Madame Bovary's Daughter

by Linda Urbach

  “I’m much relieved,” murmured Berthe, taking several steps back.

  “You must milk her every day, twice a day, until she dries up.” Grand-mère emptied a small pail of grain into Céleste’s bucket. Then the old woman set a small three-legged stool at a right angle to Céleste and sat down, resting her head against the cow’s flank.

  “Take the teat like this,” Grand-mère said, grasping one of Céleste’s pale teats in the palm of her hand. “You squeeze it like this,” she added, curling her fingers around the teat, the milk coming out in a strong stream. “When one goes dry you do the same with the other three. She should give milk ten out of twelve months. Otherwise, she will be shipped off to the butcher.” She gave Céleste a smack on the rear. Berthe immediately identified with the cow.

  “C’est tout,” her grand-mère said, groaning as she lifted herself off the stool. “When you are done, pour the milk into this.” She held up a beautiful copper jug which had a long leather strap attached to it. Berthe had seen women on the road carrying these jugs on their shoulders. The leather strap was used to keep it steady as they walked along.

  “Hurry up with the milking,” the old woman said as she left. “There’s still much to do today.”

  Berthe had never been so close to a cow, or asked to be on such intimate terms with one. She sat down and reached for the first teat with nervous fingers. She squeezed hard. Nothing happened. Céleste turned her head as much as the rope would allow and gave Berthe a look that seemed to say, “And what in heaven’s name do you think you are doing?”

  “Come on,” Berthe said, squeezing the teat even harder. She dropped one teat and quickly grabbed another as if she were ringing bells. Perspiration ran down her face. Her skin began to itch from the coarse muslin chemise. She squeezed and squeezed. Nothing happened. She did not want to report failure to her grand-mère. “Come on,” she said, gritting her teeth. Her shoulders were stiff with tension.

  “Berthe,” her grand-mère called from the courtyard, “aren’t you done yet? Milking doesn’t take all morning, for goodness’ sake.” Berthe bumped her head against Céleste’s side in annoyance.

  “Please, Céleste, please, let go of the milk.” She was ready to cry from frustration. The cow looked around at Berthe again. That sweet face that so enchanted her when she first saw it now enraged her. “You stupid, stupid cow,” she growled.

  “That’s no way to talk to her.” Berthe turned. A boy carrying a huge bundle of hay on his shoulder stood in the doorway. He had shaggy sandy-colored hair and almost painfully bright blue eyes. He was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen.

  “She won’t give me any of her cursed milk,” Berthe said. “I must be doing something wrong. Please, can you show me?”

  The boy took her place on the stool. Stroking Céleste’s flank, he began to talk to her in soft, soothing tones. “Shoosh, shoosh, shoosh, ma jolie fille. Do you have any milk for Renard?” After he had caressed and scratched her for a few minutes, he slowly, ever so slowly reached for her teat and the milk began to stream into the bucket.

  “Now you try,” he said. “Just be gentle. She is like all women. You must treat her with kindness.”

  “And what do you know of ‘all women’?” Berthe asked. He was just a boy. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old.

  “I have sisters,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Come. Even my littlest sister can do this.” Berthe took a deep breath and sat down. She gave Céleste a look. Don’t you dare hold out on me again. Then she followed Renard’s example. The milk flowed out smoothly until the bucket was almost half full.

  Forking hay into the hayloft, the boy looked down at Berthe and smiled. He had good teeth. Straight and white. She smiled back.

  “My name is Renard Garnier. And yours?” he asked.

  “Berthe Bovary,” she said. He rested his chin on the handle of his pitchfork. The way he looked at her made her feel shy.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen,” she lied. “And you?”

  “I will be sixteen on the last day of August,” he said, as if he expected her to mark it in her almanac.

  “Good for you.” She turned her back to him.

