Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  “My wife scarcely takes an interest in it,” said Charles; “she prefers, however much we beg her to exercise, to stop in her room the whole time, reading.”

  “I’m just the same,” said Léon; “in fact, what better occupation than to lie by the fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats on the panes, the lamp burns …?”

  “Isn’t it?” she said, fastening upon him her large dark wide-open eyes.

  “Nothing is planned,” he continued, “the hours slip by. One roams motionless through countries that seem vividly seen and your mind, entwining with the fiction, frolics in the details or pursues the twists and turns of the adventures. It blends with the characters; so that it seems to be you whose heart races under their dress.”

  “True! True!” she said.

  “Has it sometimes happened to you,” Léon went on, “that you meet in a book with a vague idea you’ve had, some dim picture that returns from a long way off, and which is like the total exposure of your shrewdest perception?”

  “I have felt that,” she replied.

  “This is why,” he said, “I especially love the poets. I find verse more delicate than prose, it makes you cry more easily.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s wearying in the long run,” Emma went on; “and these days, on the contrary, I adore stories where one thing follows another without a breath to spare, that make us feel scared. I detest those commonplace heroes and mild feelings, as exist in life.”

  “In fact,” the clerk observed, “as these works do not touch the heart, they wander, it seems to me, from the real aim of Art. It is so soothing, among life’s disenchantments, to be able to turn in your imagination to noble characters, unsullied affections and pictures of happiness. As for me, living here, far from society, it’s my sole distraction; but Yonville offers so few resources!”

  “Like Tostes, no doubt,” Emma went on; “I too was always subscribed to a circulating library.”

  “If Madame wishes to do me the honor of using it,” said the pharmacist, who had just caught these last words, “I myself have at her disposal a library composed of the finest authors: Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, The Literary Echo, etc., and I receive, furthermore, different periodicals, among them The Rouen Beacon daily, having the benefit of being its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel, Yonville and environs.”

  They had been eating for two and a half hours; because Artémise the maid, nonchalantly dragging the selvage of her old slippers on the tiles, would bring the plates one after the other, forget everything, pay attention to nothing and keep leaving half-open the billiard-room door which battered the wall with its latch bar’s tip.

  Without realizing it, talking all the while, Léon had placed his foot on one of the crosspieces of the chair in which Madame Bovary was seated. She wore a little blue-silk scarf, which held a collar of fluted cambric upright like a ruff; and, depending on how she moved her head, the lower part of her face buried itself in the linen or emerged from it softly. Thus it was, close to each other, while Charles and the pharmacist chatted, that they embarked on one of those vague conversations, in which chance phrases keep bringing you back to the fixed center of a mutual understanding. Parisian shows, titles of novels, new dances, and the society world they knew nothing of, Tostes where she had lived, Yonville where they had turned out to be, they explored everything, spoke of everything until the end of dinner.

  When the coffee was served, Félicité went off to prepare the bedroom in the new house, and the guests soon withdrew. Madame Lefrançois slept by the embers, while the stable lad, lantern in hand, waited to take Monsieur and Madame Bovary home. His red hair was interwoven with bits of straw, and he limped on his left leg. When he had taken Monsieur le Curé’s umbrella in his other hand, they set off on foot.

  The town was asleep. The pillars of the market house cast long shadows. The ground was entirely gray, as on a summer’s night.

  But, as the doctor’s house stood only fifty paces from the inn, they had to wish each other good night almost immediately, and the company dispersed.

  Emma, even from the entrance hall, felt the plaster’s chill drop onto her shoulders like a damp cloth. The walls were newly done, and the wooden stairs creaked. In the bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish daylight fell through the curtainless windows. Tops of trees could be glimpsed, and the meadows further off, half-drowned in fog, smoking in the moonlight wherever the river wound.

  In the middle of the rooms, piled pell-mell, there were drawers, bottles, curtain rods, gilt poles along with mattresses on chairs and basins on the parquet—the two men who had carried the furniture having left everything there, carelessly.

