“Mark time!” shouted Binet.
“Halt!” shouted the colonel. “Left dress!”
And, after a presentation of arms in which the click-clack of barrel bands, sliding back and forth, rang out like a copper kettle tumbling down the stairs, all the rifles were lowered again.
Then they saw alighting from the coach a gentleman dressed in a short black coat embroidered with silver, bald in front and with a little tuft at the back, his color wan and his appearance excessively mild. He half-closed his fat eyes, behind thick lids, in order to survey the multitude, at the same time as he lifted his sharp nose and brought a smile to his sunken mouth. He recognized the mayor by his sash, and vouchsafed to him that Monsieur le Préfet was unable to come. He was himself a counselor from the prefecture; then he added a few apologies. Tuvache responded with civilities, the other confessed himself abashed; and so they remained, face-to-face, their foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all around, the municipal council, the worthies, the national guard and the crowd. The counselor, pressing his little black tricorn hat against his chest, reiterated his greetings, while Tuvache, bowed over like an arch, smiled likewise, stammered, searched for words, protested his devotion to the monarchy, and the honor being shown to Yonville.
Hippolyte, the inn’s servant, came to take the coachman’s horses by the bridle, and limping the whole time on his club foot, led them under the porch of the Lion d’Or, where many of the country folk had gathered to gaze at the coach. The drum struck up, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen filed up onto the stage to settle themselves in the armchairs of Utrecht velvet lent by Madame Tuvache.
All these people looked alike. Their slack fair-skinned faces, a little sunburnt, were the color of sweet cider, and their puffy side-whiskers burst out of great starched collars, borne up by white and very showy bow ties. All the roll-collar waistcoats were of velvet; all the fob watches carried some oval keepsake or other at the end of a long ribbon; and with two hands resting on two thighs, one carefully spread one’s trousers at the crotch, the cloth with the sheen still on it gleaming more brilliantly than the stout boots’ leather.
The society ladies stayed at the back, under the archway, between the pillars, while the vulgar crowd was in front, standing up, or seated on chairs. In fact, Lestiboudois had carried over all those chairs that he had removed from the field, and was likewise running every minute to fetch others in the church, and causing such an obstruction with his trade, that one had great trouble reaching the little stairs to the stage.
“I think, personally,” said Monsieur Lheureux (addressing the pharmacist, who was passing by on the way to his seat), “that they should have placed two Venetian poles there: along with something a little austere and opulent in the drapery line, it would have made a mightily pretty effect.”
“Indeed,” replied Homais. “But, what can one do? The mayor has taken it all upon himself. He has dubious taste, this wretched Tuvache, and is anyway utterly devoid of what one might call artistic spirit.”
Meanwhile Rodolphe, with Madame Bovary, had climbed up to the first floor of the town hall, into the Council Chamber, and, as it was empty, he had declared that they would be well placed there to enjoy the show more comfortably. He took three stools from around the oval table beneath the bust of the monarch, and, having drawn them up to one of the windows, they sat down next to each other.
There was a bustling on the stage, lengthy whisperings, some parleying. Finally, Monsieur le Conseiller rose to his feet. Everyone now knew that his name was Lieuvain, and they repeated it one to another in the crowd. So once he had gathered together several sheets of paper and stuck an eye up close in order to see them better, he began:
“Gentlemen, may I take the liberty first of all (before talking to you of the object of today’s reunion, and this feeling, I am certain, will be shared by you all), may I take the liberty, I say, to do justice to the upper chamber, to the government, to the monarchy, gentlemen, to your sovereign, to this much-loved king to whom no branch of public or private prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who guides with such a firm and at the same time wise hand the chariot of State amidst the unceasing perils of a stormy sea, knowing moreover how to ensure that peace is as well respected as war, industry, business, agriculture and the arts.”
“I must,” said Rodolphe, “move back a little.”
“Why?” asked Emma.
