Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  Her neck emerged from a white, turndown collar. Her black hair, so smooth that its two bandeaux each seemed to be of a single piece, was separated in the middle by a fine parting, that sank slightly along the curve of the skull; and, leaving the tip of the ear scarcely visible, it eventually coalesced behind in a thick chignon, with a flowing movement around the temples, which the country doctor noticed there for the first time in his life. Her cheeks were pink. She wore, like a man, slipped between two buttons of her blouse, a tortoiseshell lorgnon.

  When Charles, after going up to say farewell to Père Rouault, came back into the room before leaving, he found her on her feet, forehead against the window, and looking into the garden, where the poles for the runner beans had been blown over by the wind. She turned around.

  “Are you looking for something?” she asked.

  “My riding crop, please,” he replied.

  And he started to ferret about on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs; it had fallen on the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma spotted it; she leaned over the sacks of corn. Charles, out of gallantry, rushed forward and, as he was also stretching his arm out in the same movement, he felt his chest brush against the back of the young woman, bent under him. Blushing, she straightened up and looked at him over her shoulder, handing him his lashed whip.

  Instead of returning to Les Bertaux in three days’ time, as he had promised her, he came back the very next day, then consistently twice a week, not counting the surprise visits he made from time to time, as if by accident.

  As for the rest, it all went well; the healing proceeded according to the rulebook, and when, at the end of forty-six days, Père Rouault was seen trying to walk on his own in his barton-yard, they began to consider Monsieur Bovary as a man of great abilities. Père Rouault said that he would not have had better treatment from the leading doctors of Yvetot or even of Rouen.

  As for Charles, he never attempted to ask himself why coming to Les Bertaux was so pleasurable. Had he considered it, he would no doubt have attributed his zeal to the seriousness of the case, or perhaps to the advantage he was hoping to draw from it. Was that really why his visits to the farm were, among the meager occupations of his life, such a delightful exception? On those days he rose early, left at a gallop, rode his animal hard, then dismounted to wipe his feet on the grass, slipping on his black gloves before entering. He liked to see himself arrive in the yard, to feel the gate against his shoulder as it opened, and the cock crowing on the wall, the boys coming to meet him. He liked the barn and the stables; he liked Père Rouault, who would clap him on the palm and call him his savior; he liked Mademoiselle Emma’s little clogs on the kitchen’s scrubbed flags; the raised heels made her taller, and, when she walked in front of him, the wooden soles, coming up swiftly, slapped with a sharp snap against the boot leather.

  She would always escort him down to the bottom of the front steps. If they had not yet brought his horse, she would stay there. Their adieus had been said, there was no more talking; the open air wrapped her about, lifting pell-mell her neck’s little downy hairs, or tossing the apron’s ties at her hip, making them writhe like streamers. One time, during a thaw, the trees’ bark oozed in the yard, the snow melted on the roofs of the buildings. She was on the threshold; she went to look for her parasol; she opened it. The parasol, of dapple-gray silk, which the sun penetrated, lit the white skin of her face with a darting shimmer. She smiled beneath it at the balmy warmth; and the drops of water could be heard, one by one, falling upon the taut moire.

  In the early days of Charles’s visits to Les Bertaux, Madame Bovary junior made sure she kept herself informed about the invalid, and in the accounts book, that she kept by double-entry, she had even selected a fine white page for Monsieur Rouault. But when she learned that he had a daughter, she made inquiries; and she learned that Mademoiselle Rouault, brought up in a convent, with the Ursuline nuns, had received, as they say, a good education; that she was acquainted, as a consequence, with dancing, geography, drawing, could do needlework and play the piano. It was the last straw!

  “So that’s why,” she said to herself, “he has such a beaming face when he goes to see her, and dresses in his new waistcoat, at the risk of spoiling it in the rain? Ah, that woman, that woman!”

