The next day he was up at the farm by nine o’clock. Emma blushed when he came in, all the while endeavoring to laugh a little, discomposed. Père Rouault embraced his future son-in-law. They put off discussing the settlement of assets; there was lots of time in hand, as the marriage could not decently take place before the end of the mourning period, in other words around the spring of next year.
Winter was spent in anticipation. Mademoiselle Rouault busied herself with her trousseau. A part of it was ordered from Rouen, and she made up nightgowns and nightcaps, following fashion drawings she had borrowed. During Charles’s visits to the farm, they chatted about the wedding preparations; they wondered which room should host the feast; they dreamed of the number of dishes needed and what the entrées would be.
Emma had, on the contrary, wished to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches; but this idea baffled Père Rouault. So there would be a wedding, attended by forty-three guests, in which sixteen hours would be spent at table, to begin again on the morrow and a little more over the following days.
IV
The guests arrived early in carriages, one-horse covered carts, two-wheeled pleasure cars, old hoodless gigs, spring carts with leather curtains, and the young folk of the nearest villages on dung carts in which they stood, in a row, hands resting on the stave-sides to stop themselves falling, trotting along and severely shaken about. They arrived there from thirty miles distant, from Goderville, from Normanville and from Cany. All the relations from both sides had been invited, quarrels patched up between friends, long-lost acquaintances written to.
From time to time, the crack of a whip could be heard from behind the hedge; shortly the gate would open; it was a cart coming in. Galloping right to the foot of the front steps, it would draw up abruptly and empty out its crowd who would issue forth from all sides, rubbing their knees and stretching their arms. The ladies, in bonnets, had town dresses, gold watch chains, tippets with their crossed ends tucked into their belts, or little colored fichus fastened at the back with a pin, revealing their necks from behind. The young lads, dressed identically to their fathers, seemed troubled by their new apparel (many that day were even breaking in their first-ever pair of boots); beside them could be seen, not breathing a word in her white communion robe let down for the occasion, some tall lass between fourteen and sixteen, no doubt their cousin or elder sister, red-faced, stupefied, hair greasy with rose pomade, and in great fear of soiling her gloves. As there were not enough stable boys to unyoke all the carriages, the gentlemen rolled up their sleeves and set to it themselves. In keeping with their differing social position, they had on dress coats, frock coats, jackets, cutaways:—best clothes, hemmed about with all the respect of a family, and which left the wardrobe only on formal occasions; frock coats with great skirts flapping in the wind, with cylindrical collars, with broad pockets like sacks; jackets of coarse cloth, that would generally accompany some cap or other with a brass rim on its visor; very short cutaways, with two buttons at the back set side by side like a pair of eyes, and whose panels seemed to have been cut straight from the same block, by a carpenter’s axe. Several more still (but these, of course, had to dine at the bottom end of the table) wore formal smock frocks; the type, that is to say, whose collar would be turned down on the shoulders, the back gathered in tiny folds and the waist attached very low down by a stitched belt.
And the shirts swelled out like breastplates! Everyone was newly shorn, with stuck-out ears and heads cropped close; there were even some who, rising before dawn and not seeing clearly enough to shave, had diagonal gashes under the nose, or, along the jaw, flaps of skin as broad as a three-franc piece, and which the open air had inflamed along the way, marbling with little pink blotches all these huge, white, beaming faces.
The Mairie being a mile and a half from the farm, they went there on foot, and returned in the same manner, once the ceremony was accomplished at the church. The procession, close-knit at first in a single scarf of color that fluttered in the fields along the narrow path snaking between the green corn, soon stretched out and divided itself into different groups, lingering to chat. The fiddler walked at its head, his violin’s scroll adorned with ribbons; the newlyweds came next, then the relatives, then the friends any old how, and the children stayed at the back, having fun plucking the little bell flowers off the oat stalks, or playing amongst themselves, without being seen. Emma’s dress, too long, dragged a little at the hem; from time to time, she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved fingers, picked off the coarse grasses and tiny spears of thistle, while Charles, empty-handed, waited for her to finish. Père Rouault, a new silk hat on his head and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands to the fingertips, gave his arm to Mère Bovary. As for Père Bovary, who, deeply contemptuous of all these types, had come simply in a military-style frock coat with a single row of buttons, he was babbling smoking-room gallantries to a blond young peasant girl. She nodded, blushed, had no idea what to reply. The remaining wedding guests chatted about business or played tricks behind each other’s backs, excited in advance by the jollity; and, listening out, one could still hear the screaking of the fiddler who went on playing among the open fields. When he realized that they were far behind him, he stopped to catch his breath, rubbed his bow with rosin for a long while, so as to make the strings squeak better, and then set off again, lowering and raising the neck of his violin by turns to beat time correctly, for himself. The noise of the instrument chased the little birds from a long way away.
