“The blow, you understand, is still too recent!”
Then Homais congratulated him on not being exposed, like everyone else, to the loss of a loved partner; from which ensued a discussion on the celibacy of priests.
“For,” said the pharmacist, “it is not natural for a man to dispense with women! We have witnessed crimes …”
“But, good grief!” cried the ecclesiastic, “how do you suppose an individual contracted in marriage might keep, for example, the secrets of confession?”
Homais attacked confession. Bournisien defended it; he expanded on the rehabilitations it had brought about. He cited various anecdotes of thieves suddenly turned honest. Soldiers, having stepped up to the penitential judgment seat, had felt the scales fall from their eyes. At Fribourg there was a minister …
His companion was asleep. Then, feeling a little suffocated in the bedroom’s stuffy atmosphere, he opened the window, which woke up the pharmacist.
“Come, a pinch of snuff,” he said to him. “Do accept, it kills the time.”
A continuous barking dragged on a long way off, somewhere.
“Can you hear a dog howling?” said the pharmacist.
“It’s alleged they smell the dead,” replied the ecclesiastic. “Likewise with bees: they fly away from the hive when someone dies.”
Homais did not react to these prejudices, as he had fallen asleep again.
Monsieur Bournisien, more robust, continued now and again to move his lips in a whisper; then, imperceptibly, he lowered his chin, let slip his great black book and began to snore.
They were facing one another, bellies prominent, faces bloated, with a scowling look, after so much disagreement joined at last in the same human frailty; and they stirred no more than the body beside them with its air of being asleep.
Charles, coming in, did not wake them. It was the last time. He was come to bid her farewell.
The aromatic herbs still smoked, and the eddies of blue vapors blended with the fog that came in. There were a few stars, and the night was mild.
The wax from the tapers fell in great drops on the bed’s sheets. Charles watched them burn, wearying his eyes against the radiance of their yellow flame.
Moiré patterns shivered on the satin dress, white as moonlight. Emma vanished away under it; and it seemed to him that, spreading outside herself, she was disappearing confusedly into the surrounding things, into the silence, into the night, into the wind blowing past, into the moist smells wafting up.
Then, all of a sudden, he saw her in the garden at Tostes, on the bench, against the thorn hedge, or else at Rouen, in the streets, at the door of their house, in the farmyard at Les Bertaux. He heard once more the laughter of the merry lads dancing under the apple trees; the room was full of the scent of her hair, and her dress shivered in his arms with a crackle of sparks. This, this was the very same!
He spent a long time thus, remembering all the vanished delights, her postures, her gestures, the timbre of her voice. After one despair, another came and always, inexhaustibly, like the waves of a bursting flood.
He felt a terrible curiosity: slowly, with his fingertips, heart pounding, he raised her veil. But he let out a scream of horror that woke the other two. They dragged him away downstairs, into the parlor.
Then Félicité came to say that he was asking for some locks of hair.
“Cut them!” replied the apothecary.
And, as she did not dare to, he came forward himself, scissors in hand. He was trembling so hard, that he punctured the temple’s skin in a number of places. At last, stiffening himself against the emotion, Homais administered two or three great thrusts at random, which left white dints in that beautiful head of black hair.
The pharmacist and the priest plunged anew into their affairs, not without slumbering from time to time, which they accused one another of doing each time they woke up. Then Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled the room with holy water and Homais tossed a bit of chlorine on the floor.
Félicité had been careful to leave them a bottle of eau-de-vie, a cheese and a plump brioche on the chest of drawers. And, at about four o’clock in the morning, the apothecary, who was exhausted, sighed:
“My word, I’ll take sustenance with pleasure!”
The clergyman needed no persuasion; he went out to say his mass, returned; then they ate and touched glasses, all the while sniggering a little, without knowing why, inflamed by that vague cheerfulness that takes hold of you after a heavy-hearted session; and, over the last little glass, the priest said to the pharmacist, slapping his shoulder all the while:
“We shall end up understanding each other!”
