Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  “Where is the priest?” asked Madame Bovary of a young boy who was amusing himself jogging the turnstile gate in its loose socket.

  “He’s coming,” he replied.

  Indeed, the presbytery door grated, Abbé Bournisien appeared; the children ran pell-mell into the church.

  “These little rascals!” murmured the clergyman, “always the same!”

  And, picking up a catechism in tatters that he had just knocked with his foot:

  “No respect for anything!”

  But, as soon as he noticed Madame Bovary:

  “Pardon me,” he said, “I failed to recognize you.”

  He thrust the catechism into his pocket and stood still, continuing to swing the sacristy’s heavy key on two fingers.

  The gleam of the setting sun that struck him full in the face blanched the tough wool of his cassock, glossy at the elbows, frayed at the hem. Specks of grease and tobacco followed the line of little buttons over his broad chest, becoming more frequent the further they strayed from his clerical collar, on which rested plenteous folds of red skin, flecked with yellow blemishes that disappeared into the coarse hairs of his graying beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily.

  “How are you keeping?” he added.

  “Badly,” replied Emma; “I am suffering.”

  “Ah well, me too,” the clergyman replied. “These first mild days weaken you amazingly, don’t they? Still, how can it be helped, we are born to suffer, as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think about it?”

  “Him!” she said with a scornful gesture.

  “What?” rejoined the good fellow, completely astonished, “he’s not prescribing something for you?”

  “Ah,” said Emma; “earthly remedies are not what I need.”

  But the priest, every now and then, would peep into the church, where the kneeling youngsters were all pushing each other with their shoulders, and falling over like a house of cards.

  “I wanted to know …” she went on.

  “Stop that, stop that, Riboudet,” cried the clergyman furiously, “I’m going to warm your ears for you, wicked rogue!”

  Then, turning to Emma:

  “That’s Boudet the carpenter’s son; his parents are well-off and leave him to his own devices. Yet he’d learn quick enough, if he wanted to, he has the wit. And so sometimes, just for sport, I call him Riboudet (as in the hill you take to get to Maromme), and I even say: ‘mon Riboudet.’ Ha ha! Mont-Riboudet! The other day, I repeated this joke to His Lordship, who laughed at it, he vouchsafed a laugh.—And how is Monsieur Bovary?”

  She seemed not to hear. He continued:

  “Still awfully busy, no doubt? For we are certainly, he and I, the two members of the parish who have the most to do. But he’s the doctor of the body,” he added with a dark laugh, “whereas I am that of the soul!”

  She fixed beseeching eyes upon the priest.

  “Yes …” she said, “you assuage all pains.”

  “Ah, don’t speak to me of those, Madame Bovary. Just this morning, I had to go over to Bas-Diauville for a cow with the wind; they thought it was under a spell. All their cows, I don’t know how … But, excuse me … Longuemarre and Boudet! By Jove, will you have done!”

  And, in one bound, he sprang into the church.

  At this point, the youngsters were crowding around the great lectern, climbing on the chantry stool, opening the missal; and others, step by stealthy step, were off venturing very nearly into the confessional. But the priest, of a sudden, served them all with a hail of boxed ears. Taking them by the jacket collar, he lifted them off the ground and set them back on their knees on the paving stones of the choir, as vigorously as if he had planned to plant them there.

  “Well,” he said, returning to Emma and unfurling his large cotton handkerchief, a corner of which he put between his teeth, “the farmers are greatly to be pitied!”

  “As are others,” she said.

  “Certainly. The workmen in the towns, for example.”

  “It is not them …”

  “Begging your pardon, but I have known poor mothers of families there, virtuous women, I can assure you, veritable saints, who even lack bread.”

  “But those,” Emma went on (and the corners of her mouth twisted as she spoke), “those, Monsieur le curé, who do have bread, but do not have …”

  “Fire in winter,” said the priest.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter!”