  “You’re a sassy one.” He threw a handful of hay in her direction. “My sister Marie used to do the housework and make the cheese and butter, but Madame Bovary let her go. You are to take her place. Has she said how much she will pay you?” Berthe shook her head. “Of course not. You will do work out of love because you are her devoted granddaughter.” He laughed.

  “And how much does she pay you to throw her hay around?” she retorted, pouring the milk into the copper jug.

  “Don’t let your grand-mère hear that you have a tongue on you,” he said. “Or you will be one sorry milkmaid.”

  “I’m not a milkmaid.” She lifted the copper jug onto her shoulder and held it secure with the leather strap. Then holding both her head and the copper jug high, she turned and walked out of the barn, knowing that she must look every bit the milkmaid that Renard had declared her to be. The sound of his laughter trailed after her. She made up her mind never to speak to him again.

  Early one morning, hours before her grand-mère woke, Berthe stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched as the sun came up. A mist lifted off the green fields. The geese emerged from the barn with an air of ownership. The chickens followed humbly behind, pecking at the ground in the unlikely event they would find leftover grain from the day before. From inside the barn she could hear Céleste mooing to be relieved of her burden of milk.

  In many ways the country life suited her. The food was good and plentiful. The air was clean and sweet. And even though she labored to exhaustion from morning to evening, she did not shirk the work. She’d settled in to living here, and was determined to make her life as beautiful as possible. While her grand-mère slept she took the homespun dress and dipped it in beet juice; the result was a pleasing pale rose color. Then she took out a small case of embroidery silks that she’d saved from the house in Yonville and embroidered a design of blue and red fleurs-de-lis on the bib of her apron. She was very pleased with the result. The dress and apron were now almost pretty. It gave her a great feeling of satisfaction to be able to transform something ugly into something almost wearable.

  When her grand-mère saw her she was indignant.

  “What have you done to your good clothes? Well, you’ll have to live with them. I have no money to waste on buying you new ones.”

  Several months later Berthe awoke to find her nightgown and bedsheets stained with blood. Am I dying? So young? Then she realized what it was. Her mother had called it the Curse without ever explaining it. Why had she called it that? Did it, as Berthe suspected at the time, have something to do with falling in love with the wrong man and having your heart broken? Whenever her mother was struck with the Curse she took to her bed for a week.

  “What’s wrong, Maman?” Berthe asked during one of these weeklong convalescences.

  “Ask your father. He’s the doctor,” her mother said, turning her back and pulling the duvet over her head.

  When Berthe was finally able to get a few moments with her father he explained everything in his clinical way: “The Curse is another name for a woman’s menses. It is the circulatory connection between a woman’s body and mind. Thus, a woman must bleed freely once a month; failing to do so will create a form of mental disorder. Similarly, she must remain quiet and calm during this time. It’s been scientifically proven that any strong emotion can cause menstrual obstruction, which can lead to insanity and death.”

  “Every single month, Papa?”

  “Every single month, child. That, you see, is the curse of being a woman.”

  “Oh” was all she could think of to say. She had more questions, like what was the curse of being a man? But her father was busy and shooed her away.

  Now, in her grand-mère’s attic without a father to ask or a mother to guide her, s
he lay in her bed afraid to move. She tried to keep her mind calm and her anxiety at bay just in case what her father said was true. She didn’t want to get her first Curse and go insane all on the same day.

  Her grand-mère’s head suddenly appeared in the open hatch of the attic floor.

  “Perhaps you would like breakfast in bed. Or would you prefer to sleep until noon? Just let me know and I’ll tell Cook to stop boiling your egg.”

  “I’m sorry, Grand-mère.” Berthe sat up. She tried to conceal her nightgown and stained sheets. But it was too late.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” her grand-mère snapped. “Go and soak everything in cold water.” Berthe slipped out of bed, keeping her back to the old woman.

  “Of course I have no rags. Why would I ever think to keep rags? You’ll have to tear up one of my nice old sheets. A perfectly good sheet, torn up …” She continued grumbling as she descended the ladder to the floor below.