It was under the wide shelter of the cart shed that the table had been laid out. Upon it were four sirloins, six chicken fricassées, some stewed veal, three shoulders of mutton, and, in the middle, a pretty roasted suckling pig, flanked by four dishes of chitterlings sprinkled with sorrel. On the corners stood decanters of brandy. The sweet bottled cider was urging its thick froth up around the corks, and all the glasses had been filled with wine to the brim. Great dishes of yellow cream, which swayed by themselves at the slightest knock of the table, displayed the initials of the newlyweds, drawn on their plain surfaces in arabesques of tiny comfits. A pâtissier from Yvetot had been sought for the tarts and nougat. As he was just starting out in the area, he had taken great pains; and he himself brought along a tiered wedding cake, for dessert, which made everyone cry out. The base, first of all, was a square of blue pasteboard featuring a temple with porticoes, colonnades and stucco statues all around, in niches spangled with stars of gilded paper; then, on the second tier, there stood a keep in Savoie cake, surrounded by minute fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, quartered oranges; and finally, on the uppermost shelf, which was a green meadow with rocks and lakes of jam and hazelnut boats, a little Cupid could be seen, playing on a chocolate swing, whose two posts were finished with two real rosebuds, by way of balls, at the summit.
They ate until the evening. When they were too tired to stay seated, they went for a stroll round the farmyards or to play a game of corks in the barn; then back to the table they came. Toward the end some fell asleep there, and snored. But at coffee time everything revived; they broke into songs, they did feats of strength, they lifted weights, they ducked under their own thumbs, they tried to lift wagons onto their shoulders, they cracked coarse jokes, they kissed the ladies. In the evening, when it was time to leave, the horses, stuffed to the nostrils with oats, found it hard to pass between the shafts; they kicked, reared, broke the harness, their masters swore or laughed; and all night, by the light of the moon, by the country roads, carts swept along at full gallop, bouncing in the drainage ditches, leaping the pebble-stone heaps, catching on banks, with women leaning out of the doors to grab the reins.
Those staying in Les Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen. The children had fallen asleep under the benches.
The bride had begged her father that they should spare her the usual jests. Nevertheless, a wholesale fish merchant among their cousins (who had even brought along a pair of sol
es as a wedding present) started to blow water with his mouth through the keyhole, when Père Rouault arrived just in time to stop him, and explained that his son-in-law’s important standing did not permit such improprieties. The cousin, however, had difficulty in going along with these excuses. Privately, he accused Père Rouault of being stuck-up, and went into a huddle with four or five other guests who, having accidentally received, several times running during the meal, the scraggier bits of meat, also deemed that they had been poorly entertained, whispered about their host and wished ruin on him in veiled terms.
Mère Bovary had not opened her lips the entire day. No one had consulted her on either the daughter-in-law’s clothes, or the arrangements for the banquet; she retired early. Her husband, instead of following her, sent for cigars from Saint-Victor and smoked until daylight, all the while drinking kirsch grog, a mixture unknown to the present gathering, and which was the source of even greater respect for him.
Charles was not the jocular type, he had not shone during the wedding. He responded indifferently to the witticisms, puns, double entendres, compliments and wanton words that others felt it their duty to let fly at him from the soup course on.
The next morning, on the other hand, he seemed like a new man. It was he, rather, who might have been taken for the virgin of the previous day, whereas the bride gave nothing away, by which she might have given rise to conjecture. Even the craftiest guests had no idea how to respond, and they studied her, when she passed close to them, straining their mental powers to the limit. But Charles hid nothing. He called her my wife, used the informal tu to her, asked her whereabouts of everyone, searched for her everywhere, and kept dragging her off into the farmyards, where he could be seen from afar, between the trees, his arm around her waist, continuing to walk half leaning on her, all the while ruffling his head against the lacy front of her bodice.
Two days after the wedding, the spouses left: Charles, because of his patients, could not absent himself for longer. Père Rouault had them taken back in his covered cart and accompanied them himself as far as Vassonville. There, he kissed his daughter one last time, dismounted and retraced his steps. When he had gone around a hundred paces, he stopped, and, as he saw the cart leaving, its wheels turning in the dust, he let out a great sigh. Then he recalled his own wedding, the times past, his wife’s first pregnancy; he was truly joyful, likewise, the day he brought her to his father’s house, when she rode pillion with him, as they trotted over the snow; for it was around Christmastime and the countryside was all white; she held on to him with one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind fluttered the long lacy ribbons of her Cauchoise headdress, so that now and again they brushed against his mouth, and, when he turned his head, he saw close to him, upon his shoulder, her little rosy countenance silently smiling, under the gold badge of her bonnet. From time to time, to warm them up, she placed her fingers against his chest. How long ago all that was. Their son would be thirty, now! And he looked behind him: he saw nothing on the road. He felt as sad as an unfurnished house; and, fond memories mingling with black thoughts in his mind dimmed by the junketing’s fumes, he had a sudden longing to take a turn about the church. Yet, as he was afraid that this sight might make him sadder still, he went straight back home.
Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived at Tostes, toward six o’clock. The neighbors gathered at the windows to look at their doctor’s new wife.
The old maid introduced herself, curtsied, apologized for the meal not being ready, and encouraged Madame, in the meantime, to become acquainted with her house.