  It was the fourth time she had slept in an unknown place. The first had been the day of her entry into the convent, the second that of her arrival at Tostes, the third at Vaubyessard, the fourth was this one; and each had acted in her life like the unveiling of a fresh phase. She refused to believe that things could repeat themselves in the same way in different places, and, as the portion already experienced had been bad, what remained to be consumed would doubtless be better.

  III

  The next day, on waking up, she saw the clerk in the square. She was in her dressing gown. He raised his head and waved at her. She gave a quick nod and closed the window.

  Léon waited all day for six o’clock to come; but entering the inn, he found no one except M. Binet, sitting at table.

  Yesterday’s dinner was, for him, a considerable event; never, until that point, had he chatted for two hours in succession with a lady. How then had he been able to expound to her, and in such language, so very many things that he would not have said so well before? He was generally shy and held himself back out of both modesty and dissimulation. In Yonville he was considered to have proper manners. He listened to the arguments of older folk, and seemed not to be overexcited politically, a remarkable thing in a young man. He was talented, besides; he painted in watercolors, could read a treble clef, and applied himself willingly to literature after dinner, when he was not playing cards. Monsieur Homais esteemed him for his learning; Madame Homais delighted in his obligingness, for he would often play in the garden with the Homais children, brats who were always begrimed, very badly brought up and of a somewhat phlegmatic humor, like their mother. To look after them, besides the maid, they had Justin, the student in pharmacy, a distant cousin of Monsieur Homais who had been taken into the household out of charity, and served also as a menial.

  The apothecary showed himself to be the best of neighbors. He proffered Madame Bovary particulars about tradesmen, had his cider merchant come over expressly, tasted the beverage himself, and saw to it that the cask was properly stowed in the cellar; furthermore he showed how to go about obtaining a cheap butter supply, and concluded an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the sacristan, who, beyond his sacerdotal and mortuary duties, looked after Yonville’s principal gardens by the hour or by the year, according to people’s inclinations.

  The need to take care of others was not all that was prompting the pharmacist to such a degree of obsequious warmth, and there was beneath it a scheme.

  He had infringed the law of the 19th Ventôse, Year XI, Article 1, which forbids any individual not holding a diploma from practicing medicine; so much so that, denounced by persons obscure, Homais had been summoned to Rouen, before the king’s procurer, in his private chambers. The magistrate had received him standing up, begowned, ermine-shouldered and with cap of office on his head. It was in the morning, before the hearing. In the corridor could be heard the sturdy boots of policemen passing, and the turning of great locks like a far-off roar. The apothecary’s ears rang as if he was about to have an apoplectic fit; dimly he glimpsed dungeons, his family in tears, the pharmacy sold, all his specimen jars dispersed; and he was obliged to enter a café for a glass of rum and seltzer water, to recover his spirits.

  Little by little, the memory of this reprimand grew fainter, and he contin
ued, as before, to give soothing consultations in his back shop. But the mayor bore him malice, his colleagues were jealous, he had everything to fear; binding Monsieur Bovary through courtesies, was to gain his gratitude, and would stop him from talking later, if he noticed anything. And every morning, Homais would bring him the newspaper, and often, of an afternoon, would leave the pharmacy for a moment to go over to the medical officer’s for a talk.

  Charles was unhappy; the patients were not coming. He remained in his chair for many hours, without speaking, went off into his consulting room to sleep or watched his wife sew. For diversion, he exerted himself at home as a drudge, and even tried to paint the loft with a residue of the color that the painters had left. But money matters were bothering him. He had laid out so much for the repairs to Tostes, for Madame’s dresses and for the removals, that the whole dowry, more than three thousand crowns, had drained itself away in two years. Then, how many things were damaged or lost in the transfer from Tostes to Yonville, not counting the plaster priest, who, falling from the carriage after an excessively heavy jolt, was smashed into a thousand pieces on the paving of Quincampoix!

