Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  It returned; and then, with neither decision nor direction, haphazardly, it roved. It was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont Gargan, at La Rouge-Mare, and the Place du Gaillard-Bois; rue Maladrerie, rue Dinanderie, in front of Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise—before the Customs House—at the Basse-Vieille-Tour, at the Trois-Pipes and at the Monumental Cemetery. From time to time, the coachman on his box threw despairing glances at the tap houses. He could not comprehend what mania for locomotion drove these individuals not to want to stop. Sometimes he tried, and immediately he heard furious exclamations burst out behind him. So more than ever he would lash his two sweating nags, but without heeding the jolts, catching on this and that, not caring about it, demoralized, and all but weeping from thirst, fatigue and dreariness.

  And on the port, amid drays and casks, and on the streets, standing by the spur stones, the citizens opened their amazed eyes wide before so extraordinary a thing in the provinces, a carriage with drawn blinds, and which kept reappearing thus, more sealed than a tomb and tossed about like a ship.

  Once, in the middle of the day, in the open level country, at the moment when the sun at its fiercest beat down upon the old silvered lanterns, a bare hand slipped under the little curtains of yellow linen and threw out some torn scraps of paper, that scattered on the wind and alighted further away, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover all in flower.

  Then, at about six o’clock, the carriage drew up in a lane in the Beauvoisine quarter, and a woman stepped down, walking on with her veil lowered, without turning her head.

  II

  Arriving at the inn, Madame Bovary was astonished not to see the diligence. Hivert, who had waited fifty-three minutes for her, had finally driven off.

  Nothing was forcing her to leave, however; but she had given her word that she would return the same evening. Moreover, Charles was waiting for her; and already she felt in her heart that sluggish docility which is, for so many women, at one and the same time both the punishment and the price for adultery.

  Hastily she packed her trunk, paid the bill, took a cab in the courtyard, and, urging on the groom, encouraging him, inquiring at every moment about the time and the number of kilometers traveled, succeeded in overtaking the Hirondelle as the first houses of Quincampoix appeared.

  Scarcely seated in her corner, she closed her eyes and opened them again at the bottom of the hill, where she recognized Félicité from afar, keeping a lookout in front of the farrier’s house. Hivert reined in his horses, and the cook-maid, raising herself up to the carriage window, said mysteriously:

  “Madame you’ve to go straight off to Monsieur Homais’s house. It’s for something urgent.”

  The village was as silent as ever. At the street corners, there were little rosy heaps steaming in the air, as it was jam-making time, and everyone in Yonville was making their own supply on the same day. But one could admire, in front of the apothecary’s shop, a much bigger heap, surpassing the others with the superiority that a laboratory must have over common stoves, a general necessity over individual whims.

  She went in. The big chair was tipped over, and even the Rouen Beacon lay around on the floor, spread out between the two pestles. She pushed open the passage door; and, in the middle of the kitchen, between the brown jars full of picked red currants, ground sugar, lump sugar, the scales on the table, basins on the fire, she saw all the Homais, big and small, with aprons tied up to the chin and holding forks in their hands. Justin stood hanging his head, and the apothecary was shouting:

  “Who told you to go and fetch it in the capernaum?”

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “The matter?” replied the apothecary. “We are making jam: it is cooking; but it was about to run over on account of an over-vigorous ebullition, and I demand another basin. So he through indolence, through sloth, goes and takes, hanging from its nail in my laboratory, the key to the capernaum!”