Downstairs in the hallway they met the workmen arriving. So, for two hours, Charles had to endure the torment of the hammer resounding on the boards. Then they brought her down in her oak coffin which they fitted into the two others; but, as the outer coffin was too big, the gaps had to be stopped up with the wool from a mattress. Finally, when the three lids were planed, nailed, soldered, she was laid in state before the door; the house was opened wide, and the folk of Yonville began to flock.
Père Rouault arrived. He fainted in the square when he saw the black pall.
X
He had only received the pharmacist’s letter thirty-six hours after the event; and, out of respect for his feelings, Monsieur Homais had written it in such a way that it was impossible to know how things stood.
The good fellow collapsed at first as if hit by a stroke. Then he understood that she was not dead. But she might be … At length he had slipped on his smock frock, donned his hat, hooked a spur on his shoe and had left at full speed; and, for the whole journey, Père Rouault, panting for breath, was consumed with anguish. Once, he even had to dismount. He could no longer see a thing, he kept hearing voices around him, he felt he was going mad.
The day broke, he saw three black hens sleeping in a tree; he gave a start, terrified by this omen. So he promised the Holy Virgin three chasubles for the church, and that he would go barefoot from the cemetery at Les Bertaux to the chapel at Vassonville.
He rode into Maromme hailing the people from the inn, forced the door open with a blow from his shoulder, leapt to the sack of oats, poured a bottle of sweet cider into the feeding trough, and again straddled his nag, whose hooves struck sparks from the stones.
He said to himself that they would no doubt save her; the doctors would find a remedy, for certain. He called to mind all the miraculous cures recounted to him.
Then she appeared to him, dead. She was there, in front of him, in the middle of the road. He pulled on the reins and the hallucination vanished.
At Quincampoix, to give himself courage, he drank three coffees straight off.
He thought they had made a mistake in writing her name. He looked for the letter in his pocket, felt it there, but did not dare open it.
He was reduced to conjecturing that it was perhaps a prank, someone’s revenge, the whim of a man on a spree; and, besides, if she were dead, would you not know it? But no! The countryside had nothing extraordinary about it: the sky was blue, the trees swayed; a flock of sheep passed. He glimpsed the village; they saw him rushing up, bent right over his horse, which he was drubbing with heavy blows, and whose saddle girths were trickling blood.
When he recovered consciousness, he fell all in tears into Bovary’s arms:
“My daughter! Emma! My child! Explain to me …?”
And the other replied through sobs:
“I don’t know, I don’t know! It is a curse!”
The apothecary separated them.
“These horrible details are useless. I will apprise Monsieur. There are people coming. Dignity, the deuce! Philosophy!”
The poor boy wanted to appear strong, and he repeated several times:
“Yes, courage!”
“Ah well,” cried the good fellow, “I’ll have it, in the name of God’s thunder! See if I shan’t be bearing her right to the end!”
The bell tol
led. Everything was ready. They must be setting off.
And, seated in a choir stall, one next to the other, they saw the three precentors continually passing back and forth in front of them, chanting psalms. The serpent player blew with all his might. Monsieur Bournisien, in full apparel, sang in a shrill voice; he bowed to the tabernacle, raised his hands, stretched his arms out. Lestiboudois went around the church with his whalebone staff; near the lectern, the coffin lay between four rows of tapers. Charles had a mind to get up and put them out.
He strove nevertheless to stir himself to his devotions, to lift himself up into the hope of a life to come when he would see her again. He imagined that she had gone on a voyage, far away, for a long time. But, when he considered that she was under there, and that everything was finished, that they would carry her into the earth, he got caught in a fierce, black, despairing rage. Sometimes, he thought he felt nothing; and he enjoyed this soothing of his sorrow, reproaching himself all the while for being a miserable wretch.
