saw only the pine
trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her a little giddy. The
horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked.
Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out.
"God protects us!" said Rodolphe.
"Do you think so?" she said.
"Forward! forward!" he continued.
He "tchk'd" with his tongue. The two beasts set off at a trot. Long ferns by
the roadside caught in Emma's stirrup. Rodolphe leant forward and removed
them as they rode along. At other times to turn aside the branches, he
passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg. The
sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred. There were spaces full of
heather in flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches
of the trees that were gray, fawn, or golden colored, according to the nature
of their leaves. Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else
the hoarse, soft cry of the ravens flying off amid the oaks.
They dismounted. Rodolphe fastened up the horses. She walked on in front
on the moss between the paths. But her long habit got in her way, although
she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe, walking behind her, saw between
the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white stocking, that
seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness.
She stopped. "I am tired," she said.
"Come, try again," he went on. "Courage!"
Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her
veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat over her hips, her face appeared
in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves.
"But where are we going?"

He did not answer. She was breathing irregularly. Rodolphe looked round
him biting his mustache. They came to a larger space where the coppice had
been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe began
speaking to her of his love. He did not begin by frightening her with
compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.
Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the bits of wood on the
ground with the tip of her foot.
But at the words, "Are not our destinies now one?——"
"Oh, no!" she replied. "You know that well. It is impossible!"
She rose to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having gazed
at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look, she said
hurriedly:
"Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let us go back."
He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated:
"Where are the horses? Where are the horses?"
Then smiling a strange smile, his pupils fixed, his teeth set, he advanced
with outstretched arms. She recoiled trembling. She stammered:
"Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let us go!"
"If it must be," he went on, his face changing; and he again became
respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm. They went back. He
said:
"What was the matter with you? Why? I do not understand. You were
mistaken, no doubt. In my soul you are as a Madonna on a pedestal, in a
place lofty, secure, immaculate. But I want you for my life. I must have
your eyes, your voice, your thought! Be my friend, my sister, my angel!"
And he put out his arm around her waist. She feebly tried to disengage
herself. He supported her thus as they walked along.
But they heard the two horses browsing on the leaves.

"Oh! one moment!" said Rodolphe. "Do not let us go! Stay!"
He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness
on the water. Faded waterlilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the
noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide themselves.
"I am wrong! I am wrong!" she said. "I am mad to listen to you!"
"Why? Emma! Emma!"
"Oh, Rodolphe!" said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder.
The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw back
her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with a long
shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him.
The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the
branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or on
the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds flying about
had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something sweet
seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beating had
begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a stream of milk.
Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she heard a vague
prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling
like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a
cigar between his lips, was mending with his penknife one of the two
broken bridles.
They returned to Yonville by the same road. On the mud they saw again the
traces of their horses side by side, the same thickets, the same stones in the
grass; nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her something had
happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places.
Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her hand to kiss it.
She was charming on horseback—upright, with her slender waist, her knee
bent on the mane of her horse, her face something flushed by the fresh air in
the red of the evening.
On entering Yonville she made her horse prance in the road. People looked
at her from the windows.

At dinner her husband thought she looked well, but she pretended not to
hear him when he inquired about her ride, and she remained sitting there
with her elbow at the side of her plate between the two lighted candles.
"'Emma!" he said.
"What?"
"Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre's. He has an old cob,
still very fine, only a little broken-kneed, that could be bought, I am very
sure, for a hundred crowns." He added, "And thinking it might please you, I
have bespoken it—bought it. Have I done right? Do tell me!"
She nodded her head in assent; then a quarter of an hour later—
"Are you going out to-night?" she asked.
"Yes. Why?"
"Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!"
And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up in
her room.
At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe,
and she again felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves rustled and the
reeds whistled.
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had
her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle
about her being transfigured her. She repeated, "I have a lover! a lover!"
delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she
was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had
despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion,
ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of
sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared
remote, far below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights.
Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric
legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the
voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual

part of these imaginings, and realized the love-dream of her youth as she
saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had so envied.
Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not suffered enough?
But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up burst forth in full
joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse, without anxiety, without
trouble.
The day following passed with a new sweetness. They made vows to one
another. She told him of her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with kisses;
and she, looking at him through half-closed eyes, asked him to call her
again by her name—to say that he loved her. They were in the forest, as
yesterday, in the shed of some wooden-shoe maker. The walls were of
straw, and the roof so low they had to stoop. They were seated side by side
on a bed of dry leaves.
From that day forth they wrote to one another regularly every evening.
Emma placed her letter at the end of the garden, by the river, in a fissure of
the wall. Rodolphe came to fetch it, and put another there, that she always
found fault with as too short.
One morning, when Charles had gone out before daybreak, she was seized
with the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. She would go quickly to La
Huchette, stay there an hour, and be back again at Yonville while every one
was still asleep. This idea made her pant with desire, and she soon found
herself in the middle of the field, walking with rapid steps, without looking
behind her.
Day was just breaking. Emma from afar recognized her lover's house. Its
two dove-tailed weathercocks stood out black against the pale dawn.
Beyond the farmyard there was a detached building that she thought must
be the château. She entered it as if the doors at her approach had opened
wide of their own accord. A large straight staircase led up to the corridor,
Emma raised the latch of a door, and suddenly at the end of the room she
saw a man sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She uttered a cry.
"You here? You here?" he repeated, "How did you manage to come? Ah!
your dress is damp."
"I love you," she answered, passing her arms round his neck.

This first piece of daring successful, now every time Charles went out early
Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe down the steps that led to the
waterside.
But when the plank for the cows was taken up, she had to go by the walls
alongside of the river; the bank was slippery; in order not to fall she caught
hold of the tufts of faded wallflowers. Then she went across ploughed
fields, in which she sank, stumbling, and clogging her thin shoes. Her scarf,
knotted round her head, fluttered to the wind in the meadows. She was
afraid of the oxen; she began to run; she arrived out of breath, with rosy
cheeks, and breathing out from her whole person a fresh perfume of sap, of
verdure, of the open air. At this hour Rodolphe still slept. It was like a
spring morning coming into his room.
The yellow curtains along the windows let a heavy, whitish light enter
softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her eyes, while the drops of
dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around her
face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him and pressed her to his breast.
Then she examined the apartment, opened the drawers of the tables,
combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself in his shaving-glass.
Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that lay on the table by
the bed, amongst lemons and pieces of sugar near a bottle of water.
It took them a good quarter of an hour to say good-bye. Then Emma wept.
She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than
herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day, seeing her come
unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out.
"What is the matter with you?" she said. "Are you ill? Tell me!"
At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming
imprudent—that she was compromising herself.

X.

Lovers' Vows.

RADUALLY Rodolphe's fears took possession of her. At first,
love had intoxicated her, and she had thought of nothing
beyond. But now that he was indispensable to her life, she
feared to lose anything of this, or even that it should be
disturbed. When she came back from his house, she looked all
about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the horizon, and
every village window from which she could be seen. She listened for steps,
cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped short, white, and trembling
more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead.
One morning as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the
long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be aimed at her. It stuck out
sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the edge of
a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked on, and a man
stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had gaiters buckled up to
the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes, trembling lips, and a red nose.
It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for wild ducks.
"You ought to have called out long ago!" he exclaimed. "When one sees a
gun, one should always give warning."
The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for a
prefectorial order having prohibited duck-hunting except in boats, Monsieur
Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them, and so he every
moment expected to see the rural guard turn up. But this anxiety whetted
his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he congratulated himself on his luck
and on his cleverness.
At sight of Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once
entered upon a conversation.
"It isn't warm; it's nipping."

Emma answered nothing. He went on—
"And you're out so early?"
"Yes," she said stammering; "I am just coming from the nurse where my
child is."
"Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am here, just as you see me, since
break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless one had the bird at
the mouth of the gun——"
"Good evening, Monsieur Binet," she interrupted him, turning on her heel.
"Your servant, madame," he replied drily; and he went back into his tub.
Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he
would form unfavorable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the
worst possible excuse, every one at Yonville knowing that the little Bovary
had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one was living in
this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet, then, would guess
whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he would talk, that was
certain. She remained until evening racking her brain with every
conceivable lying project, and had constantly before her eyes that imbecile
with the game-bag.
Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of distraction, to
take her to the chemist's, and the first person she caught sight of in the shop
was the tax-collector again. He was standing in front of the counter, lighted
by the gleams of the red bottle, and was saying:
"Please give me half an ounce of vitriol."
"Justin," cried the druggist, "bring us the sulphuric acid." Then to Emma,
who was going up to Madame Homais' room, "No, stay here; it isn't worth
while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the stove in the
meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor" (for the chemist much enjoyed
pronouncing the word "doctor," as if addressing another by it reflected on
himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). "Now, take care not to
upset the mortars! You'd better fetch some chairs from the little room; you

know very well that the armchairs are not to be taken out of the drawing-
room."
And to put his armchair back in its place he was darting away from the
counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.
"Sugar acid!" said the chemist contemptuously, "don't know it; I'm ignorant
of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid, isn't it?"
Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some copper-
water with which to remove rust from his hunting things.
Emma shuddered. The chemist began, saying:
"Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp."
"Nevertheless," replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, "there are people
who like it."
She was stifling.
"And give me——"
"Will he never go?" thought she.
"Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and
three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the varnished
leather of my togs."
The chemist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared,
Irma in her arms, Napoléon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat
down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a
footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near her
papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on labels,
making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time to time were
heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low words from the
chemist giving directions to his pupil.
"And how's the little woman?" suddenly asked Madame Homais.
"Silence!" exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in
his waste-book.

"Why didn't you bring her?" she went on in a low voice.
"Hush! hush!" said Emma, pointing with her finger to the chemist.
But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard
nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh.
"How hard you are breathing!" said Madame Homais.
"Well, you see, it's rather warm," she replied.
The next day the lovers discussed how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma
wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to find
some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.
All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night he
came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the gate,
which Charles thought lost.
To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She jumped
up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a mania for
chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild with
impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled him out at
the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up a book, and go
on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But Charles, who was in
bed, called to her to come too.
"Come, now, Emma," he said, "it is time."
"Yes, I am coming," she answered.
Then, as the candles dazzled him, he turned to the wall and fell asleep. She
escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed.
Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm
around her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden.
It was in the arbor, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Léon had
looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought of
him now.

The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they
heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the
dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness and
sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like
immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the
nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them
deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the
silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline,
and reverberating in multiplied vibrations.
When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room between
the car-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen candles that she
had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down there as if at home.
The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the whole apartment, in fine,
excited his merriment, and he could not refrain from making jokes about
Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma. She would have liked to see him
more serious, and even on occasions more dramatic; as, for example, when
she thought she heard a noise of approaching steps in the alley.
"Some one is coming!" she said.
He blew out the light.
"Have you your pistols?"
"Why?"
"Why, to defend yourself," replied Emma.
"From your husband? Oh, poor devil!" And Rodolphe finished his sentence
with a gesture that said, "I could crush him with a flip of my finger."
She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort of
indecency and a naïve coarseness that scandalized her.
Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had
spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for he had
no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called devoured by
jealousy; and on this subject Emma had treated him to a lecture, which he
did not think in the best taste.

Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on exchanging
miniatures; they had cut handfuls of hair, and now she was asking for a ring
—a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She often spoke to him
of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then she talked to him of her
mother—hers! and of his mother—his! Rodolphe had lost his twenty years
ago. Emma none the less consoled him with caressing words as one would
soothe a forsaken child, and she sometimes even said to him, gazing at the
moon:
"I am sure that above there together they approve of our love."
But she was so pretty! He had possessed so few women of such
ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for
him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride and
his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense
disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it was
lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up
appearances, and insensibly his ways changed.
He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry, nor
passionate caresses that made her mad; so that their great love, which
engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of a stream
absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it. She would not
believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe concealed his
indifference less and less.
She did not know whether she regretted yielding to him, or whether she did
not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation of feeling
herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their voluptuous
pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual seduction. He
subjugated her; she almost feared him.
Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever, Rodolphe having
succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own fancy; and at the end of
six months, when the spring-time came, they were to one another like a
married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame.
It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance of
the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter. Emma cut the

string that tied it to the basket, and read the following lines:—

"My Dear Children,—I hope this will find you in good health,
and that it will be as good as the others, for it seems to me a
little more tender, if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But
next time, for a change, I'll give you a turkey-cock, unless you
have a preference for some dabs; and send me back the hamper,
if you please, with the two old ones. I have had an accident with
my cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one windy night among
the trees. The harvest has not been over-good either. Finally, I
don't know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult now to
leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma."

Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped his pen
to dream a little while.

"For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught the other
day at the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire a shepherd,
having turned away mine because he was too dainty. How we
are to be pitied with such a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also
rude. I heard from a pedlar, who, traveling through your part of
the country this winter, had a tooth drawn, that Bovary was as
usual working hard. That doesn't surprise me; and he showed me
his tooth; we had some coffee together. I asked him if he had
seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two horses in the
stables, from which I conclude that business is looking up. So
much the better, my dear children, and may God send you every
imaginable happiness! It grieves me not yet to have seen my
dear little grand-daughter, Berthe Bovary. I have planted an
Orleans plum-tree for her in the garden under your room, and I
won't have it touched unless it is to have jam made for her by-
and-bye, that I will keep in the cupboard for when she comes.

"Good-bye my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my
son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best
compliments, your loving father,
"Théodore Rouault."

She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The mistakes in
spelling interwove with one another, but Emma followed the kindly thought
that chattered through it all like a hen half hidden in a hedge of thorns. The
writing had been dried with ashes from the hearth, for a little grey powder
slipped from the letter on to her dress, and she almost thought she saw her
father bending over the hearth to take up the tongs. How long since she had
been with him, sitting on the footstool in the chimney-corner, where she
used to burn the end of a bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges!
She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts
neighed when any one passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her
window there was a beehive, and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the
light struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What
happiness she had had at that time, what freedom, what hope! What an
abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of them now. She had got rid of
them all in her soul's life, in all her successive conditions of life,—
maidenhood, her marriage, and her love;—thus constantly losing them all
her life through, like a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every
inn along his road.
But what, then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary
catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking
round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer.
An April ray was dancing on the china of the étagère; the fire burned;
beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was bright,
the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter.
In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst of the
grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach at the top of
a rick. The servant was holding her by her skirt. Lestiboudois was raking by

her side, and every time he came near she leant forward, beating the air
with both her arms.
"Bring her to me," said her mother, rushing to embrace her. "How I love
you, my poor child! How I love you!"
Then, noticing that the tips of her ears were rather dirty, she rang at once for
warm water, and washed her, changed her linen, her stockings, her shoes,
asked a thousand questions about her health, as if on the return from a long
journey, and finally, kissing her again and crying a little, she gave her back
to the servant, who stood quite thunder-stricken at this excess of tenderness.
That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.
"That will pass over," he concluded; "it's a whim."
And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did come, she showed
herself cold and almost contemptuous.
"Ah! you're losing your time, my lady!"
And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the handkerchief
she took out.
Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she detested Charles; if
it had not been better to have been able to love him? But he gave her no
opportunities for such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much
embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the chemist came just in time
to provide her with an opportunity.

XI.

An Experiment and a Failure.

E had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing
club-foot, and as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived

the patriotic idea that Yonville, in order to keep to the fore,
ought to have some operations for strephopody or club-foot.
"For," said he to Emma, "what risk is there? See" (and he enumerated on his
fingers the advantages of the attempt), "success, almost certain relief and
beautifying the patient, celebrity acquired by the operator. Why, for
example, should not your husband relieve poor Hippolyte of the 'Lion d'Or'?
Note that he would not fail to tell about his cure to all the travellers, and
then" (Homais lowered his voice and looked round him), "who is to prevent
me from sending a short paragraph on the subject to the paper? Eh!
goodness me! an article gets about; it is talked of; it ends by making a
snowball! And who knows? who knows?"
In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing proved to Emma that he was not
clever; and what a satisfaction for her to have urged him to a step by which
his reputation and fortune would be increased! She only wished to lean on
something more solid than love.
Charles, urged by the chemist and by her, allowed himself to be persuaded.
He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval's volume, and every evening, holding his
head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it.
While he was studying equinus, varus, and valgus, that is to say,
katastrephopody, endostrephopody, and exostrephopody (or better, the
various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and outwards, with the
hypostrephopody and anastrephopody), otherwise torsion downwards and
upwards, Monsieur Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was exhorting the
lad at the inn to submit to the operation.
"You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain; it is a simple prick, like a
little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns."
Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid eyes.
"However," continued the chemist, "it doesn't concern me. It's for your
sake, for pure humanity! I should like to see you, my friend, rid of your
hideous deformity, together with that waddling of the lumbar regions
which, whatever you say, must considerably interfere with you in the
exercise of your calling."

Then Homais represented to him how much jollier and brisker he would
feel afterwards, and even gave him to understand that he would be more
likely to please the women; and the stable-boy began to smile heavily. Then
he attacked him through his vanity:—
"Aren't you a man? Hang it! what would you have done if you had had to
go into the army, to go and fight beneath the standard? Ah! Hippolyte!"
And Homais retired, declaring that he could not understand this obstinacy,
this blindness in refusing the benefactions of science.
The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a conspiracy. Binet, who never
interfered with other people's business, Madame Lefrançois, Artémise, the
neighbors, even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache—every one persuaded him,
lectured him, shamed him; but what finally decided him was that it would
cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to provide the machine for the
operation. This generosity was an idea of Emma's, and Charles consented to
it, thinking in his heart of hearts that his wife was an angel.
So, by the advice of the chemist, and after three fresh starts, he had a kind
of box made by the carpenter, with the aid of the locksmith, that weighed
about eight pounds, in which iron, wood, sheet-iron, leather, screws, and
nuts had not been spared.
But to know which of Hippolyte's tendons to cut, it was necessary first of
all to find out what kind of club-foot he had.
He had a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which, however,
did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an equinus together
with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with a strong tendency to
equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like a horse's hoof, with rugose
skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which the black nails looked as if made
of iron, the club-foot ran about like a deer from morn till night. He was
constantly to be seen on the Place, jumping around the carts, thrusting his
limping foot forward. He seemed even stronger on that leg than the other.
By dint of hard service it had acquired, as it were, moral qualities of
patience and of energy; and when he was doing some heavy work, he stood
on it in preference to its fellow.

Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary to cut the tendo Achillis, and, if
need were, the anterior tibial muscle could be seen to afterwards for getting
rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare to risk both operations at once;
he was even trembling already for fear of injuring some important region
that he did not know.
Neither Ambrose Paré, applying for the first time since Celsus, after an
interval of fifteen centuries, a ligature to an artery, nor Dupuytren, about to
open an abscess in the brain, nor Gensoul when he first took away the
superior maxilla, had hearts that trembled, hands that shook, minds so
strained as had the doctor when he approached Hippolyte, his tenotome
between his fingers. And, as at hospitals, near by on a table lay a heap of
lint, with waxed thread, many bandages—a pyramid of bandages—every
bandage to be found at the chemist's. It was Monsieur Homais who since
morning had been organising all these preparations, as much to dazzle the
multitude as to keep up his illusions. Charles pierced the skin; a dry
crackling was heard. The tendon was cut, the operation over. Hippolyte
could not get over his surprise, but bent over Bovary's hands to cover them
with kisses.
"Come, be calm," said the chemist; "later you will show your gratitude to
your benefactor."
And he went down to tell the result to five or six inquirers who were
waiting in the yard, and who fancied that Hippolyte would reappear
walking properly. Then Charles, having buckled his patient into the
machine, went home, where Emma, all anxiety, awaited him at the door.
She threw herself on his neck: they sat down to table; he ate much, and at
dessert he even wished to take a cup of coffee, a luxury he permitted
himself only on Sundays when there was company.
The evening was charming, full of prattle, of dreams together. They talked
about their future fortune, of the improvements to be made in their house;
he saw people's estimation of him growing, his comforts increasing, his
wife always loving him; and she was happy to refresh herself with a new
sentiment, healthier, better, to feel at last some tenderness for this poor
fellow who adored her. The thought of Rodolphe for one moment passed

through her mind, but her eyes turned again to Charles; she even noticed
with surprise that he had not bad teeth.
They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, in spite of the servant, suddenly
entered the room, holding in his hand a sheet of paper just written. It was
the paragraph he intended for the "Fanal de Rouen." He brought it them to
read.
"Read it yourself," said Bovary.
He read:
"'Despite the prejudices that still cover a part of the face of Europe like a
net, the light nevertheless begins to penetrate our country places. Thus on
Tuesday our little town of Yonville found itself the scene of a surgical
operation which is at the same time an act of loftiest philanthropy. Monsieur
Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners——"
"Oh, that is too much! too much!" said Charles, choking with emotion.
"No, no! not at all! What next!"
"'——Performed an operation on a club-footed man.' I have not used the
scientific term, because you know in a newspaper every one would not
perhaps understand. The masses must——"
"No doubt," said Bovary; "go on!"
"I proceed," said the chemist. "'Monsieur Bovary, one of our most
distinguished practitioners, performed an operation on a club-footed man
called Hippolyte Tautain, stable-man for the last twenty-five years at the
hotel of the "Lion d'Or," kept by Widow Lefrançois, at the Place d'Armes.
The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident to the subject, had
attracted such a concourse of persons that there was a veritable obstruction
on the threshold of the establishment. The operation, moreover, was
performed as if by magic, and barely a few drops of blood appeared on the
skin, as if to show that the rebellious tendon had at last given way beneath
the efforts of art. The patient, strangely enough—we affirm it as an eye-
witness—complained of no pain. His condition up to the present time
leaves nothing to be desired. Everything tends to show that his

convalescence will be brief; and who knows whether, at our next village
festivity, we shall not see our good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance
in the midst of a chorus of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all
eyes by his verve and his capers his complete cure? Honor, then, to the
generous savants! Honor to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their
vigils to the amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honor, thrice
honor! Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame
walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now
accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers informed as to the
successive phases of this remarkable cure.'"
* * *
This did not prevent Mère Lefrançois from coming five days after, scared,
and crying out—
"Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!"
Charles rushed to the "Lion d'Or," and the chemist, who caught sight of him
passing along the Place hatless, abandoned his shop. He appeared himself
breathless, red, anxious, and asking every one who was going up the stairs
—
"Why, what's the matter with our interesting strephopode?"
The strephopode was writhing in hideous convulsions, so that the machine
in which his leg was enclosed was knocked against the wall enough to
break it.
With many precautions, in order not to disturb the position of the limb, the
box was removed, and an awful sight presented itself. The outlines of the
foot disappeared in such a swelling that the entire skin seemed about to
burst, and it was covered with ecchymosis, caused by the famous machine.
Hippolyte had already complained of suffering from it. No attention had
been paid to him; they had to acknowledge that he had not been altogether
wrong, and he was freed for a few hours. But hardly had the œdema gone
down to some extent, than the two savants thought fit to put back the limb
in the apparatus, strapping it tighter to hasten matters. At last, three days
after, Hippolyte being unable to endure it any longer, they once more
removed the machine, and were much surprised at the result they saw. The

livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with blisters here and there, whence
oozed a black liquid. Matters were taking a serious turn. Hippolyte began to
worry himself, and Mère Lefrançois had him installed in the little room near
the kitchen, so that he might at least have some distraction.
But the tax-collector, who dined there every day, complained bitterly of
such companionship. Then Hippolyte was removed to the billiard-room. He
lay there moaning under his heavy coverings, pale, with long beard, sunken
eyes, and from time to time turning his perspiring head on the dirty pillow,
where the flies alighted. Madame Bovary went to see him. She brought him
linen for his poultices; she comforted and encouraged him. Besides, he did
not want for company, especially on market-days, when the peasants were
knocking about the billiard-balls round him, fenced with the cues, smoked,
drank, sang, and brawled.
"How are you?" they said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Ah! you're not up
to much, it seems, but it's your own fault. You should do this! do that!" And
then they told him stories of people who had all been cured by other
remedies than his. Then by way of consolation they added:—
"You give way too much! Get up! You coddle yourself like a king! All the
same, old chap, you don't smell nice!"
Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Bovary himself turned
sick at it. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte looked at him with
eyes full of terror, sobbing—
"When shall I get well? Oh, save me! How unfortunate I am! how
unfortunate I am!"
And the doctor left, always recommending him to diet himself.
"Don't listen to him, my lad," said Mère Lefrançois. "Haven't they tortured
you enough already? You'll grow still weaker. Here! swallow this."
And she gave him some good beef-tea, a slice of mutton, a piece of bacon,
and sometimes small glasses of brandy, that he had not the strength to put to
his lips.