  The apothecary gave this name to a private room, under the roof, full of the implements and wares of his profession. He would often spend long hours there alone, labeling, decanting, retying; and he considered it not as a simple storeroom, but as a veritable sanctuary, whence burst forth afterward, wrought by his hands, all kinds of pill, bolus, tisane, lotion and potion, which went on spreading his fame through the neighborhood. Nobody alive set foot there; and he revered it so intensely, that he swept it out himself. In short, if the pharmacy, open to all-comers, was the place where he displayed his pride, the capernaum was the retreat where, selfishly retiring, Homais delighted in practicing his predilections; in addition, Justin’s thoughtlessness appeared to him a monstrous irreverence; and, turning redder than the currants, he repeated:

  “Yes, of the capernaum! The key which locks away the acids and the caustic alkalis! To go and get a storeroom basin! A basin with a lid! And which I may never perhaps make use of. Everything is of consequence in the delicate operations of our art. But what the devil! One has to maintain distinctions and not employ for virtually domestic use what is intended for pharmaceutics! It’s like carving a fat pullet with a scalpel, like a magistrate …”

  “Do calm down!” said Madame Homais.

  And Athalie, tugging him by his frock coat:

  “Papa! Papa!”

  “No, leave me!” continued the apothecary, “leave me! The deuce! One might as well set up as a grocer, I swear to you! Go on, off with you! Respect nothing! Break it, smash it! Let the leeches out! Burn the marshmallow! Pickle the gherkins in the specimen jars! Tear up the bandages!”

  “You did however …” said Emma.

  “In a moment! Do you know what you were exposing yourself to? Did you not see anything, in the corner, on the left, on the third shelf? Speak, answer, articulate something!”

  “I … don’t know,” stammered the young lad.

  “Ah! You don’t know! Well, I know, for one! You saw a bottle, of blue glass, sealed with yellow wax, which contains a white powder, on which I had even written: Dangerous! And do you know what there was inside? Arsenic! And you’re about to meddle with that! To take down a basin next to it!”

  “Next to it!” exclaimed Madame Homais, clasping her hands. “Arsenic? You could have poisoned us all!”

  And the children began to cry out, as if they had already felt exquisite pains in their bowels.

  “Or else poison a patient!” continued the apothecary. “So you want me to end up in dock, in the court of assize? To see me dragged to the scaffold? Are you unaware of the care I take in handling these materials, even though I am so tremendously used to it? I often terrify myself, when I think of my responsibility. For the government persecutes us, and the absurd legislation which rules us is like a veritable sword of Damocles hanging over our heads!”

  Emma no longer considered asking what they wanted of her, and the pharmacist went on in breathless sentences:

  “This is how you recognize the kindnesses we’ve shown to you! This is how you reward me for the entirely paternal attentions I’ve lavished on you! Without me, where would you be? What would you be doing? Who supplies you with food, education, clothing, and all the means by which to cut an honorable figure one day, in society’s ranks! But, for that, one has to toil at the oars, and gain, as the saying goes, from blistered hands, Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.”

  He quoted Latin, he was so exasperated. He would have quoted Chinese or Greenlandese, if he had known these two languages; for he was undergoing one of those crises by which the whole mind gives up hints of what it conceals, like the ocean, which, in a storm, parts from the sea wrack of its shore to the sand of its unfathomable depths.

  And he went on:

  “I am beginning to rue, with a vengeance, having burdened myself with your person. I would have done better to have left you in the filth in which you were born. All you’ll ever be good for is herding horned cattle. You’ve no talent for the sciences. You scarcely know how to stick a label! And you live there, in my
house, like an honorary canon, like a cow in clover, pampering yourself!”

  But Emma, turning toward Madame Homais:

  “I was sent for …”

  “Ah, dear God!” the good woman interrupted with a sad air, “how should I put it to you exactly? It’s a tragedy!”

  She did not finish. The apothecary thundered:

  “Empty it! Scour it! Take it back! Look sharp now!”

  And, shaking Justin by the collar of his cotton smock, he caused a book to fall out of his pocket.

  The child stooped down. Homais was quicker, and, having picked the volume up, he gazed upon it, eyes wide, jaw dropped.

  “Conjugal … Love!” he said, slowly separating these two words. “Ah! Very fine. Very fine. Very pretty. And engravings …! Ah, that’s too much!”