  And she detested her, instinctively. At first, she assuaged her feelings in hints; Charles did not catch on; then, by dint of casual remarks which he let pass for fear of a storm; finally, through outbursts at point-blank range to which he was at a loss for an answer. “How is it that he kept returning to Les Bertaux, seeing that Monsieur Rouault was healed and these people had not yet paid up? Aha! It’s because over there lay a certain person, someone who knew how to converse, an embroideress, a cultivated soul. There lay what he was partial to: so now he has to have the young ladies of the town!” And she went on:

  “The daughter of Père Rouault, a young lady of the town! Indeed! Their grandfather was a shepherd, and they have a cousin who all but went on trial for a nasty thump, during a quarrel. Not worth her while cutting such a dash, nor exhibiting herself at Sunday church in a silk dress, acting the countess. Wretched fellow, moreover, who, without last year’s rapeseed, would have been hard put to it to pay his arrears!”

  Charles stopped going back to Les Bertaux, from sheer weariness. Héloïse made him swear that he would no longer go there, hand on his prayer book, after a great many sobs and kisses, in a vast explosion of love. So he obeyed; but the boldness of his desire protested against the slavishness of his behavior, and, by a sort of innocent hypocrisy, he considered that this prohibition from seeing her gave him the right to love her.

  And besides, could the widow rub away with her touch, the picture stuck to her husband’s heart? The widow was thin; she had long, hungry teeth; all the year round she wore a little black shawl whose tip came down between her shoulder blades; her stiff waist was sheathed in dresses cut like a scabbard, too short, that revealed her ankles, with the straps of her broad shoes crisscrossing over gray stockings.

  Charles’s mother came to see them now and again; but, after a few days, the daughter-in-law seemed only to sharpen her on her own cutting edge; and so, like two knives, they would be busy making little incisions in him with their remarks and observations. He was wrong to eat so much! Why always be offering a drop to the first arrival? What pigheadedness not to want to wear flannel!

  It happened that at the beginning of spring, a solicitor of Ingouville, holder of widow Dubuc’s assets, sailed off, on a favorable tide, taking with him all the money from his practice. It was true that Héloïse still owned, apart from a share in a boat valued at six thousand francs, her house in rue Saint-François; and yet, of all this fortune that had been jangled so loudly in his ears, nothing, apart from bits of furniture and a few old togs, had appeared in the house. Matters had to be cleared up. The Dieppe house was found to be eaten by mortgages right down to the foundation piles; what she had placed with the solicitor, God alone knew, and the share in the boat came to no more than a thousand écus. So the good lady had lied! In his exasperation, Père Bovary, smashing a chair against the flags, accused his wife of bringing misery on their son by hitching him up to such a nag, whose harness wasn’t worth the leather. They came to Tostes. Matters were discussed. There were scenes. Héloïse, in tears, throwing herself on her husband, entreated him to defend her from his parents. Charles tried to speak up for her. They took offense, and left.

  But the blow had been struck. Eight days later, when hanging out the washing in her yard, she began to spit blood, and the following day, while Charles had his back turned to close the curtains, she said: “Ah! My God!”—let out a sigh and fainted. She was dead! What a shock!

  When all was over at the cemetery, Charles returned home. He found no one below; he went up to the first floor, into the bedroom, saw her dress still hanging at the foot of the alcove; then, leaning on the secretary, he remained until the evening lost in a sorrowful dream. She had
loved him, after all.

  III

  One morning, Père Rouault came bringing Charles the payment for his mended leg: seventy-five francs in forty-sou coins, and a turkey. He had learned of his calamity and consoled him as best he could.