Abbé Bournisien, hearing that he was growing worse, asked to see him. He
began by pitying his sufferings, declaring at the same time that he ought to
rejoice at them since it was the will of the Lord, and take advantage of the
occasion to reconcile himself to Heaven.
"For," said the ecclesiastic in a paternal tone, "you rather neglected your
duties; you were rarely seen at divine worship. How many years is it since
you approached the holy table? I understand that your work, that the whirl
of the world may have kept you from care for your salvation. But now is the
time to reflect. Yet don't despair. I have known great sinners, who, about to
appear before God (you are not yet at this point, I know), had implored His
mercy, and who certainly died in the best frame of mind. Let us hope that,
like them, you will set us a good example. Thus, as a precaution, what is to
prevent you from saying morning and evening a 'Hail Mary, full of grace,'
and 'Our Father which art in heaven'? Yes, do that, for my sake, to oblige
me. That won't cost you anything. Will you promise me?"
The poor devil promised. The curé came back day after day. He chatted
with the landlady, and even told anecdotes interspersed with jokes and puns
that Hippolyte did not understand. Then, as soon as he could, he fell back
upon matters of religion, putting on an appropriate expression of face.
His zeal seemed successful, for the club-foot soon manifested a desire to go
on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if he were cured; to which Monsieur
Bournisien replied that he saw no objection; two precautions were better
than one; it was no risk.
The chemist was indignant at what he called the manœuvres of the priest;
they were prejudicial, he said, to Hippolyte's convalescence, and he kept
repeating to Madame Lefrançois, "Leave him alone! leave him alone! You
perturb his morals with your mysticism."
But the good woman would no longer listen to him; he was the cause of it
all. From a spirit of contradiction she hung up near the bedside of the
patient a basin filled with holy-water and a branch of box.
Religion, however, seemed no more able to succour him than surgery, and
the invincible gangrene still spread from the extremities towards the
stomach. It was all very well to vary the potions and change the poultices;

the muscles each day rotted more and more; and at last Charles replied by
an affirmative nod of the head when Mère Lefrançois asked him if she
could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet of Neufchâtel, who
was a celebrity.
A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a good position and self-
possessed, Charles's colleague did not refrain from laughing disdainfully
when he had uncovered the leg, mortified to the knee. Then having flatly
declared that it must be amputated, he went off to the chemist's to rail at the
asses who could have reduced a poor man to such a state. Shaking
Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted out in the shop:
"These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas of those gentry of the
capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform, lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities
that the Government ought to prohibit. But they want to do the clever, and
they cram you with remedies without troubling about the consequences. We
are not so clever, not we! We are not savants, coxcombs, fops! We are
practitioners; we cure people, and we should not dream of operating on any
one who is in perfect health. Straighten club-feet! As if one could straighten
club-feet! It is as if one wished, for example, to make a hunchback
straight!"
Homais suffered as he listened to this discourse, and he concealed his
discomfort beneath a courtier's smile; for he needed to humour Monsieur
Canivet, whose prescriptions sometimes came as far as Yonville. So he did
not take up the defense of Bovary; he did not even make a single remark,
and, renouncing his principles, he sacrificed his dignity to the more serious
interests of his business.
This amputation of the thigh by Doctor Canivet was a great event in the
village. On that day all the inhabitants got up earlier, and the Grande Rue,
although full of people, had something lugubrious about it, as if an
execution had been expected. At the grocer's they discussed Hippolyte's
illness; the shops did no business, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's wife,
did not stir from her window, such was her impatience to see the operator
arrive.
He came in his gig, which he drove himself. But the springs of the right side
having at length given way beneath the weight of his corpulence, it

happened that the carriage as it rolled along leaned over a little, and on the
other cushion near him could be seen a large box covered in red sheep-
leather, whose three brass clasps shone grandly.
After he had entered like a whirlwind the porch of the "Lion d'Or," the
doctor, shouting very loud, ordered them to unharness his horse. Then he
went into the stable to see that he was eating his oats all right; for on
arriving at a patient's he first of all looked after his mare and his gig. People
even said about this:
"Ah! Monsieur Camvet's a character!"
And he was the more esteemed for this imperturbable coolness. The
universe to the last man might have died, and he would not have missed the
smallest of his habits.
Homais presented himself.
"I count on you," said the doctor. "Are we ready? Come along!"
But the chemist, turning red, confessed that he was too sensitive to assist at
such an operation.
"When one is a simple spectator," he said, "the imagination, you know, is
impressed. And then I have such a nervous system!"
"Pshaw!" interrupted Canivet; "on the contrary, you seem to me inclined to
apoplexy. Besides, that doesn't astonish me, for you chemist fellows are
always poking about your kitchens, which must end by spoiling your
constitutions. Now just look at me. I get up every day at four o'clock; I
shave with cold water (and am never cold). I don't wear flannels, and I
never catch cold; my carcass is good enough! I live now in one way, now in
another, like a philosopher, taking pot-luck; that is why I am not squeamish
like you, and it is as indifferent to me to carve a Christian as the first fowl
that turns up. Then, perhaps, you will say, habit! habit!"
Then, without any consideration for Hippolyte, who was sweating with
agony between his sheets, these gentlemen entered into a conversation, in
which the chemist compared the coolness of a surgeon to that of a general;
and this comparison was pleasing to Canivet, who launched out on the

exigencies of his art. He looked upon it as a sacred office, although the
ordinary practitioners dishonoured it. At last, coming back to the patient, he
examined the bandages brought by Homais, the same that had appeared for
the club-foot, and asked for some one to hold the limb for him.
Lestiboudois was sent for, and Monsieur Canivet having turned up his
sleeves, passed into the billiard-room, while the chemist stayed with
Artémise and the landlady, both whiter than their aprons, and with ears
strained towards the door.
Bovary during this time did not dare to stir from his house. He kept
downstairs in the sitting-room by the side of the fireless chimney, his chin
on his breast, his hands clasped, his eyes staring. "What a mishap!" he
thought, "what a mishap!" Perhaps, after all, he had made some slip. He
thought it over, but could hit upon nothing. But the most famous surgeons
also made mistakes; and that is what no one would ever believe! People, on
the contrary, would laugh, jeer! It would spread as far as Forges, as
Neufchâtel, as Rouen, everywhere! Who could say if his colleagues would
not write against him. Polemics would ensue; he would have to answer in
the papers. Hippolyte might even prosecute him. He saw himself
dishonored, ruined, lost; and his imagination, assailed by a world of
hypotheses, tossed amongst them like an empty cask borne by the sea and
floating upon the waves.
Emma, opposite, watched him; she did not share his humiliation; she felt
another—that of having supposed such a man was worth anything. As if
twenty times already she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity.
Charles was walking up and down the room; his boots creaked on the floor.
"Sit down," she said; "you fidget me."
He sat down again.
How was it that she—she, who was so intelligent—could have allowed
herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had she
thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her instincts of
luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of marriage, of the
household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded swallows; all that

she had longed for, all that she had denied herself, all that she might have
had! And for what? for what?
In the midst of the silence that hung over the village a heart-rending cry
rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting. She knit her brows with a
nervous gesture, then went on. And it was for him, for this creature, for this
man, who understood nothing, who felt nothing! For he was there quite
quiet, not even suspecting that the ridicule of his name would henceforth
sully hers as well as his. She had made efforts to love him, and she had
repented with tears for having yielded to another!
"But it was perhaps a valgus!" suddenly exclaimed Bovary, who was
meditating.
At the unexpected shock of this phrase falling on her thought like a leaden
bullet on a silver plate, Emma, shuddering, raised her head in order to find
out what he meant to say; and they looked one at the other in silence,
almost amazed to see each other, so far sundered were they by their inner
thoughts. Charles gazed at her with the dull look of a drunken man, while
he listened motionless to the last cries of the sufferer, that followed each
other in long-drawn modulations, broken by sharp spasms like the far-off
howling of some beast being slaughtered. Emma bit her wan lips, and
rolling between her fingers a piece of coral that she had broken, fixed on
Charles the burning glance of her eyes like two arrows of fire about to dart
forth. Everything in him irritated her now; his face, his dress, what he did
not say, his whole person, his existence, in fine. She repented of her past
virtue as of a crime, and what still remained of it crumbled away beneath
the furious blows of her pride. She revelled in all the evil ironies of
triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover came back to her with
dazzling attractions; she threw her whole soul into it, borne away towards
this image with a fresh enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as much
removed from her life, as absent for ever, as impossible and annihilated, as
if he had been about to die and were passing under her eyes.
There was a sound of steps on the pavement. Charles looked up, and
through the lowered blinds he saw at the corner of the market in the broad
sunshine Dr. Canivet, who was wiping his brow with his handkerchief.

Homais, behind him, was carrying a large red box in his hand, and both
were going towards the chemist's.
Then with a feeling of sudden tenderness and discouragement Charles
turned to his wife saying to her:
"Oh, kiss me, my own!"
"Leave me!" she said, red with anger.
"What is the matter?" he asked, stupefied. "Be calm; compose yourself. You
know well enough that I love you. Come!"
"Enough!" she cried with a terrible look.
And escaping from the room, Emma closed the door so violently that the
barometer fell from the wall and smashed on the floor.
Charles sank back into his armchair overwhelmed, trying to discover what
could be wrong with her, fancying some nervous illness, weeping, and
vaguely feeling something fatal and incomprehensible whirling round him.
When Rodolphe came to the garden that evening, he found his mistress
waiting for him at the foot of the steps on the lowest stair. They threw their
arms round one another, and all their rancour melted like snow beneath the
warmth of that kiss.

XII.

Preparations for Flight.

HEY began to love one another again. Often, even in the
middle of the day, Emma suddenly wrote to him, then from
the window made a sign to Justin, who, taking his apron off,
quickly ran to La Huchette. Rodolphe would come; she had
sent for him to tell him that she was bored; that her husband
was odious, her life frightful.
"But what can I do?" he cried one day impatiently.
"Ah! if you would—"
She was sitting on the floor between his knees, her hair loose, her look lost.
"Why, what?" said Rodolphe.
She sighed.
"We would go and live elsewhere—somewhere!"
"You are really mad!" he said laughing. "How could that be possible?"
She returned to the subject; he pretended not to understand, and turned the
conversation.
What he did not understand was all this worry about so simple an affair as
love. She had a motive, a reason, and, as it were, a pendant to her affection.
Her tenderness, in fact, grew each day with her repulsion to her husband.
The more she gave up herself to the one, the more she loathed the other.