  “Come now. Doesn’t matter? It strikes me that when you’re well heated, well fed … for, after all …”

  “My God, my God,” she sighed.

  “You are troubled?” he said, advancing with a worried air; “doubtless that’s the digestion. You must return home, Madame Bovary, drink a little tea; that will strengthen you, or else a glass of cold water with brown sugar.”

  “Why?”

  And she looked like someone waking from a reverie. “You happened to put your hand to your brow. I thought you were taken by a giddy spell.”

  Then, thinking better of it:

  “But you were asking me about something? What was it now? I’ve no idea.”

  “Me? Nothing … nothing …” Emma repeated.

  And her gaze, turning around her, gradually lowered itself to the old man in the cassock. The two of them considered each other, face-to-face, not speaking.

  “Well, Madame Bovary,” he said at last, “do excuse me, but duty first, you know; I must be dealing with my rascals. There are the first communions coming up. We shall yet be taken by surprise, I fear! In addition, after Ascension, I keep them behind every Wednesday for a further hour. These poor children! They cannot be led too soon into the Lord’s path, as He Himself commended us through the mouth of his Divine Son … Good health to you, Madame; my respects to your husband!”

  And he went into the church, genuflecting from the door.

  Emma watched him disappear between the double line of benches, walking with a heavy tread, head leaning a little to one side, and with his hands half-open, facing outward.

  Then she turned on her heel, swiveling like a statue on a pivot, and took the path back to her house. But the priest’s rough voice and the bright voices of the boys still reached her ears and carried on behind her:

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “Yes, I’m a Christian.”

  “What is a Christian?”

  “He who, being baptized … baptized … baptized …”

  Clinging to the banister rail, she ascended the steps of her staircase and, once inside her room, fell into an armchair.

  The whitish light of the panes subsided gently in fluttering waves. The furniture, in its place, seemed to grow increasingly motionless and to be cast away in the shadows as on a murky ocean. The fire was out, the clock still beat time, and Emma let herself wonder at this calmness of things, when there were so many upheavals inside her. But, between the window and the worktable, there was little Berthe, toddling in her knitted bootees, and trying to approach her mother, to catch hold of the end of her apron strings.

  “Leave me alone!” she said, pushing the child away with her hand.

  The little girl soon came back even closer, up against her knees; and, using her arms to support herself there, looked up at her with large blue eyes, while a thread of clear saliva ran down from her lip onto the apron’s silk.

  “Leave me alone!” repeated the young woman, exasperated.

  Her face terrified the child, who began to wail.

  “Well, leave me alone then!” she said, thrusting her away with an elbow.

  Berthe tumbled by the chest of drawers, against its brass rosette; she cut her cheek on it, out came the blood. Madame Bovary rushed to pick her up, snapped the bellpull, called for the servant with all her might, and was about to curse herself, when Charles appeared. It was dinnertime, he had come home.

  “Look, my dearest,” Emma said to him in a calm voice; “our darling here has just fallen down and hurt herself, while pla
ying.”

  Charles reassured her, this was not a serious case, and he went off to find some sticking plaster.

  Madame Bovary did not come down for dinner; she wished to stay on her own to look after her child. Then, gazing at her as she slept, what anxiety remained gradually dissipated, and she seemed to herself very silly and very foolish to have been so troubled just now for so trifling a matter. Berthe, indeed, was no longer sobbing. Now her breathing was imperceptibly lifting the cotton blanket. Fat tears were settled in the corners of her half-shut eyelids, which revealed between their lashes two pale, sunken eyes; the plaster, stuck on her cheek, pulled the stretched skin aslant.

  “It’s strange,” thought Emma, “how ugly this child is.”

  When Charles, at eleven o’clock that night, came back from the pharmacy (where he had gone, after dinner, to return what remained of the plaster), he found his wife standing over the cradle.

  “I assure you it’s nothing,” he said as he kissed her on the forehead; “don’t torment yourself, poor darling, you will make yourself ill.”

