Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

“You think so?” she cried.

  “Forward, forward!” he insisted.

  He clicked his tongue. The two animals sped on.

  Long fronds of bracken, on the side of the track, kept catching in Emma’s stirrup. Rodolphe, without stopping, would lean over and pull them out one by one. At other times, to push away the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee graze her leg. The sky had turned blue. The leaves did not stir. There were large clearings full of flowering heather; and sheets of violets alternated with the tangle of trees, which were gray, fawn-colored or golden, in a variousness of leaves. Often they would hear, beneath the bushes, the faint flap of wings darting, or else the hoarse, soft caw of crows flying among the oaks.

  They dismounted. Rodolphe tied the horses. She went in front, over the moss, between the ruts.

  But the unwieldy length of her dress encumbered her, even though she lifted it up by the train, and Rodolphe, walking behind her, contemplated between that black cloth and the black half-boot, the daintiness of her white stocking, which seemed to him a part of her nakedness.

  She stopped.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “Come on, just a little more effort!” he urged. “Courage!”

  Then, a hundred paces further, she stopped again; and, through her veil, which fell obliquely from her man’s hat down onto her hips, you could make out her face in a bluish translucency, as though she were swimming beneath azure waves.

  “So where are we going?”

  He made no reply. She breathed in a jerky fashion. Rodolphe cast his eyes about him and chewed his mustache.

  They came to a broader area, where staddles had been hewn. They sat down on a felled tree trunk, and Rodolphe began to speak to her of his love.

  At first he did not frighten her at all with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholic.

  Emma listened to him with lowered head, all the while stirring the fallen woodshavings with her toe.

  But, at this sentence:

  “Are our destinies not mutual now?”

  “Of course not,” she replied. “You know perfectly well. It is impossible.”

  She got up to leave. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped dead. Then, having considered him for several minutes with moist, love-filled eyes, she said sharply:

  “Look, let us speak no more of this … Where are the horses? We are going back.”

  He made an angry, world-weary gesture. She repeated:

  “Where are the horses? Where are the horses?”

  Then, smiling with a strange smile and a fixed gaze, teeth clenched, he came forward with outspread arms. She backed off trembling. She stammered:

  “Oh! You’re scaring me! You’re hurting me! Let us leave.”

  “Since we must,” he went on, with an altered expression.

  And immediately he returned to being respectful, fawning, shy. She gave him her arm. They retraced their steps. He said:

  “So what was the matter? Why? I cannot make it out. You have doubtless misunderstood? You’re in my soul like a madonna on a pedestal, up on high, steadfast and immaculate. But I need you in order to live. I’ve need of your eyes, your voice, your mind. Be my friend, my sister, my angel!”

  And he stretched out his arm and put it around her waist. She strove feebly to break loose. He supported her thus, as they walked.

  But they heard the two horses cropping the leaves.

  “Oh, once more,” said Rodolphe. “Don’t leave! Stay!”

  He drew her further off, around the rim of a small pool, its waters green with duck weed. Withered water lilies lay motionless among the rushes. At the sound of their footsteps in the grass, frogs leapt to hide themselves.

  “It is wrong of me, wrong of me,” she said. “I must be mad to listen to you.”

  “Why?… Emma! Emma!”

  “Oh, Rodolphe!…” said the young woman slowly as she leaned on his shoulder.

  The cloth of her dress caught in the riding coat’s velvet. She threw back her white neck, distended by a sigh; and, weakening, all in tears, with a drawn-out shudder and hiding her face, she surrendered herself.

  The evening’s shadows were falling; the low sun, passing between the branches, dazzled her eyes. Here and there, all about her, in the leaves or on the ground, spots of light trembled, as if hummingbirds, flying to and fro, had scattered their feathers. The silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to rise from the trees; she was aware of her heart, that was beating again, and of the blood circling through her flesh like a river of milk. Then, she heard from far and away, beyond the wood, on the opposite hills, an indistinct and protracted cry, a voice that lingered, and she listened to it silently, as it mingled like a snatch of song with the last quiverings of her plucked nerves. Rodolphe, cigar between his teeth, was patching up a snapped bridle rein with his pocketknife.

  They returned to Yonville, by the same path. They saw again in the mud the prints of their horses, side by side, and the same bushes, the same stones in the grass. Nothing around them had changed; and yet, for her, something had taken place that was more considerable than the shifting of mountains. Rodolphe, from time to time, leaned over and seized her hand to kiss it.

  She was delightful on horseback! Straight-backed, with her slender waist, knee bent on the animal’s mane and her color heightened a little by the open air, in the evening’s blush.

  Riding into Yonville, she pranced a caracole on the paving stones. She was being watched from the windows.

  Her husband, over supper, thought she was looking well; but she appeared not to be listening when he inquired about her ride; and she rested her elbow next to the plate, between the two glowing candles.

  “Emma,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I spent this afternoon at Monsieur Alexander’s; he has an old filly, still very fair, just a little broken-kneed, and which we could have for a hundred crowns, I’m certain of it …”

  He added:

  “Thinking how much that would please you, I reserved it … I bought it … Have I done right? Tell me now.”