Never had Charles seemed to her so disagreeable, to have such stodgy
fingers, such vulgar ways, to be so dull as when they found themselves
together after her meeting with Rodolphe. Then, while playing the spouse
and virtue, she was burning at the thought of that head whose black hair fell
in a curl over the sunburnt brow, of that form at once so strong and elegant,
of that man, in a word, who had such experience in his reasoning, such
passion in his desires. It was for him that she filed her nails with the care of
a chaser, and that there was never enough cold-cream for her skin, nor of
patchouli for her handkerchiefs. She loaded herself with bracelets, rings,
and necklaces. When he was coming she filled the two large blue glass
vases with roses, and prepared her room and her person like a courtesan
expecting a prince. The servant had to be constantly washing linen, and all
day Félicité did not stir from the kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept
her company, watched her at work.
With his elbows on the long board on which she was ironing, he greedily
watched all these women's clothes spread out about him, the dimity
petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with running strings, wide
at the hips and growing narrower below.
"What is that for?" asked the young fellow, passing his hand over the
crinoline or the hooks and eyes.
"Why, haven't you ever seen anything?" Félicité answered laughing. "As if
your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the same."
"Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!" And he added with a meditative air, "As
if she were a lady like madame!"
But Félicité grew impatient of seeing him hanging round her. She was six
years older than he, and Théodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, was
beginning to pay court to her.
"Let me alone," she said, moving her pot of starch. "You'd better be off and
pound almonds; you are always dangling about women. Before you meddle
with such things, bad boy, wait till you've got a beard to your chin."
"Oh, don't be cross! I'll go and clean her boots."

And he at once took down from the shelf Emma's boots, all coated with
mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder beneath his
fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight.
"How afraid you are of spoiling them!" said the servant, who wasn't so
particular when she cleaned them herself, because as soon as the stuff of the
boots was no longer fresh madame handed them over to her.
Emma had many shoes in her closet that she wore out one after the other,
without Charles allowing himself the slightest observation. So also he
disbursed three hundred francs for a wooden leg that she thought proper to
make a present of to Hippolyte. Its top was covered with cork, and it had
spring joints, a complicated mechanism, covered over by black trousers
ending in a patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use such a
handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to get him another more
convenient one. The doctor, of course, had again to defray the expense of
this purchase.
So little by little the stable-man took up his work again. One saw him
running about the village as before, and when Charles heard from afar the
sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once went in another direction.
It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had undertaken the order;
this provided him with an excuse for visiting Emma. He chatted with her
about the new goods from Paris, about a thousand feminine trifles, made
himself very obliging, and never asked for his money. Emma yielded to this
lazy mode of satisfying all her caprices. Thus she wanted to have a very
handsome riding-whip that was at an umbrella-maker's at Rouen, to give to
Rodolphe. The week after Monsieur Lheureux placed it on her table.
But the next day he called on her with a bill for two hundred and seventy
francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was much embarrassed; all the
drawers of the writing-table were empty; they owed over a fortnight's wages
to Lestiboudois, two quarters to the servant, for any quantity of other things,
and Bovary was impatiently expecting Monsieur Derozerays' account,
which he was in the habit of paying him every year about midsummer.
She succeeded at first in putting off Lheureux. At last he lost patience; he
was being sued; his capital was out, and unless he got some in he should be

forced to take back all the goods she had received.
"Oh, very well, take them!" said Emma.
"I was only joking," he replied; "the only thing I regret is the whip. My
word! I'll ask monsieur to return it to me."
"No, no!" she said.
"Ah! I've got you!" thought Lheureux.
And, certain of his discovery, he went out repeating to himself in an
undertone, and with his usual low whistle:
"Good! we shall see! we shall see!"
She was thinking how to get out of this when the servant coming in put on
the mantelpiece a small roll of blue paper "from Monsieur Derozerays."
Emma pounced upon and opened it. It contained fifteen napoleons; it was
the account. She heard Charles on the stairs; threw the gold to the back of
her drawer, and took out the key.
Three days after Lheureux reappeared.
"I have an arrangement to suggest to you," he said. "If, instead of the sum
agreed on, you would take——"
"Here it is," she said, placing fourteen napoleons in his hand.
The tradesman was astounded. Then, to conceal his disappointment, he was
profuse in apologies and proffers of service, all of which Emma declined;
then she remained a few moments fingering in the pocket of her apron the
two five-franc pieces that he had given her in change. She promised herself
she would economise in order to pay back later on. "Pshaw!" she thought,
"he won't think about it again."
* * *
Besides the riding-whip with its silver-gilt handle, Rodolphe had received a
seal with the motto Amor nel cor; furthermore, a scarf for a muffler, and,
finally, a cigar-case exactly like the Viscount's, that Charles had formerly
picked up in the road, and that Emma had kept. These presents, however,

humiliated him; he refused several; she insisted, and he ended by obeying,
thinking her tyrannical and over-exacting.
Then she had strange ideas.
"When midnight strikes," she said, "you must think of me."
And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there were floods of
reproaches that always ended with the eternal question:
"Do you love me?"
"Why, of course I love you," he answered.
"A great deal?"
"Certainly!"
"You haven't loved any others?"
"Did you think you'd got a virgin?" he exclaimed laughing.
Emma wept, and he tried to console her, adorning his protestations with
puns.
"Oh," she went on, "I love you! I love you so that I could not live without
you, do you see? There are times when I long to see you again, when I am
torn by all the anger of love. I ask myself, where is he? Perhaps he is
talking to other women. They smile upon him; he approaches. Oh no! no
one else pleases you. There are some more beautiful, but I love you best. I
know how to love best. I am your servant, your concubine! You are my
king, my idol! You are good, you are beautiful, you are clever, you are
strong!"
He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as
original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty,
gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of
passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not
distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment
beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had
murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers;

exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if
the fulness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest
metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor
of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a
cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance
when we long to move the stars.
But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to him, who, in no
matter what circumstance, holds back, Rodolphe saw other delights to be
got out of this love. He thought all modesty in the way. He treated her quite
sans façon. He made of her something supple and corrupt. Hers was an
idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for
her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank into this drunkenness,
shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his butt of Malmsey.
By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary's manners changed. Her
looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the
impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her
mouth, "as if to defy the people." At last those who still doubted doubted no
longer when one day they saw her getting out of the "Hirondelle" her waist
squeezed into a waistcoat like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who,
after a fearful scene with her husband, had taken refuge at her son's, was not
the least scandalised of the women-folk. Many other things displeased her.
First, Charles had not attended to her advice about the forbidding of novels;
then the "ways of the house" annoyed her; she allowed herself to make
some remarks, and there were quarrels, especially one on account of
Félicité.
Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing along the passage, had
surprised her in company of a man—a man with a brown collar, about forty
years old, who, at the sound of her step, had quickly escaped through the
kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh, but the good lady grew angry,
declaring that unless morals were to be laughed at one ought to look after
those of one's servants.
"Where were you brought up?" asked the daughter-in-law, with so
impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not perhaps
defending her own case.

"Leave the room!" said the young woman, springing up with a bound.
"Emma! Mamma!" cried Charles, trying to reconcile them.
But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was stamping her feet as she
repeated—
"Oh! what manners! What a peasant!"
He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She stammered:
"She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps worse!"
And she was for leaving at once if the other did not apologize.
So Charles went back again to his wife and implored her to give way; he
knelt to her; she ended by saying—
"Very well! I'll go to her."
And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity of a
marchioness as she said:
"Excuse me, madame."
Then having gone up again to her room, she threw herself flat on her bed
and cried there like a child, her face buried in the pillow.
She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of anything extraordinary
occurring, she should fasten a small piece of white paper to the blind, so
that if by chance he happened to be in Yonville, he could hurry to the lane
behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had been waiting three-
quarters of an hour when she suddenly caught sight of Rodolphe at the
corner of the market. She felt tempted to open the window and call him, but
he had already disappeared. She fell back in despair.
Soon, however, it seemed to her that some one was walking on the
pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the yard. He
was there outside. She threw herself into his arms.
"Do take care!" he said.

"Ah! if you knew!" she replied.
And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly, exaggerating
the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses that he understood
nothing of it.
"Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!"
"But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love like ours
ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They torture me! I can bear it no
longer! Save me!"
She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like flames beneath a
wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her so much, so that he lost his
head and said:
"What is it? What do you wish?"
"Take me away," she cried, "carry me off! Oh, I entreat you!"
And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the unexpected
consent it breathed forth in a kiss.
"But——" Rodolphe resumed.
"What?"
"Your little girl!"
She reflected a few moments, then replied—
"We will take her! It can't be helped!"
"What a woman!" he said to himself, watching her as she went. For she had
run into the garden. Some one was calling her.
On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at the
change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing herself more
docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for
pickling gherkins.

Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort of
voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness of the things
she was about to leave?
But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as if lost in the
anticipated delight of her coming happiness. It was an eternal subject for
conversation with Rodolphe. She leant on his shoulder murmuring—
"Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it be? It
seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it will be as if we
were rising in a balloon as if we were setting out for the clouds. Do you
know that I count the hours? And you?"
Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had that
indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from success, and
that is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances. Her desires,
her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young illusions, that
had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers grow, gradually
developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all the plenitude of her
nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for her long amorous looks
in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her
delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light
by a little black down. One would have thought that an artist apt in
conception had arranged the curls of hair upon her neck; they fell in a thick
mass, negligently, and with the changing chances of their adultery, that
unbound them every day. Her voice now took more mellow inflections, her
figure also; something subtle and penetrating escaped even from the folds
of her gown and from the line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first
married, thought her delicious and quite irresistible.
When he came home in the middle of the night, he did not dare to wake her.
The porcelain night-light threw a round trembling gleam upon the ceiling,
and the drawn curtains of the little cot formed, as it were, a white hut
standing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles looked at them. He
seemed to hear the light breathing of his child. She would grow big now;
every season would bring rapid progress. He already saw her coming from
school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on her jacket, and
carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to be sent to a

boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to be done? Then he
reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the neighborhood, that he
would superintend every morning on his way to his patients. He would save
up what he brought in; he would put it in the savings-bank. Then he would
buy shares somewhere, no matter where; besides, his practice would
increase; he counted upon that, for he wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to
be accomplished, to learn to play the piano. Ah! how pretty she would be
later on when she was fifteen, when, resembling her mother, she would, like
her, wear large straw hats in the summer-time; from a distance they would
be taken for two sisters. He pictured her to himself working in the evening
by their side beneath the light of the lamp; she would embroider him
slippers; she would look after the house; she would fill all the home with
her charm and her gaiety. At last, they would think of her marriage; they
would find her some good young fellow with a steady business; he would
make her happy; this would last for ever.
Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her
side she awakened to other dreams.
To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a new
land, whence they would return no more. They went on and on, their arms
entwined, without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there suddenly
glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and ships, forests of
citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose pointed steeples were
storks' nests. They went at a walking-pace because of the great flag-stones,
and on the ground there were bouquets of flowers, offered you by women
dressed in red bodices. They heard the chiming of bells, the neighing of
mules, together with the murmur of guitars and the noise of fountains,
whose rising spray refreshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the
foot of pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters. And then, one night
they came to a fishing village, where brown nets were drying in the wind
along the cliffs and in front of the huts. It was there that they would stay;
they would live in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the
heart of a gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in
hammocks, and their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns,
warm and star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in
the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood
forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and it

swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonized, azure, and bathed in sunshine.
But the child began to cough in her cot or Bovary snored more loudly, and
Emma did not fall asleep till morning, when the dawn whitened the
window, and when little Justin was already in the square taking down the
shutters of the chemist's shop.
She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to him—
"I want a cloak—a large lined cloak with a deep collar."
"You are going on a journey?" he asked.
"No; but—never mind. I may count on you, may I not, and quickly?"
He bowed.
"Besides, I shall want," she went on, "a trunk—not too heavy—handy."
"Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet by a foot and a half, as they are
being made just now."
"And a travelling bag."
"Decidedly," thought Lheureux, "there's a row on here."
"And," said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt, "take this; you
can pay yourself out of it."
But the tradesman cried out that she was wrong; they knew one another; did
he doubt her? What childishness!
She insisted, however, on his taking at least the chain, and Lheureux had
already put it in his pocket and was going, when she called him back.
"You will leave everything at your place. As to the cloak"—she seemed to
be reflecting—"do not bring it either; you can give me the maker's address,
and tell him to have it ready for me."
It was the next month that they were to run away. She was to leave Yonville
as if she was going on some business to Rouen. Rodolphe would have
booked the seats, procured the passports, and even have written to Paris in
order to have the whole mail-coach reserved for them as far as Marseilles,

where they would buy a carriage, and go on thence without stopping to
Genoa. She would take care to send her luggage to Lheureux', whence it
would be taken direct to the "Hirondelle," so that no one would have any
suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion to the child.
Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer thought about it.
He wished to have two more weeks before him to arrange some affairs; then
at the end of a week he wanted two more; then he said he was ill; next he
went on a journey. The month of August passed, and, after all these delays,
they decided that it was to be irrevocably fixed for the 4th September—a
Monday.
At length the Saturday before arrived.
Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual.
"Everything is ready?" she asked him.
"Yes."
Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit down near the terrace
on the curb-stone of the wall.
"You are sad," said Emma.
"No; why?"
And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion.
"Is it because you are going away?" she went on; "because you are leaving
what is dear to you—your life? Ah! I understand. I have nothing in the
world! You are all to me; so shall I be to you. I will be your people, your
country; I will tend, I will love you!"
"How sweet you are!" he said, seizing her in his arms.
"Really!" she said with a voluptuous laugh. "Do you love me? Swear it
then!"
"Do I love you—love you? I adore you, my love!"

