She did not know if she was sorry she had yielded to him, or if, on the contrary, she longed to cherish him even more. The humiliation of feeling so weak was turning into a resentment tempered by sensuous pleasure. It was not an attachment; it was a kind of permanent seduction. He was subjugating her. She was almost afraid of it.
Outward appearances, nevertheless, were more serene than ever, Rodolphe having succeeded in managing the affair as he pleased; and after six months, by the time spring came, they found themselves behaving toward each other like a married couple calmly tending a domestic flame.
It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey, in memory of his mended leg. The gift would always arrive with a letter. Emma cut the string tying it to the basket, and read the following:
My dear children,
I hope these lines find you in good health and that this one will be as good as the others; it seems to me a little more tender, if I dare say so, and denser. But next time, for a change, I’ll give you a cock, unless you’ d rather keep getting the picots; and please send the hamper back to me, along with the last two. I’ve had an unfortunate mishap with my cart shed, one night when the wind was high, the roof flew off into the trees. The harvest wasn’t much to speak of either. Well, I don’t know when I’m going to come see you. It’s so hard for me to leave the house now that I’m on my own, my poor Emma!
And here there was a gap between the lines, as if the old fellow had let his pen drop and daydreamed for a while.
As for me, I’m well, except for a cold I caught the other day at the Yvetot fair, where I went to hire a shepherd, having sacked mine as a consequence of his being too particular concerning his food. How much there is to complain of with these highway robbers! Besides that, he was also dishonest.
I heard from a peddler who was traveling through your part of the country this winter and had a tooth pulled that Bovary was still working hard. That doesn’t surprise me, and he showed me his tooth; we had a coffee together. I asked him if he had seen you, he said no, but he had seen two horses in the stable, from which I concluded that business is good. Glad to hear it, my dear children, and may the good Lord send you all imaginable happiness.
It grieves me that I don’t yet know my beloved granddaughter Berthe Bovary. I have planted a tree for her in the garden under your bedroom window, it’s a plum tree that bears in September, and I won’t let anyone touch it except to make compotes for her later, which I will keep in the cupboard, just for her, when she comes.
Goodbye, my dear children. I kiss you, my daughter; you, too, my son-in-law, and the little one, on both cheeks.
I am, with my very best wishes,
Your affectionate father,
THÉODORE ROUAULT
She sat for a few minutes holding the coarse paper between her fingers. The letter was a tangle of spelling mistakes, and Emma followed the gentle thought that clucked its way through them like a hen half hidden in a hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the fireplace, for a little gray powder slid from the letter onto her dress, and she thought she could almost see her father bending toward the hearth to grasp the tongs. How long it was since she used to sit next to him, on the stool, by the fire, burning the end of a stick in the big flame of crackling furze! … She thought back to summer evenings flooded with sunlight. The colts would whinny when you walked by, and they would gallop and gallop … There was a hive of honeybees under her window, and now and then the bees, circling in the light, would tap against the panes like bouncing balls of gold. How happy those days had been! How free! How full of hope! How rich in illusions! There were none left now! She had spent them in all the different adventures of her soul, in all those successive stages she had gone through, in her virginity, her marriage, and her love; —losing them continuously as her life went on, like a traveler who leaves some part of his wealth at every inn along his road.
But what was making her so unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe that had overturned her life? And she lifted her head and looked around, as though seeking the cause of what hurt her so.
A ray of April sunshine shimmered over the china on the shelves of the cabinet; the fire was burning; she could feel, under her slippers, the softness of the carpet; the day was clear, the air warm, and she could hear her child bursting into peals of laughter.
In fact, the little girl was rolling around on the lawn, in the midst of the grass that was being dried for hay. She was lying flat on her stomach on top of one of the piles. The servant was holding on to her by the skirt. Lestiboudois was raking close by, and every time he came up, she would lean out, beating the air with her arms.
“Bring her to me!” said her mother, hurrying over to give her a kiss. “How much I love you, my poor child! How much I love you!”
Then, noticing that the tips of the child’s ears were a little dirty, she quickly rang for warm water and cleaned her, changed her underclothes, her stockings, her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as though just back from a trip; and finally, kissing her again and weeping a little, she handed her back to the maid, who was standing there quite astonished at this excess of tenderness.
That night, Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.
“It will pass,” he supposed; “it’s just a whim.”
And he missed three of their rendezvous in succession. When he returned, she was cold and almost disdainful.
“Ah! You’re wasting your time, my pet …”
And he appeared not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the handkerchief she kept bringing out.
It was then that Emma repented!
She even asked herself why she despised Charles, and if it would not have been better to be able to love him. But he did not offer much of an opening for this renewal of affection, so that she was quite foiled in her momentary inclination for sacrifice, when the apothecary happened to provide her with a timely opportunity.
[11]
He had recently read an article singing the praises of a new method of correcting clubfeet; and since he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, too, in order to keep abreast of the times, ought to be performing operations on strephopodia.
