Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  Elbow on the long board where she was ironing, he would greedily contemplate the women’s things spread out around him: the dimity petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the running-string pantaloons, full at the hips and narrowing lower down.

  “What’s that used for?” the young lad would ask, drawing his hand over the crinoline petticoat or a hook and eye.

  “You’ve never seen nothing, then?” laughed Félicité in reply. “As if your mistress, Madame Homais, don’t wear the like.”

  “Oh, yes! Madame Homais!”

  And he added meditatively:

  “Is she a lady like Madame?”

  But Félicité grew impatient to see him twirling all around her like that. She was six years older, and Théodore, Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, had started to court her.

  “Leave me in peace!” she said, removing her pot of starch. “Go off and crush the almonds, rather; always rummaging about next to women, you are; wait till you’ve whiskers on your jaw, naughty brat, before meddling in that.”

  “Come, don’t be cross, I’m going to do her lady boots for you.”

  And straightaway, he reached up to the mantelpiece for Emma’s shoes, all pasted with mud—the mud of assignations—that came off in powder under his fingers, and which he would watch gently float up in a beam of sunlight.

  “How scared you are of spoiling them!” said the kitchen maid, who never took such care when she cleaned them herself, because Madame, as soon as the fabric was no longer fresh and new, left them to her.

  Emma had a great number of these in her wardrobe, and she squandered them in proportion, without Charles ever allowing himself the slightest remark.

  Thus it was that he spent three hundred francs for a wooden leg which she judged only proper as a present for Hippolyte. The shaft was lined in cork, and it had sprung joints, a complicated mechanism covered in a black trouser leg, ending in a varnished boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use his handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to obtain him another and more convenient one. The doctor, of course, once again incurred the expense of this purchase.

  So, the stable lad went back to his work bit by bit. You could see him getting about the village as before, and when Charles heard, from a distance, the sharp tap of his stick upon the paving-stones, he would very speedily take another route.

  It was Monsieur Lheureux, the dealer, who took charge of this order; this gave him the opportunity to associate with Emma. He would prattle to her of the latest deliveries from Paris, of a thousand feminine curios, behaving in a most fawning manner, and never demanding money. Emma surrendered to this easy way of satisfying her whims. And so she wished to have, as a gift for Rodolphe, a very handsome horse whip to be found in an umbrella shop in Rouen. Monsieur Lheureux, the week after, placed it for her on her table.

  But the following day he appeared in person at her house with a bill for two hundred and seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was very embarrassed: all the drawers of her secretary were empty; they owed Lestiboudois more than fifteen days, the servant two quarters, a deal more of other things, and Bovary was impatiently awaiting the remittance from Monsieur Derozerays, who was in the habit, every year, of paying him around St. Peter’s Day.

  She at first succeeded in refusing Lheureux; at length he lost patience: he was being pressed hard, he had a lack of capital, and, if he couldn’t call some of it in, he would be forced to take back from her all the wares she had.

  “Well, take them back!”

  “Oh, that was a jest,” he replied. “But I do regret the horse whip, that’s all. I’faith, I shall ask Monsieur to return it.”

  “No, no!” she said.

  “Ah, now I have you,” thought Lheureux.

  And, sure of his discovery, he left, repeating in a low tone and with his habitual little wheeze:

  “Very well! We shall see, we shall see!”

  She was considering how to extricate herself from this, when the kitchen maid came in, placing on the chimneypiece a little roll of blue paper, on the part of Monsieur Derozerays. Emma leapt on it and opened it. There were fifteen napoleons. It was the right amount. She heard Charles on the stairs; she threw the gold into the back of her drawer and took the key.

  Three days later, Lheureux reappeared.

  “I’ve an arrangement to propose to you,” he said; “if, in place of the agreed sum, you would like to take …”

  “There we are,” she said, placing fourteen napoleons in his hand.

  The dealer was astonished. So, to conceal his disappointment, he poured out excuses and offers of service, all of which Emma refused; then she stayed a few moments fingering the two hundred-sous coins in her apron pocket that he had given to her in change. She resolved to economize, before paying back later …

  “Nonsense!” she reflected, “he won’t give it another thought.”

  In addition to the horse whip with its silver-gilt knob, Rodolphe had received a seal with this motto: Amor nel cor; plus a scarf to use as a comforter, and lastly a cigar case identical to the Vicomte’s, which Charles had picked up long ago on the road and that Emma had kept. Yet these presents humiliated him. He refused several of them; she was insistent, and Rodolphe ended up obeying, finding her tyrannical and overencroaching.

  Then she would have strange ideas:

  “Whenever midnight sounds,” she said, “you shall think of me!”

  And, if he confessed that he had not thought of her then, reproaches would fly in abundance, and always finished on the eternal sentence:

  “Do you love me?”

  “Why yes, I love you,” he would reply.

  “A lot?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “You haven’t loved others then, hmm?”

