Madame Bovary's Daughter

by Linda Urbach

  Berthe smiled. What a fool she had been to worry about her money affecting Armand’s pride. Where had his pride, or lack of it, gotten them? She was thrilled with the money. It was hers and no one could take it away. She knew exactly what she would do with this windfall.

  Berthe asked Monsieur Worth for permission to run a quick errand. Then she hurried over to the bank, where she surprised the banker by signing over both checks. Together with her earlier commission, they were more than enough not only to buy the house on avenue Bois de Boulogne outright—but have money left over for furniture.

  Once the banker recovered from his shock, he cleared his throat. “We will have the ownership papers drawn up for you within the week. Uh … will you need to give notice at your current residence? When do you plan to move in?”

  Berthe looked down and placed her hands carefully across her belly. “Immediately.” She smiled. “You see, I’m having a baby, and I want her to be born there.”

  She gave birth on a Saturday morning.

  “It’s a girl,” said Hélène, handing Berthe the baby. For the first time she could remember, Berthe thought she saw tears in her friend’s eyes.

  “A perfect baby,” said Mademoiselle Gossien, now happily employed in Berthe’s household. She held out a soft baby blanket she had just finished embroidering that morning.

  “I’ll call her Emma.” Berthe gazed down at her daughter and then glanced out the window at the garden below. The pink peonies were in bloom. The air was sweet with their scent. The lawn was freshly mown and at the peak of its late spring greenness. It was her garden, her lawn, her flowers. This was her bedroom with its green and white silk curtains and cream-colored damask walls. She looked down. And this soft being, this precious bundle, was her most beautiful daughter.

  Tiny pink fingers curled against her mother’s breast. More than the house with its large light-filled rooms and the garden with its sweet blossoms, this small silent creature was the dearest prize of Berthe’s life.

  Who knew that true happiness would come to her as simply and naturally as the blessed creature she held in her arms? Berthe’s heart filled and overflowed with love. She felt a part of her had been healed. Of all the lessons she had learned from her mother, this had been the most important of all: She must first love herself and then, and only then, could she give her heart to another.

  Epilogue

  EMMA’S SECOND BIRTHDAY WAS TO BE CELEBRATED WITH A GARDEN party.

  It was a bright blue spring day and the garden at the house on avenue Bois de Boulogne was in full bloom. The guests, dressed in varying shades of white, lazed about as they observed the two children at play. Céline Proiret was six months younger than Emma Bovary. Hélène and Monsieur Proiret watched as their redheaded daughter crawled over to little Emma and grabbed a blue-and-white-striped pinwheel out of her hands. Emma’s little mouth opened in surprise and dismay.

  “Céline. No! That ain’t yours. It belongs to Emma. Give it back.” Hélène turned to Berthe. “I don’t want her following in her mother’s footsteps.” But Emma had already pulled the pinwheel back out of Céline’s hands.

  Monsieur Millet and his wife sat under a large umbrella. He was busy sketching the two little girls. He had turned them into bedraggled peasant children picking potatoes in a field.

  Mademoiselle Gossien sat under the oak tree with her two younger sisters, whom Berthe had brought to her home from the mill in Lille. Their sister was helping them learn some intricate stitches on samples of silk that were to be presented to Monsieur Worth for his approval.

  “Ah, the goslings are learning well,” Worth observed.

  “Michelle is an excellent teacher and her sisters seem to have a real talent for fine needlework. I think you’ll be able to feature their work in your next collection. Which brings me to a point of business,” said Berthe.

  “No, no, not now,” pleaded Worth. “Can’t you see I am half asleep?”

  “What better time?”

  “Go on, speak your brain, you will anyway,” he sighed.

  “We have ten more girls coming from the mill to learn embroidery and fine detail. I don’t have enough room to put them up here. We are already bursting at the seams, so to speak.”

  “And you want me to find them a nice house to live in.”

  “Monsieur Worth, you are always one step ahead of me. Yes, we need to give them a house and money enough to live on while Michelle and I teach them.”

  “Why do I feel like I am being masticated?”

  “It’s all to better serve you, monsieur. You have the need for fine needlework, do you not?”

  “Yes, but do we have to rescue the entire population of mill workers?”

  Berthe smiled and patted his hand. Worth looked past her at a figure that was just entering the garden. His heavy eyebrows lifted in surprise.

  “Ah, look what the canary dragged in,” he said.

  Berthe looked up and saw Armand for the first time since that awful day. He had been in Italy for the past two years and had never laid eyes on his daughter. Berthe, thinking it was time they finally met, had sent word for him to come to the party.

  She rose to greet him.

  “According to Monsieur Millet you have gained quite a reputation in Italy. Your paintings have enjoyed great success.”

  “I’ve come to understand that success can be measured in other ways than what one does for a living. You may find this hard to believe, but I’ve learned a great deal since we last met.”

  “Oh?” She smiled.

  “I’ve changed,” he said, taking her hand and looking down at her.

