Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  “How was it,” he went on, “that you did not call on me?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Why? Do I frighten you then? On the contrary, it is I who should be complaining. We scarcely know one another! Yet I am devoted to you; you no longer doubt it, I hope?”

  He held out his hand, seized hers, covered it with ravenous kisses, then kept it on his knee, and he delicately dabbled with her fingers, all the while talking blandishments to her by the thousand.

  His insipid voice murmured, like a stream gliding past; a spark flashed from his eye through the gleam of his spectacles, and his hands advanced into Emma’s sleeve, to examine her arm. She felt the puff of a panting breath against her cheek. This man was bothering her horribly.

  She leapt to her feet and said to him: “Monsieur, I am waiting!”

  “What for?” said the notary, who grew extremely pale all of a sudden.

  “That money.”

  “But …”

  Then, giving in to the eruption of an overpowering desire:

  “Well, yes …!”

  He was crawling on his knees toward her, without regard for his dressing gown.

  “For mercy’s sake, stay! I love you!”

  He clasped her about the waist.

  A tide of crimson surged swiftly over Madame Bovary’s face. She drew back with a terrible look, shouting:

  “You are taking shameless advantage of my distress, Monsieur! I am to be pitied, but not to be sold!”

  And she left.

  The notary remained decidedly stupefied, eyes fixed on his handsome needlework slippers. They were a love token. This sight finally consoled him. In addition to which, he considered that such an adventure would have drawn him in too far.

  “What a wretch! What a blackguard! What ignominy!” she said to herself, dashing away beneath the aspens by the road. The disappointment of failure strengthened the indignation of outraged modesty; it seemed to her that Providence was implacable in its pursuit of her, and, self-worth appreciating with pride, never had she held herself in so much esteem nor others in so much contempt. Something warlike was enrapturing her. She would have liked to batter the race of men, to spit in their faces, pulverize them all; and she continued to walk speedily onward, pale, quivering, enraged, ferreting the empty horizon with tearful eyes, and as if relishing the hatred which choked her.

  When she caught sight of her house, a torpor took hold. She could not go on anymore; yet she must; besides, where flee?

  Félicité was waiting for her at the door.

  “Well?”

  “No!” said Emma.

  And, for quarter of an hour, the two of them considered the various people in Yonville prepared perhaps to come to her aid. But, each time Félicité named someone, Emma replied:

  “Is it likely? They wouldn’t want to.”

  “And Monsieur on his way home!”

  “I know … Leave me on my own.”

  She had tried everything. There was nothing more to do now; and so when Charles appeared, she would say to him:

  “Step back. This carpet you tread is no longer yours. Of your house, you do not have a stick of furniture, a pin, a straw, and it is I who have ruined you, poor man!”

  So there would be a great sobbing, then he would cry a great deal, and at length, the surprise over, he would forgive her.

  “Yes,” she murmured as she ground her teeth, “he’ll forgive me, the one who has not millions enough to offer me that I might pardon him for having known me … Never! Never!”

  It was exasperating, this notion of Bovary’s superiority over her. Then, whether she confessed or did not confess, presently, soon, tomorrow, he would not know any the less of the catastrophe; so she must await this horrible scene and suffer the burden of his magnanimity. She felt a desire to go back to Lheureux’s—to what end? To write to her father: it was too late; and perhaps she would now rue not having yielded to that other, when she heard a horse’s trot on the path. It was him, he was opening the gate, he was paler than the plaster wall. Leaping down the stairs, she made her escape smartly by the square; and the mayor’s wife, who was chatting in front of the church with Lestiboudois, saw her go into the tax-gatherer’s house.

  She ran to tell Madame Caron. These two ladies went up into the attic; and, hidden by laundry spread out on poles, stationed themselves conveniently to see full into Binet’s home.

