Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  “Oh! Stay! Stay!”

  But, at Pentecost, she decamped from Yonville, carried off by Théodore, and stealing everything that remained in the wardrobe.

  It was at about this time that the widow Dupuis had the honor to inform him of the “marriage of Monsieur Léon Dupuis, her son, notary at Yvetot, to Mademoiselle Léocadie Leboeuf, of Bondeville.” Among the congratulations that he conveyed to her, Charles wrote this sentence:

  “How happy my poor wife would have been!”

  One day when wandering aimlessly through the house, he had climbed right up to the attic, he felt under his slipper a ball of thin paper. He opened it out and read: “Courage, Emma! Courage! I do not wish to be your life’s misfortune.” It was Rodolphe’s letter, fallen to the floor between some boxes, that had lain there, and that the wind from the dormer window had blown toward the door. And Charles stayed motionless and gaping on that same spot where long ago, even paler than he, Emma, in despair, had wanted to die. At last, he discovered a little R at the bottom of the second page. Who was it? He recalled the attentiveness of Rodolphe, his sudden disappearance and the constrained manner he had shown on meeting him two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter deceived him.

  “They perhaps loved each other platonically,” he told himself.

  Moreover, Charles was not the type to go to the bottom of things; he recoiled from evidence, and his uncertain jealousy was carried away in the immensity of his grief.

  They must, he thought, have adored her. All the men, most certainly, had hankered after her. She appeared to him more beautiful; and he conceived a permanent, furious desire for her, which inflamed his despair and was limitless, because it could not be realized.

  For his own pleasure, as if she were still alive, he adopted her partialities, her ideas; he bought himself polished boots, he took to wearing white neck cloths. He applied cosmetics on his mustaches, like her he signed promissory notes. She corrupted him from beyond the grave.

  He was obliged to sell the silver plate piece by piece, then he sold the sitting-room furniture. All the rooms were stripped; but the bedroom, her own bedroom, stayed as before. After his dinner, Charles would go up there. He pushed the round table in front of the fire, and he approached her armchair. He sat down facing it. A candle burned in one of the gilded candlesticks. Berthe, close by him, would color in some prints.

  He suffered, the poor man, to see her so badly dressed, with her laceless boots and her blouses’ armholes torn down to the hips, for the housekeeper took but little care. But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her little head would lean so gracefully, letting her full blond hair fall over her pink cheeks, that an infinite delight broke upon him, a pleasure entirely mixed with bitterness like those badly made wines that smell of resin. He repaired her playthings, made her dancing puppets out of card, or sewed up her dolls’ torn stomachs. Then, if his eyes lighted on the work box, a ribbon lying about or even a pin remaining in a crack in the table, he began to dream, and he looked so sad, that she became sad with him.

  Nobody now came to see them; for Justin had fled to Rouen, where he had become a grocer’s boy, and the apothecary’s children associated less and less with the little girl, Monsieur Homais not caring for the close connection to be prolonged, given the difference in their social conditions.

  The blind man, whom he had not been able to cure with his salve, had gone back to the hill at Bois-Guillaume, where he related to travelers the fruitless attempt of the pharmacist, to the point where Homais, when he went to town, hid behind the curtains of the Hirondelle, in order to avoid meeting him. He cursed the fellow; and, in the interests of his own reputation, wanting to be absolutely rid of him, he swung all his guns upon him in secret, revealing the depth of his own intellect and the nefariousness of his vanity. So for six consecutive months, you could read in the Rouen Beacon paragraphs conceived thus:

  “Whoever proceeds toward the fertile lands of Picardy has doubtless observed, upon the hill at Bois-Guillaume, a wretch suffering from a loathsome facial sore. He plagues you to death, persistently follows you and levies a veritable tax on the traveler. Are we yet in those monstrous times of the Middle Ages, when vagabonds were permitted to show off in our public places the leprosy and the scrofula that they had carried back from the Crusades?”

