Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

by Jean Améry

  “Such a fine person, elegant, charming, highly cultivated, full of talent.”

  So he spoke of her, and I believe he meant it, even as he breathes down my neck with demands that he refuses to see I can’t pay, having nothing left to my name. He wants to settle his affairs, in other words, to get his money, and I wish to settle mine, which are, were, and will be Emma, until the very end. He’ll see as little of his miserable lucre as I will of my dearly beloved wife. She lies in a grave, and the francs have gone off to Rouen, to the piano teacher, God knows where else. Lheureux lusted after her too, how could it be otherwise, she was more gorgeous than the fattest purse, than a rain of louis d’ors falling down from the matte blue sky of Normandy and trickling over the gables.—Rubbish. Nothing rains down from a blue sky. Heated apparitions, kindled by her. A disturbance stemming from the slight crackle of her white stockings being pulled up over her legs.—Silence, j’entends. Rien. A rooster crows for the first, second, third time, that is all. And the voice of Madame LeFrançois. And the grating banter of Monsieur Binet outside. I can’t ask for quiet to hear what can no longer be heard, the stroking of the comb through her brown hair, the rustle of her lace-trimmed petticoat.

  “Such a fine person, elegant, charming, highly cultivated, full of talent.”

  So they spoke of her. That was saying too little.

  Those who never saw her as I did in the mornings when I rode away on horseback and she would wave me off through the window, her nightgown slightly open, know nothing. Even I know too little—patience, I will sort things out. My head is far from clear, but it will have to bear me through this belated chain of considerations about how everything came to be, and how it all ended so dismally.

  Three . . .

  “Who’s there?”

  “Postman.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Bonjour.”

  “Merci.”

  . . . I have the honor of submitting to you an invoice for the last six piano lessons of the unfortunately deceased Madame Bovary.

  . . . I am compelled, along with my condolences, to submit an invoice for outstanding sums relating to the champagne breakfasts with pastry and sorbet enjoyed by Madame Bovary, with my sincerest respect, Madame Veuve Duchamp, Hôtel de Boulogne, Rouen.

  . . . Madame la Veuve Dupuis has the honor of announcing the engagement of her son Léon, a notary in Yvetot, with Mademoiselle Léocadie Leboeuf of Bondeville.

  Léon. A dear young man, friendly, pleasant, obliging. Congratulations are in order. How glad my poor wife would have been to hear that. . . . One knows, in the end, what propriety demands, even when one can think of nothing but the death suffered by the dead. I’ll write back. Léon, Rouen; nice, it’s good, my beloved, that you breakfasted with champagne in the Hôtel de Boulogne, God bless the crackling of the white froth in your mouth, may he bless every trinket you ever bought. On your hands, on your body, the cheapest charms turned to priceless jewels. Now they have come to me with the bill. So be it. I could never pay enough for the dazzle of a necklace on her neck as it strayed into the enigmatic hollow of her bosom. What was it like, your breakfast au champagne, before you left to see Mademoiselle Lempereur, who trained your fingers for the études of that venerable Pole in Paris? And your gauzy nightgown, was it open at the legs, so that they stood out, soft and white, with their slight shade of cinnamon, against the tulle? Did you leave your bed in the sweet disorder of lust, and when you left the room, did the scent of it stream out behind you, making Madame la Veuve Duchamp, proprietress of the Hôtel de Boulogne, crinkle her nose in disapproval? Plead for your outstanding sums all the same, Madame. Charles Bovary, country doctor, will draw the last cent from his meager purse to put aright what can never be put aright. Emma, I lust for you! Necrophilia, the trial court in Rouen, the clinking of the gendarme’s key in the lock. Charles Bovary, officier de santé in Yonvillel’Abbaye, arrested and found guilty of thoughts both sinful and contrary to nature. Monsieur le Procureur du Roi shakes the sleeves of his robe, raises his well-manicured hands to heaven and censures, before God and the court:

  “This husband loved his wife more and more, even beyond the grave. But the central figure here is Madame Bovary herself. Let us bother no more with this man’s fate, but look instead to Christian morals, which are the basis of modern civilization. . . .” [6]

  Homais couldn’t have put it better himself, save that he would omit Christian morals, substituting natural ones. But what do I know? I got my news from those grisly trial reports in the Fanal de Rouen, which I used to read now and again, seated at the dinner table, until the newspaper slipped from my hands and I would drift off in weariness—to Emma’s exasperation. Words read and gathered. And then forgotten. And yet I say it, over and again: Emma, I lust for you—and no warnings about grievous offenses and ill consequences will make me turn away. Speak to me, Emma, just a single soothing word, stroke my hair again, say what you confessed in death, that I was good—that at least I was good. And know, please—but you cannot know, the dead are deaf, the cerebrum decays, and with it, what a person was. My words cannot pierce the three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, and one of lead. I can only speak to myself: you gather in me, like your scent in the alcove.

  Misfortune makes one strange. Courage and philosophy have long since left me. I have had to break my promise to be brave—for you. All I can do is try and appease the creditors, as a last testament to my devotion.

  —Madame, you needn’t worry about the outstanding sums related to my eternal beloved’s expenditures. I, the undersigned, Charles Bovary, officier de santé of Yonville-l’Abbaye, swear on my honor to provide you with—

  But how clumsily I write, and with what lumbering hands! I always left our correspondence to you. Your script was as graceful as a bird’s tracks over snow, and with finely turned phrases you asked my patients for money due for services rendered, and also some I never did render, as I recently found out; to err is human, they say, and why should I begrudge you if you helped yourself, here and there, to honoraria paid a long time ago. I can only be thankful you took any interest at all in my gloomy and often filthy enterprise, that you went to fetch vinegar when a man who couldn’t bear the sight of his own blood fainted in my consulting room, that you listened to me when I told you what happened day after day in the farmhouses and meadows. It was a pleasure to me to talk between courses of your exquisitely prepared meals, which I wolfed down, because I was so hungry at night, my backside ached to high heaven from riding and my shoulders from the horse’s jerky trot. I went on and on about whatever came into my head, the horseshoes that had fallen off, the blacksmith’s son who got called up to the army, a pastor who waved me down on a dusty back road and asked for advice about his rheumatism. There wasn’t much to be done, I told him, and I couldn’t take payment from him, and the blacksmith’s wife. . . .You were silent. I saw in your eyes that it bored you. Just know I am deeply thankful that you listened, though your thoughts wandered. . . .To where, Emma? I ask myself, and still I find no answer. It can’t have always been the migraines that made you stare so absently.

  You were with me, and you weren’t. You filled the house with love, but you were elsewhere. Was it just those stirring novels you used to send for from Rouen? Kidnapped princesses, heated vows spoken in secret pavilions—I only leafed through them rarely, they put me right to sleep, even the medical journal I subscribed to was too much for me. I never knew how to start cultivating the finer passions, I was and remain a duteous country lout, son of an assistant army surgeon in the service of the Emperor, little better than a nag hitched to one of the supply chains, and there was never another emperor for me to toast the way my father did when he drank brandy and smoked his long porcelain pipe engraved with the portrait of Napoleon before spitting into the fireplace and carrying on with his harangues. Vive l’Empereur! Nothing. I had nothing to offer you, Emma, not even the daunting jingle of Father’s spurs when he would come to visit and start his paternal flirting wit
h raspy breath, grabbing you around the hips and calling out to me in jest: “Watch out, Charles!” What should I have watched out for? I wasn’t supposed to pester her, her nerves were too sensitive. Anyway, she wouldn’t have allowed it, she knew I was trash compared to her. And I knew it, too. We never spoke of it, but she gave me to understand, and understand I did.