But, at that moment, the Councillor’s voice swelled in an extraordinary manner. He declaimed:
“We are no longer of that hour, gentlemen, when civil strife stained our public places with blood, when the landlord, the merchant, the worker himself, sleeping their pleasant slumber of a night, trembled to find themselves woken all at once by the din of inflammatory alarums, when slogans of the most subversive kind brazenly sapped the foundations …”
“It’s just that they can see me,” said Rodolphe, “from below; then I’d be making excuses for a fortnight, and, what with my bad reputation …”
“Oh, you slander yourself,” said Emma.
“No no, it’s quite awful, I do assure you.”
“But, gentlemen,” the Councillor went on, “if, putting aside these somber pictures from my memory, I turn my gaze upon the present condition of our lovely homeland: what do I see? Everywhere business and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the State, are establishing new relations; our great manufacturing centers have resumed their activities; religion, strengthened the more, smiles in every heart; our harbors are thriving, our confidence reborn, and at last France may breathe …!”
“Yet,” added Rodolphe, “perhaps, from society’s point of view, might they be right?”
“How so?” she asked.
“What,” he said, “aren’t you aware that some souls are endlessly tormented? They require both dreams and deeds in turn, the purest of passions, the fiercest of enjoyments, and so one plunges into all sorts of fancies, follies.”
Then she looked at him as you gaze upon a traveler who has come by way of remarkable lands, and she said:
“Not that we’ve even this diversion, we poor women!”
“Dreary diversion, for there happiness is not to be found.”
“But do we ever find it?” she ventured.
“One day, yes, you hit upon it,” he answered.
“And this is what you have understood,” said the Councillor. “You, farmers and workers of the fields; you peaceful pioneers of a wholly civilized labor! You men of progress and morality! You have understood, say I, that political storms are in truth even more formidable than atmospheric disturbances …”
“One day you hit upon it,” Rodolphe repeated, “one day, all of a sudden, and just when you have lost heart. Then the horizons yawn asunder, it’s like a voice that cries out: ‘There it is!’ You feel the need to confide your life to this person, to give them all, sacrifice all! No need to explain, you divine each other’s meaning. You glimpse one another in dreams.” And he looked up at her. “At last, there it is, this treasure you have sought so long, there, before you; it shines, it glistens. Nevertheless you still have your doubts, you do not dare trust it; you remain dazzled, as if newly emerged from shadows into the light.”
And, completing these words, Rodolphe added a dumb-show to his speech. Over his face he passed his hand, like a man taken with a dizzy spell; then he let it fall onto Emma’s. She withdrew her own. But the Councillor was still reading:
“And who can marvel at this, gentlemen? Only he who would be sufficiently blind, sufficiently immersed (I do not fear to say it), sufficiently immersed in the prejudices of another age not to recognize once more the spirit of the farming population. Where meet, indeed, with more patriotism than in the fields, with more devotion to the public cause, with, in a word, more intelligence? And I do not mean, gentlemen, that superficial intelligence, vain ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and moderate intelligence
, which applies itself above all else to the pursuit of profitable aims, contributing thus to the good of each person, to the common betterment and the upholding of the State, fruit of respect for the law and for the observance of one’s duties …”
“Ah, yet again!” said Rodolphe. “Always one’s duties, I’m wearied to death by these words. They’re a heap of old blockheads in flannel vests, and bigoted dames with foot warmers and rosaries, who go on warbling in our ears: ‘Duty! Duty!’ Pah! Ye gods! Duty is rather to savor what is great, cherish what is beautiful, and not accept every convention of society, along with the infamies it forces upon us.”
“And yet … and yet …” objected Madame Bovary.
“Ah, no! Why speak out against the passions? Are they not the only beautiful thing on earth, the fount of heroism, of enthusiasm, of poetry, of music, of the arts, indeed of everything?”
“But one really ought,” said Emma, “to conform to society’s opinion a little and obey its morality.”