  He had stayed a long time at the apothecary’s house. Even though Charles had not appeared very upset about it, Monsieur Homais had nevertheless striven to fortify him, to raise his morale. So they had chatted about the various dangers menacing childhood and of the thoughtlessness of servants. Madame Homais knew all about it, still bearing on her breast the marks of a porringer full of live embers that a cook had, in days gone by, let fall into her frock. So these good parents took a variety of precautions. The knives were never sharpened, nor the rooms waxed. There were iron bars over the windows and strong rails across the fireplace. The Homais children, despite their independence, could not stir a finger without someone supervising them; at the least cold, their father crammed them with cough medicines, and up to more than four years old they all wore, unsparingly, cushioned padding around their heads. This was, in truth, a mania of Madame Homais; her husband was privately distressed by it, fearing the possible effects of such compression on the intellectual organs, and he forgot himself to the extent of saying to her:

  “So you want to turn them into Caribs or Botocudos?”

  Charles, in the meantime, had tried to break off the conversation several times.

  “I would like to have a chat with you,” he had whispered into the clerk’s ear, who set off up the stairs in front of him.

  “Does he suspect something?” Léon asked himself. His heart pounded and he was lost in conjecture.

  At last Charles, having closed the door, begged him to see for himself what the price of a good daguerreotype might be in Rouen; he was preparing a romantic surprise for his wife, something nice and thoughtful, his portrait in black. But he first wanted to know where he stood; these proceedings should not trouble Monsieur Léon, since he went to town every week, more or less.

  With what aim? Homais suspected some young man’s fancy lay beneath it, an intrigue. But he was wrong; Léon was pursuing no love affair. He was sadder than ever, and Madame Lefrançois observed this clearly from the amount of food that he now left on his plate. To find out more, she questioned the tax-gatherer; Binet replied, in a haughty tone, that he was not paid by the police.

  His companion, nevertheless, seemed to him most peculiar; for Léon would often fall back in his chair with outspread arms, and complain vaguely about existence.

  “It’s because you don’t have enough distractions,” the tax-gatherer would say.

  “Such as?”

  “In your position, I would have a lathe!”

  “But I don’t know how to work one,” the clerk replied.

  “Ah, that’s true,” said the other as he stroked his jaw, with an air of disdain mingled with satisfaction.

  Léon was weary of loving without any outcome; and he began to feel that extreme depression which the repetition of the same way of living induces in you, when no interests shape it and no hope sustains it. He was so bored of Yonville and of the Yonvillais, that the sight of certain people, of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the pharmacist, easy fellow though he was, had become completely insufferable to him. Nevertheless, the prospect of a new situation appalled as much as it beguiled.

  This fear quickly turned to impatience, and then, in the distance, Paris beckoned him with the fanfare of its masked balls and the laughter of its grisettes. As he had to finish his law studies there, why did he not leave? What was keeping him back? And he set about making mental preparations; he contrived his affairs in advance. He furnished an apartment in his head. There he would lead the life of an artist! There he would take guitar lessons! He would have a dressing gown, a Basque beret, blue velvet slippers! And he was already even admiring a pair of crossed foils over his chimneypiece, with a death’s-head and the guitar above.

  The difficult business was his mother’s consent; yet nothing could seem more reasonable. His master was even obliging him to consider another practice, where he might better thrive. Taking the middle course therefore, Léon searched for some assistant clerk’s post in Rouen, did not find it, and finally wrote a long detailed letter to his mother, in which he explained his reasons for going to live in Paris immediately. She gave her consent.

  He did not hurry, however. Each day, for a full month, Hivert transported for him trunks, valises and parcels from Yonville to Rouen, from Rouen to Yonville; and, when Léon had replenished his wardrobe, he had his three armchairs stuffed, bought a supply of handkerchiefs, in short made more arrangements than for a journey around the world, delaying week after week, until he received a second maternal letter in which he was urged to depart, since he wished to take his exam before the holidays.