  He was alone, in his garret, in the process of imitating, in wood, one of those undescribable ivories, made up of crescents, spheres hollowed from one another, the whole as straight as an obelisk and of no earthly use; and he was attacking the last piece, the end was in sight! In the workshop’s half-light, the flaxen dust flew from his lathe like a tuft of sparks under the shod hooves of a galloping horse: the two wheels were turning, were humming; Binet was smiling, chin lowered, nostrils flared, and seemed lost at last in one of those perfect joys, doubtless belonging only to mediocre occupations, that tickle the intelligence through simple difficulties, and satisfy it with an accomplishment beyond which there is nothing to dream.

  “Ah there she is,” said Madame Tuvache.

  But it was scarcely possible, on account of the lathe, to hear what she was saying.

  At last, these ladies thought they could make out the word francs, and Mère Tuvache whispered very low:

  “She’s begging him in order to get a deferment of her tax payments.”

  “On the surface!” replied the other.

  They saw her walking up and down, inspecting the napkin rings, the candlesticks, the baluster knobs against the walls, while Binet stroked his beard in satisfaction.

  “Might she have come to order something?” said Madame Tuvache.

  “But he doesn’t sell anything,” her neighbor objected.

  The tax-gatherer looked to be listening, though with wide eyes, as if he did not understand. She went on in a tender, beseeching manner. She drew nearer; her breast heaved; they were no longer talking.

  “Is she making advances to him?” said Madame Tuvache.

  Binet was red up to the ears. She clasped his hands.

  “Oh, that’s too much!”

  And without question she was offering him something disgusting; for the tax-gatherer—he was valiant, all the same, he had fought at Bautzen and at Lutzen, he had served in the French campaign, and had even been recommended for a medal—all of a sudden, as at the sight of a snake, drew well away, shouting:

  “Madame! What are you thinking of …?”

  “Women like that should be horsewhipped!” said Madame Tuvache.

  “Where is she now?” resumed Madame Caron.

  For she had disappeared during these words; then, glimpsing her as she threaded her way up the Grande-Rue and turned right as though to reach the cemetery, they lost themselves in conjecture.

  “Mère Rolet,” she said on her arrival at the wet nurse’s, “I’m choking … Unlace me.”

  She fell upon the bed; she sobbed. Mère Rolet covered her with a petticoat and remained standing near her. Then, as she did not reply, the good woman moved away, took up her wheel and began to spin flax.

  “Oh, have done!” she murmured, believing she could hear Binet’s lathe.

  “What’s bothering her?” the wet nurse asked herself. “Why has she come here?”

  She had hastened there, driven by a sort of dread that banished her from home.

  Lying on her back, motionless and with unblinking eyes, she discerned things vaguely, even though she gave them her attention with an idiot persistence. She studied the wall’s peeling flakes, two firebrands smoking end to end, and a long spider crawling above her head in the cleft of a beam. At last she gathered her ideas together. She remembered … One day, with Léon … Oh, how far away it was … The sun shone on the river and the scent of clematis hung sweet … Then, swept away by her memories as by a bubbling torrent, she soon came to recall the previous day.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

 
; Mère Rolet went out, raised the fingers of her right hand up toward where the sky was clearest, and slowly came back in, saying:

  “Three o’clock, shortly.”

  “Ah thank you! Thank you!”

  For he was going to come. It was certain! He would have found the money. But he would perhaps go over there, not doubting she was there; and she bade the wet nurse to run to her house and fetch him.

  “Hurry!”

  “But, my dear lady, I’m going, I’m going!”

  She was amazed, now, that she had not thought of him straightaway; yesterday, he had given his word, he would not fail; and she saw herself already at Lheureux’s house, spreading out the three bank notes on his desk. Then she would have to invent a story to explain things to Bovary. Which one?

