Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  “Wretch!” cried the apothecary all of a sudden.

  And he ran to his son, who had just thrown himself into a pile of lime in order to paint his shoes white. Beneath the weight of reproaches, Napoléon set about howling, while Justin wiped his shoes for him with a fistful of straw. But a knife was needed: Charles offered his.

  “Ah!” she said to herself, “he carries a knife in his pocket, like a peasant!”

  The hoarfrost fell, and they turned back for Yonville.

  Madame Bovary did not go over to her neighbors that evening, and when Charles had left, and she felt alone, the comparisons began again with the clarity of an immediate sensation and the lengthening of perspective that memory gives to things. Gazing from her bed at the burning fire’s brightness, she saw again, as if she were there, Léon standing, flexing his switch with one hand and with the other holding Athalie, who was sucking calmly on a piece of ice. She found him charming; she found it impossible to tear herself away; she recalled other gestures of his on other days, phrases that he had uttered, the sound of his voice, his whole self; and she repeated, putting her lips forward as for a kiss:

  “Yes, delightful! Quite delightful!… Is he not in love?” she asked. “With whom then? Why, with me!”

  All the little proofs at once spread themselves out, her heart leapt. The blaze from the hearth was sending a merry light quivering over the ceiling; she turned on her back and stretched her arms out wide.

  Then began the eternal lament: “Oh! If the heavens had but wished it! Why isn’t it so? Then who prevented …?”

  When Charles returned, at midnight, she looked as if she were waking up, and, as he made a noise undressing, she complained of a migraine; then casually asked what had happened that evening.

  “Monsieur Léon,” he said, “retired early.”

  She could not stop herself smiling, and she went to sleep, soul filled with fresh enchantment.

  The next day, at nightfall, she was visited by ’sieur Lheureux, seller of fancy goods. A sharp fellow, this tradesman.

  Born a Gascon, but ending up Norman, he lined his southern loquacity with a Cauchois cunning. His greasy face, slack and beardless, seemed to have been tinted with extract of clear licorice, and his white hair made the fierce luster of his tiny black eyes even more intense. No one knew what he had been before: peddler, some said, banker at Routot, according to others. What was certain, was that he could, in his head, make complicated calculations, enough to give even Binet himself a fright. Polite to the point of obsequiousness, he always held himself crook-backed, in the posture of someone either bowing or beckoning.

  Having left his crape-trimmed hat at the door, he placed a green pasteboard box on the table, and began by complaining to Madame, with numerous courtesies, that up to now he had still not gained her confidence. A poor shop like his was not fit to attract a fashionable lady; he laid stress on the term. Yet all she had to do was to bid him, and he would undertake to supply her with whatever she desired, as much in haberdashery as in drapery, hosiery or fancy goods; for he traveled into town four times a month, regularly. He had relations with the most considerable establishments. You could mention his name at the Trois Frères, at the Barbe d’Or or at the Grand Sauvage; all those gentlemen knew him like the back of their hand! So today, he had come to show Madame, in passing, various articles that he happened to have, thanks to the rarest of opportunities. And he took from the box half a dozen embroidered collars.

  Madame Bovary examined them.

  “I don’t need anything,” she said.

  And Monsieur Lheureux daintily exhibited three Algerian scarves, several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and, finally, four coconut eggcups, carved in openwork fashion by convicts. Then, hands on the table, neck stretched, bent forward, he followed, mouth hanging wide, Emma’s gaze, as it wandered uncertainly among the wares. From time to time, as if to expel the dust, he gave a flick of the nails to the silk of the scarves, unfolded to their full length; and they quivered with a slight rustle, the cloth’s gold spangle, in the greenish light of dusk, sparkling like tiny stars.

  “How much are they?”

  “A trifle,” he replied, “a trifle; but there’s no urgency: whenever you please; we aren’t Jews.”

  She considered for a moment, and again finished by thanking Monsieur Lheureux, who answered impassively:

  “Ah well, we’ll get along together later; I have always come to an arrangement with the ladies, though not, however, with my own!”

  Emma smiled.

  “So what I’m saying here,” he continued with a simple, easy air after his little joke, “is that it is not the money that bothers me … I would give them to you if needs be.”

  She made a surprised gesture.

  “Ah,” he said sharply and in a low voice, “I don’t have to go far to find you something; count on it.”

  And he set about asking for news of Père Tellier, the landlord of the Café Français, whom Monsieur Bovary was attending at that time.

  “What’s the matter with him then, Père Tellier?… He coughs enough to shake the whole house, and I’m much afraid he’ll shortly be needing a pinewood greatcoat rather than a flannel nightshirt. He went on a fair few jags in his youth! That sort, Madame, they had not the least notion of orderliness. He pickled himself with brandy! But it’s disagreeable all the same to see an acquaintance pop off.”

  And, while he was buckling up his box again, he continued expatiating on the doctor’s patients.

  “It’s doubtless the weather,” he said, looking on the panes with a glum face, “which is responsible for all those diseases. I don’t feel quite myself, either; one of these days I must also pay Monsieur a visit, about the backache. Still, good day to you, Madame Bovary; at your command; your very humble servant!”