  Or else:

  “In spite of the laws against vagabondage, the approaches to our great towns continue to be infested by gangs of paupers. Some are to be seen going about on their own, these being, perhaps, not the least dangerous. What are our magistrates thinking of?”

  Then Homais would make up anecdotes:

  “Yesterday, on the hill at Bois-Guillaume, a skittish horse …” And an account would follow of an accident caused by the presence of the blind man.

  He did so well that they imprisoned the fellow. But they let him go. He began again, and Homais also began again. It was a battle. He won the day; for his enemy was sentenced to life confinement in an almshouse.

  This success emboldened him; and not a dog was run over, a barn burned down, a wife beaten in the district, that he did not immediately apprise the public of it, ever guided by a love of progress and a loathing of priests. He made comparisons between elementary schools and the Ignorantine brothers, to the detriment of these latter, called to mind Saint Bartholomew in reference to a grant of a hundred francs made to the Church, and denounced abuses, shot forth sallies. He was having his say. Homais kept on undermining; he was becoming dangerous.

  Nevertheless, he was suffocating in the narrow confines of journalism, and soon he must have the book, the literary work! So he composed General Statistics of the Canton of Yonville, followed by Some Climatological Observations, and the statistics pushed him on toward philosophy. He engrossed himself in the big questions: the social problem, the moralization of the poorer classes, pisciculture, India rubber, railways, etc. He came to feel ashamed at being a bourgeois. He affected the artistic manner, he smoked! He bought himself two chic Pompadour statuettes, to adorn his drawing-room.

  He did not give up the pharmacy; quite the contrary! He kept up with the latest discoveries. He followed the great advance in chocolates. He was the first who brought cho-ca and revalenta into the Seine-Inférieure. He was smitten with enthusiasm for the Pulvermacher hydroelectric body chains; he wore one himself; and, in the evening, when he removed his flannel vest, Madame Homais remained utterly dazzled before the gold spiral beneath which he would disappear, and felt her ardor double for this man pinioned tighter than a Scythian and as splendid as a magus.

  He had some fine ideas concerning Emma’s tomb. At first he proposed a stump of pillar with a piece of drapery, then a pyramid, then a temple of Vesta, a sort of rotunda … or else “a heap of ruins.” And, in all these plans, he stuck to the weeping willow, considering it the required symbol of sadness.

  Charles and he took a trip together to Rouen, to view tombs at a monumental mason’s—accompanied by a painter, one Vaufrylard by name, friend of Bridoux, and who kept making puns all the time. At last, having examined a hundred drawings, ordered an estimate and made a second trip to Rouen, Charles settled on a mausoleum which would bear on its two principal facets “a guardian spirit holding a snuffed torch.”

  As for the inscription, Homais found nothing fitter than Sta viator, and he stopped there; he racked his brains; he continually repeated Sta viator … At last, he hit on amabilem conjugem calcas! Which was taken up.

  One strange thing, was that Bovary, while continually thinking on Emma, was forgetting her; and he was in despair at feeling this image escaping his memory amidst the efforts he was making to retain it. Yet each night he would dream of her; it was always the same dream: he would approach her; but, when he was on the point of clasping her, she fell to rottenness in his arms.

  They saw him entering the church in the evening for a week. Monsieur Bournisien even called on him two or three times, then gave him up. Besides, the old fellow was becoming intolerant, fanatica
l, Homais said; he would fulminate against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every fortnight, in his sermon, to relate the death struggle of Voltaire, who died eating his own feces, as everyone knows.

  Despite the thriftiness with which Bovary lived, he was far from being able to pay off his debts. Lheureux refused to renew any promissory note. The seizure grew imminent. So he had recourse to his mother, who agreed to let him take out a mortgage on her property, while pouring out violent recriminations against Emma; and, in return for her sacrifice, she asked for a shawl, which had escaped Félicité’s pillagings. Charles refused. They fell out.

  She made the first overtures toward a reconciliation, by proposing to take in the little girl, who would comfort her in her home. Charles consented. But, at the moment of parting, all courage forsook him. So there was a definitive, total rupture.

