Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  “I don’t have it,” replied Rodolphe in that perfect calm with which a resigned fury masks itself as though behind a shield.

  She left. The walls shook, the ceiling bore down on her; and she passed again by the long alley, tripping up on the piles of dead leaves that the wind was scattering. At last she arrived at the ha-ha before the gate; she broke her nails on the lock, she was in such haste to open it. Then, a hundred paces further on, out of breath, near collapse, she stopped. And so, turning around, she saw once again the impassive chateau, with the park, the gardens, the three courtyards, and all the windows of the façade.

  She remained lost in a stupor, and had no more consciousness of herself than through the throb of her arteries, thinking she could hear it burst forth like a deafening music that filled the countryside. The earth under her feet was softer than a wave, and the furrows appeared to her as immense brown billows, unfurling. All that was in her head, those reminiscences, ideas, broke loose at once, in a single leap, like the thousand parts in a firework. She saw her father, Lheureux’s study, their bedroom over there, another landscape. Madness seized her, she grew scared, and managed to recover herself, in truth confusedly; for she could not remember the reason for her horrible state, that is to say the question of money. She suffered only from her love, and felt her soul abandoning her through this memory, as the wounded, in the pangs of death, feel life slipping away through their bleeding hurt.

  The night was falling, crows took wing.

  It seemed all of a sudden that little fire-colored globes were bursting in the air like explosive shot flattening out, and were reeling around, reeling around, eventually to melt on the snow, between the branches of the trees. In the middle of each one, Rodolphe’s face would appear. They multiplied, and they came closer, penetrated her; everything vanished. She recognized the lights of houses, beaming from afar in the fog.

  And, like an abyss, her situation appeared before her. She was panting sufficient to rupture her chest. Then, in a heroic delirium that turned her almost joyous, she ran down the hill, crossed the cattle board, the path, the alley, the market house, and arrived in front of the pharmacist’s shop.

  No one was around. She was about to enter; but, at the sound of the bell, someone could come; and, creeping in by the gate, holding her breath, feeling the walls, she made it up to the threshold of the kitchen, where a candle burned on the stove. Justin, in shirtsleeves, was carrying a dish.

  “Ah, they’re at dinner. Let’s wait.”

  He returned. She knocked on the glass. He came out.

  “The key! The one high up, where the …”

  “What?”

  And he stared at her, completely astonished by the pallor of her face, which stood out against the night’s blackness beyond. She appeared extraordinarily beautiful to him, and as majestic as a phantom; without understanding what she wanted, he had a presentiment of something terrible.

  But she continued eagerly, in a low voice, with a sweet, deliquescent voice:

  “I want it. Give it to me.”

  As the wall was thin, you could hear the clicking of forks on the plates in the dining room.

  She pretended that she had to kill the rats that stopped her sleeping.

  “I must inform Monsieur.”

  “No! Stay!”

  Then, with an air of indifference:

  “Well, it’s not worth it, I’ll tell him presently. Come, light my way!”

  She entered the corridor onto which the laboratory door opened. On the wall there was a key labeled capernaum.

  “Justin!” roared the apothecary, growing impatient.

  “Coming up!”

  And he followed her.

  The key turned in the lock, and she went straight to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue jar, tore the stopper out, thrust her hand inside, and, withdrawing it full of a white powder, she began to eat then and there.

  “Stop!” he shouted, throwing himself upon her.

  “Hush, they’ll come …”

  He grew desperate, wanted to call out.

  “Say nothing about this, it will all be laid at your master’s door.”

  Then she went back home unexpectedly soothed, and in the near serenity of a duty fulfilled.

  When Charles, thrown into confusion by the news of the seizure, had returned to the house, Emma had just left. Where could she be? He sent Félicité to Homais’s house, Monsieur Tuvache’s house, Lheureux’s house, to the Lion d’Or, everywhere; and, in the pauses of his anguish, he saw his respectability destroyed, their fortune lost, Berthe’s future shattered. From what cause? Not a word! He waited until six o’clock in the evening. Finally, able to hold out no longer, and imagining that she had left for Rouen, he went out onto the highway, walked a mile and a half, met no one, waited some more and returned.

