Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  When she bore a child, it had to be put out to a wet nurse. Returned home, the brat was spoiled like a prince. His mother fed him jams; his father let him run around without shoes, and, acting the philosopher, even said that he could go about naked, like the young of animals. To counter any maternal leanings, he had in his head a certain virile ideal of childhood by which he endeavored to mold his son, wanting him to be brought up the hard way, in the Spartan manner, to give him a sound constitution. He sent him to bed without a fire, taught him to take great swigs of rum and to insult the church processions. But, being naturally easygoing, the child responded poorly to his efforts. His mother was always dragging him after her; she would cut up pasteboard boxes for him, tell him stories, converse with him in unending monologues, full of melancholic gaieties and babbling blandishments. In the loneliness of her life, she transferred onto this child’s head all her scattered, broken vanities. She dreamed of high positions, she saw him as already tall, handsome, witty, established in civil engineering or in the magistracy. She taught him to read, and even, on an old piano of hers, to sing two or three sentimental ballads. But, to all this, Monsieur Bovary, who cared little for the arts, objected that it was not worth it! Would they ever have what was needed to support him at a government school, buy him a practice or a business? Besides, if he has the cheek, a fellow always succeeds in the world. Madame Bovary bit her lip, and the child roamed the village.

  He followed the plowmen and, with clods of earth, would drive off the crows that flew away. He ate blackberries all along the ditches, kept watch over the turkeys with a stick, tossed the hay at harvest, ran in the woods, played hopscotch in the church porch on rainy days, and, during the main festivals, would beg the verger to let him ring the bells, so that he could hang full length from the great rope and feel its peals carry him away.

  And he shot up like an oak. He acquired strong hands, a healthy bloom.

  When he was twelve, his mother was finally allowed to start him on his studies. They assigned these to the priest. But the lessons were so brief and so poorly followed, that they could serve little purpose. They were given at spare moments, in the sacristy, standing up, in a rush, between a baptism and a burial; or else the priest would send for his pupil after the evening Angelus, if he had not to go out. You went up to his room, you settled down: the midges and the moths swirled around the tallow. It was hot, the child fell asleep; and the old fellow, dozing off with his hands on his belly, was soon snoring, mouth agape. At other times, when Monsieur le Curé, returning from giving the eucharist to some sick person or other in the neighborhood, spotted Charles up to mischief in the open fields, he would call him over, give him a good talking-to for a quarter of an hour and use the opportunity to make him conjugate his verbs at the foot of a tree. Rain would come to interrupt them, or an acquaintance passing by. Yet he was always pleased with him, even saying that the young fellow had an ample memory.

  Charles could not stop there. Madame was insistent. Ashamed, or weary rather, Monsieur yielded without resistance, and they waited one more year until the boy had made his first communion.

  Another six months went by; and, the following year, Charles was sent for good to school in Rouen, taken there personally by his father, toward the end of October, at the time of the Saint-Romain fair.

  It would be impossible now for any of us to remember a thing about him. He was an even-tempered boy, who played at break time, worked in the study hour, listened in class, sleeping well in the dormitory and eating well in the refectory. He had a wholesale ironmonger in the rue Ganterie as guardian, who took him out once a month, on Sundays, after his shop was shut, would send him off to walk around the harbor to look at the boats, then take him back to school as soon as it was seven o’clock, before supper. Each Thursday evening, he wrote a long letter to his mother using red ink and three bars of sealing wax; then he would go over his history exercise books, or read an old volume of Anacharsis lying about in the schoolroom. On walks, he chatted with the servant, who was from the country just like him.

  By dint of application, he always remained around the middle of the class; once, he even gained a first certificate of merit in natural history. But at the end of his fourth year, his parents took him out of school to have him study medicine, convinced that he could make his own way up to the baccalaureate.