  According as his affections disappeared, the more narrowly did he confine himself to the love of his child. She worried him, however; for she would cough sometimes, and had red blotches on her cheeks.

  Opposite him sprawled, blooming and merry, the family of the pharmacist, whom all earthly things conduced to satisfy. Napoléon helped him in the laboratory, Athalie embroidered him a bonnet-grec, Irma cut out paper circles to cover the jams, and Franklin recited the multiplication table in a single breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men.

  Illusion! One secret ambition gnawed at him: Homais longed for the cross. He did not lack for claims:

  “1. Being distinguished by a boundless devotion at the time of the cholera; 2. having published, at my own expense, various works of public benefit, such as … (and he called to mind his dissertation entitled: ‘On cider, of its manufacture and effects’; plus, some observations on the apple-plant louse, sent to the Academy; his book of statistics, and even his pharmaceutical thesis); not to mention the fact that I am a member of several learned societies (he belonged to only one).

  “Lastly,” he cried, with a cunning sidestep, “even if it’s only for distinguishing myself at the fires!”

  So Homais bent to the powers that be. He privately did Monsieur le Préfet great services in the elections. In short he sold himself, he prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign in which he entreated him to do him justice; he called him our good king and compared him to Henri IV.

  And, each morning, the apothecary threw himself on the newspaper to behold his nomination within: it did not come. Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he had a turf plot designed in his garden representing the star of honor, with two little grassed twists springing from the top to imitate the ribbon. He would stroll around it, arms folded, reflecting on the government’s folly and man’s ingratitude.

  Out of respect, or a kind of sensuality that made him slow down his investigations, Charles had not yet opened the secret compartment of an ebony desk that Emma habitually used. One day, at last, he sat before it, turned the key and pressed the spring. All Léon’s letters lay within. No doubting it, this time! He devoured them to the last one, rummaged in every corner, every piece of furniture, every drawer, behind the walls, sobbing, howling, desperate, mad. He discovered a box, staved it in with a single kick. Rodolphe’s portrait leapt at him full in the face, amidst a confusion of love letters.

  People were astonished at his despondency. He no longer left the house, received no one, refused even to go and see his patients. So they maintained that he shut himself up to drink.

  Sometimes, however, a busybody would raise himself above the garden hedge, and discern with amazement this long-bearded man, muffled up in sordid clothes, wild-looking, and weeping loudly as he paced.

  In the evening, through the summer, he would take his little girl with him and convey her to the cemetery. They would return from there in the dark of night, when the square was lit by no more than Binet’s garret window.

  Nevertheless, the voluptuousness of his grief was incomplete, for he had no one around him who shared it; and he would call on Mère Lefrançois so that he could talk about her. But the landlady would only listen with half an ear, having heartaches like him, for Monsieur Lheureux had just set up Les Favorites du Commerce at last, and Hivert, who enjoyed a high reputation for running errands, exacted an increase in salary and threatened to hire himself out “to the Competition.”

  One day when he had gone to the market in Argueil in order to sell his horse—last resort—he met Rodolphe.

  They paled on perceiving each other. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, stammered the odd excuse to begin with, then grew bolder and even stretched his self-possession (it was very hot, this now being August) to the point of inviting him to the tavern for a bottle of beer.

  Leaning on his elbow opposite him, he chewed his cigar while he chatted, and Charles lost himself in reverie before this face that she had loved. He seemed to see something of her again. It was a wonder. He would have liked to be this man.

  The other continued to talk cultivation, cattle, manure, stopping up with banal phrases any little space between where a hint might slip in. Charles was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed this, and he followed the memories fleeting past in the motions of his face. Little by little it turned crimson, the nostrils palpitating fast, the lips quivering; there was even a moment when Charles, full of a dark rage, fixed his gaze on Rodolphe who, in a kind of fright, broke off. But soon the same mournful weariness reappeared on his countenance.

  “I hold nothing against you,” he said.