  Yet the wet nurse was a long time coming back. But, as there was no clock in the thatched cottage, Emma feared she was perhaps exaggerating the length of time. She began to walk around the garden, a step at a time; she went along the hedge-side path, and turned back smartly, hoping that the good woman would have returned by another route. Finally, weary of waiting, assailed by suspicions that she beat back, no longer knowing whether she had been there for a century or a minute, she sat in a corner and closed her eyes, blocked her ears. The gate creaked: she leapt up: before she had spoken, Mère Rolet said to her:

  “There’s no one at your house.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, no one! And the master’s crying. He’s calling for you. They’re looking for you.”

  Emma said nothing in reply. She was panting, rolling her eyes all about her, while the peasant woman, frightened by her face, stepped back instinctively, believing her to be mad. All of a sudden she slapped her brow, let out a cry, for the memory of Rodolphe, like a great flash of lightning on a gloomy night, had slipped into her mind. He was so good, so nice, so generous! And, what is more, if he should hesitate to do her this service, she would know how to compel him into it by calling up their lost love at a single glance. So she left for La Huchette, not perceiving that she was rushing to yield to what had so greatly incensed her a little while ago, nor suspecting herself in the slightest of this prostitution.

  VIII

  Walking along she asked herself: “What shall I say? How shall I begin?” And according as she advanced, she recognized the bushes, the trees, the sea rushes on the hill, the chateau over there. She found herself returned to the sensations of her first tender love, and her poor flattened heart swelled lovingly. A warm wind blew against her face; the snow, melting, fell drop by drop from the buds onto the grass.

  She entered, as in former times, by the park’s little door, then reached the main courtyard, lined by a double row of bushy lindens. They waved their long branches, hissing. All the kenneled dogs barked, and the explosion of their baying resounded without anyone appearing.

  She climbed the broad, straight, wooden-balustered staircase that led to the corridor paved with dusty flagstones onto which several bedrooms opened in a row, as in a monastery or an inn. His was right at the end, furthest off, to the left. When she came to place her fingers on the lock, her strength unexpectedly forsook her. She was fearful that he might not be there, all but desired it, and yet this was her only hope, the last chance of salvation. She collected herself for a moment, and, tempering her courage in the consciousness of present necessity, she went in.

  He was in front of the fire, both feet on the mantelpiece, smoking his pipe.

  “Well! It’s you!” he said, abruptly starting up.

  “Yes, it’s me. I would like to ask you, Rodolphe, for a bit of advice.”

  And, despite all her efforts, it proved impossible for her to open her lips.

  “You haven’t changed. You are still charming.”

  “Oh,” she answered bitterly, “those are sad charms, my friend, seeing how you have scorned them.”

  Then he entered upon an explanation of his conduct, excusing himself in vague terms, for want of being able to invent better ones.

  She let herself be carried away by his words, yet more by his voice and by the sight of his person; so much so that she pretended to believe, or perhaps did believe, in the pretext for their rupture; it was a secret on which the honor and even the life of a third person depended.

  “Never mind,” she said, looking at him sadly, “I have suffered so!”

  He replied in a philosophical tone:

  “Life is like that.”

  “Has it,” replied Emma, “at least been good to you since our separation?”

  “Oh, neither good … nor bad.”

  “It would perhaps have been better never to have left each other.”

  “Yes … perhaps.”

  “You think so?” she said, drawing nearer.

  And she sighed:

  “O Rodolphe! If you knew … I loved you very much!”

  It was then that she took his hand, and they remained a little while with fingers entwined—as on the first day, at the agricultural show! Out of a residue of pride, he floundered under the emotion. But, collapsing against his chest, she said to him:

  “How do you want me to live without you? Happiness can’t be broken like a habit! I was in despair. I thought I would die. I’ll tell you all about it, you’ll see. And you, you ran away from me …!”