  Berthe took off her nightgown, wrapped it in the soiled sheet, and brought everything downstairs. Her grand-mère was at the stove boiling the morning coffee. She scowled at the bundle in Berthe’s arms and Berthe ducked her head in embarrassment.

  Her stomach hurt. It was a deep-down tender ache. For some reason it made her long for her mother. And that was the truly painful part. Because what would her mother have done if she were alive? She thought of Félicité, the maid, whom she ran to whenever she was hurt or upset. She realized now that Félicité had been paid to watch over her, to act as if she cared. She remembered once as a small child encountering Félicité in the small park in Yonville on the maid’s day off. She was walking with a new beau. Berthe ran up to her and Félicité acted as if she didn’t know her. Or didn’t want to know her. Remembering this now, Berthe was filled with sadness. Had she really been so hard to love?

  Outside, she plunged the sheet and gown into the water trough and then suddenly brought her hand down hard on the edge of the iron container. The pain caused her to cry out. Damn. Damn. Damn. She studied her palm. It was already bruised and bleeding. She brought the injured hand to her mouth as if kissing it would make the pain go away.

  “Careful, mademoiselle, farmwork can be a dangerous thing.” She glanced up. Renard had seemingly come out of nowhere. He leaned over the trough studying the contents. She felt her face turn red as she plunged the wet laundry farther down into the water.

  “Go away,” she said. “Can’t you see I’m busy? You must have better things to do than hang over my shoulder all day.”

  “Actually, no. I can’t think of anything better.” He gave her a broad grin before turning and walking toward the fields. He must have known she was watching him because just as he got to the edge of the field where the hay had already been mowed, he turned and gave her a smart salute. She quickly bent her head so that he wouldn’t see her smile.

  The next evening after the milking she was washing herself outside by the pump. She had taken off her heavy muslin shirt and was wearing only a thin cotton camisole underneath. She looked down at herself. Water had soaked through the thin material and she could see pink nubs poking through. It was as if her breasts had begun to form almost overnight. Just at that moment Renard came around the corner of the barn. He smiled broadly as she quickly picked up her shirt to cover herself.

  She had the beginnings of a woman’s body and now the strange feelings that went along with it. Her grand-mère seemed to be all too aware of the change.

  When she went inside for supper, the old woman grabbed her by her braid and pulled her around to face her.

  “Don’t think I’m not watching you, young lady. And I am warning you right now, stay away from that boy. He’s up to no good—and if you’re anything like your mother, neither, I believe, are you.”

  Renard seemed to linger in the mornings so that Berthe always saw him on her way out to milk Céleste. They never spoke, only exchanged glances. But for her part she looked forward to that glimpse of him. His smile was the single bright spot of her day.

  One morning while she was rinsing the milk jug at the pump he came up behind her and pulled at the string of her straw hat.

  “And how goes it with you and your cow?” he asked, his blue eyes bright in the early sun.

  “It’s fine. She gives her milk without an argument.”

  “I told you. All you have to do is be gentle.” He pulled the string of her hat again and this time it came tumbling off.

  “Stop that,” she said, snatching the hat from the ground and smashing it down on her head. He laughed and made another lunge for her hat but she jumped out of the way. She wanted to keep the conversation going—to keep his blue eyes on her. At the same time, she felt shy. “Is your house far from here?”

  “Over there,” he said with a slight nod of his head. She looked in the direction he indicated and saw nothing but fields of hay stacked in towering hills. “My house is beyond that grove of trees. But it’s nothing to see even if you could see it. My sister Marie says we should burn the place down and start over from scratch. My mother says it would only take our family a week to ruin a new place.”

  “Do you have many brothers and sisters?”

  “I am the oldest of seven. Four boys, three girls,” he said, kicking dirt at one of the geese who had ventured a little too close.

  “How lucky you are,” she said, remembering the Homaises and the comfort and laughter of a large family. She thought back to how, as a little girl, she’d hovered around them as though they were a good fire that provided her only source of warmth.

