Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

by Jean Améry

  Where was it sweeter, Emma, up there in La Huchette or down in Rouen, in the Hôtel de Boulogne? What did you like better, the powerful hands of the horseman Monsieur Rodolphe or the soft fingers of the notary’s clerk, which flicked you more gracefully than they flicked through his reams of files? Did he stroke your legs, your knees, then reach for you manfully, as I reached after the buxom girls I never managed to get hold of? Pliant boy’s fingers, playfully climbing upward, as if feeling their way along and taking shelter in your frizzy bush? Or stiffening, brushing all boyishness aside, tearing off the white underclothes, grasping the hills and the fruits, making you moan with pleasure? On your knees, Bovary! Roaring. Down, shameless fellow who dares to stir, when it is my heart alone that should be stirred! It cannot happen again, and yet it comes back to haunt me, the boyhood sin, which they say softens the marrow and the brain! Hack away at the little man, who did his business so quickly once he sank into her viscosity. It is his blood that should flow, not that wretched liquid that used to dry into the boy’s sheet, leaving behind shameful blotches that resembled the great lakes in the pictures in our geography book, and that I rushed to wash away with ice-cold well water at the gray break of day. Hack it off. The axe, the raw wooden handle that fits well in my rustic hand, a hand that never slipped off into the nappy underbrush. Hack away at the clearly marked little face of the officious companion, the child who grew to be a man inside you, to my sorrow, to my never-stilled lust. They should be wiped from this world, the lovers who loved you too well and too badly, for in your final need, none of them stood by you. May a shot cut through the air and leave both their heads in tatters.

  “Madame, I request a word with your husband, the notary. I am here, Léon. On your knees, and beg! The bullet in the barrel of my pistol is meant for you, and will show no mercy, cry as you may, looking up at me as to God himself. The country doctor demands payback: your boy’s face, your notary’s dignity, your squalid life. And now, with the hammer cocked, from so close, even an untrained hand can carry out its final labor.” No gun in the house. What would an officier de santé need with a firearm? His task is to heal, and when he kills, it is because professional error thwarts him. But there are other means, good, medical ones, after all, one did learn a bit of pharmacology and it hasn’t all been forgotten. Powders, concoctions, stick to what you know.

  “Congratulations on your wedding, my young friend, and for opening your notary’s office. But we should have a little glass of something to celebrate your new honors and title, and to commemorate my eternal beloved, who wished you well. Remember the little rug she made with her own hands and gave you as a present for your bare little bachelor’s room? Or what about your departure for Paris, and the sorrow in Madame Bovary’s black eyes when the coach took you southward? How it would have delighted her to know you are married now, and a professional. Let’s raise a glass to your good fortune and to my wife’s memory and eternal bliss. Yes, that’s right, like a man: in one swig. Cheers. Pardon? You’re staggering? Eh, what is this! You’re falling from your chair. Your cheeks are as pale as the café’s whitewashed walls, you’re grasping weakly at your stomach and heart, you’re whimpering, my dear friend, what’s happening to you? Fortunately, as a doctor, I—”

  “What’s going on with that man? Is he drunk? Is he ill? If he’s having seizures, a doctor must come right away.”

  “Un docteur, mon Dieu! Un homme se meurt!” [36] Women screeching, and the crash of shattering glasses on stone floors.

  “I am a doctor, Charles Bovary, officier de santé. His pulse is weak. Bring vinegar! It’s hardly detectable anymore. His eyes are glazing over. A typical case of—hm—sudden heart failure, astonishing for one so young, but hardly unknown to us medical men. Early marriage, excessive strain at work. Death, Mesdames, Messieurs, now and then strikes even tender little saplings full of hope, as if they were the old, tall trees lightning attacks because they tower over the others.”

  “This could hurt my bar’s reputation. We’d better take the dead man to the billiard room. We must fetch the local doctor, no one else is legally authorized to sign the death certificate.”

  So it shall be, and when the bill is presented, I will pay and will confess. Monsieur le Procureur du Roi . . .

