“To Monsieur Belot, of Notre-Dame …”
“Ah no! Surely I shall count for something in your thoughts, in your life?”
“Porcine stock, prize ex aequo; to Messieurs Lehérissé and Cullembourg; sixty francs!”
Rodolphe clasped her hand, and felt its full warmth, its quivering, like a captive turtledove that wants to take flight again; but either because she was trying to disengage it or was responding to this pressure, she moved her fingers; he cried out:
“Oh, thank you! You’re not spurning me! You are so good! You understand that I am yours! Let me see you, let me gaze upon you!”
A gust of wind coming through the windows wrinkled the cloth on the table, and, on the Square, down below, the large bonnets of the peasant women all lifted, like wings of fluttering white butterflies.
“Use of oil-seed cake,” continued the President.
He hastened on:
“Flemish manure … flax cultivation … drainage … long leases … domestic service …”
Rodolphe no longer spoke. They gazed at each other. An overwhelming desire made their dry lips tremble; and loosely, without effort, their fingers melded together.
“Catherine-Nicaise-Élisabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerrière, for fifty-four years of service in the same farm, a silver medal—valued at twenty-five francs!”
“Where is she, Catherine Leroux?” repeated the Councillor.
She did not come forward, and whispering voices could be heard:
“Go on!”
“No.”
“To the left!”
“Don’t be scared!”
“Ah, she’s so silly!”
“Is she there, after all?” shouted Tuvache.
“Yes!… There she is!”
“So let her step up!”
Then a little old lady of timid bearing could be seen moving across the stage, seemingly shriveled up in her wretched clothes. She wore stout wooden pattens on her feet, and, about the hips, a large blue apron. Her thin face, surrounded by an untrimmed béguin hood, was more frounced with wrinkles than a withered pippin apple, and the sleeves of her red blouse overshot her long, gnarled hands. The dust of barns, the wash’s lye and the wool’s grease had so deeply encrusted, chafed and hardened them that they seemed filthy despite having been soused in clear water; and, by dint of long service, they were always half-open, as though to tender on their own account the humble witness of such suffering endured. Something of a nunlike severity dignified the cast of her face. Nothing sad nor tender softened that pale look. From a life spent with animals, she had taken on their dumbness and their placidity. It was the first time that she had found herself in the middle of so great a company; and, inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in black dress and the Councillor’s cross of the Legion of Honor, she remained utterly still, not knowing whether to advance or flee, nor why the crowd was pushing her on and why the judges were smiling at her. So stood, before the beaming burghers, that half-century of servitude.
“Approach, time-honored Catherine-Nicaise-Élisabeth Leroux!” intoned the Councillor, who had taken the list of the laureates from the President’s hands.
And examining by turns the sheet of paper and then the old woman, he repeated in a paternal manner:
“Approach, approach!”
“Are you deaf?” said Tuvache, bouncing on his chair. And he began to shout into her ear:
“Fifty-four years of service! A silver medal! Twenty-five francs! It’s yours.”
Then, when she had her medal, she gazed at it. And a beatific smile spread over her face, and you could hear her mumbling as she went off:
“I’ll give it to the priest back home, so as he might say masses for me.”
“What fanaticism!” exclaimed the pharmacist, leaning toward the lawyer.
The meeting was over; the crowd dispersed; and, now that the speeches had been read, everyone recovered rank and everything resumed its habitual round: the masters spoke harshly to their servants, and these hit their animals, sluggish triumphators who made their way back to the stall, a green crown between their horns.
Meanwhile the national guardsmen had come up to the first floor of the town hall, with brioche cakes spitted on their bayonets, and the battalion’s drum conveying a basket of bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe’s arm; he accompanied her to her house; they separated at her door; then he walked alone in the field, awaiting the banqueting hour.
The feast was long, noisy, badly served; so crammed were they, they could scarce move their elbows, and the narrow planks that served as benches all but snapped under the weight of the guests. They ate copiously. Each took a goodly share. The sweat trickled down every brow; and a whitish vapor, like a river mist on an autumn morning, floated above the table, between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning back against the tent cloth, was thinking so deeply about Emma, that he heard nothing. Behind him, out on the grass, servants were stacking dirty plates; his table companions spoke, he did not answer them; his glass was filled, and a silence settled on his thoughts, despite the growing clamor. He dreamed on what she had said and on the shape of her lips; her face, as in a magic mirror, shone out from the badge on the shakos; along the walls fell the folds of her dress, and days of love unrolled to infinity through the vistas of the future.
He saw her that evening, during the fireworks; but she was with her husband, Madame Homais and the pharmacist, the latter fretting about the danger of lost fireworks; and, every other moment, he would leave the company to go and give Binet his advice.
The pyrotechnical pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache’s address had, out of excessive precaution, been shut away in a cellar; so the damp gunpowder scarcely ignited, and the principal item, which should have featured a dragon biting its tail, misfired completely. From time to time, a wretched Roman candle went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a clamor in which were mingled the screams of women being tickled round the waist in the darkness. Emma, silent, cowered softly against Charles’s shoulder; then, chin lifted, she followed the luminous spurt of the rockets in the black sky. Rodolphe gazed at her by the light of the burning lamps.