  Rodolphe remained speechless. And Charles, his head in his hands, repeated in a feeble voice and in the resigned tone of numberless sorrows:

  “No, I hold nothing against you anymore!”

  He even added a high-flown phrase, the only one he had ever uttered:

  “It is the fault of fate!”

  Rodolphe, who had driven this fate, thought him too easygoing and weak for a man in his situation, comic even, and a little contemptible.

  The next day, Charles went to sit on the bench, in the arbor. Daylight filtered through the trellis; the vine leaves drew their shadows on the sand, the jasmine gave out its fragrance, the sky was blue, the Spanish flies hummed around the flowering lilies, and Charles choked like an adolescent under the vague exhalations of love that swelled his grief-stricken heart.

  At seven o’clock, little Berthe, who had not seen him all afternoon, came to fetch him for dinner.

  His head was tipped back against the wall, eyes closed, mouth open, and he was holding in his hands a long lock of black hair.

  “Papa, come now!” she said.

  And, thinking that he wanted to play, she gently pushed him. He fell on the ground. He was dead.

  Thirty-six hours later, at the apothecary’s request, Monsieur Canivet hastened in. He opened him up and found nothing.

  When everything was sold, there remained twelve francs and seventy-five centimes that served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary’s journey to her grandmother’s. The good woman died that same year; Père Rouault being paralyzed, it fell to an aunt to take charge of her. She is poor and sends her, to earn her bread, to a cotton mill.

  Since Bovary’s death, three doctors have succeeded one another at Yonville without managing to prosper there, Monsieur Homais so instantly demolishing them. He has a hellishly fine clientele; authority treats him with care and public opinion protects him.

  He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honor.

  To Marie-Antoine-Jules Sénard

  member of the Paris bar

  ex-president of the National Assembly

  and former Minister of the Interior

  Dear and illustrious friend,

  Allow me to inscribe your name in the front of this book and even before its dedication; for it is to you, above all, that I owe its publication. On submitting to your magnificent defense in court, my work has acquired for me a kind of unforeseen authority. Accept here, then, the acknowledgment of my gratitude, which, as great as it may be, will neve
r be equal to your eloquence and your devotion.

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  Paris, 12th April 1857.

  TO LOUIS BOUILHET

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My grateful thanks to Laura Hassan, my editor at Random House, for her patience and support, and to her assistant Frances MacMillan; to Alison Samuel for her remarkable close-reading editorial work—and without whose suggestions and corrections this translation would have been much the poorer; and to Alison Hennessy and the original instigator of the project, Liz Foley. Numerous people have provided encouragement and untied knots at various critical moments: these include Jean-Louis Habert, David Owen, Niek Miedema, Bernard Péchon, Patricia and Laurent Decornet, Simon Elmes, Julian Barnes, Anne-Marie Privat, Corinne Pinferi, Robert Chandler, my late father Barney Thorpe, my daughter Anastasia Thorpe and my tireless agent Lucy Luck. Finally, a special thank-you to my wife, Jo Wistreich, for putting up with Emma for so long and with such tolerance, and for seeing her through.

  NOTES

  1 Dedicatees: Louis Bouilhet, Flaubert’s closest friend, a failed medical intern and erudite bohemian poet, suggested to Flaubert that he write a novel based on the domestic tragedy of the country doctor Eugène Delamare and his adulterous, free-spending wife, Delphine. Marie-Antoine-Jules Sénard was a notable Rouen lawyer who successfully defended Flaubert, when charges were brought against Madame Bovary for affronting public morals, by suggesting it was an astringent warning to young girls.

  PART ONE

  1 chapka A nineteenth-century Polish cavalryman’s hat; this celebrated description of Charles Bovary’s composite headgear introduces him as a dull-witted, bovine grotesque. It will take the length of the novel to turn him into a much more complex and sympathetic character.

  2 the Quos ego The command by which Neptune calms the storm in Virgil’s Aeneid (1, 135), a passage familiar as a set text to the nineteenth-century pupil.