“After all,” he said to Emma, “what risk is there? Look” (and he enumerated on his fingers the advantages of the attempt): “almost certain success, relief and improved appearance for the patient, immediate celebrity for the surgeon. Why wouldn’t your husband, for example, want to help out poor Hippolyte, over at the Lion d’Or? Note that the boy would be sure to tell the story of his cure to all the travelers, and also” (Homais lowered his voice and looked around) “what would prevent me from sending the newspaper a little piece about it? My Lord! An article gets around … people talk about it … the thing ends up snowballing! And who knows? Who knows?”
Indeed, Bovary might make a success of it; Emma had no reason to think he was not skillful, and what a satisfaction it would be for her to have started him on a path that would increase both his reputation and his fortune? All she wanted, now, was to be able to lean on something more solid than love.
Charles, urged by her and by the apothecary, allowed himself to be persuaded. He sent to Rouen for the volume by Doctor Duval, and every evening, his head in his hands, he immersed himself in reading it.
While Charles was studying pes equinus, varus, and valgus, that is, strephocatopodia, strephendopodia, and strephexopodia (or, to be more exact, the various malformations of the foot, downward, inward, and outward), along with strephypopodia and strephanopodia (in other words, downward torsion and upward straightening), Monsieur Homais, by every kind of argument, was exhorting the innkeeper’s stableboy to submit to the operation.
“You may possibly feel just a slight pain; it’s a simple prick like a mild bloodletting, less than the extirpation of certain types of corns.”
Hippolyte, as he thought a
bout it, was rolling his eyes in bewilderment.
“In any case,” the pharmacist went on, “this has nothing to do with me! I’m thinking of you! Out of pure humanity! I would like to see you relieved, my friend, of your hideous claudication, along with that swaying of the lumbar region, which, though you claim otherwise, must prove a considerable obstacle to you in the exercise of your vocation.”
Then Homais described how much nimbler and more vigorous he would feel afterward, and even implied that he might be more pleasing to women; and the stableboy began to smile foolishly. Then he attacked him through his vanity:
“Aren’t you a man, by heaven! What if you had had to serve in the army, follow your flag into battle? … Ah! Hippolyte!”
And Homais would walk away, declaring that he could not understand such stubbornness, such blindness in refusing the benefits of science.
The poor fellow gave in, for it was a kind of general conspiracy. Binet, who never meddled in other people’s affairs, Madame Lefrançois, Artémise, the neighbors, and even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache—everyone urged him, lectured him, shamed him; but what decided him, in the end, was that it wouldn’t cost him anything. Bovary even undertook to provide the apparatus for the operation. This piece of generosity had been Emma’s idea; and Charles agreed to it, telling himself in his heart of hearts that his wife was an angel.
And so, with suggestions from the pharmacist, and after starting over three times, he had the carpenter, with the help of the locksmith, build him a sort of box weighing about eight pounds and containing ample quantities of iron, wood, sheet metal, leather, screws, and nuts.
However, in order to know which of Hippolyte’s tendons should be cut, it was necessary to find out first what sort of clubfoot he had.
His foot formed an almost straight line with his leg, which did not prevent it from also being turned inward, so that it was a pes equinus mixed with a little of the varus, or a slight varus strongly marked by the pes equinus. But with this pes equinus, as broad, in fact, as a horse’s hoof, with its roughened skin, stringy tendons, large toes, and black toenails representing the nails of the horseshoe, the strephopod would gallop, from morning to night, like a deer. One was always seeing him in the square, skipping around the carts, thrusting his unequal limb out in front of him. In fact, he seemed stronger on that leg than on the other. Through having served so long, it had developed something like the moral qualities of patience and energy, and when he was given a heavy piece of work to do, he would throw his weight on that leg by preference.
Now, since it was a pes equinus, it was necessary to cut the Achilles tendon, only later tackling the anterior tibial muscle so as to get rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare risk both operations at once, and in fact he was quaking already, for fear of assaulting some important part of the foot with which he was unfamiliar.
Neither Ambroise Paré, applying a ligature directly to an artery for the first time since Celsus, fifteen centuries before; nor Dupuytren, about to open an abscess through a thick layer of encephalon; nor Gensoul, when he performed the first ablation of the superior maxilla, had a heart that pounded so, a hand so tremulous, a mind so tense as Monsieur Bovary approaching Hippolyte, his tenotomy knife in his hand. And as in a hospital, one saw, on a table to one side, a pile of lint, some waxed threads, a great many bandages, a pyramid of bandages, all the bandages that could be found in the apothecary. It was Monsieur Homais who had been organizing all these preparations since early morning, as much in order to dazzle the crowd as to delude himself. Charles pierced the skin; a sharp snap could be heard. The tendon was cut, the operation was done. Hippolyte could not get over his surprise; he took Bovary’s hands and covered them with kisses.
“Now, now, calm down,” said the apothecary. “You’ll have a chance later on to show your benefactor how grateful you are!”