  She was back.

  “What was the matter …? Why …? Will you tell me …?”

  She sat down at her writing table and wrote a letter that she slowly sealed, adding the day’s date and the hour. Then she said in a solemn tone:

  “You will read it tomorrow; from now until then, I beg you, do not address a single question to me … No, not one!”

  “But …”

  “Oh, leave me alone!”

  And she lay down full length on her bed.

  An acrid taste that she could sense in her mouth woke her up. She caught sight of Charles and closed her eyes again.

  She watched herself closely and carefully, to discern whether she was suffering pain. But no! Nothing yet. She could hear the beat of the clock, the crackle of the fire, and Charles, standing near her bed, breathing.

  “Ah it’s really nothing much, death,” she thought; “I’ll go to sleep, and it will all be over.”

  She drank a mouthful of water and turned to the wall.

  This horrible taste of ink continued.

  “I’m thirsty …! Oh, I’m really thirsty!” she sighed.

  “What is the matter with you?” said Charles, holding out a glass for her.

  “It’s nothing … Open the window … I am choking!”

  And she was taken with a fit of nausea so sudden, that she hardly had time to grab hold of her handkerchief under the pillow.

  “Take it away!” she said sharply; “throw it away!”

  He asked her questions; she did not answer. She stayed stock-still, for fear that the least disturbance might make her vomit. Nevertheless, she felt an icy cold rising from her feet to her heart.

  “Ah, now it’s beginning!” she murmured.

  “What did you say?”

  She rolled her head with a gentle movement full of anguish, while at the same time continually opening her jaws, as if she were carrying something very heavy on her tongue. At eight o’clock, the vomitings came back.

  Charles observed that at the bottom of the basin there was a sort of white grit, stuck to the inner sides of the porcelain.

  “It’s extraordinary, it’s peculiar,” he repeated.

  But she said in a loud voice:

  “No, you’re mistaken!”

  Then, delicately and all but caressing her, he passed his hand over her stomach. She let forth a shrill scream. He retreated, utterly appalled.

  Then she began to moan, feebly at first. A great shuddering rocked her shoulders, and she became paler than the sheet in which her tensed fingers were buried. Her pulse, become irregular, was almost imperceptible now.

  Drops oozed over her bluish face, which seemed frozen with the exhalation of a metallic vapor. Her teeth chattered, her widened eyes gazed vaguely about her, and to every question, she would only answer by shaking her head; she even smiled two or three times. Little by little, her moans grew louder. A muffled howl escaped her; she maintained that she was feeling better and would get up by and by. But the convulsions took hold; she shouted out:

  “Ah, it’s dreadful, my God!”

  He fell upon his knees against her bed.

  “Speak! Wh
at have you eaten? Answer, in heaven’s name!”

  And he looked at her with eyes of a tender lovingness such as she had never seen.

  “Ah well, there … there …” she said in a faltering voice.

  He leapt to the writing desk, broke the seal and read out loud. No one is to blame … He stopped, passed his hand over his eyes, and read over it again.

  “What? Oh, help! Help!”

  And he could only repeat this word: “Poisoned! Poisoned!” Félicité ran to Homais’s house, who shouted it out in the square; Madame Lefrançois heard it at the Lion d’Or; several people got out of bed to tell their neighbors, and all night the village was on the alert.

  Desperate, stammering, near collapse, Charles paced around and around in the bedroom. He knocked against the furniture, tore his hair out, and the pharmacist would never have believed such a frightful sight possible.

  He went back home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to Doctor Larivière. He was out of his wits; he got through more than fifteen drafts. Hippolyte set off for Neufchâtel, and Justin pressed Bovary’s horse so hard, that he left it on the hill at Bois Guillaume, badly lamed and three-quarters done for.