  And he closed the door, softly.

  Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom, by the fire, on a tray; she took a long time eating; everything seemed good to her.

  “How sensible I’ve been!” she said to herself, thinking about the scarves.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs: it was Léon. She rose, and took off the chest of drawers, from among the dusters to be hemmed, the first in the pile. She seemed very busy when he appeared.

  The conversation was flat, Madame Bovary abandoning it at every turn, while he himself remained as though completely embarrassed. Seated on a low chair, near the fireplace, he turned the ivory case in his fingers; she plied her needle, or from time to time, with her nail, pleated the folds of the cloth. She did not speak; he said nothing, captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her words.

  “Poor boy!” she thought.

  “How do I displease her?” he asked himself.

  Léon, however, finally said that he had, one of these days, to go to Rouen, on a case for his practice.

  “Your music subscription is expired, should I renew it?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “Why?”

  “Because …”

  And, biting her lips, she slowly pulled a long needleful of gray thread.

  This work irritated Léon. Emma’s fingers seemed to be flayed at the tips; a gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it.

  “You’re giving it up then?” he resumed.

  “What?” she said sharply; “the music? Ah, dear God, yes! Haven’t I my house to keep, my husband to look after, a thousand things in short, a great many tasks which must be put first?”

  She looked at the clock. Charles was late. So she played the anxious wife. She even repeated two or three times:

  “He is so good!”

  The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this tenderness regarding the latter amazed him in an unpleasant way; nevertheless he went on eulogizing, as he had heard everyone do, he said, and above all the pharmacist.

  “Ah, he’s a decent man,” Emma replied.

  “Certainly,” answered the clerk.

  And they began to
talk of Madame Homais, whose badly neglected appearance usually made them laugh.

  “What difference does it make?” Emma interrupted. “A decent mother of a family does not trouble herself about her clothes.”

  Then she relapsed into silence.

  It was the same over the days that followed; her talk, her manner, everything changed. She was seen to take her housekeeping to heart, go regularly again to church and manage her maid with greater strictness.

  She withdrew Berthe from the wet nurse. Félicité brought her in when visitors called, and Madame Bovary undressed her in order to show her limbs. She declared that she adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her madness, and her caresses were accompanied by lyrical effusions, which would have reminded anyone other than the Yonvillais of la Sachette in Notre-Dame de Paris.

  When Charles came in from work, he found his slippers warming by the embers. Now his waistcoats no longer lacked linings, nor his shirts buttons, and he even delighted in surveying in the wardrobe all the cotton caps marshaled into matching piles. She no longer balked, as before, at taking a turn in the garden; whatever he proposed was always granted, although she might not predict what odd fancies she would submit to without a murmur—and when Léon saw him by the hearth, after dinner, hands on his belly, feet on the firedog, cheeks flushed by digestion, eyes moist with happiness, with the child crawling on the rug, and this slender wife coming up to kiss his forehead over the back of the chair:

  “What madness,” he said to himself, “and how to reach her?”

  Thus she appeared to him, so virtuous and unapproachable that all hope, even the haziest, forsook him.

  But, by renouncing her, he vested her with extraordinary qualities. She was disentangled, for him, from the carnal properties he had no means of procuring; and she ran on in his heart, ascending still and detaching herself from him, in the gorgeous manner of a soaring apotheosis. It was the kind of pure unadulterated sentiment that does not trouble the practice of life, cultivated because it is rare, and whose loss is more distressing than the joy of its possession.

  Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paled, her face lengthened. With her black swathes of hair, her large eyes, her straight nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to pass through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her forehead the hazy impress of some sublime predestination? She was so sad and so calm, so gentle and at the same time so reserved, that when close to her you felt yourself caught under an icy spell, as in churches when you shiver in the fragrance of flowers dashed with a marble chill. Even the others did not escape this seduction. The pharmacist said:

  “She’s a woman of great talents and would not be out of place in a sub-prefecture.”

  The wives admired her thrift, the patients her politeness, the poor her charity.

  But she was full of lusts, rage, hate. That dress with the straight pleats concealed an overthrown heart, and those so-chaste lips would not speak of the torment. She was in love with Léon, and she sought solitude, that she might more easily delight in his image. The sight of him in person troubled this voluptuous contemplation. Emma quivered at the sound of his footsteps; then, in his presence, the emotion fell away, and all that remained to her afterward was a boundless wonder that ended in gloom.

  Léon did not know, leaving her house in despair, that behind his back she would get up to look at him in the street. She was anxious about his proceedings; she secretly watched his face; she fabricated a long story as pretext for visiting his room. The pharmacist’s wife seemed to her very fortunate to be sleeping under the same roof; and her thoughts continually alighted on this house, like the pigeons of the Lion d’Or who came to dip in its gutters their pink feet and their white wings. But the more Emma became aware of her love, the more she pushed it away, so that it should not be visible, and to abate it. She would have liked Léon to suspect something; and she imagined the risks, the catastrophes that might have made this easier. Doubtless what held her back was indolence or terror, as well as shame. She imagined that she had repelled him too far, that there was no time left, that all was lost. Then pride, the joy of telling herself, “I am virtuous,” and of looking at herself in the mirror as she struck resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice that she believed she was making.