“Pah! The fact is, there are two,” he responded. “The petty, the expedient, the morality that belongs to man, that never ceases to change and bawls at the top of its voice, bustling about down below, workaday, like that gathering of imbeciles that you see there. But the other, the eternal one, lies all around and overhead, like the landscape that surrounds us and the open sky that gives us light.”
Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with his pocket handkerchief. He went on:
“And what would be the point, gentlemen, in demonstrating the usefulness of farming to you here? Who provides for our needs? Who supplies our sustenance? Is it not the farmer? The farmer, gentlemen, who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the fields, brings forth the wheat which, once ground, is turned to powder by means of ingenious apparatuses, emerging under the name of flour, and, thence, transported to the cities, is shortly taken to the baker’s, who turns it into a nutriment for rich and poor alike. Is it not once more the farmer who, for the sake of our garments, fattens his abundant flocks on the pastures? For how to clothe ourselves, how feed ourselves, without the farmer? And is it even necessary, gentlemen, to seek so far for examples? Who has not often reflected on the utmost importance that we reap from that humble animal, ornament of our farmyards, which at the same time furnishes a soft pillow for our beds, its succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I would never come to a close, if I had to enumerate one after another the different types of produce which the well-tilled earth, like a generous mother, lavishes on her children. Here, it is vines; elsewhere, it is cider apples; there, rape; further off, cheeses; and flax; gentlemen, let us not forget flax! Which, over these last few years, has seen a considerable increase and to which I draw your particular attention.”
He had no need to draw it; for all the mouths of the multitude were held open, as though to drink in the words. Tuvache, beside him, listened with a wide-eyed stare; Monsieur Derozerays closed his lids placidly from time to time; and, further away, the pharmacist, with his son Napoléon between his knees, had his hand cupped behind his ear in order not to lose a single syllable. The other members of the jury slowly rocked their chins in their waistcoats, as a sign of approval. The firemen, at the foot of the stage, rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, remained with his elbow out, the point of the saber aloft. He could perhaps hear, but could not have observed a thing, on account of his helmet’s visor which sloped down to his nose. His lieutenant, the eldest son of Monsieur Tuvache, had gone even further with his; for he wore an enormous one that wobbled on his head, leaving an end of his cotton handkerchief peeping out. He smiled beneath with an entirely childlike meekness, and his pale little face, sweat trickling down it, bore an expression of joy, exhaustion and sleepiness.
The Square was packed with people right up to its houses. Folk were to be seen leaning their elbows at every window, others standing in every doorway, and Justin, in front of the pharmacy, seemed stuck in contemplation of whatever he was looking at. Despite the silence, Monsieur Lieuvain’s voice was lost to the air. It reached you in scraps of phrases, interrupted here and there by the noise of chairs in the crowd; then you heard, all of a sudden, an ox’s drawn-out bellow emanating from behind him, or the bleating of lambs answering one another at street corners. In fact, the cowherds and the shepherds had driven their animals thus far, and they lowed every so often, while tearing off with their tongue some odd end of foliage that dangled on their muzzles.
Rodolphe had approached Emma, and he said, speaking quickly in a soft voice:
“Aren’t you revolted by this conspiracy of society? Is there a single feeling it does not condemn? The noblest of instincts, the purest of sympathies are persecuted, slandered, and, if two poor souls do finally meet, all’s organized so they cannot consort. Nevertheless they will try, they’ll beat their wings, they’ll call to one another. Oh, no matter! sooner or later, in six months, ten years, they will be united again, will love each other, because fate demands it and because they are born for one another.”