  Charles wanted to leaf through his medical dictionary; he could not see it, the words danced.

  “Calm down!” said the apothecary. “The question is simply to administer some powerful antidote. What is the poison?”

  Charles showed the letter. It was arsenic.

  “Right then,” Homais went on, “we must make an analysis.”

  For he knew that one must, in all cases of poisoning, make an analysis; and the other, not understanding, replied:

  “Ah, make it, make it, save her …”

  Then, returning to her side, he sank down onto the carpet, and he stayed with his head leaning on the side of her bed, sobbing.

  “Don’t cry,” she told him. “Soon I’ll torment you no longer.”

  “Why? What drove you to it?”

  She replied:

  “It had to be done, my dear.”

  “Weren’t you happy? Is it my fault? Yet I did everything I could!”

  “Yes … that’s true … you, you are good!”

  And she ran her hand through his hair, slowly. The sweet pleasure of this sensation overburdened his sadness; he felt his entire being collapse in despair at the idea that he must lose her, when, on the contrary, she was acknowledging more love for him than ever; and he could think of nothing, did not dare to, the urgency of an immediate solution bringing him to a state of utter distraction.

  She had finished, she reflected, with all the treachery, the sordidness and the innumerable lusts that tortured her. She hated no one, now; a twilight confusion fell on her thoughts, and of all the sounds of the earth Emma heard nothing but the intermittent lamentation of this poor heart, soft and indistinct, like the last echo of a symphony growing ever fainter.

  “Bring me the little one,” she said, raising herself on one elbow.

  “You’re not worse, are you?” asked Charles.

  “No, no.”

  The child, serious and still half-dreaming, came on the arm of her nursemaid, in her long night shift, from which her bare feet poked out. She considered the room in its state of complete disorder with astonishment, and blinked her eyes, dazzled by the lighted candles on the furniture. They doubtless reminded her of New Year or mid-Lent feastday mornings, when, woken up early like this by flamelight, she came into her mother’s bed to receive her presents, for she began to say:

  “Where is it then, Mamma?”

  And, as everyone held their tongue:

  “But I can’t see my little stocking!”

  Félicité tilted her toward the bed, while she was still looking in the direction of the fireplace.

  “Has nurse taken it?” she asked.

  And, at this name, which took her back to the memory of her adulteries and her afflictions, Madame Bovary turned her head aside, as if in disgust at the taste of another, stronger poison coming up into her mouth. Berthe, meanwhile, stayed where she was put on the bed.

  “Oh, how big your eyes are, Mamma! How pale you are! How you sweat so …!”

  Her mother looked at her.

  “I’m frightened!” said the little girl, retreating.

  Emma took her hand to kiss it; she struggled.

  “Enough! Take her away!” cried Charles, sobbing in the alcove.

  Then the symptoms were allayed for a moment; she appeared less agitated; and, at each insignificant word, at each slightly calmer swell and fall of her breast, he recovered hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself weeping into his arms.

  “Ah, it’s you! Thank you! You are good! But it’s all getting better. Here, look at her …”

  His colleague was not at all of this opinion, and, not wishing, as he put it, to beat about the bush, he prescribed an emetic, in order to clear the stomach completely.

  She was not long in vomiting blood. Her lips were increasingly clamped. She had twitching limbs, a body covered in brown spots, and her pulse slid between the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp chord ready to snap.

  Then she began to shout, horribly. She cursed the poison, inveighed against it, begged it to make haste, and pushed away with her arms all that Charles, more in the throes of death than she was, struggled to make her drink. He was standing, his handkerchief over his lips, groaning, weeping, and suffocated by the sobs that shook him right down to his toes; Félicité ran hither and thither in the room; Homais, immovable, let out great sighs, and Monsieur Canivet, still maintaining his self-possession, began however to feel perturbed.

  “The devil …! Yet … she has been purged, and, from the moment the cause ceases …”

  “The effect should cease,” said Homais; “it is obvious.”