  She moved her head in a sign of assent; then, a quarter of an hour later:

  “Are you going out this evening?” she asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Oh nothing, nothing, my dear.”

  And, as soon as she was rid of Charles, she went upstairs to shut herself up in her room.

  At first, it was like a giddy spell; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she still felt the grip of his arms, while the leaves quivered and the rushes hissed.

  But, when she glimpsed herself in the mirror, she marveled at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, nor so deep. Something subtle had spread over her body, transfiguring it.

  She repeated to herself: “I have a lover! A lover!”—delighting in this idea as if at a second puberty that had unexpectedly come upon her. So she would at last possess those joys of love, that fever of happiness she had so despaired of. She was entering into something wondrous where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium; a bluish immensity surrounded her, emotion’s peaks glistened beneath her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only in the distance, far below, in the shade, between the intervals of these heights.

  Then she recalled the heroines in the books she had read, and the lyric legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with beguiling, sisterly voices. She became a veritable part of these imaginings and realized the drawn-out dream of her youth, in deeming herself one of those archetypal lovers whom she had so envied. Moreover, Emma felt the gratification of vengeance. Had she not suffered enough! But now she was triumphant, and love, so long contained, gushed forth whole and with a joyful bubbling. She relished it without remorse, without unease, without confusion.

  The next day passed by in a fresh sweetness. They exchanged pledges. She recounted her sorrows. Rodolphe would interrupt her with his kisses; and she would beg him, gazing upon him with eyelids
half-closed, to call her again by her name and to say once more that he loved her. It was in the forest, as the day before, in a shoemaker’s hut. The walls were of straw and the roof came down so low, they had to stoop. They were seated one against the other, on a bed of dry leaves.

  From that day forth, they wrote to each other regularly every evening. Emma would carry her letter to a crack in the wall, at the bottom of the garden, near the river. Rodolphe would come there to fetch it and put in its place another, that she would always accuse of being too short.

  One morning, when Charles had gone out before dawn, the whim took her to see Rodolphe instantly. One could speedily reach La Huchette, stay there an hour and be back in Yonville with everyone still fast asleep. This idea made her gasp with lust, and she soon found herself in the middle of the meadow, where she walked at a rapid pace, without a glance behind her.

  The day was beginning to break. Emma, from a distance, recognized her lover’s house, whose two swallow-tailed weather-vanes stood out blackly against the pale dawn.

  After the farmyard, there was a main building which must be the chateau. She entered, and it was as though the walls, at her approach, had stood aside of their own volition. A great flight of stairs rose straight up to a corridor. Emma lifted the latch on a door, and all of a sudden, at the far end of the bedroom, she perceived a sleeping man. It was Rodolphe. She let out a cry.

  “There you are! There you are!” he repeated. “How did you manage to come?… Ah, your dress is soaked.”

  “I love you,” she replied, circling his neck with her arms.

  Having succeeded in this first boldness, each time Charles now left the house early, Emma would dress swiftly and with a stealthy tread descend the flight of steps that led to the water’s edge.

  But, when the cattle board was raised, she had to follow the walls that ran along the river; the steep bank was slippery; she hung on with one hand to the bunches of withered wallflower, so as not to fall. Then she took off across plowed fields, into which she would sink, stumble and entangle her puny lady’s boots. Her scarf, knotted over her head, was flung about by the wind in the pasture; she was scared of the oxen, she broke into a run; she would arrive out of breath, cheeks flushed, and breathing from every pore a fresh fragrance of sap, of greenery and the open air. Rodolphe, at that hour, would be still asleep. It was as though a spring morning had entered his room.

  The yellow curtains across the windows let through a deep golden light. Emma would grope her way blinking, while the dewdrops suspended from the drawn-back swathes of her hair made a halo of topazes all about her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him and caught her to his heart.

  Afterward, she would examine the room, she would open the drawers, she would comb her hair with his comb and gaze at herself in the shaving mirror. Often, she would go so far as to set between her teeth the stem of a stout pipe that was on the night table, among the lemons and the sugar lumps, next to a carafe of water.

  A good quarter of an hour was needed for their farewells. Then Emma would weep; she wished never to have to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than herself thrust her toward him, so much so that one day, seeing her suddenly and unexpectedly appear, he knitted his brows like someone vexed.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Are you in pain? Tell me!”

  Finally he declared, in a serious manner, that her visits were becoming indiscreet and that she was compromising herself.

  X

  Little by little, these fears of Rodolphe’s gained on her. Love had intoxicated her at first, and she had thought of nothing beyond it. But, now it was indispensable to her existence, she feared to lose some part of it, or even that it might be disturbed. When she made her way back from visiting him, she would throw anxious glances all about her, closely watching each shape that went by on the horizon and each attic window from which she might have been observed. She listened to the footsteps, the cries, the clinks of plows; and she came to a stop, more pale and shivering than the poplars’ leaves swaying above her head.

  One morning, when she was returning thus, she suddenly thought she could discern the long barrel of a rifle which seemed to be aimed at her. It extended at an angle beyond the rim of a small tub, half-buried among the grasses, on the margin of a ditch. Emma, ready to faint from terror, came forward nevertheless, and a man emerged from the tub, like a Jack-in-the-box springing up from the bottom. He had gaiters buckled up to his knees, his cap pushed down to his eyes, lips shivering with cold and a red nose. It was Captain Binet, lying in wait for wild ducks.