  “You think you took me intact?” he exclaimed, laughing.

  Emma wept, and he endeavored to console her, embellishing his protests with puns.

  “Oh, it’s because I love you,” she went on, “I love you so much I can’t do without you, don’t you know that? Sometimes my longing to see you again tears me apart with all the rages of love. I say to myself: ‘Where is he? Perhaps he’s talking to other women? They smile at him, he draws near …’ Oh no, not one of them pleases you, do they? There are some more beautiful; but I know better how to love. I’m your servant and concubine. You are my king, my idol, you’re good, you’re handsome, you’re intelligent, you are strong!”

  He had heard these things said so many times, that to his ear there was nothing original about them. Emma resembled all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, dropping away little by little like a garment, left nakedly in view the endless monotony of passion, whose shapes and words are always the same. This man, with so much experience, could not distinguish the differences in feeling beneath the sameness of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured similar phrases to him, he believed only feebly in their innocent candor; one had to beat back, he thought, the exaggerated language under which everyday affections hid themselves; as if the soul’s fullness would not at times spill over through the most vacant of metaphors, since no one can ever take the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows, and human utterance is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes to make the bears dance, when we would like to move the stars to pity.

  But, with that high ground of discrimination belonging to those who, whatever the engagement, keep to the rear, Rodolphe perceived in this love other enjoyments to be made the most of. He judged any sense of modesty inconvenient. He treated her without ceremony. He fashioned her into something compliant and corrupt. It was a kind of idiot affection full of admiration on his part, of voluptuousness on hers, a bliss that numbed her; and her soul sank down into this drunkenness and drowned in it, shriveled up, like the Duke of Clarence in his butt of malmsy.

  By virtue of her amorous habits alone, Madame Bovary’s appearance changed. Her looks grew bolder, her words looser; she even had the unseemliness to wa
lk out with Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth, as if to defy the world; finally, those who doubted still, doubted no longer when she was seen, one day, alighting from the Hirondelle, her figure squeezed into a waistcoat, in the manner of a man; and Mère Bovary, who, after a dreadful scene with her husband, had come to take refuge at her son’s, was not the least scandalized of the good townswomen. She found much else to displease her: first, Charles had not listened to her advice concerning the prohibition of novels; then, she did not like the style of the house; she took the liberty of making some remarks, and they quarreled, one time especially, over Félicité.

  The previous evening, when going along the passage, Mère Bovary had surprised her in the company of a man, a man with a dark collar, of about forty years of age, and who, at the sound of her footsteps, swiftly fled the kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh; but the good woman lost her temper, declaring that, unless morals were to be made a mockery of, one ought to watch over those of the servants.

  “What world do you belong to?” said the daughter-in-law, with such an impertinent look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not in fact defending her own cause.

  “Get out!” said the young woman, leaping to her feet.

  “Emma!… Mother!…” cried Charles, in an attempt at reconciliation.

  But they had both fled in their exasperation. Emma stamped her feet and kept repeating:

  “Ah, what good breeding. What a peasant!”

  He ran after his mother, she was beside herself, she stammered out:

  “A sauce box, that’s what she is! A featherbrain! Worse, perhaps!”

  And she wanted to leave immediately, if the other did not come to apologize. So Charles went back to his wife and entreated her to yield; he got down on his knees; she ended by replying:

  “So be it. I’ll go.”

  Indeed, she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity of a marquess, saying to her:

  “Excuse me, Madame.”

  Then, going back upstairs to her own room, Emma threw herself full-length upon the bed, and cried there like a child, her head buried in the pillow.

  They had agreed, she and Rodolphe, that in the event of something unusual happening, she would attach a little scrap of white paper to the window blind, so that, if by chance he was in Yonville, he would hasten into the lane behind the house. Emma prepared the signal; she waited for three-quarters of an hour, when all at once she caught sight of Rodolphe at the corner of the market house. She was tempted to open the window, to call him; but he had already vanished. She slumped again in despair.

  Soon however she thought she heard someone walking on the pavement. Doubtless it was him; she descended the stairs, crossed the yard. He was there, outside. She threw herself into his arms.

  “Be careful now,” he said.

  “Oh, if only you knew!” came her response.

  And she began to tell him everything, in a hurry, disconnectedly, exaggerating the facts, inventing a few, and lavishing digressions in such an abundance that he understood nothing.

  “Come now, my poor angel, cheer up, console yourself, patience!”

  “But I have been patient and suffering for the past four years … A love like ours ought to be declared before Heaven. They are torturing me. I can stand it no longer. Save me!”

  She pressed herself close to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, glistened like flames beneath the waters; her throat pulsed in agitation; he had never loved her so much; to such an extent that he lost his head and said to her:

  “What must we do? What is it you want?”

  “Take me away!” she cried. “Carry me off … Oh, I beg you!”