  His mother chose a room for him, on the fourth floor, along the Eau-de-Robec, with a dyer of her acquaintance. She concluded the arrangements for his board and lodging, bought some furniture, a table and two chairs, had an old cherrywood bed sent from home, and in addition bought a little cast-iron stove, with a supply of wood to keep her poor child warm. Then she left at the end of the week, after innumerable recommendations to behave well, now that he was to be left to his own devices.

  The curriculum, which he read on the noticeboard, made him feel giddy: lectures in anatomy, lectures in pathology, lectures in physiology, lectures in pharmacology, lectures in chemistry, in botany, and in clinical and therapeutic medicine, not to mention hygiene and materia medica, all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant and which were like so many sanctuary doors full of august shades.

  He understood nothing; he listened in vain, he did not grasp it. Yet he worked, he had well-bound notebooks, he would follow all the lectures, he missed not a single ward round. He performed his little daily task like a mill horse, that turns on the same spot blindfold, ignorant of what it is crushing.

  To spare him expense, his mother sent him, each week, by messenger, a piece of roast veal, on which he would breakfast in the morning, when he returned from the hospital, all the while beating his feet against the wall to warm them. Then he had to run to classes, to the amphitheater, to the hospice, and come back home, right across town. In the evening, after his landlord’s meager dinner, he went up again to his room and got back down to work, in wet clothes that steamed on his body, before the glowing stove.

  On beautiful summer evenings, when the warm streets are empty and the servant girls play battledore on the front step, he would open the window and lean on his elbows. The river, which made a vile little Venice of this area of Rouen, flowed below, right beneath him, yellow, violet or blue between its bridges and its railings. Workers, crouched by the edge, washed their arms in the water. On poles protruding from the lofts, hanks of cotton dried in the open air. Opposite, beyond the roofs, the great pure sky stretched, with a red setting sun. How good it must be over there! How cool under the beech grove! And he opened his nostrils wide to breathe in the good smells of the countryside, which did not reach him.

  He thinned out, he grew taller, and his face took on a sort of doleful expression which made it almost interesting.

  Naturally, out of indolence, he began to release himself from all the resolutions he had made. Once, he skipped a ward round, the next day his lecture, and, savoring the laziness, little by little, returned there no more.

  He became a tavern regular, developing a passion for dominoes. Shutting himself up every evening in a squalid public bar, tapping the little black-dotted sheep bones on marble tables, seemed to him a precious act of liberty, which gave him back his self-esteem. It was his initiation into the world, his admittance into forbidden pleasures; and, on entering, he would place his hand upon the doorknob with a joy that was almost sensual. Then a lot of things that were squeezed in him began to expand; he learned little songs by heart that he sang at the initiation drinks, was infatuated with Béranger, learned how to make punch and knew what love was at last.

  Thanks to these preparatory labors, he completely failed his medical officer’s exam. They were waiting for him that very evening at the house to celebrate his success!

  He set off on foot and stopped at the entrance to the village, where he sent for his mother, told her everything. She forgave him, shifting blame onto the unfairness of the examiners, and stiffened his resolve a little, taking it upon herself to sort things out. It was another five years before Monsieur Bovary knew the truth;
it was hoary old news, he accepted it, not being able to imagine, anyway, that his male issue could be a dunce.

  So Charles went back to work and revised for his exams without a break, learning all the questions in advance by heart. He passed with quite a good mark. What a wonderful day for his mother! They gave a huge dinner.

  Where would he go to practice his skills? To Tostes. There was only an old doctor there. For a long time Madame Bovary had been on the watch for his death, and the gentleman had not yet turned up his toes when Charles was installed opposite, as his successor.

  But it was not enough to have raised her son, to have had him study medicine and to have found a practice for him in Tostes: he needed a wife. She found him one: the widow of a Dieppe bailiff, who was forty-five and worth twelve hundred livres a year.