  “But save her!” shouted Bovary.

  Then, without listening to the pharmacist who was still hazarding this hypothesis: “It is perhaps a beneficial paroxysm,” Canivet was about to administer an opiate, when the crack of a whip was heard; all the windowpanes trembled, and a post-chaise, urged on at full stretch by three horses spattered in mud up to their ears, emerged in a bound from the corner of the market house. It was Doctor Larivière.

  The appearance of a god would not have caused more of a stir. Bovary raised his hands, Canivet stopped short, and Homais removed his bonnet-grec long before the doctor made his entry.

  He belonged to the great school of surgeons issuing from Bichat’s leather apron, to that generation, now vanished, of practicing philosophers who, cherishing their art with a fanatical ardor, would exercise it exultantly and shrewdly. Everyone in his hospital trembled when he got into a rage, and his pupils venerated him so much that, scarce set up in business, they strove to imitate him as closely as possible; so that you would recognize them, in the neighboring towns, by his long wadded greatcoat of merino wool and his large black dress coat, whose unbuttoned cuffs partly covered his brawny hands, very handsome hands, and which never wore gloves, as if to be readier to plunge into pain. Disdainful of medals, of titles and academies, hospitable, liberal, fatherly to the poor and practicing virtue without being aware of it, he would have passed almost for a saint if the subtlety of his mind had not made him feared as a demon. His gaze, sharper than his scalpel, sank straight down into your soul and unjointed every lie through its assertions and coynesses. And thus he would proceed, full of that easy grandeur imparted by the consciousness of a great talent, wealth, and forty years of a hard-working and irreproachable life.

  He frowned from the door, on seeing the cadaverous face of Emma, stretched out on her back, mouth open. Then, while appearing to be listening to Canivet, he passed his forefinger under his nose and repeated:

  “Good, good.”

  But his shoulders made their slow sign. Bovary noticed it; they looked at one another; and this man, so accustomed to the sight of sorrow, could not restrain a tear that dropped onto his shirt frill.

  He wished to take Caniv
et away into the adjoining room. Charles followed him.

  “She’s very bad, isn’t she? If we were to apply mustard poultices?—I don’t know what! Then think of something, you who have saved so many!”

  Charles wrapped his arms about the doctor’s frame, and gazed at him wildly, beseechingly, half-swooning against his chest.

  “Come, my poor boy, cheer up. There is nothing more to be done.”

  And Doctor Larivière turned away.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I shall return.”

  He left as though to give an order to the postilion, along with Monsieur Canivet, who did not care to see Emma die in his hands.

  The pharmacist joined them in the square. He was, by disposition, incapable of parting company from celebrated persons. And he entreated Monsieur Larivière to grant him the honor of accepting an invitation to dine.

  Pigeons were sent for at the Lion d’Or, everything in the way of cutlets at the butcher’s, cream from Tuvache, eggs from Lestiboudois, and the apothecary himself helped with the preparations, while Madame Homais said, tightening the strings on her gown:

  “You must beg our pardon, Monsieur; for, in our wretched part of the country, if it happens that notice isn’t given the day before …”

  “The wineglasses!!!” whispered Homais.

  “At least, if we were in town, we could make shift with stuffed trotters.”

  “Hold your tongue! Dinner’s ready, doctor.”

  He thought it proper, after the first morsels, to provide a few details on the catastrophe:

  “Initially we had a feeling of dryness in the pharynx, followed by intolerable pains in the epigastrium, superpurgation, coma.”

  “How did she poison herself?”

  “I have no idea, doctor, and I’m not even too sure where she could have come by this arsenical acid.”

  Justin, who was just then carrying a pile of plates, started to tremble.

  “What’s the matter with you?” said the pharmacist.

  In reply, the young man dropped everything on the floor, with a great crash.

  “Idiot!” yelled Homais. “Butterfingers! Blockhead! Deuced ass!”