The moon, full and purple-colored, was rising right out of the earth at the
end of the meadow. She rose quickly between the branches of the poplars,
that hid her here and there like a black curtain pierced with holes. Then she
appeared dazzling with whiteness in the empty heavens that she lit up, and
now sailing more slowly along, let fall upon the river a great stain that
broke up into an infinity of stars; and the silver sheen seemed to writhe
through the very depths like a headless serpent covered with luminous
scales; it also resembled some monster candelabra all along which sparkled
drops of diamonds running together. The soft night was about them; masses
of shadow filled the branches. Emma, her eyes half-closed, breathed in with
deep sighs the fresh wind that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they
were in the rush of their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came back
to their hearts, full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the
perfume of the syringas, and threw across their memories shadows more
immense and more sombre than those of the still willows that lengthened
out over the grass. Often some night-animal, hedgehog or weasel, setting
out on the hunt, disturbed the lovers, or sometimes they heard a ripe peach
falling all alone from the espalier.
"Ah! what a lovely night!" said Rodolphe.
"We shall have others," replied Emma; and, as if speaking to herself, "Yes,
it will be good to travel. And yet, why should my heart be so heavy? Is it
dread of the unknown? The effect of habits left? Or rather——? No; it is the
excess of happiness. How weak I am, am I not? Forgive me!"
"There is still time!" he cried. "Reflect! perhaps you may repent!"
"Never!" she cried impetuously. And coming closer to him: "What ill could
come to me? There is no desert, no precipice, no ocean I would not traverse
with you. The longer we live together the more it will be like an embrace,
every day closer, more heart to heart. There will be nothing to trouble us, no
care, no obstacle. We shall be alone, all to ourselves eternally. Oh, speak!
Answer me!"
At regular intervals he answered, "Yes—Yes—" She had passed her hands
through his hair, and she repeated in a childlike voice, despite the big tears
which were falling, "Rodolphe! Rodolphe! Ah! Rodolphe! dear little
Rodolphe!"

Midnight struck.
"Midnight!" said she. "Come! it is to-morrow! One day more!"
He rose to go; and as if the movement he made had been the signal for their
flight, Emma said, suddenly, assuming a gay air—
"You have the passports?"
"Yes."
"You are forgetting nothing?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Certainly."
"It is at the Hôtel de Provence, is it not, that you will wait for me at mid-
day?"
He nodded.
"Till to-morrow then!" said Emma, in a last caress; and she watched him go.
He did not turn round. She ran after him, and, leaning over the water's edge
between the bulrushes—
"To-morrow!" she cried.
He was already on the other side of the river and walking fast across the
meadow.
After a few moments Rodolphe stopped; and when he saw her with her
white gown gradually fade away in the shade like a ghost, he was seized
with such a beating of the heart that he leant against a tree lest he should
fall.
"What an imbecile I am!" he said with a fearful oath. "No matter! she was a
pretty mistress!"

And immediately Emma's beauty, with all the pleasures of their love, came
back to him. For a moment he softened; then he rebelled against her.
"For, after all," he exclaimed gesticulating, "I can't exile myself—have a
child on my hands."
He was saying these things to give himself firmness.
"And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no, no! a thousand times
no! It would have been too stupid."

XIII.

Deserted.

O SOONER was Rodolphe at home than he sat down
quickly at his bureau under the stag's head that hung as a
trophy on the wall. But when he had the pen between his
fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting on his
elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to him to have
receded into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly
placed a distance between them.
To get back something of her, he fetched from the cupboard at the bedside
an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he usually kept his letters from
women, and from it came an odor of dry dust and withered roses. First he
saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a handkerchief of hers.
Once when they were walking her nose had bled; he had forgotten it. Near
it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature given him by Emma: her

toilette seemed to him pretentious, and her languishing look in the worst
possible taste. Then, from looking at this image and recalling the memory
of its original, Emma's features little by little grew confused in his
remembrance, as if the living and the painted face, rubbing one against the
other, had effaced each other. Finally, he read some of her letters; they were
full of explanations relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent,
like business notes. He wanted to see the long ones again, those of old
times. In order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all
the others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers
and things, finding pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair
—hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box, broke
when it was opened.
Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style of
the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or jovial,
facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love, others that
asked for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain gestures, the sound
of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered nothing at all.
In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts, cramped each other
and lessened, as reduced to a uniform level of love that equalized them all.
So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself for some
moments with letting them fall in cascades from his right into his left hand.
At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to the cupboard,
saying to himself, "What a lot of rubbish!" Which summed up his opinion;
for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon
his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it,
more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved
upon the wall.
"Come," said he, "let's begin."
He wrote—

"Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring misery into your
life."

"After all, that's true," thought Rodolphe. "I am acting in her interest; I am
honest."
"Have you carefully weighed your resolution? Do you know to
what an abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not,
do you? You were coming confident and fearless, believing in
happiness in the future. Ah! unhappy that we are—insensate!"
Rodolphe stopped here to think of some good excuse.
"If I told her all my fortune is lost? No! Besides that would stop nothing. It
would all have to be begun over again later on. As if one could make
women like that listen to reason!" He reflected, then went on—
"I shall not forget you, oh! believe it; and I shall ever have a
profound devotion for you; but some day, sooner or later, this
ardour (such is the fate of human things) would have grown less,
no doubt. Lassitude would have come to us, and who knows if I
should not even have had the atrocious pain of witnessing your
remorse, of sharing it myself, since I should have been its
cause? The mere idea of the grief that would come to you
tortures me, Emma. Forget me! Why did I ever know you? Why
were you so beautiful? Is it my fault? O my God! No, no! accuse
only fate."
"That's a word that always tells," he said to himself.
"Ah! if you had been one of those frivolous women that one
sees, certainly I might, through egotism, have made an
experiment, in that case without danger for you. But that
delicious exaltation, at once your charm and your torment, has
prevented you from understanding, adorable woman that you
are, the falseness of our future position. Nor had I reflected upon
this at first, and I rested in the shade of that ideal happiness as
beneath that of the manchineel tree, without foreseeing the
consequences."
"Perhaps she'll think I'm giving it up from avarice. Ah, well! so much the
worse; it must be stopped!"

"The world is cruel, Emma. Wherever we might have gone, it
would have persecuted us. You would have had to put up with
indiscreet questions, calumny, contempt, insult, perhaps. Insult
to you! Oh! And I, who would place you on a throne! I who bear
with me your memory as a talisman! For I am going to punish
myself by exile for all the ill I have done you. I am going away.
Whither I know not. I am mad. Adieu! Be good always. Preserve
the memory of the unfortunate who has lost you. Teach my
name to your child; let her repeat it in her prayers."
The wicks of the candles flickered. Rodolphe got up to shut the window,
and when he had sat down again—
"I think it's all right. Ah! and this for fear she should come and hunt me up."
"I shall be far away when you read these sad lines, for I have
wished to flee as quickly as possible to shun the temptation of
seeing you again. No weakness! I shall return, and perhaps later
we shall talk together very coldly of our old love. Adieu!"
And there was a last 'adieu' divided into two words: "A Dieu!" which he
thought in very excellent taste.
"Now how am I to sign?" he said to himself. "Yours devotedly?' No! 'Your
friend?' Yes, that's it."
"Your friend."

He re-read his letter. He considered it very good.
"Poor little woman!" he thought with emotion. "She'll think me harder than
a rock. There ought to have been some tears on this; but I can't cry; it isn't
my fault." Then, having emptied some water into a glass, Rodolphe dipped
his finger into it, and let a big drop fall on the paper, that made a pale stain
on the ink. Then looking for a seal, he came upon the one "Amor nel cor."
"That doesn't at all fit in with the circumstances. Pshaw! never mind!"
After which he smoked three pipes and went to bed.

The next day when he was up (at about two o'clock—he had slept late),
Rodolphe had a basket of apricots picked. He put his letter at the bottom
under some vine leaves, and at once ordered Girard, his ploughman, to take
it with care to Madame Bovary. He made use of this means for
corresponding with her, sending according to the season fruits or game.
"If she asks after me," he said, "you will tell her that I have gone on a
journey. You must give the basket to her herself, into her own hands. Get
along and take care!"
Girard put on his new blouse, knotted his handkerchief round the apricots,
and, walking with great heavy steps in his thick iron-bound galoshes, made
his way to Yonville.
Madame Bovary, when he got to her house was arranging a bundle of linen
on the kitchen-table with Félicité.
"Here," said the ploughboy, "is something for you from master."
She was seized with apprehension, and as she sought in her pocket for some
coppers, she looked at the peasant with haggard eyes, while he himself
looked at her with amazement, not understanding how such a present could
so move any one. At last he went out. Félicité remained. Emma could bear
it no longer; she ran into the sitting-room as if to take the apricots there,
overturned the basket, tore away the leaves, found the letter, opened it, and,
as if some fearful fire were behind her, she flew to her room terrified.
Charles was there; she saw him; he spoke to her; she heard nothing, and she
went on quickly up the stairs, breathless, distraught, dumb, and ever holding
this horrible piece of paper, that crackled between her fingers like a plate of
sheet-iron. On the second floor she stopped before the attic-door, that was
closed.
Then she tried to calm herself; she recalled the letter; she must finish it; she
did not dare to. And where? How? She would be seen! "Ah, no! here," she
thought, "I shall be all right."
Emma pushed open the door and went in.

The slates threw straight down a heavy heat that gripped her temples, stifled
her; she dragged herself to the closed garret-window. She drew back the
bolt, and the dazzling light burst in with a leap.
Opposite, beyond the roofs, stretched the open country until it was lost to
the sight. Underneath her, the village square was empty; the stones of the
pavement glittered, the weathercocks on the houses were motionless. At the
corner of the street, from a lower story, rose a kind of humming with
strident modulations. It was Binet turning.
She leant against the embrasure of the window, and re-read the letter with
angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the more
confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled him with
her arms, and the throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast like blows
of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven intervals. She
looked about her with the wish that the earth might crumble into pieces.
Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was free. She advanced,
looked at the paving-stones, saying to herself, "Come! come!"
The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of her
body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the oscillating
square went up the walls, and that the floor dipped on end like a tossing
boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging, surrounded by vast space.
The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air was whirling in her hollow
head; she had but to yield, to let herself be taken; and the humming of the
lathe never ceased, like an angry voice calling her.
"Emma! Emma!" cried Charles.
She stopped.
"Wherever are you? Come!"
The thought that she had just escaped from death almost made her faint
with terror. She closed her eyes; then she shivered at the touch of a hand on
her sleeve; it was Félicité.
"Master is waiting for you, madame; the soup is on the table."
And she had to go down to sit at table.