  Madame Homais came forward.

  “No! Don’t touch it!”

  The children wanted to see the pictures.

  “Leave!” he said imperiously.

  And they left.

  He walked up and down at first, in long strides, keeping the volume open in his hands, rolling his eyes, choked, swollen-faced, apoplectic. Then he came straight up to his pupil, and, planting himself in front of him with arms crossed:

  “So you’ve every vice then, little wretch …? Take care, you’re on the slippery slope …! So you never considered that this, this infamous book, might have fallen into the hands of my children, striking a spark in their brains, tarnishing the purity of Athalie, corrupting Napoléon! He is already formed like a man. Are you certain, at least, that they haven’t read it? Can you assure me …?”

  “But, Monsieur,” said Emma, “you had something to tell me?”

  “True enough, Madame … Your father-in-law is dead!”

  In fact, Père Bovary had expired just two days before, quite suddenly, from an apoplectic stroke, getting up from the table; and, out of excessive care for Emma’s feelings, Charles had begged Monsieur Homais to apprise her gently of this horrid news.

  He had pondered over his sentence, he had smoothed it, polished it, given it a certain rhythm; it was a masterpiece of discretion and transition, of fine turns of style, of fastidiousness; but rage had swept away the rhetoric.

  Emma, giving up the idea of getting any details, left the pharmacy; for Monsieur Homais had once more resumed his vituperative flow. He calmed down, however, and was now grumbling on in a fatherly tone, all the while fanning himself with his bonnet-grec:

  “It’s not that I disapprove entirely of the work. The author was a doctor. It includes certain scientific aspects that it would not be amiss for a man to know and, dare I say it, that a man must know. But later, later! At least wait until you’re a man and your character is established.”

  On Emma’s hammering at the door, Charles, who was waiting for her, came forward with arms spread and said to her in a tearful voice:

  “Ah, my dearest …”

  And he bowed softly to kiss her. But, at the touch of his lips, she was gripped by the memory of the other, and she passed her hand over her face, shuddering.

  Nevertheless she replied:

  “Yes, I know … I know …”

  He showed her the letter in which his mother recounted the news, without any sentimental hypocrisy. She merely regretted that her husband had not received the succor of religion, having died in Doudeville, in the street, on the threshold of a café, after a patriotic meal with former officers.

  Emma returned the letter; then, over dinner, out of decency, she feigned a brief loss of appetite. But as he kept on obliging her, she resolutely set about eating, while Charles, opposite, sat motionless, looking crushed.

  From time to time, raising his head, he cast her a long glance full of anguish. Once he sighed:

  “I would have liked to see him once more.”

  She remained silent. At length, realizing that she had to speak:

  “How old was he? Your father?”

  “Fifty-eight!”

  “Ah.”

  And that was all.

  A quarter of an hour later, he added:

  “My poor mother … What will become of her, now?”

  She gestured that she did not know.

  Seeing her so taciturn, Charles inferred she was distressed and forced himself to say nothing, so as not to heighten this grief affecting her. Nevertheless, shaking off his own:

  “You had good fun yesterday?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  When the tablecloth was removed, Bovary did not stand up, neither did Emma; and, as she considered him, the dreariness of the sight progressively banished all pity from her heart. He seemed to her paltry, weak, useless, in short a wretched man in every way. How to get rid of him? What an interminable evening! Something stupefying like an opium haze benumbed her.

  They heard in the hall the hard sound of a stick on the floorboards. It was Hippolyte bringing Madame’s luggage. To put it down, he laboriously described a half-circle with his wooden leg.

  “He doesn’t even think of it any longer,” she said to herself as she watched the poor devil, his thick red hair dripping with sweat.

  Bovary searched for a tiny coin in the bottom of his purse; and, without appearing to take in what humiliation there was for him in the mere presence of this man standing there, the personified reproach of his incurable ineptitude:

  “Here, you’ve a pretty bouquet,” he said, noticing Léon’s violets on the chimneypiece.