  “I know its nature!” he said, slapping him on the shoulder; “I’ve been as you are, I have indeed! Upon losing my dear departed, I went into the fields to be all alone; I fell down by a tree, I wept, I called on the good Lord, I said foolish things to Him; I’d have rather been like the moles I saw up in the branches, with worms aswarm in the belly, stone dead, in a word. And when I thought that others, at that very moment, were with their little missus and hugging her tight, I gave the earth some fair old thumps with my stick; I was well nigh mad, so much so that I no longer ate; the very thought of going alone to the café disgusted me, you wouldn’t credit it. Ah well, very gradually, one day chasing out another, a spring after a winter and an autumn atop a summer, all that slipped past grain by grain, crumb by crumb; it all went away, it’s gone, gone down, rather, for you’ll always have something left at the bottom, as it were … a weight, there, on the chest! But, as that’s everybody’s lot, one can’t be letting oneself waste away, and, just because others are dead, wishing to die oneself … You have to be shaking yourself up, Monsieur Bovary; it’ll pass! Come and pay us a visit; my daughter thinks of you from time to time, I’ll have you know, and she says as you’ve forgot her, just like that. Spring’s around the corner; we’ll have you shooting a wild rabbit up in the woods, to take your mind off matters a bit.”

  Charles took his advice. He returned to Les Bertaux; he found everything as it was the day before, as it was five months ago, that is to say; the pear trees were already in flower, and old man Rouault, now up and about, kept coming and going, which made the farm livelier.

  Believing it his duty to lavish as many courtesies as possible on the doctor, owing to his woeful situation, he urged him not to take off his hat, spoke to him in hushed tones, as though he had been ill, and even pretended to get angry over the fact that they had not prepared something for his benefit that was a little lighter than all the rest, such as some little cream pots or stewed pears. He told stories. Charles found himself laughing; but the memory of his wife, coming back to him all of a sudden, filled him with gloom. A coffee was brought to him; he thought no more of her.

  He thought about her less, the more he grew used to living alone. The fresh charm of independence soon made solitude more bearable to him. Now he could change the times of his meals, come and go without giving a reason, and, when he was truly weary, stretch out with all four limbs, the full width, on his bed. So, he pampered and coddled himself, and accepted the consolations that he was offered. Furthermore, his wife’s death had not served him so badly in his job, as for a whole month people kept saying: “That poor young man! What a misfortune!” His name spread, his clientele increased; and then he would go to Les Bertaux without a qualm. He felt an aimless hope, a vague happiness; he would find his face more pleasant-looking when brushing his whiskers in the mirror.

  He arrived one day at about three o’clock; everyone was in the fields; he entered the kitchen, but failed to spot Emma at first; the shutters were closed. Through the cracks in the wood, the sun stretched out its long thin rays on the flagstone floor, shattering against the corners of the furniture and trembling on the ceiling. Flies were climbing the length of the glasses left on the table, and buzzing as they drowned at the bottom, in the cider’s dregs. The daylight that came down the chimney, giving a velvet sheen to the fireback’s soot, turned the cold cinders slightly blue. Between the window and the hearth, Emma was sewing; she wore no shawl; you could see on her bare shoulders tiny drops of sweat.

  As was the custom in the country, she offered him something to drink. He refused, she insisted, and finally suggested, laughing, that he have a glass of liqueur with her. So she went to fetch a bottle of curaçao from the cupboard, reached for two small glasses, filled one to the brim, poured scarce a drop in the other, and, having clinked glasses, brought it to her mouth. As it was almost empty, she leaned back to drink; and, head tipped up, lips pushed forward, neck tensed, she laughed that she could not taste a thing, while the tip of her tongue, slipping between her fine teeth, took little licks at the bottom of the glass.

  She sat down and picked up her work again, a white cotton stocking that she was darning; she worked with her head down; she did not say a word, and neither did Charles. The draft, slipping in under the door, thrust a little dust onto the flags; he watched it creep along, and all he could hear was the inward throbbing of his head, with the cry of a hen, in the distance, laying its eggs in the yard. Emma, from time to time, would refresh her cheeks by pressing on them the palms of her hands, which she cooled again afterward on the iron pommels of the massive firedogs.