She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as if to
examine the darns, and she really thought of applying herself to this work,
counting the threads in the linen. Suddenly the remembrance of the letter
returned to her. How had she lost it? Where could she find it? But she felt
such weariness of spirit that she could not even invent a pretext for leaving
the table. Then she became a coward; she was afraid of Charles; he knew
all, that was certain! Indeed he pronounced these words in a strange
manner:
"We are not likely to see Monsieur Rodolphe soon again, it seems."
"Who told you?" she said, shuddering.
"Who told me!" he replied, rather astonished at her abrupt tone. "Why,
Girard, whom I met just now at the door of the Café-Français. He has gone
on a journey, or is to go."
She gave a sob.
"What surprises you in that? He absents himself like that from time to time
for a change, and, ma foi, I think he's right, when one has a fortune and is a
bachelor. Besides, he has jolly times, has our friend. He's a bit of a rake.
Monsieur Langlois told me—"
He stopped for propriety's sake because the servant came in. She put back
into the basket the apricots scattered on the sideboard. Charles, without
noticing his wife's color, had them brought to him, took one, and bit into it.
"Ah! perfect!" said he; "just taste!"
And he handed her the basket, which she put away from her gently.
"Do just smell! What an odor!" he remarked, passing it under her nose
several times.
"I am choking," she cried, leaping up. But by an effort of will the spasm
passed; then—
"It is nothing," she said, "it is nothing! It is nervousness. Sit down and go
on eating." For she dreaded lest he should begin questioning her, attending
to her, that she should not be left alone.

Charles, to obey her, sat down again, and he spat the stones of the apricots
into his hands, afterwards putting them on his plate.
Suddenly a blue tilbury passed across the square at a rapid trot. Emma
uttered a cry and fell back rigid to the ground.
In fact, Rodolphe, after many reflections, had decided to set out for Rouen.
Now, as from La Huchette to Buchy there is no other way than by Yonville,
he had to go through the village, and Emma had recognized him by the rays
of the lanterns, which like lightning flashed through the twilight.
The chemist, at the tumult which broke out in the house, ran thither. The
table with all the plates was upset; sauce, meat, knives, the salt, and cruet-
stand were strewn over the room; Charles was calling for help; Berthe,
scared, was crying; and Félicité, whose hands trembled, was unlacing her
mistress, whose whole body shivered convulsively.
"I'll run to my laboratory for some aromatic vinegar," said the chemist.
Then as she opened her eyes on smelling the bottle:
"I was sure of it," he remarked; "that would wake any dead person for you!"
"Speak to us," said Charles; "collect yourself; it is I—your Charles, who
loves you. Do you know me? See! here is your little girl! Oh, kiss her!"
The child stretched out her arms to her mother to cling to her neck. But
turning away her head, Emma said in a broken voice—
"No, no! no one!"
She fainted again. They carried her to her bed. She lay there stretched at full
length, her lips apart, her eyelids closed, her hands open, motionless, and
white as a waxen image. Two streams of tears flowed from her eyes and fell
slowly upon the pillow.
Charles, standing up, was at the back of the alcove, and the chemist, near
him, maintained that meditative silence that is becoming on the serious
occasions of life.

"Do not be uneasy," he said, touching his elbow; "I think the paroxysm is
past."
"Yes, she is resting a little now," answered Charles, watching her sleep.
"Poor girl! poor girl! She has gone off now!"
Then Homais asked how the accident had come about. Charles answered
that she had been taken ill suddenly while she was eating some apricots.
"Extraordinary!" continued the chemist. "But it might be that the apricots
had brought on the syncope. Some natures are so sensitive to certain smells;
and it would even be a very fine question to study both in its pathological
and physiological relation. The priests know the importance of it, they who
have introduced aromatics into all their ceremonies. It is to stupefy the
senses and to bring on ecstasies—a thing, moreover, very easy in persons of
the weaker sex, who are more delicate than the other. Some are cited who
faint at the smell of burnt hartshorn, of new bread—"
"Take care; you'll wake her!" said Bovary in a low voice.
"And not only," the chemist went on, "are human beings subject to such
anomalies, but animals also. Thus you are not ignorant of the singularly
aphrodisiac effect produced by the Nepeta cataria, vulgarly called cat-mint,
on the feline race; and, on the other hand, to quote an example whose
authenticity I can answer for, Bridaux (one of my old comrades, at present
established in the Rue Malpalu) possesses a dog that falls into convulsions
as soon as you hold out a snuff-box to him. He often even makes the
experiment before his friends at his summer-house at Guillaume Wood.
Would any one believe that a simple sternutation could produce such
ravages on a quadrupedal organism? It is extremely curious, is it not?"
"Yes," said Charles, who was not listening to him.
"This shows us," went on the other, smiling with benign self-sufficiency,
"the innumerable irregularities of the nervous system. With regard to
madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very susceptible. And so I
should by no means recommend to you, my dear friend, any of those so-
called remedies that, under the pretence of attacking the symptoms, attack
the constitution. No; no useless physicking! Diet, that is all; sedatives,

emollients, dulcification. Then, don't you think that perhaps her imagination
should be worked upon?"
"In what way? How?" said Bovary.
"Ah! that is it. Such is indeed the question. 'That is the question,' as I lately
read in a newspaper."
But Emma, awaking, cried out—
"The letter! the letter!"
They thought she was delirious; and she was by midnight. Brain-fever had
set in.
For forty-three days Charles did not leave her. He gave up all his patients;
he no longer went to bed; he was constantly feeling her pulse, putting on
sinapisms and cold-water compresses. He sent Justin as far as Neufchâtel
for ice; the ice melted on the way; he sent him back again. He called
Monsieur Canivet into consultation; he sent for Dr. Larivière, his old
master, from Rouen; he was in despair. What alarmed him most was
Emma's prostration, for she did not speak, did not listen, did not even seem
to suffer, as if her body and soul were both resting together after all their
troubles.
About the middle of October she could sit up in bed supported by pillows.
Charles wept when he saw her eat her first bread-and-jelly. Her strength
returned to her; she got up for a few hours of an afternoon, and one day,
when she felt better, he tried to take her, leaning on his arm, for a walk
round the garden. The sand of the paths was disappearing beneath the dead
leaves; she walked slowly, dragging along her slippers, and leaning against
Charles's shoulder. She smiled all the time.
They went thus to the bottom of the garden near the terrace. She drew
herself up slowly, shading her eyes with her hand to look. She looked far
off, as far as she could, but on the horizon were only great bonfires of grass
smoking on the hills.
"You will tire yourself, my darling!" said Bovary. And pushing her gently to
make her go into the arbour, "Sit down on this seat; you'll be comfortable."

"Oh! no; not there!" she said in a faltering voice.
She was seized with giddiness, and from that evening her illness
recommenced, with a more uncertain character, it is true, and more complex
symptoms. Now she suffered in her heart, then in the chest, the head, the
limbs; she had vomitings, in which Charles thought he saw the first signs of
cancer.
And besides this, the poor fellow was worried about money matters.

XIV.

Religious Fervor.

O BEGIN with, he did not know how he could pay Monsieur
Homais for all the physic supplied by him, and though, as a
medical man, he was not obliged to pay for it, he
nevertheless blushed a little at such an obligation. Then the
expenses of the household, now that the servant was
mistress, became terrible. Bills rained in upon the house; the tradesmen
grumbled; Monsieur Lheureux especially harassed him. In fact, at the
height of Emma's illness, the latter, taking advantage of the circumstances
to make his bill larger, had hurriedly brought the cloak, the travelling-bag,
two trunks instead of one, and a number of other things. It was very well for
Charles to say he did not want them. The tradesman answered arrogantly
that these articles had been ordered, and that he would not take them back;
besides, it would vex madame in her convalescence; the doctor had better
think it over; in short, he was resolved to sue him rather than give up his

rights and take back his goods. Charles subsequently ordered them to be
sent back to the shop. Félicité forgot; he had other things to attend to; then
thought no more about them. Monsieur Lheureux returned to the charge,
and, by turns threatening and whining, so managed that Bovary ended by
signing a bill at six months. But hardly had he signed this bill than a bold
idea occurred to him: it was to borrow a thousand francs from Lheureux.
So, with an embarrassed air, he asked if it were possible to get them, adding
that it would be for a year, at any interest he wished. Lheureux ran off to his
shop, brought back the money and dictated another bill, by which Bovary
undertook to pay to his order on the 1st of September next the sum of one
thousand and seventy francs, which, with the hundred and eighty already
agreed to, made just twelve hundred and fifty, thus lending at six per cent,
in addition to one-fourth for commission; and the things bringing him in a
good third at the least, this ought in twelve months to give him a profit of a
hundred and thirty francs. He hoped that the business would not stop there;
that the bills would not be paid; that they would be renewed; and that his
poor little money, having thriven at the doctor's as at a hospital, would come
back to him one day considerably more plump, and fat enough to burst his
bag.
Everything, moreover, succeeded with him. He was adjudicator for a supply
of cider to the hospital at Neufchâtel; Monsieur Guillaumin promised him
some shares in the turf-pits of Gaumesnil, and he dreamt of establishing a
new diligence service between Arcueil and Rouen, which no doubt would
not be long in ruining the ramshackle van of the "Lion d'Or," and that,
travelling faster, at a cheaper rate, and carrying more luggage, would thus
put into his hands the whole commerce of Yonville.
Charles several times asked himself by what means he should next year be
able to pay back so much money. He reflected, imagined expedients, such
as applying to his father or selling something. But his father would be deaf,
and he—he had nothing to sell. Then he foresaw such worries that he
quickly dismissed so disagreeable a subject of meditation from his mind.
He reproached himself with forgetting Emma, as if, all his thoughts
belonging to this woman, it was robbing her of something not to be
constantly thinking of her.

The winter was severe, Madame Bovary's convalescence slow. When it was
fine they wheeled her armchair to the window that overlooked the square,
for she now had an antipathy to the garden, and the blinds on that side were
always down. She wished the horse to be sold; what she formerly liked now
displeased her. All her ideas seemed to be limited to the care of herself. She
stayed in bed taking little meals, rang for the servant to inquire about her
gruel or to chat with her. The snow on the market-roof threw a white, still
light into the room; then the rain began to fall; and Emma waited daily with
a mind full of eagerness for the inevitable return of some trifling events
which nevertheless had no relation to her. The most important was the
arrival of the "Hirondelle" in the evening. Then the landlady shouted out,
and other voices answered, while Hippolyte's lantern, as he fetched the
boxes from the boot, was like a star in the darkness. At mid-day Charles
came in; then he went out again; next she took some beef-tea, and towards
five o'clock, as the day drew in, the children coming back from school,
dragging their wooden shoes along the pavement, knocked the clapper of
the shutters with their rulers one after the other.
It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien came to see her. He inquired
after her health, gave her news, exhorted her to religion in a coaxing little
gossip that was not without its charm. The mere thought of his cassock
comforted her.
One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself dying,
and had asked for the communion; and, while they were making the
preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the
night-table covered with sirups into an altar, and while Félicité was
strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over
her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all feeling. Her
body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was beginning; it seemed to
her that her being, mounting toward God, would be annihilated in that love
like a burning incense that melts into vapour. The bed-clothes were
sprinkled with holy water, the priest drew from the holy pyx the white
wafer; and it was fainting with a celestial joy that she put out her lips to
accept the body of the Saviour presented to her. The curtains of the alcove
floated gently round her like clouds, and the rays of the two tapers burning
on the night-table seemed to shine like dazzling halos. Then she let her head
fall back, fancying she heard in space the music of seraphic harps, and