  “Into what?” she asked, cocking her head. His face took on a pained expression. She was sorry the moment she said it. She took a deep breath. “Armand, chèr Armand. I harbor no ill feelings toward you. None at all.” And as soon as she said it she knew it was true. All her anger, her resentment toward him, had vanished. And in its place she was infused with the most extraordinary feeling of lightness and peace. What was it? It came to her. It was forgiveness. For him, for her mother, her father, her grand-mère, even Madame Rappelais—anyone who had inflicted pain on her in the past. Who would have thought that the simple, or not-so-simple, act of forgiveness could feel so full of grace?

  Armand stood behind Berthe’s chair in the garden as they watched Emma toddle after the two geese who had been sunning themselves by the small fishpond. Céline, who could still only crawl, watched Emma with admiration and envy. A large shaggy dog of indeterminate breed lay dozing in the shaded corner of the house, happy to escape the children’s attention for a change.

  “She looks like me,” said Armand, unable to stop smiling.

  “Some might say so.”

  “I will do a beautiful portrait of you. Mother and daughter.”

  “If you can get her to sit still long enough.” Berthe laughed, picking up her sketch pad and adding some final touches to a new fabric design she had been working on.

  Emma took a tumble and Armand moved to pick her up. Berthe put her hand on his arm to stop him.

  “No, wait. Watch.” The child shook her head, her dark curls glistening in the sunlight. Then, laughing, she pushed herself back up on her pudgy legs and continued her pursuit of the geese.

  “She looks like me, but I see she has your determination. Her mother’s daughter. I think she’ll get everything she wants in life,” said Armand.

  “Well, she certainly won’t lack for love if I have anything to say about it,” said Berthe.

  Armand gently touched her shoulder. “And, thankfully, you do.”

  Author’s Note

  One of the joys of writing Madame Bovary’s Daughter was having the opportunity to read up on the fascinating cultural, artistic, and scientific advancements happening in France around the time that Gustave Flaubert lived, and to imagine what his character Berthe Bovary might have encountered had she been able to leap off the pages of Madame Bovary and wander around. Because I wanted to share the rich in
tellectual life of France with my readers, and because Madame Bovary’s Daughter is a novel, not a history lesson, I took liberties in the story with a few dates:

  Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners was completed in 1857. Berthe sees an unfinished version of the painting on an easel in Millet’s studio in 1852. This is plausible, as earlier versions of The Gleaners are known to exist, and Millet completed The Sower, the first in the trio of paintings that included The Gleaners and The Angelus, in 1850. It would have been a shame not to call readers’ attention to this influential painting that speaks volumes about life in the French countryside.

  Louis Pasteur began working on a solution to the epidemic that was killing silkworms in Alais, in the south of France, in 1865. Georges Audemars began developing the first artificial silk around 1855; commercial production began in 1891 but faced various issues, and ultimately it was improvements made in 1904 that finally made artificial silk comparable to the real thing. The term “rayon” wasn’t adopted until 1924. What I wished to show in the scene in which Charles Frederick Worth, Monsieur Rappelais, and Berthe discuss Pasteur and artificial silk were the technological advancements that influenced the fashion industry in ways we take for granted today—and which most readers wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of.

  Le Bon Marché, which Hélène and Berthe visit in 1858, began as a small shop in 1838 and grew into a successful department store by 1850. A new building was constructed in 1867, and it wasn’t until the 1870s that the store brought in Gustave Eiffel to construct its metal framework. But what a wonderful opportunity to give readers a glimpse of the man whose Eiffel Tower, built years later in 1889, would instantly become France’s most iconic symbol.

  Levi Strauss was in San Francisco for the Gold Rush in 1853, which historically was a few years earlier than when Berthe meets him in the boardinghouse, but I wanted to give readers a taste of what was happening in America around the same time. The bigger license I took was in imagining that serge de Nîmes might have been the material he first used to make his miner’s dungarees. Denim was in American usage since the late eighteenth century. The word “jean” was used to describe a lighter cotton material and comes from the French word for Genoa, Italy (Gênes), where the first denim pants were made. The fact is, my heroine Berthe had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of jeans, Levi’s or otherwise.

  Acknowledgments

  At first I thought this was going to be the hardest page of all to write.

  How to mention all the dear friends and family who have so lovingly cheered me on?

  How to acknowledge who was truly responsible for this book?

  Then it became glaringly simple.

  Thank you to Caitlin Alexander, my wonderful, awesome editor.

  And to Natasha Kern, my very dedicated agent.

  Finally, to Gustave Flaubert, wherever you are.

  A Conversation with Linda Urbach

  Random House Reader’s Circle: Where did the idea for Madame Bovary’s Daughter originate?

  Linda Urbach: Directly from the great master himself, Gustave Flaubert.

  To make a short question long: After graduating from college I knew I wanted to be a writer. I thought the best place to do this was Paris, and the best way to do it was to find a garret and live the life of a starving artiste. I found a garret, or rather a furnished room without a bathroom, on the Left Bank, and proceeded to starve, which seemed to take up all my writing time. What little time I had left I spent trying to earn a few francs. I got a job teaching English—I could barely speak French, by the way—for five francs an hour. I lived this way for a year.