  “Yes,” she said indifferently; “it’s a bouquet I bought just now … from a beggar woman.”

  Charles took the violets, and, refreshing his tear-reddened eyes on them, he delicately inhaled their scent. She took them quickly from his hand, and went off to put them in a glass of water.

  The next day, Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son cried a lot. Emma, under the pretext of giving orders, disappeared.

  The day after, they had to see to the mourning arrangements together. They went to sit down, with the work boxes, by the river, under the arbor.

  Charles thought about his father, and he marveled at feeling so much affection for this man whom he had believed he loved only very middlingly up till now. Madame Bovary senior thought about her husband. The worst times of the old days appeared desirable to her again. Everything was obliterated beneath the instinctive regret of so long a habit; and, now and again, while she plied her needle, a fat tear descended the length of her nose and remained hanging there a moment. Emma thought how not even forty-eight hours ago, they were together, far from the world, heady with ecstasy, and eyes not wide enough to gaze their fill of one another. She strove to seize again the least perceptible details of that vanished day. But the presence of mother-in-law and husband cramped her. She would have liked to hear nothing, see nothing, so as not to disturb the contemplation of her love which would disappear, whatever she did, beneath external impressions.

  She was unstitching the lining of a dress, whose scraps lay scattered about her; Mère Bovary, without looking up, kept making her scissors squeal, and Charles, with his list slippers and his old brown frock coat that served as a dressing gown, kept his hands in his pockets and likewise did not speak; near them, Berthe, in a little white apron, was scraping the sand on the path with her spade.

  Suddenly, they saw Monsieur Lheureux, the cloth dealer, enter by the gate.

  He was come to offer his services, regardful of the fatal circumstance. Emma replied that she thought she could manage without. The dealer did not consider himself beaten.

  “A thousand apologies,” he said; “I wish to have a private chat.”

  Then, in a low voice:

  “It’s with reference to this business … you know?”

  Charles turned scarlet to the earlobes.

  “Ah yes … indeed.”

  And, in his confusion, turning to his wife:

  “Couldn’t you … my dearest …?”

  She appeared to understand him, for she rose, and Charles said to his mother:

&nb
sp; “It’s nothing. Doubtless some domestic trifle.”

  He did not want her to know about the bill business, dreading her comments.

  As soon as they were alone, Monsieur Lheureux began, in fairly clear terms, to congratulate Emma on her inheritance, then to chat of unimportant things, the espaliers, the harvest and his own health, which was middling as ever, neither foul nor fair. Indeed, he was taking the devil’s own pains, although he did not have the simple wherewithal, despite folk’s tattle, to put butter on his bread.

  Emma let him talk. The last two days had been so prodigiously weary!

  “And here you are altogether recovered?” he continued. “My word, I saw your poor husband in a nice mess. He’s a valiant fellow, even though we’ve had our difficulties together.”

  She asked which ones, as Charles had concealed from her the dispute over the supplies.

  “But you know all about it,” said Lheureux. “It was for your little fancies, the traveling cases.”

  He had lowered his hat over his eyes, and, hands behind his back, smiling and wheezing, he looked straight at her, in an insufferable manner. Did he suspect something? She was left plunged in all kinds of fears. In the end, however, he went on:

  “We have made it up, and I’ve just proposed a further settlement.”

  It was to renew the bill signed by Bovary. Monsieur, however, would proceed as he thought best; he must not go tormenting himself, above all now that he was going to have a swarm of money worries.

  “And what’s more it would be better to entrust them to someone, to you, for example; with a power of attorney, that would be comfortable, and then we could do a little business together …”

  She did not understand. He held his tongue. Then, switching to matters of trade, Lheureux declared that Madame could not avoid purchasing something from him. He would send her twelve meters of black barège wool, from which to make a dress.