And he went downstairs to describe the result to five or six curious bystanders who had taken up positions in the courtyard and who imagined that Hippolyte would reappear walking upright. Then Charles, having buckled his patient into the mechanical-motion device, returned home, where Emma, very anxious, was waiting for him at the door. She threw her arms around him; they sat down at the table; he ate a great deal; and, at dessert, he even asked for a cup of coffee, a bit of intemperance he usually permitted himself only on Sundays when they had company.
The evening was delightful, full of conversation and shared dreams. They talked about their future wealth, improvements to be made in the household; he saw his reputation growing, his prosperity increasing, his wife loving him forever; and she was happy to find herself reinvigorated by a new sentiment, a healthier, better one, a feeling of some affection for this poor man who cherished her so. The thought of Rodolphe passed through her mind for a moment; but her eyes returned to Charles: she even noticed with surprise that his teeth weren’t bad at all.
They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, despite the cook, abruptly entered their room, holding in his hand a freshly written sheet of paper. It was the notice he was going to send to Le Fanal de Rouen. He was bringing it for them to read.
“Read it to us,” said Bovary.
He read:
“‘Despite the prejudices that still cover a part of the face of Europe like a web, the light is nevertheless beginning to penetrate into our countryside. Thus, on Tuesday last, our little city of Yonville found itself the theater for a surgical experiment that was at the same time an act of pure philanthropy. Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners …’”
“Oh! That’s going too far! Too far!” said Charles, suffocating with emotion.
“No, not at all! Come now! … ‘Operated on a clubfoot …’ I didn’t use the scientific term because, you know, in a newspaper … perhaps not everyone would understand; the common people must …”
“Indeed, yes,” said Bovary. “Go on.”
“I’ll continue,” said the pharmacist. “‘Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners, operated on a clubfoot by the name of Hippolyte Tautain, stableboy for the past twenty-five years at the Lion d’Or hotel, kept by Madame Widow Lefrançois, on the Place d’Armes. The novelty of the undertaking and the interest felt in the patient had attracted such a gathering of the population that there was a veritable crush on the threshold of the establishment. The operation, what is more, was performed as though by magic, and only a few drops of blood appeared on the skin, as if to announce that the rebellious tendon had at last yielded to the efforts of art. The patient, strange to say (we affirm this de visu), professed no pain. His condition, up to the present, is all that could be hoped for. There is every indication that his convalescence will be brief; and who knows but what, at the next village fair, we may see our good Hippolyte, amid a chorus of gay blades, taking part in the bacchanalian dances, thus proving to all eyes, by his verve no less than his entrechats, how fully he has recovered? All honor, therefore, to our generous men of science! All honor to those tireless intellects who devote their waking hours to the betterment or relief of their fellow men! All honor to them! All honor thrice over! Can we not now cry out that the blind shall see, the deaf shall hear, and the lame shall walk? But what fanaticism once promised to its chosen few, science now accomplishes for all men! We shall keep our readers informed of the successive stages of this most remarkable cure.’”
Which did not stop Mère Lefrançois from coming by five days later, frightened to death and shouting:
“Help! He’s dying! … I’m going out of my mind!”
Charles hurried to the Lion d’Or, and the pharmacist, seeing him pass through the square without a hat, left the pharmacy. He himself turned up breathless, red-faced, worried, and asking everyone who was climbing the stairs:
“What’s the matter with our interesting strephopod?”
The strephopod was thrashing about in dreadful convulsions, so much so that the mechanical apparatus in which his leg w
as enclosed was striking the wall hard enough to stave it in.
With many precautions so as not to disturb the position of the leg, they therefore removed the box, and a horrifying sight met their eyes. The shape of the foot had disappeared within a swelling so extreme that the skin seemed about to split, and the entire surface was covered with ecchymoses caused by the much-vaunted machine. Hippolyte had complained before this that it was hurting him; no one had paid any attention; they had to admit he had not been entirely wrong; and they left him free for a few hours. But scarcely had the edema gone down a little than the two experts deemed it advisable to return the limb to the apparatus, tightening it further in order to speed things up. At last, three days later, Hippolyte being unable to endure it any longer, they removed the contrivance again, and were quite astonished at the result they observed. A livid tumefaction was now spreading up the leg, with phlyctenae here and there from which a black liquid was seeping out. Things were taking a serious turn. Hippolyte was becoming despondent, and Mère Lefrançois moved him into the small parlor, next to the kitchen, so that he would at least have some distraction.
But the tax collector, who dined there every day, complained bitterly at such companionship. So they transported Hippolyte into the billiards room.
There he lay, whimpering under his coarse blankets, pale, unshaven, hollow-eyed, now and then turning his sweaty head on the dirty pillow where flies kept landing. Madame Bovary would come to see him. She would bring cloths for his poultices and comfort him, encourage him. He had no lack of company, in any case, especially on market days, when he was surrounded by countryfolk knocking the billiard balls, sparring with the cue sticks, smoking, drinking, singing, shouting.
“How are you?” they would say, slapping him on the shoulder. “Ah, you don’t look too good! But it’s your own fault. You should have done this, you should have done that.”
Madame Bovary Page 22