  Even though on the surface it seemed like a wonderful adventure for a twenty-two-year-old, it was pretty depressing. No one would talk to me (my bad French), so I did what I’ve always loved to do: I read books. This was when I encountered Madame Bovary for the first time. I remember thinking How sad, how tragic. Poor Emma Bovary. Her husband was a bore, she was desperately in love with another man (make that two men), and she craved another life, one that she could never afford (I perhaps saw a parallel to my own life here). Finally, tragically, she committed suicide. It took her almost a week of agony to die from the arsenic she’d ingested.

  But twenty-five years later and as the mother of a very cherished daughter, I reread Madame Bovary. And now I had a different take altogether: What was this woman thinking? What kind of wife would repeatedly cheat on her hardworking husband and spend all her family’s money on a lavish wardrobe for herself and gifts for her man of the moment; most important of all, what kind of mother was she?

  When Berthe was born, Emma Bovary did the opposite of rejoice. The epigraph to my novel describes how she greeted her daughter’s arrival in Madame Bovary: She fainted in distress! How, I wondered, did the ignored, unloved Berthe overcome such a childhood? Her father was too busy trying to make a living and her mother barely acknowledged her existence. I wondered how it felt to grow up as the child of one of literature’s worst mothers. When I wrote this book, I wanted to make sure Emma’s child not only survived but triumphed in the end. I guess you could say I adopted Berthe as a sort of second daughter.

  RHRC: Madame Bovary was recently called “the most scandalous novel of all time” by Playboy. Do you agree with that assessment? How did you approach writing a continuation of Flaubert’s story 150 years later, when society has different standards (or do we?) for what is scandalous?

  LU: I laughed when a friend pointed out the Playboy cover. In all the many editions of Madame Bovary that have been published over the last century I don’t know of one with a centerfold. And, no, I don’t agree with Playboy’s assessment of Madame Bovary as the most scandalous novel of all time. For heaven’s sake, they’re totally forgetting about the Marquis de Sade’s various novels, just to mention one example. Now you’re talking scandalous.

  I really would never claim that Berthe’s story was a continuation of Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s exquisite novel is an impossible act to follow. But I can say that it was ever so much easier for me to write a novel that’s a bit risqué than it would have been in Flaubert’s time.

  RHRC: What interested you about exploring the roles of women in Victorian times?

  LU: I’ve always been drawn to the Victorian period, perhaps in part because of my love of Victorian furniture (I still own some very uncomfortable, very impractical pieces that belonged to my great-grandmother!). Thanks to some wonderful websites, I was able to plunge headlong into the period when it came time to do research for my novel. I found myself in an era when most women did not work outside the home—I’m speaking only of the upper class here. And in that home they were responsible for putting multicourse meals on the table, children in their beds, occasional musical entertainment, and always exquisite needlework.

  And as far as women owning property, the following is from the French Civil Code:

  A wife, even when there is no community, or when she is separated as to property, cannot give, convey, mortgage, or acquire property, with or without consideration, without the husband joining in the instrument or giving his written consent.

  In other words, a woman could only inherit from her family or her husband. If she were separated from her husband, he got the children and, of course, the house. I decided to write a story about flouting all these conventions and codes, thereby allowing Berthe, a single woman (gasp!), to acquire her beloved house.

  In Madame Bovary’s Daughter I have Berthe working her way toward a career in fashion. A career per se was a rare thing for a woman of the times. Unless of course the business was operating a house of ill repute. Being born a girl in Victorian times was certainly no piece of cake. In reading Dickens’s Dombey and Son I ran across this passage:

  But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested—a bad Boy—nothing more.

  RHRC: I happen to know that mother-daughter relationships are a par
ticular passion of yours. Tell us a little bit about the ways in which you’ve explored that topic outside of Madame Bovary’s Daughter.

  LU: Well, it all started with the adoption of our two-and-a-half-day-old Charlotte, who is, in my opinion (as well as hers), the perfect daughter. Becoming a mother was the single best thing that ever happened to me. I really believe that mother-daughter relationships, although sometimes difficult, are to be cherished.

  I began writing about Charlotte when she casually announced that she had 209 days left before she got her driver’s license. How could that be? She had just recently learned to walk! Where had the time gone? Writing was a way of capturing my daughter and my feelings about her before she literally drove out of my life. I kept a daily journal for the next six months. It allowed me to indelibly engrave Charlotte in my mind—it was like bronzing the memories instead of the baby shoes. This was when I came up with the idea of the MoMoir.

  I published a couple of magazine articles about MoMoirs and began a writing workshop at the Theater Artists Workshop in Norwalk, Connecticut. This turned into a theater piece called MoMoirs: The Umbilical Cord Stops Here! which has been performed in New York City and throughout Fairfield, Connecticut.

  I now lead other MoMoirs workshops. I’ve seen how women (even those who’ve never written before) can write easily and beautifully about a subject that is near and dear to them.

  I am presently working on another historical novel, about yet another orphan girl who longs for a mother-daughter relationship of her own. It’s currently called Sarah’s Hair and is the story of Sarah Bernhardt’s hairdresser. But these days I also find myself writing about my mother, who’s been deceased for many years, and remembering how very patient and loving she was with me. Writing about her now almost makes up for my years as a sulky, smart-mouthed teenage ingrate.