  “Quel pauvre homme!” [7]

  Did you think I didn’t hear, Emma? You whispered it out the window, into the night, as I told you—

  “My dear colleague, you have committed a grave professional error! The man is not suffering from bronchitis, but from cardiac asthma. You should have prescribed wooly foxglove, digitalis lanata, rush to Homais, he may be a mere apothecary, but he would have hit on the proper remedy right away.”

  From the bed, a death rattle: I’ll swallow whatever you pour down my throat, so long as I can breathe. “Finding a diagnosis is of the essence, my dear man, the cause must be brought to light before—”

  I let my head hang, Emma. The doctor from Beauvais was right, those gentlemen always know better than we doctors from the provinces, a man must kneel and bow his head before superior knowledge.

  Blood shot into your cheeks, which would one day have flecks on them where death’s hand left its mark. You railed in rage against the ignorance of my indisputably more distinguished colleagues. Whispered, but softer than ever, so I would not be able to hear: Quel pauvre homme. The poor man, pity him. Or was it: the pathetic loser, and was the red that rose into her cheeks a sign not of compassion, but of contempt? There is no point in wondering. It’s all the same now, pity, derision, it makes no difference. In the end, I was good, that is all that matters. No one should forget the way her voice cracked when she granted me this bequest from a life that was already revoked, or how her cold hands stroked my bedraggled hair: Yes . . . it’s true . . .you are good. That is all you left behind for me, and it is more than all the riches Lheureux could ever connive. It returns to me whenever someone dares besmirch your memory. Mother! How could you! I tore up your last letter, but my mind has retained that one dreadful phrase:

  “She was born to be a wealthy Parisian’s kept woman.”

  With those words, Mother, you broke the bond of filial love and reverence that held me to you. Ah oui, mon petit par ci, mon petit par là, [8] another plate of groats, so you’ll grow up big and strong! And pull on your woolen stockings, this morning we had ice crystals on the window. Are you following along like a good boy in your Latin lessons with the priest? You will turn out better than your father. Le Docteur Charles Bovary, or Engineer in Charge of Roads and Bridges, Maître Charles Bovary, près la Cour Royale à Rouen!

  Such good intentions, Mother. And how badly it turned out. And how bitter it is to break the tie that binds us. But it has to be. Death demands it. A kept woman in Paris. Perhaps. . . . But you have to understand, Mother, one doesn’t say such things! The words are ripe with ruin, like the storm clouds over Yonville. The thread is broken, but it is not silken, like the garters that encircled Emma’s knee, and the sound is not a soft hiss, as when she pulled up her stockings. Do you not understand that I loved her, Mother? The finger that used to skim the white cream from the milk now and then, and traveled to her lips to be sucked clean; the tongue that lustily licked those last white drops from her lips. Chatte tendre, petite chatte. [9] I never said that to you, Emma, our sort didn’t talk that way, that is something only the upper classes get away with. Did you long for the tendresse of those words? Now, when it is too late, the chamber bare, the purse empty, the child hungry for hard candy I can no longer pay for, the épicier won’t extend our credit, and you yourself are deaf and dumb, your lips blue and stiff, unrecognizable by tomorrow, so no one will believe at the autopsy that they once licked the white cream. . . .Tendre petite chatte, tender little kitten, you would have liked very much to have that whispered in your ear, perhaps, or maybe other, more piquant words were wanting, I don’t know. I can’t think of any. I could only say over and over: My dear, how good you are, I never learned any other way.

  It is as if I never woke up before you’d gone to sleep until the end of time. As if only then did the light shine down on me. As if by magic, I’d become respectable, a man, like Rodolphe. Skilled with words, with a rapier, with a pistol, with the ladies. Don’t his letters to you say that: ma tendre petite chatte? A gentleman paying his respects to a lady, to a gifted woman, who wouldn’t be out of place as the wife of a subprefect; a man who lusted for a woman because her eyes were dark blue or dark brown and looked black, and her legs, when she gamely, inattentively bent forward, would emerge from her nightgown, and her words flowed becomingly, without stutters or stumbling. Lusted: that should honor me, and it did, deeply, when you rode off with the chevalier in tailored riding clothes. I did what I could, and wasn’t chary with my sous like other men of our modest station. So why? Why then? Because I was too shy, and couldn’t utter the words, tendre petite chatte? If this intimation rises up now in my mind, that must mean that I—

  “No, Berthe, I can’t now. I’ll help you make your flower wreath later, I’m too tired, I. . . .”