  Although she was ugly, thin as a rake and pimply as a goose, it has to be said that Madame Dubuc did not lack for choice when it came to a match. To achieve her ends, Mère Bovary had to oust them all, and she foiled—and very skillfully too—the intrigues of a pork butcher who was backed by the priests.

  Charles had dimly envisaged in the marriage the advent of a better life, imagining that he would be freer and could have at his disposal her person and her money. But his wife was the master; in front of people he must say this, must not say that, had to abstain from meat on Fridays, dress as she thought fit, harass on her instructions those clients who were not settling up. She unsealed his letters, spied on his every move, and put her ear to the partition wall as he was giving consultations in his surgery, when there were women.

  She must have her hot chocolate every morning, and his never-ending attentions. She would complain ceaselessly of her nerves, her chest, her fluids. The noise of footsteps gave her pains; you went away, and the solitude grew hateful to her; you came back to her side, and it was to watch her die, no doubt. In the evening, when Charles returned, she produced her long, scrawny arms from under the sheet, slipped them around his neck, and, having made him sit on the edge of the bed, set about telling him her sorrows: he was forgetting her, he loved another! People had indeed told her she would be unhappy; and she ended up asking him for a syrup for her health and a little bit more love.

  II

  One night, at about eleven o’clock, they were woken by the noise of a horse that stopped just in front of the door. The maid opened the attic skylight and argued things over for some time with the man still down below, in the street. He had come looking for a doctor; he had a letter. Nastasie descended the steps shivering, and went to open the lock and slip the bolts, one after the other. The man left his horse and, following the maid, appeared behind her all of a sudden. From his gray-tasseled cotton bonnet he pulled out a letter wrapped in a piece of rag, and daintily presented it to Charles, who leaned his elbow on the pillow to read it. Nastasie, near the bed, held the light. Madame, out of a sense of decency, stayed with her back turned, facing the wall.

  This letter, sealed with a little seal of blue wax, begged Monsieur Bovary to go immediately to the farm at Les Bertaux, to set a broken leg. Now, between Tostes and Les Bertaux, there are a good eighteen miles to cross, by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. The night was black. Madame Bovary the younger was fearful of accidents befalling her husband. So it was decided that the stable boy should set off first. Charles would leave three hours later, when the moon rose. They would send a child to meet him, in order to show him the way to the farm and open the gates ahead.

  At about four o’clock, Charles, wrapped up well in his cloak, set off for Les Bertaux. Still drowsy from the warmth of sleep, he let himself be lulled by the peaceful trot of his beast. Whenever it stopped of its own accord before those thorn-wreathed holes they dig on the boundaries of plowed fields, Charles, waking up with a start, would remember the broken leg, and endeavor to remind himself of all the fractures he knew. The rain was no longer falling; day was breaking, and, on the leafless apple trees, the birds stayed motionless, ruffling their little feathers in the cold morning wind. The flat country stretched out as far as the eye could see, and the clumps of trees around the farms made, at rare intervals, deep violet patches on this vast gray surface that fused at the horizon with the gloomy tint of the sky. Charles, from time to time, opened his eyes; then, his mind wearying and sleep returning of its own accord, he soon slipped into a kind of slumber where, his recent feelings merging with his memories, he perceived himself in duplicate, both student and married man, lying in his bed as he had been just now, crossing an operating room as in the past. The hot smell of poultices blended in his head with the fresh scent of the dew; he heard the beds’ iron rings trundling on their curtain rods and his wife sleeping … As he came through Vassonville, he noticed, on the edge of a ditch, a young boy seated on the grass.

  “Are you the doctor?” the child asked.

  And, at Charles’s reply, he took his clogs in his hands and began to run ahead.

  Along the way, the medical officer understood from the chatter of his guide that Monsieur Rouault must be among the better-off farmers. He had broken a leg, the evening before, on his way back from a Twelfth Night revel at a neighbor’s house. His wife had been dead two years. He had only his young lady with him, who helped him keep house.