  “Gentlemen of the court, gentlemen of the jury! I will only speak briefly, for this is an open-and-shut case. The accused, Charles Bovary, a former country doctor in Yonvillel’Abbaye, following the suicide of his wife Emma, née Rouault, has taken the lives of two lovers of the aforementioned woman through the dastardly use of poison. His first victim was the landholder Rodolphe Boulanger, his second the young notary Léon Dupuis. In vile pretense, the accused invited both to a drink, and making use of his own toxic mixture, the composition of which the esteemed court physician has already described to you, he willfully murdered them out of despicable hunger for revenge.—Gentlemen of the court! This conclusion, based on the expert report and the bald-faced confession of the accused, should neither excuse the adulteress nor justify her deceased accomplices. However, the full force of the law. . .”

  May they find me guilty, et que le couperet tombe. [37]

  “All the more so, as there remains the abominable crime of necrophilia to be considered. Charbovaricharbovaricharbovari has committed abhorrent, unnatural sexual offenses with the deceased and her lovers. Sodom and Gomorrah, right here in Normandy. Pitch and brimstone upon the head of the sinner, who even as a boy committed acts clearly condemned by sacred writ. Pitch and brimstone, I say, and of course, the guillotine.”

  “The disturbing transgressions of the once well-loved doctor have resounded throughout the Département Seine-Maritime, provoking revulsion in the populace. The Fanal de Rouen and its correspondent for Yonville and environs condemn the unhinged man’s barbaric conduct as severely as possible, and as a standard bearer of enlightenment and reason, we shall continue to combat all forms of fanaticism and dissipation, and to greater effect than those who give no instruction to our fellow citizens in the here-below, but only promise peace to their souls in the beyond.”

  “Murder by poison and desecration of a corpse. For that, the guillotine is not enough. The fiend probably mangled poor Hippolyte on purpose, and now he has to clatter about with that wooden leg, raising such a furor it seems the devil incarnate is out wreaking havoc in the village.”

  “The blame is hers, hers! Even from beyond the grave, she corrupts him.”

  “What did I always say? Women like that should be whipped.”

  Welts on your back, Emma! Words of opprobrium spit in your face, I will wipe away all traces of them with a soft hand. Calm, now, I will make everything right, I don’t wish to dissect you or do damage to your rotting body. And none of those filthy crones will dare to swing the whip, to crack it on your lovely skin. I will stand by you, avenge you and myself, for we were ruined by lust, in our own peculiar ways, and I will pay down to the last sou.

  “I do not ask for mercy, Monsieur le Président de la Cour, may the full force of the law come down on me. Reprehensibly, willfully, I have overstepped the boundary of bourgeois propriety, and have requested the cross of the Legion of Honor. Was such a thing ever heard of? But my eternal beloved is blameless. She only fulfilled the carnal destiny of her beauty. Luxe et luxure, as nature owed them to her.”

  “Whipped? Ma chère, no, not even that would bring the corruption to an end; even with bloody welts on her back, she would have rolled around sensually with her three lovers, one of whom wed her before God and man. She was a witch. Pile up the boards and light the fire, where the sinful flesh will melt and the bones burn away to cinders.”

  “Ardor and lechery both merit damnation and may only be cleansed through the fires of Hell. I preach this constantly from my pulpit, which is long in need of repair. She fell into guilt, and he followed after her into the glowing swamp. Be wary of the enticements of the age and the wicked days we are living through, my flock, whom I must watch over like a shepherd, as the Mos
t High commands, and as I am ordained to do. Such offenses would never have occurred in the blessed days when master was master and the serf a serf, and each knew his place. On your knees, people of Yonville, and do not call yourselves citizens, don’t carp on about your civil rights, which are but temptations, like the naked phantoms of the flesh and the glimmering enticements of corruption that haunted Saint Anthony. The bourgeois is a man of moderation, he does not have the right to lapse into excess. Let us honor those worthy traditions the highborn have mercifully passed down to us, and honor God in Heaven, but without unseemly ardor. On your bare knees, in discreet piety, and give thanks to Him that you have averted the fate of that miserable man who is roasting in the flames and shall have neither abatement nor indulgence.”