  A happier care came to divert him, namely his wife’s pregnancy. The nearer her term approached, the more he cherished her. It was the establishing of a different fleshly bond, and like the continual reminder of a more complex union. When from afar he caught sight of her sluggish gait and her waist swinging slackly on uncorseted hips, or when the two of them were face-to-face and he beheld her so utterly comfortable, assuming weary postures as she sat in her chair, then his happiness could no longer contain itself; he rose, he kissed her, stroked her face, called her little mother, wanted to make her dance, and babbled, half laughing, half crying, all manner of tender pleasantries as they came into his head. The idea that he had begot delighted him. He wanted for nothing at present. He was acquainted with the entire span of human existence, and leaned on his elbows serenely there at its table.

  Emma experienced a great amazement at first, then longed for the delivery, to know what it was to be a mother. But, not being able to spend what she wanted, to have a cradle with curtains in pink silk and embroidered bonnets, she renounced the baby’s outfit in a paroxysm of bitterness, and ordered it all at once from a workwoman in the village, without choosing or discussing a thing. So she never had fun with those preparations on which a mother’s love whets its appetite, and her fondness, from the beginning, was perhaps weakened in some way.

  However, as Charles, at every meal, would talk about the mite, she considered it in greater depth.

  She desired a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this notion of having a male child was like the anticipated revenge for all her former powerlessness. A man, at least, is free: he can leaf through loves and lands and pass through obstacles, have a taste for the most remote joys. But a woman is continually impeded. Inert and pliant at the same time, against her she has the weakness of the flesh and the law’s subjections. Her will, like her bonnet’s veil constrained by a ribbon, flutters at every breath of wind; there is always some desire that urges, some seemliness that constrains.

  She was delivered one Sunday, around six o’clock, at sunrise.

  “It’s a girl!” said Charles.

  She turned her head and fainted.

  Almost immediately, Madame Homais ran up and kissed her, as did Mère Lefrançois, of the Lion d’Or. The apothecary, a prudent fellow, merely sent her some provisional congratulations, through the half-open door. He wished to see the infant, and found it well formed.

  During her convalescence, she was much occupied in seeking a name for her daughter. At first, she reviewed all those with Italianate endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she rather liked Galsuinde, and Yseult or Léocadie even more so. Charles desired the child to be called after his mother; Emma was against it. They leafed through the calendar from end to end, and outsiders were consulted.

  “Monsieur Léon,” said the apothecary, “with whom I was chatting the other day, is amazed that you have not chosen Madeleine, which is excessively in fashion now.”

  But Mère Bovary clamored vociferously against this sinner’s name. As for Monsieur Homais, he had a fondness for all the ones that called to mind a great man, an illustrious deed or a noble notion, and it was by this very system that he had christened his four children. Thus, Napoléon stood for glory and Franklin for liberty; maybe Irma was a concession to romanticism; but Athalie, a homage to the most immortal masterpiece of the French stage. Because his philosophical convictions did not impede his artistic admirings, the thinker in him never smothered the sensitive man; he knew how to differentiate, to make allowances for imagination and for zealotry. In that tragedy, for example, he censured the ideas, but admired the style; he cursed the conception, but applauded all the details and became exasperated by the characters, as he enthused over their speeches. When he read the great passages, he was enraptured; but, when he considered how the Church bigots would take advantage of them to set out their stall, he was disconsolate, and in this confusion of entangled feelings, he would have liked at the same time to have crowned Racine with both hands and to have argued with him for a good quarter of an hour.

