Before they were married, she had believed herself to be in love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from this love had not come, she must have been mistaken, she reflected. And Emma endeavored to find out what precisely was meant in life by the words delight, passion and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.
VI
She had read Paul et Virginie and she had longed for the bamboo house, the Negro boy Domingo, the dog Fidèle, but above all for the tender friendship of a dear little brother, who goes searching red fruit for you in trees higher than steeples, or who runs barefoot on the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.
When she was thirteen, her father brought her to town himself, to place her in the convent. They stayed in an auberge in the Saint-Gervais quarter, where they ate supper off painted plates that represented the story of Mademoiselle de La Vallière. All the written explanations, cut off here and there by the scratching of knives, exalted religion, the tenderness of the heart, and the court’s splendor.
Far from finding it tedious at the convent in the early days, she delighted in the company of the nuns, who kept her occupied with visits to the chapel, reached from the refectory by a long corridor. She played scarcely at all during recreation, understood the catechism well, and was always the one to reply to Monsieur le Vicaire when it came to the difficult questions. Living thus without ever leaving the tepid atmosphere of the classes and among these whey-faced women with their beads and copper crosses, she was softly lulled into the mystic languor exuded by the altar’s perfumes, by the coolness of the holy-water fonts and the candles’ beaming light. Instead of following the mass, she would look in her book at the pious engravings faintly edged in blue, and she loved the sick lamb, the holy heart pierced by sharp arrows, or poor Jesus, who fell beneath His cross as He walked. In an attempt to mortify the flesh, she tried to go a whole day without eating. She searched in her mind for some vow to fulfill.
When she went to confession, she would invent little sins so as to stay there longer, on her knees in the shadows, hands together, face to the grille beneath the priest’s whisperings. The similes of the betrothed, spouse, celestial lover and marriage everlasting which recurred in the sermons roused unexpected sweetnesses in the depths of her soul.
In the evening, before prayers, a religious reading would be held in the study. During the week, it would be a recapitulation of a story from scripture or Abbé Frayssinous’s Conférences, and, on Sundays, passages from Le Génie du Christianisme, for diversion. How avidly she listened, the first few times, to romantic melancholy’s high-sounding lament renewing itself at every echo of the earth and of the everlasting! If her childhood had been passed in the back shop of some merchant quarter, she might have been open to the lyrical invasions of nature, which usually reach us only when translated by writers. But she knew the countryside too well; she knew the flocks’ bleating, milking-times, the plow. Used to flat views, she was drawn, contrariwise, to the uneven. She liked the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it was thinly scattered among ruins. She had to be able to derive a kind of personal advantage from things; and she rejected as useless all that did not immediately contribute to her heart’s consummation,—being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, seeking emotions and not landscapes.
There was an old maid in the convent, who came every month, for eight days, to work in the laundry. Recommended by the archbishop as belonging to an old family of gentlefolk ruined by the Revolution, she ate in the refectory at the nuns’ table, and would have a little natter with them before getting back to her work again. Often the boarders would escape from their lessons to go and see her. She knew by heart the amorous songs of the last century, singing them half to herself as she plied her needle. She told stories, gave you the latest news, ran errands for you in town, and lent the bigger girls some novel or other on the sly, that she would always have in the pockets of her apron, and whose long chapters were devoured by the good maiden lady herself, during pauses in her work. It was all passions, suitors, sweethearts, persecuted ladies swooning in lonely summer-houses, postilions slain at every staging post, horses ridden to death on every page, dark forests, troubles of the heart, eternal vows, sobbings, tears and kisses, little rowing boats in the moonlight, nightingales in the bushes, gentlemen as brave as lions, as gentle as lambs, as virtuous as no one ever is, always well dressed, and who cry in bucketloads. Thus for six months, at fifteen, Emma soiled her hands on the dust of old circulating libraries. Later, with Walter Scott, she became smitten by historical things, dreaming of chests, wardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to have lived in an old manor house, like those châtelaines in their long dresses, who, under the trefoil of pointed arches, whiled away their days leaning on the stone and cupping their chin, to watch a white-plumed knight on a black horse gallop toward them from the depths of the countryside. She worshiped Mary Stuart during this time, and felt an enthusiast’s reverence for illustrious or unhappy women. For her, Jeanne d’Arc, Héloïse, Agnès Sorel, La Belle Ferronière and Clémence Isaure detached themselves like comets from the gloomy immensity of history—where, gushing forth here and there, but cast further back in the shadows and with no connection between them, came Saint Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, a few of Louis XI’s ferocities, a dash of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the Béarnais crest, and always the memory of those painted plates extolling the glory of Louis XIV.
In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was no question of anything but little golden-winged angels, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers, peaceful compositions which allowed her to glimpse, through the inanity of the language and the forced notes, the enticing phantasmagoria of sentimental truths. Some of her companions brought keepsake books they had received in their Christmas boxes. They must be hidden; it was no easy matter; they read them in the dormitory. Delicately handling their lovely satin bindings, Emma would fix her dazzled gaze on the names of unknown authors who had signed themselves, more often than not, as counts or viscounts, at the bottom of each piece.