  Then the appetites of the flesh, the lust for money and the gloomy states of passion, all blended into the one single suffering—and, instead of averting her mind from it, she fastened upon it the more, excited by the pain and seeking opportunities for it everywhere. She would become incensed at a poorly served dish or a half-open door, groaned over the velvet she did not have, the good fortune she lacked, her too-lofty dreams, her too-narrow house.

  What exasperated her, was that Charles did not appear to have any awareness of her anguish. His firm belief that he was making her happy seemed to her an idiotic insult, and his confidence about it an ingratitude. For whom then was she being well-behaved? Was he himself not the obstacle to all bliss, the cause of all misery, and like the sharp buckle-tongue of this complex leather strap binding her on all sides?

  So she carried over to him alone the sum of hatred which resulted from her vexation, and each effort to lessen it merely served to increase it; for this needless pain would be added to other counts of despair and contribute even further to the separation. Her very gentleness toward herself occasioned revolts. Domestic competence pushed her into luxuriant fantasies, matrimonial tenderness into adulterous desires. She wished Charles would thrash her, that she could have detested him more justly, taken her revenge. She amazed herself at times with the atrocious conjectures which entered her mind; and she had to go on smiling, hear herself repeat how happy she was, feign being so, suffer it to be believed!

  She felt moments of disgust, however, at this hypocrisy. She was tempted to elope with Léon, somewhere, far away, to essay a new destiny; but immediately a vague gulf opened in her soul, full of darkness.

  “Besides, he doesn’t love me anymore,” she thought; “what’s to be done? What rescue to expect, what consolation, what relief?”

  She stood broken, panting, inert, sobbing under her breath and with tears trickling down.

  “Why not speak about it to Monsieur?” the maidservant would ask her, when she came in during these crises.

  “It’s my nerves,” replied Emma: “don’t speak to him about it, you’ll distress him.”

  “Ah yes!” Félicité continued, “you’re just like la Guérine, the daughter of Père Guérine, the Pollet fisherman, who I knew at Dieppe, before coming here. She was so sad, so sad, that to see her stood on the front step of her house, she put you in mind of a burial cloth in front of the door. Her trouble, apparently, was a kind of fog she had inside the head, and the doctors couldn’t do a thing, nor the priest either. When it took her too strong, she went off all by herself to the seashore, so that the customs officer, doing his round, would often find her laid out flat on her belly and weeping into the pebbles. Then, after her marriage, it wore off, they said.”

  “But, in my case,” Emma rejoined, “it was after the marriage that it came upon me.”

  VI

  One evening when the window was open, and seated on the sill she had just watched Lestiboudois, the beadle, pruning the box tree, all of a sudden she heard the Angelus ring out.

  It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are out; a mild wind rolls across the dug flower beds, and the gardens, like women, seem to be preparing their finery for the feast days of summer. Through the bars of the arbor and beyond, all around, the river could be seen in the meadow, sketching restless meanders over the grass. The evening haze passed between the leafless poplars, blurring their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a delicate gauze pinned on their branches. Far off, cattle were on the move; you could hear neither their steps, nor their lowing; and the bell, still ringing, continued its peaceful lament on high.

  At this repeated tolling, the young woman’s
mind wandered through old memories of youth and boarding school. She recalled the altar’s tall candlesticks, higher than the vases full of flowers and the columned tabernacle. She would have liked, as in times past, to be mingled still with the long line of white veils that was marked here and there in black by the stiff cowls of the good sisters bowed down on their prayer stools; on Sundays, at mass, when she lifted her head, she would perceive the Virgin’s sweet face among the bluish eddyings of the incense as it rose. Then a tender feeling came over her; she felt weak and wholly abandoned, like a bird’s feather wheeling round and round in the storm; and without being conscious of it she set out for the church, in the mood for no matter what devotion, provided it absorbed her soul and the whole of existence might vanish within it.

  On the square she met Lestiboudois, who was on his way back; for, in order not to cut the day short, he preferred to interrupt his task and then to take it up again, ringing the Angelus at his own convenience. Besides, rung earlier, the bells warned the children that it was time for catechism.

  Some had already arrived, and were playing marbles on the cemetery’s flagstones. Others, sitting astride the wall, were jiggling their legs, and with their wooden shoes mowing down the tall nettles that sprouted between the low wall and the most recent graves. It was the only place that was green; all the rest was nothing but stones, and constantly covered in a fine dust, despite the sacristy broom.

  The children in list shoes ran about there as if on an inlaid floor made just for them, and the peal of their voices could be heard through the humming of the bell. It diminished along with the vibration of the fat rope which, falling from the heights of the belfry, dragged its end over the ground. House martins swooped past uttering little cries, cutting the air with the edge of their outspread wings, and going swiftly back into their yellow nests, under the drip-stone tiles. At the back of the church, a lamp burned; that is to say, the wick of a night lamp in a hanging glass. Its glow, from a distance, resembled a whitish stain trembling on oil. A long ray of sunlight crossed the entire nave and made the side aisles and corners even gloomier.