  At last, Emma remembered that at the Château de la Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; consequently this name was chosen, and, as Père Rouault was unable to come, they begged Monsieur Homais to be godfather. His christening presents were all goods from his business, namely: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of Arabian sweetmeats, three little baskets of marshmallow and, furthermore, six sugar-candy sticks that he had found in a cupboard. The evening of the ceremony, there was a great dinner; the priest was there; things warmed up. Monsieur Homais, over the liqueurs, struck up The God of the Simple Folk. Monsieur Léon sang a gondolier’s song, and Mère Bovary, who was the godmother, a ballad from the days of the Empire; finally Père Bovary demanded that the baby be brought downstairs, and set about baptizing it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head from on high. This mockery of the first of the sacraments roused the indignation of the Abbé Bournisien: Père Bovary responded with a quotation from The War of the Gods, the priest wanted to leave; the ladies implored; Homais interposed; and they succeeded in making the clergyman sit down again, he calmly taking up once more, on its saucer, his little half-drunk cup of coffee.

  Père Bovary stayed another month at Yonville, dazzling its inhabitants with a superb silver-banded forage cap, which he wore in the mornings, when smoking his pipe on the square. Being likewise in the habit of drinking a deal of brandy, he frequently dispatched the maid to the Lion d’Or to buy a bottle for him, which they put on his son’s account; and, to scent his handkerchiefs, he consumed the entire stock of eau-de-Cologne in his daughter-in-law’s possession.

  The latter did not find his company at all disagreeable. He had traveled the world: he spoke of Berlin, Vienna, Strasbourg, of his time as an officer, the mistresses he had had, the great luncheons he had given; he proved himself endearing besides, and sometimes, either on the stairs or in the garden, he would seize her around the waist and exclaim:

  “Charles, you watch out!”

  So Mère Bovary feared for her son’s happiness, and, dreading that her husband, in the long run, might have an immoral influence on the young woman, she lost no time in hastening the departure. Perhaps she had graver anxieties. Monsieur Bovary was a man who respected nothing.

  One day, Emma was suddenly taken with a need to see her daughter, who had been put out to nurse with the carpenter’s wife; and, without checking by the calendar whether the six weeks of the Virgin were over yet, she set out for the Rollet house, which lay right on the edge of the village, at the foot of the hill, between the high road and the meadows.

  It was midday: the houses had their shutters closed, and the slate roofs, glittering under the sharp light of the blue sky, seemed to be sending up sparks from the ridges at their gable ends. A strong wind bl
ew. Emma felt faint, walking; the pavement’s stones hurt her; she hesitated whether to return home, or to go in somewhere and sit down.

  At that moment, Monsieur Léon came out of a neighboring door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came over to greet her and stood in the shade before Lheureux’s shop, under the gray awning that jutted out.

  Madame Bovary said that she was going to see her child, but that she had begun to feel weary.

  “If …” began Léon, not daring to go on.

  “Have you an engagement somewhere?” she asked.

  And, at the clerk’s reply, she begged him to accompany her. From that evening, Yonville knew all about it, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife, declared in front of her maid that Madame Bovary had compromised herself.

  To reach the wet nurse’s house they were obliged, after the road, to turn left, as if making their way to the cemetery, and to pursue, between the small houses and the yards, a little path bordered by privet. This was in flower, as were the speedwell, the dog roses, the nettles, and the slender-stemmed brambles bursting forth from the thickets. Through holes in the hedges, they perceived, in the barton-yards, some hog or other on a muck heap, or wooden-collared cows, rubbing their horns against the trunks of trees. Both of them, side by side, walked slowly, she leaning on him and he curbing his step, measuring his pace to hers; in front of them, a swarm of flies hovered, buzzing in the warm air.

  They recognized the house from the old walnut tree by which it was shaded. Low and covered in brown tiles, it had a string of onions hung outside under the loft window. Bunches of kindling, upright against the thorn fence, surrounded a patch of lettuce, a few lavender plants and some sweetpeas trained up sticks. Dirty water ran straggling over the grass, and all about lay a number of indeterminate rags, knitted stockings, a red cotton nightshirt, and a big sheet of thick canvas stretched lengthwise over the hedge. At the sound of the gate, the wet nurse emerged, holding a suckling baby on her arm. With her other hand she was pulling a poor wretched mite, his face covered in scrofulous sores, a Rouen hatmaker’s son whose parents, too taken up by their business, would leave him in the country.