They heard on the flagstones something like the sharp click of an iron-shod pole tapping them with even strokes. It came from the back, and stopped abruptly in the church’s side aisle. A man in a coarse brown jacket kneeled painfully. It was Hippolyte, the servant from the Lion d’Or. He had put on his new leg.
One of the precentors was walking up the nave for the collection, and the two-sous coins chinked in the silver dish, one after the other.
“Hurry up now! I’m suffering. I am!” cried Bovary, as he threw a five-franc coin at it in anger.
The churchman thanked him with a slow bow.
They sang, they kneeled, they got up, it never ended! He remembered how once, in the early times, they had attended mass together, and they were on the other side, to the right, against the wall. The bell began again. There was a great stirring of chairs. The bearers slipped their three poles under the coffin, and it was carried out of the church.
Justin then appeared at the door of the pharmacy. He went back inside all of a sudden, pale, tottering.
They stood at windows to watch the procession pass. Charles, in front, threw back his shoulders. He put on an appearance of courage and nodded at those who, emptying out of lanes and doors, found a place in the crowd.
The six men, three on each side, were walking with short steps and puffing a little. The priests, the precentors and the two choirboys were performing the De Profundis; and their voices dwindled away over the fields, rising and falling in waves. Sometimes they disappeared from sight with the track’s windings; but the great silver cross stood erect still between the trees.
The women followed, covered in black mantles with lowered hoods; each carried in her hands a big lighted candle, and Charles felt himself swooning at this continual repetition of prayer and flame, under these cloying smells of wax and cassock. A fresh breeze blew, the rye and the rape were verdant, the dewdrops trembled on the sides of the path, on the thorn hedges. All kinds of joyous sounds filled the horizon: the banging of a cart rolling at a distance over the ruts, the cockerel’s crow repeating itself or the scamper of a hen that you could see fleeing under the apple trees. The clear sky was speckled with pink clouds; curls of smoke fell back upon the thatched roofs covered in irises; Charles, as he passed, recognized the yards. He remembered mornings like this, when, having visited some sick patient or other, he left them, and went back to her.
The black cloth, sprinkled with white teardrops, rose up from time to time and revealed the coffin. The weary bearers were slowing down, and it advanced by continual jerks, like a launch that pitches at every wave.
They arrived.
The men continued further down, to a spot in the grass where the ditch had been dug.
They lined up all around; and, while the priest spoke, the red earth, thrown up on the sides, was trickling at the corners noiselessly, on and on.
Then, when the four ropes were ready, the coffin was heaved on top. He watched it descend. It was descending forever.
At last they heard a thud; squeaking, the ropes came back up. Then Bournisien took the spade that Lestiboudois held out to him; with his left hand, as he went on sprinkling with the right, he pushed in a large shovelful with vigor; and the coffin’s wood, clipped by the pebbles, made that tremendous noise that seems to us to be the resounding of eternity.
The clergyman passed the aspergillum to his neighbor. It was Monsieur Homais. He shook it solemnly, then held it out to Charles, who sank down onto his knees in the earth, and was casting in handfuls of it as he called out: “Adieu!” He blew kisses at her; he crawled to the grave to be swallowed up with her.
They led him away; and he was not long in calming down, experiencing, perhaps, like all the others, the vague satisfaction of having done with it.
Père Rouault, on the way back, began quietly smoking a pipe; something Homais, in his heart of hearts, deemed improper. He noted likewise that Monsieur Binet had refrained from appearing, that Tuvache had “made off” after the mass, and that Théodore, the notary’s servant, wore a blue coat, “as if they couldn’t find him a black coat, seeing it’s the custom, devil take it!” And to impart his observations, he went from one group to the other. They deplored Emma’s death, and above all Lheureux, who had not failed to come to the funeral.
“That poor little woman. What woe for her husband.”
The apothecary answered:
“Without me, I’ll have you know, he’d have carried out some fatal attempt on himself.”