  And she hurled herself onto his mouth, as if to catch there the unhoped-for consent exhaled in a kiss.

  “But …,” Rodolphe resumed.

  “What is it?”

  “And your daughter?”

  She reflected for a few minutes, then replied: “We will take her, too bad!”

  “What a woman,” he said to himself, as he watched her move off.

  For she had just slipped away into the garden. They were calling her.

  Mère Bovary was most astonished, over the next few days, at the metamorphosis of her daughter-in-law. In fact, Emma was turning out more manageable, and even carried her deference to the point of requesting a recipe for pickled gherkins.

  Was it in order to dupe both of them the better? Or did she want to savor more deeply, by a kind of voluptuous stoicism, the bitterness of what she was soon to abandon? But she paid no heed to it, quite the contrary; she lived as if lost in the anticipated first taste of her imminent happiness. This was an eternal topic in her chats with Rodolphe. She would lean on his shoulder, murmuring:

  “Ah, when we are in the mail coach … Do you think about it? Can it be possible? The very moment, it seems to me, that I feel the carriage spring off, it will be as if we are going up in a balloon, as if we are leaving for the clouds. You know that I’m counting the days?… And you?”

  Madame Bovary was never so beautiful as at that time; she had that undefinable beauty which results from joy, from enthusiasm, from success, and is but the effect of temperament and circumstances in harmony. Her lustfulness, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure and her still youthful illusions, had developed her by degrees, just as dung, rain, wind and sun bring out flowers, and she was opening at last into the fullness of her nature. Her eyelids seemed expressly shaped for her long, amorous glances in which the pupils would vanish, while each vigorous breath widened her slender nostrils and turned up the fleshy corner of her lips where a slight black down lay shadowed from the light. One would have said that an artist qualified in depravities had arranged her hair’s twisted coil over her nape: it rolled itself up in one heavy mass, carelessly, and according to the accidents of adultery, which unraveled it every day. Her voice now took on softer inflections, as did her figure; you were pierced by something artful that emanated even from the fabric of her dress and the arch of her foot. Charles, as in the early days of his marriage, found her delicious and utterly irresistible.

  When he came back in the middle of the night, he did not dare wake her. The porcelain night lamp cast a round, quivering brightness on the ceiling, and swelling out in the shadows beside the bed, the little cradle’s closed curtains formed a kind of white hut. Charles gazed at them. He thought he could hear his child’s faint breath. She would grow up now; each month would bring a speedy advance. He already saw her coming back from school at dusk, all laughter, her little smock spotted with ink, and carrying a basket on her arm; then she would have to be sent to boarding school, and that would cost a great deal; how to do it? So he reflected. He thought of renting a small farm in the neighborhood, and he would look after it himself, every morning, when going to see his patients. He would put the income by, he would place it in a savings bank; then he would buy shares, somewhere, no matter where; besides, the practice would grow; he was counting on it, because he wanted Berthe to be well brought up, to have accomplishments, to learn the piano. Ah, how pretty she would be, later, at fifteen, when, looking like her mother, she would wear, like her, big straw hats in summer! They would be taken for sisters, from a distance. He imagined her working in the evenings close to them, under the light of the lamp; she would be embroidering slippers for him; occupying herself with the housekeeping; filling the whole house with her charm and cheerfulness. Finally, they would think about her settling down: they would find her some honest fellow with a solid business; he would make her happy; it would last forever.

  Emma was not sleeping, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was slumbering at her side, she roused herself with other dreams.

  A coach-and-four had been galloping them away for a week toward a new land, whence they would not return. On they went, on they went, arms entwined, their words spent. Often, from a mountaintop, they would suddenly descry some splendid city with domes, bridges, ships, forests of lemon tree and cathedrals of white marble, whose poi
nted steeples held storks’ nests. The horses went at walking pace, because of the great flagstones, and on the ground there were bunches of flowers that red-bodiced women would offer you. They heard the peal of bells, the neighing of mules, with the murmur of guitars and the splash of fountains, whose drifting mist cooled the heaps of fruit, arranged in pyramids at the foot of pale statues, smiling under the water jets. And then they arrived, one night, in a fishing village, where dark nets dried in the wind, along the cliffs and the cottages. This was where they would stop to live; they would dwell in a low house, with a flat roof, shaded by a palm tree, in the remotest part of a bay, on the edge of the sea. They would take rides in a gondola, they would swing in a hammock; and their life would be yielding and generous like their silk clothes, all warm and starry like the mild nights they would gaze upon. Nevertheless, from the immensity of this future that she conjured, no one particular thing emerged; the days, all of them magnificent, were as alike as waves; and they rolled to the horizon, endless, harmonious, bluish and bathed in sun. But the child would begin to cough in her cradle, or Bovary snore louder, and Emma would only nod off in the morning, when dawn blanched the windowpanes and young Justin on the square was already opening the shutters of the pharmacy.