  I didn’t ask for them anyway. What has happened, has happened, c’était la faute de la fatalité, which I take on myself and fulfill.—Silence. Only the rustling of your silks. Peace. Only the fear of some disturbance. No more loathing of God, no more disavowal of reason. The sweat on my face brings coolness, the diffusion of warmth through evaporation, sobriety: my hand has exhausted the little one, who no longer stands up against the sorrow in my heart. Time for what must be dealt with, the bills, the child’s torn doll, the porridge I have to make myself, it tastes joyless, but must be spooned up and slurped, Berthe’s stomach is empty and mine is rumbling too, your mother puts out no more sweet delicacies, Emma’s tender hand will make no more meals flavored with redolent herbs from the countryside, I reach for the blanket or lurch painfully, because sooner or later, I’ll have to vomit. It won’t last much longer, fear has me in its clutches, I see a wailing visage in the wallpaper. Visage and verdict, le Procureur de la Cour, c’est moi. [38] Rights of the citizen, bourgeois moderation, shall be joined as one, I judge you as bourgeois and citizen: you, gentlemen, who neglected the duty lust demands, and banished her to three coffins; myself, for my immoderation did not make me better suited to her. How softly the tears flow now, mingling with the sweat of death on my ravaged face, so evaporation draws more and more warmth from me, and I grow cold, and my teeth chatter. The judge must prepare himself, if his masterly prescription is to take effect, or else the learned apothecary, who tries to hoard all toxic poudres and potions, shall have the last word.

  “The defense may take the floor. Charles Bovary, bourgeois and lover, will now attempt to exonerate himself.”

  THE REALITY OF CHARLES BOVARY

  RETURNING to the question: What should we take the reality of a figure from art to mean? Nothing, one might say. Its inventor has acted arbitrarily, has played a game, and the ludic element of every sort of art—whether its intent be “realist” or symbolic, démarche, recherche, or radioscopy (as in the case of Zola)—is only rarely investigated, and then with insufficient rigor; we are all merely playing, and it is wise to recollect it.

  So Gustave Flaubert was playing as he composed Madame Bovary, groaning under the crushing weight of words; and the game plays out further in these pages, albeit according to a different set of rules. Charles Bovary, the poor man from whom everything was stripped away, love, his beloved, his possessions, and even his memory—for, as he is forced to realize, he has lived in error—was treated by Gustave Flaubert as a quantité négligeable. He comes to see himself as victim and bearer of fatalité, as a man of the abyss. This is reality as a game, its imaginary precepts (though sadly, not the weight of its words) as valid as any other. No moderation, no criteria of truth, no palpable notion of reality is close at hand. Just a postulate: The wife of a country doctor gets caught up in two love affairs, brings her husband to ruin, kills herself. That is all. The postulate being accepted tel quel, the literary operation is examined not with regard to its logical correctness—a narrative game cannot be reduced to a mathematical equation!—but only to the realism of the course of action, and this in utterly conventional terms, without the least deference to epistemology. (What is “real”? What is “real-ism”? This has never been fully plumbed, but only acquiesced to, in line with the commonsense equilibrium of everyday speech.) And yet, holding fast to the precarious stability of quotidian jargon, accepting without argument the ludic maxims conceived by the bourgeois Flaubert, it remains permissible to move beyond the element of play and to question the reality of this country doctor now present in the imaginative life of millions, over whom the ownership claims of the bourgeois landowner from Croisset have long expired—even without hope of any “real” insight.

  What we see before us is a man from the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. The great adventures of the French nation have come to an end; the universal allure of the Revolution, the imperial-pathetic escapade of Napoleon I, the Grande Armée dreamer, have run their course. In Waterloo, the eagle, rapacious hunter and heraldic seal, is beheaded; only once more will he rise from the ashes as the outsized general with the oddly small mouth uttering phrases that are the grandest, most solemn literature, before flying off and vanishing forever in the heavens.