He sat with his arms crossed on his knees, and, thus lifting his face toward Emma, he gazed at her from close to, fixedly. In his eyes she could make out tiny golden beams darting out all round his black pupils, and could even smell the perfume of the pomade with which his hair gleamed. Then a limpness laid hold of her, she recalled that Vicomte who made her waltz at La Vaubyessard, and whose beard, like the hair in front of her now, gave off this fragrance of vanilla and lemon; and, automatically, she half-closed her eyelids the better to breathe it in. But, as she did so, arching back slightly on her chair, she perceived far off, on the furthermost horizon, the old diligence Hirondelle, trundling slowly down the Leux hill, trailing a long plume of dust. It was in this yellow vehicle that Léon had so often come back to her; and by the same road there that he had left forever! She thought she saw him opposite, at his window; then everything grew confused, clouds passed over; it seemed to her that she was twirling still in the waltz, under the chandeliers’ blaze, on the Vicomte’s arm, and that Léon was not far, that he was about to arrive … and yet she continued to smell Rodolphe’s hair beside her. So the sweetness of this sensation permeated her earlier desires, and like grains of sand under a gust of wind, they swirled about in the fine puffs of perfume spreading through her soul. Several times she flared her nostrils, wide, to inhale the cool scent of the ivy around the pillars’ capitals. She removed her gloves, she wiped her hands; then, with her handkerchief, she fanned her face, while through the beating of her temples she heard the crowd’s murmur and the voice of the Councillor droning on.
He was saying:
“Carry on! Persevere! Heed neither the suggestions of routine, nor the overly premature counsel of a rash empiricism! Apply yourselves above all to the improvement of the soil, to decent manure, to the development of equine, bovine, ovine and porcine stock! May these agricultural shows be for you as peaceful arenas in which the victor, on leaving there, holds forth his hand to the vanquished and fraternizes with him, in the hope of greater success! And you, time-honored servants! Humble menials! Whose painful labors no government up to this day has taken into proper consideration, come and receive the reward for your silent virtues, and be assured that the State, from this time forward, has its eyes fastened upon you, encouraging you, protecting you, that it shall do justice to your rightful demands and shall, to the best of its ability, ease the burden of your painful sacrifices!”
Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down again; Monsieur Derozerays stood up, beginning another speech. Perhaps his was not so flowery as the Councillor’s; but was to be commended for its more positive style, that is to say by a more particular grasp of things and a loftier set of reflections. Thus, praise for the government took up less space; religion and agriculture occupied more. One ascertained the affinity between these two, and how they had always concurred in civilization. Rodolphe, with Madame Bovary, was chatting of dreams, premonitions, animal magnetism. Traveling back to the cradle of society, the speaker w
as painting for you those fierce times when men lived on acorns in the depths of the woods. Then they put away the skins of wild beasts, put on cloth, plowed furrows, planted the vine. Was it a boon, and were there not more inconveniences than advantages in this discovery? Monsieur Derozerays did ask himself this question. From animal magnetism, little by little, Rodolphe had come round to the subject of affinities, and, while the President was quoting Cincinnatus at his plow, Diocletian planting his cabbages, and the Emperors of China inaugurating the year by sowing seed, the young man was explaining to the young lady that these irresistible attractions drew their cause from some previous existence.
“Likewise, with us,” he said, “why did we meet? What chance willed it? Across the separation, no doubt, like two rivers that flow on to reunite, our own particular inclinations thrust us toward one another.”
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
“For good general husbandry!” cried the President.
“Just now, for example, when I came to your house …”
“To Monsieur Bizet, of Quincampoix.”
“Did I know that I would be accompanying you?”
“Seventy francs!”
“A hundred times, even, I desired to leave, and I followed you, I stayed.”
“Manures.”
“As I shall stay tonight, tomorrow, every day, all my life!”
“To Monsieur Caron, of Argueil, a gold medal!”
“For in no one else’s company have I ever found a more perfect sweetness.”
“To Monsieur Bain, of Givry-Saint-Martin!”
“And so I, for one, shall be carrying away your memory.”
“For a merino ram …”
“But you’ll forget all about me, I will have passed like a shadow.”
Madame Bovary (Modern Library) Page 17