She shivered, lifting with her breath the silvery tissue paper over the engravings, which rose half-folded and relapsed gently against the page. There, behind the balustrade of a balcony, stood a young man in a short coat, clasping in his arms a young girl in a white dress, with an alms bag at her belt; or else the anonymous portraits of English “ladies” with blond curls, who, from beneath their round straw hats, gaze upon you with their big limpid eyes. They were to be seen displayed in carriages, gliding in the midst of parkland, where a hare leapt before the team of horses, being driven at a trot by two little postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming on ottomans beside a broken-sealed note, were contemplating the moon through the half-open window, partly draped by a black curtain. The artless creatures, a single tear on the cheek, would be pecking a turtledove through the bars of a Gothic cage, or, smiling with head on one side, picking the petals off a daisy with their pointed fingers, the ends turned up like poulaine slippers. And you were there too, sultans with long pipes swooning under green arbors in the arms of Hindu dancing girls, giaours, Turkish sabers, bonnet-grecs, and you above all, wan landscapes of dithyrambic regions, which oftimes and simultaneously show us palm trees, pines, tigers to the right, lions to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon, Roman ruins in the foreground, then some squatting camels; all framed by a virgin forest, nicely cleaned and with a great ray of perpendicular sunlight trembling in the water—in which, standing out at scattered intervals as white abrasions on a ground of steel gray, swans glide about.
And the shade of the oil lamp, hanging in the thick wall above Emma’s head, illumined all these scenes of the world, which passed before her one after the other, in the silence of the dormitory and to the distant sound of a belated hackney coach still rolling along the boulevards.
When her mother died, she cried a great deal for the first few days. She had a funeral picture made incorporating the hair of the deceased, and, in a
letter she sent to Les Bertaux, full of sad reflections on existence, she asked that she might be buried later in the same tomb. The old fellow reckoned she was ill and came to see her. Emma was inwardly gratified to feel that she had with her first attempt gained access to that rare ideal of tame lives, which mediocre hearts never attain. So she let herself slide into winding Lamartinian lines, listened to the harps on the lakes, to all the death hymns of dying swans, all the leaf falls, the spotless virgins ascending to heaven, and to the voice of the Everlasting descanting in the dales. She grew bored with it, but not wanting to admit this, carried on out of habit, then out of vanity, and was finally surprised to feel soothed, and with no more sadness in her heart than she had wrinkles on her forehead.
The good nuns, who had felt so sure of her vocation, observed with great amazement that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be breaking loose from their care. They had, in fact, lavished on her so many prayers, retreats, novenas and sermons, preached so well of the respect due to the saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice on the modesty of the body and the salvation of the soul, that she did as does a horse that one drags along by the bridle: she stopped short and the bit slipped from her teeth. Pragmatic amidst her enthusiasms, loving the church for its flowers, music for its romantic sentiments, and literature for its passionate excitements, her spirit would revolt before faith’s mysteries, just as she chafed against discipline, which was something antipathetical to her constitution. When her father removed her from the school, no one was sorry to see her go. The abbess even implied that, of late, she had become wanting in reverence toward the community.
Emma, once home, delighted at first in taking charge of the servants, then took a dislike to the country and missed her convent. When Charles came to Les Bertaux for the first time, she thought herself to be extremely disillusioned, having nothing more to learn, nothing more to feel.
But the anxiety of a new state of mind, or perhaps the nervous irritation caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed to make her believe that, at last, she was in possession of that wondrous passion which up to then had remained like a great bird with rosy feathers soaring through the splendor of poetical skies;—and she could not now imagine that this calm she was dwelling in constituted the happiness of which she had dreamed.
VII
She would sometimes consider that this was, nonetheless, the most beautiful time of her life—the honeymoon, as one might say. To relish its fragrance, doubtless they would have had to take themselves off to those countries with high-sounding names where the days following the nuptials are all the more sweetly idle! In post-chaises, behind blinds of blue silk, you climb at walking pace up the steep roads, listening to the song of the postilion, which echoes in the mountains with the bells of goats and the rumbling din of the waterfall. When the sun sets, you breathe by the gulf’s shore the scent of lemon trees; then, in the evening, on the villa’s veranda, alone and with fingers entwined, you gaze upon the stars, making plans. It seemed to her that certain places on the earth must yield happiness, like a plant peculiar to that soil and growing poorly anywhere else. Why could she not lean on the balcony of a Swiss chalet or confine her sadness in a Scottish cottage, with a husband dressed in a long-skirted coat of black velvet, and sporting soft boots, a pointed hat and ruffled sleeves!
Well may it have been her wish to confide all these things to someone. But how to express an indiscernible disquiet, which alters its shape like the clouds, which whirls like the wind? So she could not find the words, the opportunity, the boldness.
If Charles had wanted it, however, if he had suspected something, if his gaze, just once, had come to meet her thoughts, it seemed to her that a sudden plenteousness would have detached itself from her heart, as the fruit of an espalier falls when a hand is laid upon it. But, as the intimacy of their life pressed them closer to each other, an indifference grew inside that loosened her from him.