perceived in an azure sky, on a golden throne in the midst of saints holding
green palms, God the Father, resplendent with majesty, who with a sign sent
to earth angels with wings of fire to carry her away in their arms.
This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing that it
was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her sensation, that
still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion and with a deeper
sweetness. Her soul, tortured by pride, at length found rest in Christian
humility, and, tasting the joy of weakness, she saw within herself the
destruction of her will, that must have left a wide entrance for the inroads of
heavenly grace. There existed, then, in the place of happiness, still greater
joys,—another love beyond all loves, without pause and without end, one
that would grow eternally! She saw amid the illusions of her hope a state of
purity floating above the earth mingling with heaven, to which she aspired.
She wanted to become a saint. She bought chaplets and wore amulets; she
wished to have in her room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in
emeralds that she might kiss it every evening.
The curé marvelled at this humour, although Emma's religion, he thought,
might, from its fervour, end by touching on heresy, extravagance. But not
being much versed in these matters, as soon as they went beyond a certain
limit he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, bookseller to Monsignor, to send him
"something good for a lady who was very clever." The bookseller, with as
much indifference as if he had been sending off hardware to niggers, packed
up, pell-mell, everything that was then the fashion in the pious book trade.
There were little manuals in questions and answers, pamphlets of
aggressive tone after the manner of Monsieur de Maistre, and certain novels
in rose-coloured bindings and with a honied style, manufactured by
troubadour seminarists or penitent blue-stockings. There were the "Think of
it; the Man of the World at Mary's Feet, by Monsieur de * * *, décoré with
many Orders;" "The Errors of Voltaire, for the Use of the Young," &c.
Madame Bovary's mind was not yet sufficiently clear to apply herself
seriously to anything; moreover, she began this reading in too much hurry.
She grew provoked at the doctrines of religion; the arrogance of the
polemic writings displeased her by their inveteracy in attacking people she
did not know; and the secular stories, relieved with religion, seemed to her
written in such ignorance of the world, that they insensibly estranged her

from the truths for whose proof she was looking. Nevertheless, she
persevered; and when the volume slipped from her hands, she fancied
herself seized with the finest Catholic melancholy that an ethereal soul
could conceive.
As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had thrust it back to the bottom of her
heart, and it remained there more solemn and more motionless than a king's
mummy in a catacomb. An exhalation escaped from this embalmed love,
that, penetrating through everything, perfumed with tenderness the
immaculate atmosphere in which she longed to live. When she knelt on her
Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same suave words that she
had murmured formerly to her lover in the outpourings of adultery. It was to
make faith come; but no delights descended from the heavens, and she
arose with tired limbs and with a vague feeling of a gigantic dupery.
This searching after faith, she thought, was only one merit the more, and in
the pride of her devoutness Emma compared herself to those grand ladies of
long ago whose glory she had dreamed of over a portrait of La Vallière, and
who, trailing with so much majesty the lace-trimmed trains of their long
gowns, retired into solitudes to shed at the feet of Christ all the tears of
hearts that life had wounded.
Then she gave herself up to excessive charity. She sewed clothes for the
poor, she sent wood to women in childbed; and Charles one day, on coming
home, found three good-for-nothings in the kitchen seated at the table
eating soup. She had her little girl, whom during her illness her husband had
sent back to the nurse, brought home. She wanted to teach her to read; even
when Berthe cried, she was not vexed. She had made up her mind to
resignation, to universal indulgence. Her language about everything was
full of ideal expressions. She said to her child, "Is your stomach-ache better,
my angel?"
Madame Bovary senior found nothing to censure except perhaps this mania
of knitting jackets for orphans instead of mending her own house-linen; but,
harassed with domestic quarrels, the good woman took pleasure in this
quiet house, and she even staid there till after Easter, to escape the sarcasms
of old Bovary, who never failed on Good Friday to order chitterlings.

Besides the companionship of her mother-in-law, who strengthened her a
little by the rectitude of her judgment and her grave ways, Emma almost
every day had other visitors. These were Madame Langlois, Madame
Caron, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and regularly from two to five
o'clock the excellent Madame Homais, who, for her part, had never
believed any of the tittle-tattle about her neighbor. The little Homais also
came to see her; Justin accompanied them. He went up with them to her
bedroom, and remained standing near the door, motionless and mute. Often
even Madame Bovary, taking no heed of him, began her toilette. She began
by taking out her comb, shaking her head with a quick movement, and
when he for the first time saw all this mass of hair that fell to her knees
unrolling in black ringlets, it was to him, poor child! like a sudden entrance
into something new and strange, whose splendour terrified him.
Emma, no doubt, did not notice his silent attentions or his timidity. She had
no suspicion that the love vanished from her life was there, palpitating by
her side, beneath that coarse holland shirt, in that youthful heart open to the
emanations of her beauty. Besides, she now enveloped all things with such
indifference, she had words so affectionate with looks so haughty, such
contradictory ways, that one could no longer distinguish egotism from
charity, or corruption from virtue. One evening, for example, she was angry
with the servant, who had asked to go out, and stammered as she tried to
find some pretext. Then suddenly—
"So you love him?" she said.
And without waiting for any answer from Félicité, who was blushing, she
added, "There! run along; enjoy yourself!"
In the beginning of spring she had the garden turned up from end to end,
despite Bovary's remonstrances. However, he was glad to see her at last
manifest a wish of any kind. As she grew stronger she displayed more
wilfulness. First, she found occasion to expel Mère Rollet, the nurse, who
during her convalescence had contracted the habit of coming too often to
the kitchen with her two nurslings and her boarder, better off for teeth than
a cannibal. Then she got rid of the Homais family, successively dismissed
all the other visitors, and even frequented church less assiduously, to the
great approval of the chemist, who said to her in a friendly way—

"You were going in a bit for the cassock!"
As formerly, Monsieur Bournisien dropped in every day when he came out
after catechism class. He preferred staying out of doors to taking the air "in
the grove," as he called the arbour. This was the time when Charles came
home. They were hot; some sweet cider was brought out, and they drank
together to madame's complete restoration.
Binet was there; that is to say, a little lower down against the terrace wall,
fishing for cray-fish. Bovary invited him to have a drink, and he thoroughly
understood the uncorking of the stone bottles.
"You must," he said, throwing a satisfied glance all round him, even to the
very extremity of the landscape, "hold the bottle perpendicularly on the
table, and after the strings are cut, press up the cork with little thrusts,
gently, gently, as indeed they do seltzer-water at restaurants."
But during his demonstration the cider often spurted right into their faces,
and then the ecclesiastic, with a thick laugh, never missed this joke—
"It's goodness strikes the eye!"
He was, in fact, a good fellow, and one day he was not even scandalised at
the chemist, who advised Charles to give madame some distraction by
taking her to the theatre at Rouen to hear the illustrious tenor, Lagardy.
Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion, and the priest
declared that he considered music less dangerous for morals than literature.
But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The theatre, he contended,
served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath a mask of pleasure, taught
virtue.
"Castigat ridendo mores, Monsieur Bournisien! Thus, consider the greater
part of Voltaire's tragedies; they are cleverly strewn with philosophical
reflections, that make them a very school of morals and diplomacy for the
people."
"I," said Binet, "once saw a piece called the 'Gamin de Paris,' in which there
was the character of an old general that is really hit off to a T. He sets down
a young swell who had seduced a working girl, who at the end——"

"Certainly," continued Homais, "there is bad literature as there is bad
pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most important of the fine arts
seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic idea, worthy of the abominable times that
imprisoned Galileo."
"I know very well," objected the curé, "that there are good works, good
authors. However, if it were only those persons of different sexes together
in a bewitching apartment, decorated with worldly pomp, and then, those
pagan disguises, that rouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this
must, in the long run, engender a certain mental libertinage, give rise to
immodest thoughts, and impure temptations. Such, at any rate, is the
opinion of all the Fathers. Finally," he added, suddenly assuming a mystic
tone of voice, while he rolled a pinch of snuff between his fingers, "if the
Church has condemned the theatre, she must be right; we must submit to
her decrees."
"Why," asked the chemist, "should she excommunicate actors? For formerly
they openly took part in religious ceremonies. Yes, in the middle of the
chancel they acted; they performed a kind of farce called 'Mysteries,' which
often offended against the laws of decency."
The ecclesiastic contented himself with uttering a groan, and the chemist
went on—
"It's just as it is in the Bible; for there, you know, are more than one piquant
detail, matters really libidinous!"
And on a gesture of irritation from Monsieur Bournisien—
"Ah! you'll admit that it is not a book to place in the hands of a young girl,
and I should be sorry if Athalie——"
"But it is the Protestants, and not we," cried the other impatiently, "who
recommend the Bible."
"No matter," said Homais. "I am surprised that in our days, in this century
of enlightenment, any one should still persist in proscribing an intellectual
relaxation that is inoffensive, moralising, and sometimes even hygienic; is it
not, doctor?"

"No doubt," replied the doctor carelessly, either because, sharing the same
ideas, he wished to offend no one, or else because he had not any ideas.
The conversation seemed at an end when the chemist thought fit to shoot a
Parthian arrow.
"I've known priests who put on ordinary clothes to go and see dancers
kicking about."
"Come, come!" said the curé.
"Ah! I've known some!" And separating the words of his sentence, Homais
repeated, "I—have—known—some!"
"Well, they did wrong," said Bournisien, resigned to anything.
"By Jove! they go in for more than that," exclaimed the chemist.
"Sir!" replied the ecclesiastic, with such angry eyes that Homais was
intimidated by them.
"I only mean to say," he replied in less brutal a tone, "that toleration is the
surest way to draw people to religion."
"That is true! that is true!" agreed the good fellow, sitting down again on his
chair. But he stayed only a few moments.
Then, as soon as he had gone, Monsieur Homais said to the doctor—
"That's what I call a cock-fight. I beat him, did you see, in a way!—Now
take my advice. Take madame to the theatre, if it were only for once in your
life, to enrage one of these ravens, hang it! If any one could take my place, I
would accompany you myself. Be quick about it. Lagardy is only going to
give one performance; he's engaged to go to England at a high salary. From
what I hear, he's a regular dog; he's rolling in money; he's taking three
mistresses and a cook along with him. All these great artists burn the candle
at both ends; they require a dissolute life, that stirs the imagination to some
extent. But they die at the hospital, because they haven't the sense when
young to lay by. Well, a pleasant dinner! Good-bye till to-morrow."

The idea of the theatre quickly germinated in Bovary's head, for he at once
communicated it to his wife, who at first refused, alleging the fatigue, the
worry, the expense; but, for a wonder, Charles did not give in, so sure was
he that this recreation would be good for her. He saw nothing to prevent it:
his mother had sent them three hundred francs which he had no longer
expected; the current debts were not very large, and the falling in of
Lheureux's bills was still so far off that there was no need to think about
them. Besides, imagining that she was refusing from delicacy, he insisted
the more; so that by dint of worrying her she at last made up her mind, and
the next day at eight o'clock they set out in the "Hirondelle."
The chemist, whom nothing whatever kept at Yonville, but who thought
himself bound not to budge from it, sighed as he saw them go.
"Well, a pleasant journey!" he said to them; "happy mortals that you are!"
Then addressing himself to Emma, who was wearing a blue silk gown with
four flounces—
"You are as lovely as a Venus. You'll cut a figure at Rouen."
The diligence stopped at the "Croix-Rouge" in the Place Beauvoisine. It
was the inn that is in every provincial faubourg, with large stables and small
bedrooms, where one sees in the middle of the court chickens pilfering the
oats under the muddy gigs of the commercial travellers;—a good old house
with worm-eaten balconies that creak in the wind on winter nights, always
full of people, noise, and feeding, whose black tables are sticky with coffee
and brandy, the thick windows made yellow by the flies, the damp napkins
stained with cheap wine, and that always smells of the village, like
ploughboys dressed in Sunday-clothes, has a café on the street, and towards
the country-side a kitchen-garden. Charles at once set out. He muddled up
the stage-boxes with the gallery, the pit with the boxes; asked for
explanations, did not understand them; was sent from the box-office to the
acting-manager; came back to the inn, returned to the theatre, and thus
several times traversed the whole length of the town from the theatre to the
boulevard.
Madame Bovary bought a bonnet, gloves, and a bouquet. The doctor was
much afraid of missing the beginning, and, without having had time to

swallow a plate of soup, they presented themselves at the doors of the
theatre, which were still closed.