They went out little by little. The stars brightened. A few drops of rain began to fall. She tied her shawl over her bare head.
At that moment, the Councillor’s hackney coach emerged from the inn. Its driver, who was drunk, dozed off all of a sudden; and you could discern from a distance, over the hood, between the two lamps, his body’s bulk swaying from right to left with the pitch and toss of the carriage braces.
“The truth is,” said the apothecary, “we must treat drunkenness with proper rigor! I would like to have recorded, on a weekly basis, at the door of the town hall, on a special board, the names of all those who, during the week, had poisoned themselves with alcohol. Moreover, with regard to the statistics, we would have a sort of open record we could go to when the need arose … But excuse me.”
And he ran once more toward the captain.
The latter was returning to his house. He was off to behold his lathe again.
“Perhaps it would not be a bad thing,” Homais said to him, “to send one of your men or to go yourself …”
“Leave me in peace,” replied the tax-gatherer, “since there is nothing amiss!”
“You can rest easy,” said the apothecary, when he had returned to his friends. “Monsieur Binet has assured me that the proper steps were taken. No spark will fall. The pumps are full. Let’s go to our slumbers.”
“My word, I need to,” declared Madame Homais, who was yawning a great deal; “but, never mind, we’ve had the most lovely day for our festival.”
Rodolphe repeated in a low voice and with a tender gaze:
“Oh yes. Most lovely.”
And, having bid good night to each other, they went their separate ways.
Two days later, in the Rouen Beacon, there was a big article on the agricultural show. Homais had composed it, in a rapture, the following day.
“Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whence runs this crowd, like the billows of a furious sea, under the torrents of a tropical sun pouring out its heat upon our tilled fields?”
After that, he discussed the condition of the peasants. Certainly the government did much, but not enough! “Courage!” he roared at it; “a thousand reforms are absolutely necessary, let us execute them.” Then, broaching the Councillor’s entrance, he did not forget “the martial look of our militia,” nor “our friskier village maidens,” nor “the bald-pated old men, a certain sort of patriarch, who were there, and of whom several, relics of our immortal battalions, felt their hearts throb once more to the manly sound of the drums.” He named himself among the leading members of the jury, and he even recalled, in a footnote, that M. Homais, pharmacist, had sent a dissertation on cider to the Agricultural Society. When he came to the prize giving, he depicted the joy of the winners in dithyrambic strokes of the pen. “The father embraced his son, the brother his brother, the husband his wife. More than one displayed his humble medal with pride, and without doubt, once returned to his home, beside his good housewife, he will have hung it tearfully on the modest walls of his little thatched cot.
“About six o’clock, a banquet, laid out in M. Liégeard’s meadow, brought together the principal persons present at the festival. There the greatest heartiness never ceased to prevail. Various toasts were made: M. Lieuvain, to the king! M. Tuvache, to the prefect! M. Derozerays, to farming! M. Homais, to industry and to the fine arts, those two sisters! M. Leplichey, to improvement! In the evening, a brilliant firework display suddenly lit up the sky; it looked like a veritable kaleidoscope, a genuine opera set, and a moment when our little locality could believe itself transported into the middle of a dream from A Thousand and One Nights.
“Let us note that no disagreeable incident came to perturb this family reunion.”
And he added:
“All we did observe was the clergy’s absence. Without doubt the vestries take progress to mean something quite different. Entirely up to you, gentlemen of the Loyola strain!”
IX
Six weeks went by. Rodolphe did not come back. At last, one evening, he appeared.
He had said to himself, the day after the agricultural show:
“Let us not return there so soon, that would be a mistake.”
And, at the end of the week, he had left to go hunting. After the hunt, he thought it would be too late, then he reasoned to himself:
“But, if she loved me from the first day, she should, eager to see me again, love me all the more. On on, then!”
And he understood that his calculation had been correct when, as he entered the room, he noticed Emma turn pale.
She was alone. The day was fading. The little muslin curtains, drawn across the windowpanes, thickened the twilight, and the barometer’s gilt, struck by a shaft of sun, glimmered fierily in the mirror, between the coral’s jagged edges.
Rodolphe stayed standing; and Emma scarcely responded to his first polite phrases.
“I’ve had business matters to attend to. I have been ill.”
“Seriously so?” she cried.
“Well,” said Rodolphe, sitting down beside her on a stool, “no!… It’s just that I did not wish to come back.”
“Why?”
“You cannot guess?”
He stared at her again, but in so violent a way that she lowered her head, blushing. He went on:
“Emma …”
“Monsieur!” she said, moving away a little.
“Ah, you see plainly,” he replied in a melancholy voice, “that I was right not to want to come back; for this name, this name that fills my soul and has burst from my lips, you forbid me to use it. Madame Bovary!… Ah, all the world calls you that … What’s more, it’s not your name; it is the name of another!”
He said again:
“Another!”
And he buried his face in his hands.
“Yes, I think of you all the time. The memory of you drives me to despair. Ah, forgive me! I’m leaving you … Farewell! I’ll go far away … so far away, that you will hear of me no longer … And yet … today … some unknown power thrust me toward you again. For we cannot strive against Heaven, we do not resist the smile of angels. What is lovely, sweet, adorable, we allow ourselves to be tempted by!”