  She complained of being afflicted, since the start of the season, with dizzy spells; she asked if sea bathing might be helpful; she began to chat about the convent, Charles about his school, the phrases came easily. They went up to her room. She let him look at her old music notebooks, the little volumes she had been given as prizes and the crowns of oak leaves, abandoned at the bottom of a wardrobe. She spoke to him again of her mother, of the cemetery, and even showed him the flower bed in the garden from where she would pick blooms, every first Friday of each month, to place on her grave. But their gardener understood nothing; one was so badly served! She would have liked, even if it was only for the winter, to live in town, although perhaps the length of the fine days made the country even duller during the summer;—and, depending on what she was saying, her voice would be clear, high, or turn languid all of a sudden, would drawl in a singsong that finished almost as a murmur, when she spoke of herself, now joyful, opening innocent eyes, now with lids half-closed, her gaze drowned in weariness, her thoughts wandering.

  In the evening, on his return, Charles took up the phrases one after another that she had uttered, trying to recall them, to complement their meaning, in order to imagine the portion of existence she had lived through in the period when he had not yet known her. But he could never picture her in his thoughts, differently from how he had seen her the first time, or as she was when he had left her just now. Then he asked himself what would become of her, if she were to marry, and to whom? Alas! Père Rouault was very well off, and she!… so lovely! But Emma’s face kept swimming back in front of his eyes, and something monotonous like the hum of a spinning top droned in his ears: “If you were to marry, even so! If you were to marry!” At night, he could not sleep; his throat felt squeezed, he was thirsty; he got up to drink from his water jug and opened the window; the sky was covered in stars, a warm wind was blowing, dogs barked from afar. He turned his head toward Les Bertaux.

  Thinking that after all he had nothing to lose, Charles resolved to pop the question when the occasion offered itself; but, each time it offered itself, the fear of not finding the right words sealed his lips.

  Père Rouault would not have been sorry to have been relieved of his daughter, who was scarce any use to him in the house. He excused her in his own heart, finding that she was too intelligent for cultivation, a calling cursed by heaven, as no millionaire ever came of it. Far from making his fortune, the old fellow made a loss every year; for, if he excelled at bargaining in the markets, where he relished the wiles of his trade, the actual farmwork, on the other hand—along with the day-to-day running of the property—suited him less than anyone. He did not readily take his hands out of his pockets, and spared no expense for anything that concerned his creature comforts, wanting to be well fed, well warmed and well tucked up. He loved rough cider, shoulders of mutton done rare, and properly whipped coffees laced with brandy. He took his meals in the kitchen, alone, in front of the fire, on a little table that was carried to him all laid out, as in the theater.

  So as soon as he noticed that Charles’s cheeks went rosy near his daughter, which meant that one of these days he would ask her to ma
rry him, he chewed the whole matter over in advance. He certainly found him a bit of a runt, and not the son-in-law he would have wished for her; but they said he was steady, careful with money, well educated, and doubtless wouldn’t be caviling too much over the dowry. Now, seeing as Père Rouault was going to be forced to sell twenty-two acres of his property, that he owed a lot to his builder, to his saddlemaker, that the shaft on the cider press needed replacing: “If he asks me for her,” he said to himself, “I’ll give him her.”

  At Michaelmas, Charles came to spend three days at Les Bertaux. The last day went by just like the previous days, as he deferred from one quarter of an hour to the next. Père Rouault went to see him off; they were walking in a sunken lane, they were about to separate; the moment had come. Charles gave himself as far as the corner of the hedge, and at last, when they had passed it:

  “Maître Rouault,” he murmured, “I would very much like to have a word with you.”

  They stopped. Charles held his tongue.

  “Let’s hear all about it! Don’t I know everything already?” said Père Rouault, laughing softly.

  “Père Rouault … Père Rouault …” Charles stammered.

  “I’d like nothing better,” the farmer went on. “Though doubtless the little chit will be of like mind, we ought to ask her opinion of it. So you be off, then; I’ll be heading back home. Listen close: if it’s a yes, you won’t need to come back, because of the other folk about, and, besides, that’ll be too much for her. But so as you don’t fret, I’ll push the shutter wide open against the wall: you’ll see it from the back, if you lean over the hedge.”

  And he moved off.

  Charles tethered his horse to a tree. He ran to position himself on the path; he waited. Half an hour went by, then he counted nineteen minutes by his watch. All of a sudden came a clap against the wall; the shutter had been thrown back, the catch was still trembling.