XV.

A New Delight.

HE crowd was waiting against the wall, symmetrically
enclosed between the balustrades. At the corner of the
neighbouring streets huge bills repeated in quaint letters
"Lucia de Lammermoor—Lagardy—Opera—&c." The
weather was fine, the people were hot, perspiration trickled
amid the curls, and handkerchiefs taken from pockets were mopping red
foreheads; and now and again a warm wind that blew from the river gently
stirred the border of the tick awnings hanging from the doors of the public-
houses. A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a current of icy
air that smelt of tallow, leather, and oil. This was an exhalation from the
Rue des Charrettes, full of large black ware-houses where they make casks.
For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma before going in wished to have a
little stroll in the harbour, and Bovary prudently kept his tickets in his hand,
in the pocket of his trousers, which he pressed against his stomach.
Her heart began to beat as soon as she reached the vestibule. She
involuntarily smiled with vanity on seeing the crowd rushing to the right by
the other corridor while she went up the staircase to the reserved seats. She
was as pleased as a child to push with her finger the large tapestried door.

She breathed in with all her might the dusty smell of the lobbies, and when
she was seated in her box she bent forward with the air of a duchess.
The theatre was beginning to fill; opera-glasses were taken from their cases,
and the subscribers, catching sight of one another, were bowing. They came
to seek relaxation in the fine arts after the anxieties of business; but
"business" was not forgotten; they still talked cotton, spirits of wine, or
indigo. The heads of old men were to be seen, inexpressive and peaceful,
with their hair and complexions looking like silver medals tarnished by
steam of lead. The young beaux were strutting about in the pit, showing in
the opening of their waistcoats their pink or apple-green cravats, and
Madame Bovary from above admired them leaning on their canes with
golden knobs in the open palm of their yellow gloves.
Now the lights of the orchestra were lit, the lustre, let down from the
ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its facets a sudden gaiety over the
theatre; then the musicians came in one after the other; and first there was
the protracted hubbub of the basses grumbling, violins squeaking, cornets
trumpeting, flutes and flageolets fifing. But three knocks were heard on the
stage, a rolling of drums began, the brass instruments played some chords,
and the curtain rising, discovered a country-scene.
It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a fountain shaded by an oak to the
left. Peasants and lords with plaids on their shoulders were singing a
hunting-song together; then a captain suddenly came on, who evoked the
spirit of evil by lifting both his arms to heaven. Another appeared; they
went away, and the hunters started afresh.
She felt herself transported to the reading of her youth, into the midst of
Walter Scott. She seemed to hear through the mist the sound of the Scotch
bagpipes re-echoing over the heather. Then her remembrance of the novel
helping her to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by
phrase, while vague thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once again
with the bursts of music. She gave herself up to the lullaby of the melodies,
and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her
nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery, the
actors, the painted trees that shook when any one walked, and the velvet
caps, cloaks, swords—all those imaginary things that floated amid the

harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young woman
stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was left alone,
and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the warbling of
birds. Lucia attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She plained of love;
she longed for wings. Emma too, fleeing from life, would have liked to fly
away in an embrace. Suddenly Edgar-Lagardy appeared.
He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the majesty of marble to
the ardent races of the South. His vigorous form was tightly clad in a
brown-coloured doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against his left
thigh, and he cast around laughing looks showing his white teeth. They said
that a Polish princess having heard him sing one night on the beach at
Biarritz, where he mended boats, had fallen in love with him. She had
ruined herself for him. He had deserted her for other women, and this
sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his artistic reputation. The
diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into his advertisements some
poetic phrase on the fascination of his person and the susceptibility of his
soul. A fine organ, imperturbable coolness, more temperament than
intelligence, more power of emphasis than of real singing, made up the
charm of this admirable, charlatan nature, in which there was something of
the hairdresser and the toréador.
From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucia in his arms,
he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of rage,
then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes escaped from his
bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward to see him, clutching
the velvet of the box with her nails. She was filling her heart with these
melodious lamentations that were drawn out to the accompaniment of the
double-basses, like the cries of the drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She
recognized all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her.
The voice of the prima donna seemed to her to be but echoes of her
conscience, and this illusion that charmed her as some very thing of her
own life. But no one on earth had loved her with such love. He had not
wept like Edgar that last moonlit night when they said, "To-morrow! to-
morrow!" The theatre rang with cheers; they recommenced the entire
movement; the lovers spoke of the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile,
fate, hopes; and when they uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry
that mingled with the vibrations of the last chords.

"But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute her?"
"No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!"
"Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on
before said, 'I love Lucia and she loves me!' Besides, he went off with her
father arm in arm. For he certainly is her father, isn't he—the ugly little man
with a cock's feather in his hat?"
Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began in which
Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master Ashton,
Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucia, thought it was a
love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that he did not understand
the story because of the music, which interfered very much with the words.
"What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be quiet!"
"Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning against her shoulder, "I like to
understand things."
"Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried impatiently.
Lucia advanced, half supported by her women, a wreath of orange blossoms
in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed of
her marriage-day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the little
path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not she, like this woman,
resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had been joyous, without seeing
the abyss into which she was throwing herself. Ah! if in the freshness of her
beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the disillusions of adultery, she
could have anchored her life upon some great, strong heart, then virtue,
tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty blending, she would never have fallen
from so high a happiness. But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented
for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions
that art exaggerated. So, striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined
now to see in this reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well
enough to please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful
pity when at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared
in a black cloak.

His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he made, and immediately the
instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury,
dominated all the others with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal
provocations at him in deep notes; Lucia, uttered her shrill plaint, Arthur, at
one side, his modulated tones in the middle register, and the bass of the
minister pealed forth like an organ, while the voices of the women repeating
his words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were all in a row
gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, and stupefaction
breathed forth at once from their half-opened mouths. The outraged lover
brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with jerks to the
movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left with long strides,
clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of his soft boots, widening
out at the ankles. He, she thought, must have an inexhaustible love to lavish
it upon the crowd with such effusion. All her small fault-findings faded
before the poetry of the part that absorbed her; and, drawn towards this man
by the illusion of the character, she tried to imagine to herself his life—that
life resonant, extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if fate
had willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With
him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she would have travelled from
capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the flowers
thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each evening, at
the back of a box, behind the golden trellis-work, she would have drunk in
eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung for her alone; from
the stage, even as he acted he would have looked at her. But the mad idea
seized her that he was looking at her; it was certain. She longed to run to his
arms, to take refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and
to say to him, to cry out, "Take me away! carry me with you! let us go!
Thine, thine! all my ardour and all my dreams!"
The curtain fell.
The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the
fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the crowd
filled the corridors, and she fell back in her armchair with palpitations that
choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to the refreshment-
room to get a glass of barley-water.

He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were
jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and he even
spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who
feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered cries like a
peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband, who was a mill-
owner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with her handkerchief
wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured taffeta gown, he
angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At last Charles
reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath:
"Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a crowd—
such a crowd!"
He added—
"Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Léon!"
"Léon?"
"Himself! He's coming along to pay his respects." And as he finished these
words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box.
He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary
extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will. She
had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon the green
leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the window. But soon
recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an effort she shook
off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a few hurried words.
"Ah, good-day! What! you here?"
"Silence!" cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.
"So you are at Rouen?"
"Yes."
"And since when?"
"Turn them out! turn them out!" People were looking at them. They were
silent.

But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests,
the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all
were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the
characters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at the
chemist's, and the walk to the nurse's, the reading in the arbour, tête-à-tête
by the fireside—all that poor love, so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so
tender and that she had nevertheless forgotten. And why had he come back?
What combination of circumstances had brought him back into her life. He
was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the
box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from
his nostrils falling upon her hair.
"Does this amuse you?" he said, bending over her so closely that the end of
his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly:
"Oh, dear me, no, not much."
Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an ice
somewhere.
"Oh, not yet; let us stay," said Bovary. "Her hair's undone; this is going to
be tragic."
But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the singer
seemed to her exaggerated.
"She screams too loud," said she, turning to Charles, who was listening.
"Yes—perhaps—a little," he replied, undecided between the frankness of
his pleasure and his respect for his wife's opinion.
Then with a sigh Léon said:
"The heat is—"
"Unbearable! Yes!"
"Do you feel unwell?" asked Bovary.
"Yes, I am stifling; let us go."

Monsieur Léon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and
all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside the
windows of a café.
First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles from
time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Léon; and the latter told
them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large office, in
order to get practice in his profession, which was different in Normandy
and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mère Lefrançois, and
as they had, in the husband's presence, nothing more to say to one another,
the conversation soon came to an end.
People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or
shouting at the top of their voices, "O bel ange, ma Lucie!" Then Léon
playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tamburini, Rubini,
Persiani, Grisi, and compared with them, Lagardy, despite his grand
outbursts, was nowhere.
"Yet," interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet, "they
say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving before the end,
because it was beginning to amuse me."
"Why," said the clerk, "he will soon give another performance."
But Charles replied that they were going back next day.
"Unless," he added, turning to his wife, "you would like to stay alone,
pussy?"
And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity that presented itself
to his hopes, the young man sang the praises of Lagardy in the last number.
It was really superb, sublime. Then Charles insisted—
"You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your mind. You are wrong
not to stay if you feel that this is doing you the least good."
The tables round them, however, were emptying; a waiter came and stood
discreetly near them. Charles, who understood, took out his purse; the clerk
held back his arm, and did not forget to leave two more pieces of silver that
he made chink on the marble.

"I am really sorry," said Bovary, "about the money which you are——"
The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and taking his hat said
—
"It is settled, isn't it? To-morrow, at six o'clock?"
Charles explained once more that he could not absent himself longer, but
that nothing prevented Emma——
"But," she stammered, with a strange smile, "I am not sure——"
"Well, you must think it over. We'll see. Night brings counsel." Then to
Léon, who was walking along with them, "Now that you are in our part of
the world, I hope you'll come and ask us for some dinner now and then."
The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being obliged, moreover, to
go to Yonville on some business for his office. And they parted before the
Saint-Herbland Passage just as the cathedral struck half-past eleven.

End of Madame Bovary, Vol. 1 by Gustave Flaubert

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADAME
BOVARY: A TALE OF PROVINCIAL LIFE, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be
renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law
means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the
Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States
without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying
and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a
registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook,
except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying
royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge
anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg
eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may do
practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by
U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license,
especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any
other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”), you
agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg License
available with this file or online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing
Project Gutenberg electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg electronic work,
you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the
terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright)
agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement,
you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy
of or access to a Project Gutenberg electronic work and you do not agree to
be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on
or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can
do with most Project Gutenberg electronic works even without complying
with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a
lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg electronic works if you
follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to
Project Gutenberg electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual
work is unprotected by copyright law in the United States and you are

located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are
removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg
mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing
Project Gutenberg works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for
keeping the Project Gutenberg name associated with the work. You can
easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg License when you
share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a
constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the
laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before
downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating
derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg work.
The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status
of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg work (any work on which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied
or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License included with
this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in
the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country
where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is derived from
texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a notice
indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the
work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without
paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a
work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on
the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs
1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is posted with the
permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply
with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed
by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project
Gutenberg License for all works posted with the permission of the
copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg License
terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any
other work associated with Project Gutenberg.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently
displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or
immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg work in a format other than “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the
official Project Gutenberg website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no
additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of
exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work
in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format
must include the full Project Gutenberg License as specified in paragraph
1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing,
copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg works unless you comply
with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to
or distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the
use of Project Gutenberg works calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the
owner of the Project Gutenberg trademark, but he has agreed to donate
royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days
following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to
prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly
marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about
donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does
not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You
must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works
possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all
access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in
this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project