  When the moment came to embrace one another, Madame Homais cried; Justin sobbed; Homais, acting brave, hid his feelings; he himself desired to carry his friend’s greatcoat up to the gate of the notary, who was taking Léon to Rouen in his carriage. The latter just had time to bid goodbye to Monsieur Bovary.

  When he was at the top of the stairs, he paused, so out of breath did he feel. At his entrance, Madame Bovary rose eagerly.

  “It’s me again!” said Léon.

  “I was sure it was!”

  She bit her lips, and a surge of blood coursed under her skin, which turned pink all over, from the roots of her hair to the edge of her collar. She stayed standing, leaning on the wainscot with her shoulder.

  “So Monsieur is not in?” he went on.

  “He’s out.”

  She repeated:

  “He’s out.”

  There was a silence then. They looked at one another; and their thoughts, mingled in the same anguish, pressed tighter together, as breast to throbbing breast.

  “I would very much like to kiss Berthe,” said Léon.

  Emma went down a few steps, and called Félicité.

  Quickly he threw a wide glance around him that ranged over the walls, the shelves, the fireplace, as if to penetrate all, bear all away.

  But she came back in, and the maid brought Berthe, who was jiggling a windmill upside down on the end of a string.

  Léon kissed her several times on the neck.

  “Goodbye, poor child. Goodbye, little one, goodbye.”

  And he handed her back to her mother.

  “Take her away,” said the latter.

  They remained alone.

  Madame Bovary’s back was turned, her face resting against a windowpane; Léon held his cap in his hand, beating it gently down his thigh.

  “It’s going to rain,” said Emma.

  “I have a coat,” he replied.

  “Ah.”

  She drew away, chin down and brow forward. The light slipped over it as over marble, to the curve of her eyebrows, revealing nothing of what Emma was looking at on the horizon nor of the thoughts in her heart.

  “Well, goodbye,” he sighed.

  She raised her head with a brusque movement:

  “Yes, goodbye …, go!”

  They advanced toward each other; he he
ld out his hand, she hesitated.

  “In the English fashion then,” she said, yielding up her own and all the while endeavoring to laugh.

  Léon felt it between his fingers, and the very substance of his being seemed to go down into this moist palm.

  Then he opened his hand; their eyes met each other once more, and he vanished.

  When he was beneath the market house, he stopped, and hid himself behind a pillar, so as to gaze one last time upon that white house with its four green wooden blinds. He thought he saw a shadow behind the window, in the bedroom; but the curtain, unhooked from the retaining peg as though by its own volition, slowly stirred its long, aslant folds, that in one bound all spread themselves out, and then it stayed straight, more motionless than a wall of plaster. Léon began to run.

  He perceived from afar, on the road, his employer’s gig, and beside it a man dressed in a thick apron, holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were chatting together. They were waiting for him.

  “Embrace me,” said the apothecary with tears in his eyes. “Here is your greatcoat, my good friend; mind the cold! Look after yourself! Take care of yourself!”

  “Come on, Léon, into the carriage with you,” said the notary.

  Homais leaned on the splashboard, and in a voice broken by sobs, let fall these two sad words:

  “Pleasant journey!”

  “Good night,” replied Monsieur Guillaumin. “Cast off!”

  They left, and Homais returned home.

  Madame Bovary had opened her window onto the garden, and she was watching the clouds.

  They were piled up to the west toward Rouen, and were swiftly rolling their black volutes, behind which great rays of sunlight extended, like the golden arrows of a hung trophy, while the rest of the empty sky had the whiteness of a porcelain vase. But a squall of wind made the poplars bend, and all of a sudden the rain fell; it pattered on the fresh leaves. Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, the sparrows shook their wings in the wet bushes, and the puddles of water draining on the sand bore away the pink flowers of an acacia.

  “Ah, how far he must already be,” she thought.