V
The brick façade was right on the line of the street, or rather the road. Behind the door hung a cloak with a little collar, a bridle, a black leather cap, and, in a corner, on the floor, was a pair of spatterdashes still covered in dry mud. To the right was the parlor, that is to say the room used for dining and sitting. A canary-yellow paper, set off at the top by a garland of wan flowers, shivered all over on its badly stretched canvas; white calico curtains, edged with red, overlapped each other across the windows, and on the narrow chimneypiece glistened a clock-faced head of Hippocrates, between two silver-plated lamp-holders under oval globes. On the other side of the corridor lay Charles’s consulting room, a little apartment about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs and an office armchair. The tomes of the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, uncut, but whose stitching had suffered in all the successive sales they had passed through, adorned almost single-handedly the six shelves of a pinewood bookcase. The smell of brown butter sauce made its way through the wall during consultations, just as from the kitchen one could hear the patients coughing in the surgery and pouring out their whole sorry tale. Next came a large and dilapidated room with an oven, opening immediately onto the courtyard where the stables stood, and which served nowadays as woodshed, cellar, warehouse, full of scrap iron, empty casks, unserviceable farm implements, with a mass of other dusty stuff whose use was impossible to fathom.
The garden, longer than it was wide, went up, between two walls of pugging mortar covered in espaliered apricots, to a thorn hedge that separated it from the fields. In the middle was a slate sundial on a stone pedestal; four narrow beds embellished with thin dog-rose plants symmetrically framed the more useful patch of serious-minded vegetation. Right at the end, under the little firs, a plaster priest was reading his breviary.
Emma went up to the bedrooms. The first was unfurnished; but the second, being the matrimonial chamber, had a mahogany bed in an alcove hung with red drapes. A shell-work box decorated the chest of drawers; and, on the writing table near the window, there stood a bouquet of orange blossom in a carafe, tied with ribbons of white satin. It was a wedding bouquet, the other one’s bouquet! She stared at it. Charles noticed this, picked it up and conveyed it to the attic, while Emma, seated in an armchair (their belongings were being placed around her), reflected on her own wedding bouquet, wrapped up in a box, and wondered, dreamily, what would be done with it, if she happened to die.
She busied herself, in the first few days, contemplating changes in the house. She removed the lamp-holders’ glass globes, had new paper hung, the staircase repainted and benches made for the garden, all round the sundial; she even asked how to set about having an ornamental pond with an artificial fountain and some fish. Finally her husband, knowing how she loved to take a ride in a carriage, found a secondhand buggy, which, once new lamps and splashboards in stitched leather had been added, all but resembled a tilbury.
So he was happy and without a care in the world. A meal alone together, an evening walk on the high road, a gesture of her hand on the side of her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from a window fastening, and yet more things in which Charles had never suspected delight might be found, now made up his unbroken happiness. In bed, in the morning, their heads side by side on the pillow, he would watch the sunlight thread through the down on her fair cheeks, half-hidden by the scalloped ties of her bonnet. Seen from so close, her eyes seemed to him magnified, especially when she opened her lids several times over on waking; black in shadow and deep blue in daylight, it was as though her eyes had successive layers of color, and which, thicker deep down, grew clearer as they rose to the enameled surface. His own eye lost itself in these depths, and he saw a little version of himself to the shoulders, with the silk kerchief on his head and the top of his nightshirt half-open. He got up. She stood at the window to watch him leave; and she stayed leaning on the sill, between two pots of geraniums, robed in her dressing gown that fell loose about her. Charles, down in the street, was buckling his spurs on the mounting stone; and she continued to talk to him from above, all the while plucking off with her mouth scraps of bloom or greenery that she blew in his direction, and which, fluttering about, floating, making semicircles in the air like a bird, would catch themselves, before falling to earth, on the uncombed mane of the old white mare, motionless by the door. Charles, in the saddle, blew her a kiss; she replied with a wave, she close
d the window again, he went off. And so, upon the highway that stretched forth its long, endless ribbon of dust, by way of sunken tracks arbored by bowed trees, on paths where the corn came up to his knees, with the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night’s delights, his soul calm, his flesh contented, he rode away ruminating on his happiness, like those who, digesting after dinner, still masticate the flavor of the truffles.
Up until now, what fun had he had in life? Was it his time in school, where he stayed shut up between those high walls, alone amidst his fellows who were richer than he or more able in their lessons, who laughed at his accent, who mocked his clothes, and whose mothers came to the parlor with pastries in their muffs? Was it later, when he was studying medicine and never had a purse full enough to dance the quadrille with a little working girl who might have become his mistress? Then he lived for fourteen months with the widow, whose feet, in bed, were as cold as icicles. But now, he was in lifetime possession of this pretty woman whom he adored. His universe was bounded by the silky turn of her petticoat; and he reproached himself for not loving her, he needed to see her again; he rushed back, climbed the stairs, his heart thumping. Emma was in her bedroom, dressing; he stepped up soundlessly, he kissed her on the back, she cried out.
He could not stop himself continually touching her comb, her rings, her fichu; sometimes he would give her fat, full-lipped kisses on the cheeks, or a row of little kisses up the entire length of her bare arm, from fingertips to shoulder; and she would push him away, half smiling and half annoyed, as one does to a child who clings to you.
Madame Bovary (Modern Library) Page 5