  “Lucky to sleep three to a bed? Lucky that my father is so poor I have to work on four different farms in order to earn my keep? Lucky if I get a decent supper by the time I return home at night because they have eaten what little there is?”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. She reached out and touched his arm and then withdrew her hand quickly.

  He kicked at the dirt once again, his face red.

  “Why should you be sorry? It’s not your fault.” He hitched up his pants, grabbed his pitchfork, and walked toward the fields. This time, he didn’t look back.

  She thought of Renard going hungry at the end of a hard day’s work, and that night when she had finished scrubbing the kitchen she took some food from her grand-mère’s pantry to give to him. The old woman frequently traded her cheeses for delicacies from other farms. Her pantry was filled with all manner of good things: smoked hams hanging from hooks, jars of strawberry preserves, tiny cornichons, and boiled sweets lining the shelves. Food was something they had more than enough of. Berthe reasoned her grand-mère would never miss what she took.

  Berthe had stolen only one thing as a child. She had coveted many things that had belonged to her mother: a single silver hair comb, an embroidered handkerchief, a velvet ribbon, a cut-glass rouge jar. From time to time, she would “borrow” these small treasures, play with them, and return them before her mother was any the wiser. Until the paisley shawl.

  Monsieur Lheureux, the draper, seemed to become more and more of an enticing presence to her mother. One day, when Berthe was around six years old, he brought a dozen of his finest silk shawls for Madame Bovary to choose from.

  “They come from around the world,” he said, laying them out on her mother’s bed. “Some all the way from China. Look at the patterns: Are they not exquisite? Choose one. Choose two.”

  “I have no use for such a thing,” Emma Bovary said, pretending disinterest as she fingered the one nearest her.

  “It is not a question of use,” said Monsieur Lheureux, “it’s a matter of obligation. You owe it to yourself to have one of these. They are too beautiful to sit hidden away in a dark drawer in my shop.”

  Her mother spent the whole week narrowing down her selection. One afternoon she spread the shawls over the settee and turned to Berthe, who was sitting on the floor practicing her needlework. “Pick one. The prettiest,” she said. Her mother had never asked her opinion before.

  Berthe chose a shawl o
f the palest peach, with an intricate design of delicate blue and green leaves. Seeing which one her daughter preferred, Emma Bovary chose another, a deep red and purple paisley that she wore for a day over her cashmere dressing gown.

  Some months later Berthe found the shawl on the bottom of her mother’s wardrobe and took it for herself. She hid the shawl underneath her mattress. Félicité found it later while turning the bed.

  “And what is this, pray tell?” Félicité asked, holding it in front of Berthe’s face.

  “It’s mine,” Berthe said, reaching up to pull it away from her.

  “Oh, we shall see.”

  Moments later, her mother swept into the room.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for this,” she said. “What wonderful news. My daughter is turning into a thief. As if I don’t have enough to deal with.” She thrust the shawl in Berthe’s face. “Here, if you want it so badly, you may have it.”

  Berthe took the shawl and laid it on top of her pillow. She loved having something of her mother’s to sleep with every night. But one day the shawl disappeared. And as her mother sold off her belongings one by one, Berthe never saw it again.

  The following afternoon when Renard was about to leave, Berthe motioned him into the barn.

  “I have something for you,” she said, handing him a jar of strawberry preserves and a cheese wrapped in muslin that she had hidden away in her apron.

  “You don’t have to feed me,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I’m not starving.”

  “It’s just a gift. From my grand-mère,” she added.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Your grand-mère would kill you if she knew,” he said seriously.

  “Not if I kill her first,” she declared. He laughed.

  “You talk like a hooligan.”

  “You would know how a hooligan talks,” she said. He pulled at her hat strings and she hit him lightly on the arm. Suddenly all her shyness was gone. He took the preserves and cheese and gave her a smile so wide it caused his blue eyes to sparkle with pleasure.