  We have a new king, no longer of the empire, but rather of the rich, a bourgeois race that yearns for nothing more than peace and order and prosperity; alongside them lives another group, historically embodied by the silkweavers of Lyon, who stagnate and yearn. For what? Not for liberty, equality, fraternity; just for a few scant crumbs of the wealth achieved by the bourgeoisie of every station. No nation has the strength to strive onward unendingly. Law and statute, which permit children to labor and perpetuate the unequal distribution of goods, nonetheless hold out for the individual a previously inconceivable path upwards. Enrichissezvous: [39] a majestic phrase, for money is freedom and honor, dignity and tranquility. Just as the Grand Emperor thrust a marshal’s baton in the knapsack of every soldier, so the July Monarchy gave every bourgeois the certified right to be Julien Sorel. Quel maréchal, le pauvre Julien! [40] Had he lived a bit less zealously, he would have been spared his dreadful end; for the bourgeois, forbearance is not granted from above, he has to impose it upon himself. So it was with the ancestors of Gustave Flaubert, people on the lower fringes of the middle class, veterinarians who moved up in rank, becoming healers of the human body and its plaints. Gustave’s grandfather still looked after livestock, yet his father grew to be an eminent doctor in the Département Seine-Maritime, docteur, member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Rouen, of the Royal Academy of Medicine. Bourgeois moderation has carte blanche to transcend itself and be replaced by something else. The deliverance can be brutal, as it was for Julien Sorel. But in general the process was less hasty.

  Why did Charles Bovary not follow the trajectory his era laid before him? Why did he take that dubious leap over the line of demarcation, choosing for his wife Emma Rouault, who was marked for destiny by her beauty? For his creator, it was a foregone conclusion. Charles Bovary remains the person presented to us on the novel’s very first page: a tubby mediocrity. That he was moreover risible—ridiculus erat!—was an additional bit of malice from that incorrigible aesthete, who claimed only to find escape from himself in raging verbal debauchery, and in whose bulging eyes the world of the bourgeoisie—from which, in reality, he never broke free—was a flat caricature; thus the petits bourgeois laugh at themselves when they make their vapid jokes about cuckolds in the Café du Commerce. They do not like themselves because they do not wish to be themselves—and then they look away when the simple hearts turn out not to be so simple, and long in turn after a few crumbs from the bourgeoisie’s wealth! Charles, as his creator makes clear, was not a bad country doctor, only a mediocre one. The kind that might have met with great success, for example, by performing a bold operation on a clubfoot. But it was not to be, the omnipotent master willed it otherwise. Charles Bovary had as little sanction to succeed as the two companions Bouvard and Pécuchet, concerning whom it is far from evident why all their lust for learning, their diligence, had to come to nothing. The answer: The haut bourgeois Gustave Flaubert, whose income was secured and who found protection in his father’s name against the judg
es who would ultimately pronounce, as was foreseeable, a balanced verdict on his novel, deeply detested the petit bourgeois, the country doctor, whom he had most likely met with or else had heard disparaging remarks about from his father’s lips, even more than the huddled masses, who barely existed for him, and about whom it was therefore easy to fabricate tales of simple hearts, stirred and stirring but not demanding any substantive engagement.

  Charles, a man of duty, does what he can. Maybe it isn’t much—but how much more did the great Doctor Achille-Cléophas Flaubert accomplish? How much did his counterpart, Doctor Larivière, accomplish, when he was forced to admit defeat at Emma’s death? For the farm people, Charles’s work was one of boundless generosity. He came, and with a stroke of the lancet did away with an abscess. He allayed the difficult hours of the fever-stricken, swathing them in cold compresses. It is true they died nonetheless. But they died at the hands of Larivière too, just as they still meet their deaths today under the meticulous care of contemporary medical luminaries. The poor devil, who even on the first day of school made the sons of the better families erupt in laughter because, stricken with fear and embarrassment, he pronounced his name Charbovaricharbovaricharbovari, was not allowed to thrive. Because that is the way the story was conceived? Naturally. And yet the fact that it was conceived in this way is unnatural to the highest degree. The unsavory pleasure taken by the author in this bourgeois tragedy from an era in which, indeed, the bourgeoisie scarcely produced any comedies, devoting themselves rather to the codification in history of their constant upward ascension, reflects Flaubert’s profound and sinister predilection for misfortune, which was appealing—so long as he didn’t fall victim to it.