  Because, for three years, he had studiously avoided her, in consequence of that natural cowardice by which the stronger sex is characterized; and Emma went on with pretty movements of the head, more wheedling than a loving cat:

  “You love others, admit it. Oh, I understand them, agreed—I forgive them; you’ll have seduced them, as you seduced me. You, you’re a man. You have all that’s needed to make you beloved. But we’ll begin again, shan’t we? We will love one another! Hey, I’m laughing, I’m happy …! Speak, then!”

  And she was ravishing to see, with her gaze in which a tear quivered, like the rain from a storm in a blue flower cup.

  He drew her onto his knees, and with the back of his hand he stroked her smooth bandeaux, where, in the light of dusk, a last ray of sun shimmered like a golden arrow. She inclined her brow; he finished by kissing her on the eyelids, very gently, with a brush of his lips.

  “But you’ve been crying!” he said. “Why?”

  She burst into sobs. Rodolphe thought it was the bursting of her love; as she said nothing, he took this silence for a final modesty, and so he cried out:

  “Ah forgive me! You are the only one who pleases me. I’ve been idiotic and wicked. I love you, I shall love you forever … What is the matter with you? Tell me now!”

  He knelt down.

  “Well … I am ruined, Rodolphe. You are going to lend me three thousand francs.”

  “But … but …” he said, getting to his feet by degrees, while his face took on a solemn expression.

  “You know,” she speedily continued, “that my husband placed his entire fortune with a notary; he ran away. We took out loans; the clients were not paying. The settlement is not done, however; we will have something later. But, today, for want of three thousand francs, they are going to seize our goods; it is happening now, at this very instant; and counting on your friendship, I have come.”

  “Ah,” thought Rodolphe, growing very pale all of a sudden, “that’s why she has come!”

  Finally he said with an air of great calm: “I don’t have it, dear lady.”

  He was not lying. Had he had it he would doubtless have given it to her, even though it was generally disagreeable to carry out such fine deeds: a demand for money, of all the squalls that fall upon love, being the coldest and the most uprooting.

  At first she stayed staring at him for some minutes.

  “You don’t have it!”

  Several times she repeated:

  “You don’t have it … I might have spared myself this final shame. You’ve never loved me! You are no better than the others!”

  She was giving herself away, she was growing confused.

  Rodolph
e interrupted her, maintaining that he was somewhat “short of cash” himself.

  “Oh, I pity you!” said Emma. “Yes, so very much!”

  And, her eyes fastening on an elaborately embossed musket glittering in the armor display:

  “But, when someone’s poor, he does not invest money in the butt end of his gun! He does not buy an ornamental clock with tortoiseshell inlays,” she went on, indicating the Boulle clock; “nor silver-gilt whistles for his whips”—she touched them!—“nor charms for his watch. Oh, he lacks for nothing! Even a liquor frame in his bedroom; for you love yourself, you live well, you have a chateau, farms, woods; you hunt with the hounds, you take trips to Paris … Well, when all it is is that,” she cried, seizing his sleeve buttons from the chimneypiece, “but the least of these baubles, money can be got from it … Oh, I don’t want any! Keep them!”

  And she hurled the two buttons a fair distance, so that the gold chain between them snapped on hitting the wall.

  “But as for me, I would have given you everything, would have sold everything, would have labored with my hands, would have begged in the streets, for a smile, for a glance, to hear you say, ‘Thank you.’ And you stay there calmly in your armchair, as if you haven’t already made me suffer enough? Without you, as well you know, I could have lived quite happily. Who forced you into it? Was it a wager? Yet you loved me, you said so yourself … And again just now … Ah, it would have been better to drive me away. My hands are warm from your kisses, and there’s the very spot, on the carpet, where you fell at my feet and swore everlasting love. You made me believe it: for two years you dragged me along in the sweetest and most magnificent dream … Well? Our plans to travel, do you remember? Oh, your letter, your letter. It tore my heart apart. And then, when I come back to him—to him—he being rich, happy, free—to implore the kind of help that anyone would have given, beseeching and yielding him all my tender love, he spurns me, because that would cost him three thousand francs!”