  “You should have spoken from further off!” he shouted. “When one observes a gun, warning must always be given.”

  In this way, the tax-gatherer was trying to conceal the fright that he had just had; for, a prefectorial decree having forbidden duck hunting other than from a boat, Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the law, was committing an offense. So at every moment he believed he could hear the rural guard arriving. But this worry chafed at his sport, and, all alone in his tub, he congratulated himself on his good fortune and his wiliness.

  At the sight of Emma, he seemed relieved of a great burden, and immediately, beginning the conversation:

  “Not warm out. Biting!”

  Emma made no reply. He pursued:

  “And there you are, out bright and early?”

  “Yes,” she said, stammering; “I’m coming from the wet nurse’s house where my child is.”

  “Ah, very good! Very good! As for me, I’ve been here from daybreak, just as you see me; but the weather’s so mizzly, that unless you’ve the feather on the muzzle …”

  “Good day, Monsieur Binet,” she interrupted, turning on her heel.

  “Your servant, Madame,” he resumed in a dry tone.

  And he popped back into his tub.

  Emma regretted leaving the tax-gatherer so brusquely. He would be making unfavorable conjectures, no doubt. The story of the wet nurse was the worst excuse, everyone at Yonville knowing full well that the Bovary child had been back at her parents’ house for a year. Moreover, nobody lived around about; this path led only to La Huchette; so Binet had guessed where she was coming from, and he would not keep quiet, he would blab, for certain! She continued until dark torturing her mind with all the lying schemes imaginable, and having this imbecile with the game pouch endlessly before her eyes.

  After dinner, Charles, seeing her anxious, wished to divert her by taking her to the pharmacist’s; and the first person she noticed in the pharmacy was him again, the tax-gatherer! He was standing before the counter, lit by the glow of the red jar, and was saying:

  “Let me have, if you please, a half-ounce of vitriol.”

  “Justin,” cried the apothecary, “bring us some sulfuric acid.”

  Then, to Emma, who wished to go up to Madame Homais’s room:

  “No, stay, it’s not worth it, she’ll be coming down. Warm yourself by the stove while you wait … Excuse me … Good day, doctor …” (for the pharmacist very much flattered himself in uttering the word doctor, as if by addressing another as this, he would have something of the splendor he found therein reflected back on himself) … “But take care not to tip over the mortars! In fact, go and fetch the chairs from the parlor; you know jolly well that the armchairs in the drawing-room are not to be disturbed.”

  And Homais was hurrying out from behind the counter to put back his own armchair, when Binet asked him for a half-ounce of sugar acid.

  “Sugar acid?” said the pharmacist scornfully. “Don’t know, never heard of it. Perhaps you want some oxalic acid? It’s oxalic, isn’t that right?”

  Binet explained that he needed a mordant to mix his own copper solution with which to rub the rust off various hunting pieces. Emma gave a start. The pharmacist began to say:

  “Indeed, the weather is not propitious, on account of the wet.”

  “Nevertheless,” said the tax-gatherer with a sly air, “there are some who put up with it.”

&n
bsp; She choked.

  “And give me …”

  “So he’s never going to go!” she thought.

  “A half-ounce of rosin and turpentine, four ounces of unbleached wax, and three ounces of bone black, please, to clean my equipment’s shiny leather parts.”

  The apothecary was starting to cut the wax, when Madame Homais appeared with Irma in her arms, Napoléon next to her and Athalie following. She went to sit down on the velvet bench by the window, and the little boy squatted on a stool, while his older sister prowled around the jujube box, next to her dear papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking bottles, he was pasting labels, making up parcels. There was a hush around him; and all that could be heard was the weights jingling in the scales from time to time, with the odd low word from the pharmacist giving advice to his apprentice.

  “How is your little one?” asked Madame Homais suddenly.

  “Silence!” exclaimed her husband, who was scribbling figures in the rough book.

  “Why haven’t you brought her along?” she resumed in a whisper.

  “Hush, hush!” said Emma, pointing at the apothecary.

  But Binet, completely absorbed in reading the bill, had probably heard nothing. At last he left. Then Emma, rid of him, let out a great sigh.

  “What deep breaths you take!” said Madame Homais.

  “Oh, it’s because it is a little warm,” she responded.

  So they considered, the next day, how to arrange their meetings; Emma wanted to bribe her maid with a present; but it would be better to find some discreet house in Yonville.

  All winter, three or four times a week, in the darkest night, he would come to the garden. Emma had deliberately taken the key out of the gate, Charles believing it lost.

  To alert her, Rodolphe would throw a fistful of sand against the window blinds. She got up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait for her, as Charles had a mania for prattling by the fire, and he would not finish. She was consumed with impatience; if her eyes could have managed it, they would have thrown him out of the window. At last, she began to prepare for bed; then she took up a book and went on reading quite calmly, as if entertained by the words. But Charles, who was in bed, would appeal to her to turn in.