Charles’s conversation was as flat as a street pavement, and everyone’s ideas paraded along it in their ordinary dress, without rousing emotion, laughter or dreams. He had never been curious, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theater and see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim, to fence, to shoot, and he could not explain a riding term she came across one day in a novel.
On the contrary, ought not a man to know everything, excel in numerous activities, initiate you in the forces of passion, in the refinements of life, in all the mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, desired nothing. He believed her happy; and she resented him for this stolid calm, this serene dullness, for the very happiness that she gave him.
Sometimes she drew; and it was a great entertainment for Charles just to stand and watch her leaning on her drawing board, half-closing her eyes to see her work better, or rolling little pellets of breadcrumbs on her thumb. As for the piano, the faster her fingers played, the more he marveled. She struck the notes with aplomb, and ran up and down the whole keyboard without a break. Thus tormented by her, the old instrument, whose chords buzzed, could be heard right up at the other end of the village if the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing by on the highway, bareheaded and in house slippers, would stop to listen to her, a sheet of paper in his hand.
Emma, by contrast, did know how to run her house. She sent the patients their bills, in well-phrased letters without a whiff of the invoice. On Sundays, when they had some neighbor or other to dinner, she found the means to offer a stylish dish, was skilled at setting pyramids of greengages on vine leaves, served up fruit preserves turned out on a plate, and she even talked of buying mouthwash bowls for the dessert course. Much esteem rebounded from all this onto Bovary.
Charles ended up by rating himself more highly for possessing such a wife. With pride he would show, in the parlor, two little sketches of hers, in lead pencil, that he had had framed in very wide frames and hung against the wallpaper on long green ribbons. Coming out of mass, people would see him at his door in beautiful needlework slippers.
He would come back late, at ten o’clock, sometimes at midnight. He would ask for something to eat, and, as the maid had turned in, it was Emma who served him. He removed his riding coat to dine in more comfort. He spoke of all the people, one after another, that he had met, all the villages he had been to, the prescriptions he had made out, and, pleased with himself, he ate the rest of the boiled beef, peeled the rind off his cheese, crunched on an apple, drained his decanter, then went off to bed, lay down on his back and snored.
As he had long been in the habit of wearing a cotton night cap, his silk kerchief would not stay over his ears; and his hair, in the morning, would be pressed higgledy-piggledy over his face and whitened by the down from his pillow, whose ties had come undone during the night. He always wore stout boots, which had two thick folds slanting up from the instep to the ankle, while the rest of the upper leather extended in a straight line, as if stretched over a wooden foot. He said that it was quite good enough for the country.
His mother approved of this economy; for she came to see him as before, whenever some slightly violent squall had occurred at her home; and yet Madame Bovary senior seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She thought her style too grand for their financial position; wood, sugar and candles disappeared as in a great house, and the amount of embers burning themselves up in the kitchen would suffice for twenty-five dishes! She rearranged her linen in the closets and taught her to look sharp after the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma accepted these lessons; Madame Bovary was prodigal with them; and the words Daughter and Mother were exchanged all day long, accompanied by a little quivering of the lips, both women casting blandishments in voices trembling with anger.
In Madame Dubuc’s time, the old lady still felt herself the favorite; but now, Charles’s love for Emma appeared to her as a desertion of his affection, an encroachment on what belonged to her; and she observed her son’s happiness in sad silence, as a bankrupt might watch, through the
window panes, people sitting at table in his old house. She reminded him, by way of reminiscences, about her pains and her sacrifices, and, comparing them to Emma’s negligences, concluded that it was not reasonable to adore her in such an exclusive fashion.
Charles did not know what to say in reply; he respected his mother, and infinitely loved his wife; he considered the judgment of the one unerring, and yet found the other irreproachable. When Madame Bovary had left, he tried timorously to venture, and using the same phrases, one or two of the most anodyne observations he had heard his mother make; Emma, proving to him in a single word that he was mistaken, sent him back to his patients.
Nevertheless, with theories she thought sound, she tried to devote herself to love. By moonlight, in the garden, she would recite all the passionate verses she knew by heart and sing him melancholy adagios, sighing all the while; but she found herself feeling just as flat afterward as before, and Charles appeared neither more amorous nor more roused.
Once she had thus struck the flint a few times against her heart, without making a single spark fly, incapable still of understanding what she could not feel, just as she was of believing in whatever did not show itself in conventional form, she painlessly convinced herself that Charles’s passion no longer had anything exorbitant about it. His effusiveness had become punctual; he would kiss her at such-and-such a time. It was one more habit among others: a dessert anticipated beforehand, after the monotony of dinner.
A gamekeeper, cured by Monsieur of an inflammation on the chest, had given a little Italian greyhound bitch to Madame; she took it with her on walks, for she would leave the house now and again, in order to be alone for a moment and not have the garden with the dusty road eternally before her eyes.
She went as far as the beech copse at Banneville, near the abandoned summerhouse at the corner of the wall along the fields. In the ha-ha, among the weeds, there are long reeds with sharp-edged leaves.
Madame Bovary (Modern Library) Page 6