“Such a good person she was. And to think that it was only last Saturday that I saw her again in my shop!”
“I didn’t have the leisure,” said Homais, “to prepare a few words for me to cast on her tomb.”
Back home, Charles undressed, and Père Rouault donned his blue smock again. It was new, and, as he had, along the way, wiped his eyes often on the sleeves, its color had come off on his face; and there the trace of tears made lines in the layer of dust by which it was soiled.
Madame Bovary senior was with them. All three kept quiet. At length the good old fellow sighed:
“Do you remember, my friend, me coming to Tostes that time, when you’d just lost your first deceased. I comforted you back then. I found what to say; but right now …”
Then, with a slow groan that raised his entire chest:
“Ah, it’s the end for me, y’know. I’ve seen my wife depart … my son after … and here’s my daughter, today!”
He wanted to head back to Les Bertaux straightaway, saying that he could not sleep in that there house. He even refused to see his granddaughter.
“No, no. That’d be too much grief for me. Just give her a fine kiss. Farewell! You’re a good lad! And besides, I’ll never forget this,” he said, slapping his thigh, “never fear! You’ll always have your turkey.”
But, when he reached the top of the hill, he turned around, as before he had turned around on the Saint-Victor road, on parting from her. The windows of the village were all aflame in the sun’s slanting rays as it sank into the meadow. He put his hand in front of his eyes; and he glimpsed on the horizon an enclosure of walls where, here and there, trees formed dark tufts between white stones, then he carried on at a gentle trot, for his nag was lame.
Charles and his mother, despite their weariness, stayed chatting together for a very long time that evening. They spoke of days past and of the future. She would come to live in Yonville, she would run the house, they would never more leave one another. She was ingenious and fawning, inwardly delighted to retake possession of an affection that had evaded her for so many years. Midnight rang out. The village, as usual, was silent, and Charles, wide awake, still thought of her.
Rodolphe, who, to distract himself, had beaten the wood for game all day long, slept peacefully in his chateau; and Léon, further away, slept as well.
There was someone else who, at that hour, was not asleep.
On the grave, between the pines, a child wept on his knees, and his breast, made sore with sobbing, heav
ed in the shadows, under the pressure of an immense regret gentler than the moon and more unfathomable than the night. All of a sudden the gate creaked. It was Lestiboudois; he was coming to look for his spade that he had forgotten earlier. He recognized Justin scaling the wall, and now knew just who the evildoer was that kept stealing his potatoes.
XI
Charles, the next day, had the little one returned home. She asked for her mama. They told her that she was away, that she would bring her back some toys. Berthe spoke of her again a few times; then, in the end, thought no more of it. This child’s cheerfulness broke Bovary’s heart, and he had to suffer the pharmacist’s unbearable consolings.
Soon the money business began afresh, Monsieur Lheureux stirring up his friend Vinçart again, and Charles pledged himself to exorbitant amounts; for he would never consent to allow the least stick of furniture to be sold that had belonged to her. His mother grew exasperated with him. He waxed more indignant than she did. He had quite changed. She quit the house.
Then each person set about profiting. Mademoiselle Lempereur claimed six months of lessons, even though Emma had never taken a single one (despite that paid-off bill she had shown Bovary): it was an agreement between the two women; the book lender claimed three years of subscription; Mère Rolet claimed the postage for a score of letters; and, as Charles asked for an explanation, she had the decency to reply:
“Ah, I don’t know anything about it. It was to do with her transactions.”
With each debt he paid off, Charles thought he had done with them. Others kept arriving unexpectedly, over and over.
He demanded that the arrears of former consultations be paid. He was shown the letters his wife had sent. Then he had to apologize.
Félicité now wore Madame’s dresses; not all, as he had kept some, and he would go to examine them in his dressing room, secluding himself there; as she was roughly her size, Charles, on catching sight of her from behind, would frequently be gripped by delusion, and shout out:
Madame Bovary (Modern Library) Page 37