It was the first time that Emma herself had heard such things said; and her pride, like someone refreshing themselves in a sweat house, stretched itself out languidly and at full length in the warmth of these words.
“But, though I did not come,” he continued, “though I was unable to see you, ah! at least I have looked upon your surroundings. At night, each and every night, I would rise from my bed, I would venture up here, I would gaze at your house, the roof shining in the moonlight, the garden trees waving at your window, and a tiny lamp, a gleam, shining through the windowpanes, in the shadows. Ah, you little knew that a poor, miserable wretch stood by, so near and yet so far …!”
She turned toward him with a sob.
“Oh, you’re so good,” she said.
“No, I love you, that’s all. You do not doubt it. Say it to me; one word, a single word!”
And Rodolphe, imperceptibly, allowed himself to slip from the stool onto the floor; but the clatter of wooden shoes could be heard in the kitchen, and the door to the room, he perceived, was not shut.
“Might you be kind enough,” he pursued, rising, “to gratify a whim.”
This was to visit his house; he wished to know her; and, as Madame Bovary saw no inconvenience in it, they were both rising to their feet, when Charles came in.
“Good day, doctor,” said Rodolphe.
The physician, flattered by this unexpected title, broke out in obsequiousness, and the other man took advantage of this to compose himself a little.
“Madame was talking to me,” he said, “of her health …”
Charles interrupted him: he was extremely anxious, indeed; his wife’s dullness of spirits had started again. Then Rodolphe asked if horse riding would not be beneficial.
“Certainly. Excellent, perfect. Now there’s an idea! You should follow it up.”
And, as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered her one; she refused his offer; he did not insist; then, with the aim of stating a motive for his visit, he related how his carter, the man who was bled, was still troubled with giddy spells.
“I’ll drop in,” said Bovary.
“No, no, I shall send him along; we’ll come together, that will be more convenient for you.”
“Ah! Very well. I thank you.” And, as soon as they were alone:
“Why do you not accept Monsieur Boulanger’s proposition, so kind as it is?”
She adopted a sulky air, sought a thousand excuses, and declared finally that perhaps it would look strange.
“Ah, what do I care for that?” said Charles, with a crafty sidestep. “Health before anything. You’re mistaken.”
“Well, how do you wish me to ride a horse, since I have no riding habit?”
“We must order one,” he replied.
The riding habit decided her.
When the costume was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his disposal, and that they were counting on his compliance.
The next day, at twelve o’clock, Rodolphe arrived in front of Charles’s door with two mounts. One sported pink pompoms behind the ears and a lady’s deerskin saddle.
Rodolphe had donned long soft boots, telling himself that without doubt she had never seen the like; indeed, Emma was charmed by his bearing, when he appeared at the top of the steps with his long velvet riding coat and his white knitted breeches. She was ready, she was waiting for him.
Justin slipped out of the pharmacy to have a look at her, and the apothecary likewise went out of his way. He gave Monsieur Boulanger some advice:
“A misfortune happens so quickly! Take care! Your horses may perhaps be spirited!
”
She heard a noise overhead: it was Félicité drumming on the windowpanes to distract little Berthe. The child sent a kiss from afar; her mother signaled back to her with the knob of her horse whip.
“Happy riding!” cried Monsieur Homais. “Prudence, above all! Prudence!”
And he waved his newspaper as he watched them move off.
As soon as it felt earth, Emma’s horse broke into a canter. Rodolphe cantered next to her. At moments they exchanged words. Face lowered, hand held high and right arm stretched, she abandoned herself to the rhythm of the movement that rocked her in the saddle.
At the bottom of the hill, Rodolphe gave his mount its head; they set off together, in a single bound; then, up on the top, all of a sudden, the horses came to a halt, and her long blue veil subsided.
It was early October. There was fog over the flat country. Between the contours of the hills vapors spread to the horizon; and others, tearing away, rose, dissolved. Sometimes, during a break in the clouds, under a shaft of sun, they glimpsed the roofs of Yonville in the distance, with the riverside gardens, the yards, the walls, and the church steeple. Emma narrowed her eyes to pick out her house, and never had this poor village in which she lived seemed so small to her. From where they were on the heights, the whole valley appeared like an immense pale lake, evaporating into the air. The blocks of trees, here and there, jutted out like black rocks; and the tall lines of poplars, reaching above the mist, became strands stirred by the wind.
Nearby, on the greensward, between the pines, a dusky light was circulating in the warm air. The earth, reddish-brown like tobacco powder, deadened the plod of the hooves; and, with the tips of their horseshoes, as they walked, the steeds kicked before them the fallen fir cones.
In this manner Rodolphe and Emma followed the verge of the wood. She turned away from time to time in order to avoid his gaze, and then saw nothing but the straight lines of pine trunks, whose unbroken succession made her a little dizzy. The horses blew. The saddles’ leather creaked.
The moment they entered the forest, the sun came out.
“God is shielding us,” said Rodolphe.
Madame Bovary (Modern Library) Page 18