  The ruts grew deeper. He was approaching Les Bertaux. The little lad, slipping through a hole in a hedge, vanished, then reappeared at the bottom of a courtyard to open the gate. The horse slipped on the wet grass; Charles ducked down to pass under the branches. The guard dogs barked in a kennel, tugging on their chain. When he entered Les Bertaux, his horse took fright and shied.

  It was a fine-looking farm. In the stables, through the open upper doors, heavy plow horses could be seen, feeding calmly from new racks. An ample muck heap stretched the length of the buildings; steam rose from it, and, among the hens and turkey cocks, five or six peacocks pecked about on top, a luxury of Caux farmyards. The sheepfold was long, the barn was high, its walls smooth as your hand. Inside the shed were two large carts and four plows, with their whips, their chains, their full harness, whose blue wool fleeces were being soiled by the fine dust that fell from the haylofts. The yard sloped upward, planted with evenly spaced trees, and the happy chatter of a gaggle of geese rang out by the pond.

  A young woman, in a blue merino dress trimmed with three flounces, appeared at the door of the house to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she showed into the kitchen, where a great fire blazed. The servants’ meal bubbled around it, in little pots of uneven size. Wet clothes were drying in the chimney’s recess. The fire shovel, tongs and bellows, all of massive proportions, shone like polished steel, while along the walls stretched a copiousness of coppers and pans, in which the clear flame of the fireplace glittered unevenly, mingling with the sun’s first gleams arriving through the panes.

  Charles went up to the first floor, to see the patient. He found him in his bed, sweating under the covers and having tossed his cotton bonnet a fair distance. He was a fat little man of fifty, white-skinned, blue-eyed, bald at the front, and wearing earrings. At his side, on a chair, he had a large carafe of brandy, which he poured for himself now and again to buck himself up; but, as soon as he saw the doctor, his intense excitement dropped away, and instead of cursing, as he had been doing for the last twelve hours, he began to moan feebly.

  It was a simple fracture, with no complications whatsoever. Charles could not have hoped for anything easier. So, recalling how his teachers behaved at the bedside of the injured, he comforted the patient with all sorts of kindly words, surgical endearments that are like the oil with which they lubricate the scalpels. For the splints, a bundle of laths was fetched from the cart shed. Charles chose one of them, cut it into pieces and polished it with a sliver of glass pane, while the maidservant ripped up sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma endeavored to sew some pads. As she took a long time to find her box, her father grew impatient; she said nothing in reply; but, while sewing, she kept pricking her fingers, that she would then bring to
her mouth to suck.

  Charles was surprised by the whiteness of her nails. They were glossy, fine at the tips, buffed more thoroughly than the ivories of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not beautiful, not pale enough perhaps, the knuckles a little dry; it was too long as well, and its outline had no soft curves. What was beautiful about her, was her eyes; although they were brown, her lashes made them appear black, and her glance reached you candidly with a guileless daring.

  Once the dressing was done, the doctor was invited, by Monsieur Rouault himself, to take a bite before he left.

  Charles went down into the ground-floor room. Two places had been set with silver goblets on a little table, at the foot of a great canopied four-poster bed covered in calico printed with characters representing Turks. A smell of iris root and damp sheets could be detected, escaping from the tall oaken wardrobe, facing the window. On the floor, in the corners, placed upright, stood sacks of corn. They were the overflow from the nearby barn, which was reached by three stone steps. For decoration, hooked onto a nail in the middle of the wall whose green paint was being lifted by the saltpeter, the room had a head of Minerva in black pencil, gilt-framed, and which bore at the bottom, written in Gothic lettering: “to my dear papa.”

  The talk at first was of the invalid, then of the weather, of the hard winters, of the wolves that roam the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not really enjoy herself in the countryside, above all now that she was in almost sole charge of the farm’s affairs. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate, revealing something of her full lips, which she had a habit of nibbling at in her silent moments.