  I. What do I know of myself? As little as I do of you, Emma, who may well have seen yourself as a . . . a kept woman in Paris. . . . No, Mother, never! Silence! I won’t listen to you any longer. If Emma felt she was no worse than the noble-women at the Marquis’s ball, that her fine figure counted for more than a name and an estate, she was right. But that she refused to understand who I was brought me the bitterest grief. I, the doctor, the one they rushed to when a man hacked into his own foot while chopping wood, and black blood poured forth; the one who chatted with Homais about the questions of the day and eagerly soaked up the great man’s words; the one who worked his way up in Tostes, who slaved away in Yonville and the surrounding area and still never hesitated to lend a hand around the house; the one who overlooked it kindly when our friend and neighbor, Homais, played the doctor to earn himself a few extra francs, giving the farm people not only the salves I prescribed them, but whatever else his agile mind hit on; who knew nothing of arrogance, and was as patient with the farmhands as with the noblemen; the one who, when it came to his marital duties . . .when she asked for it, that is, with yearning in her eyes, and did not say: Laisse-moi. I fear you thought as little of me as I think of myself, Emma. I had no respite. A good son, I wrote regularly to my mother, and to my father too, though he wasn’t pleased with me, because I didn’t grow up to be the strapping young soldier he would have liked. A respectful son-in-law to your good father, Père Rouault, who treated me well and took my side when I courted you. Everything was work and more work, there was no rest for the laughingstock Charbovari, charbovari, charbovari. Now the surplus time is dreadful. No one comes to hear my advice, unless it’s free because I owe them something. So much time, no more time, time passes, I can take time but I can’t lose it if I still want to figure out—why? Why then? Was it my fault, I only did—

  Who? Charbovari, charbovari, charbovari, and the rabble laughed, my pronunciation was wretched, my character submissive, the class, the teacher, they intimidated me. You intimidated me, Emma, even on the days when I thought I could go home, play paterfamilias, slurp down what you had cooked me if it tasted good and the mood struck me, and my tired body believed I was within my rights. At times you ate next to nothing, I smacked my food, I learned no better from the assistant army surgeon and my poor mother; you made little cuts in the oilcloth with your knife and your eyes wandered out into the world that lay beyond Yonville, so, so far away! The fine writing paper you purchased in Rouen lay neatly arranged on your desk, the long sheets yellowed at the edges, who were you supposed to write to? I picked at my teeth, you yawned elegantly into your lifted hand. What did you know of me? Just that I was putting on weight, which happens to us family men when we get to be around thirty; my face was plump, my eyes ensconced in chubby cheeks, it was hard-earned bulk, a country doctor is not some lean hunter or soulful baron. Emma! Come loo
k at me. I’ve changed since the clumps of dirt clattered over the three coffins. The pudginess is gone now, I’m pale, I hardly go out. I’m wearing clothes you would have liked, even my mind is quicker, the pain has sharpened it. I suffer, just as you suffered, because you were shut away in Yonville and forced to seek out the glimmer of Paris on maps you had gotten hold of, in vain. If the earth didn’t cover you, you could see in my face, which is slowly hardening to a mask, the chiselwork of suffering, and if you sang that song I can’t clear from my mind, about the first night in the grave, you would wish to pass those long nights in your tomb lying beside me, because now, at last, I am worthy of you!

  It can’t be too late. It is too late. Courage, mon garçon, said His Excellency, Doctor Larivière: there is nothing left to be done. The laws of nature. And who vows to uphold those laws? Who vouches for them? Homais?

  “Homais, Homais, au secours, help, I can’t take it anymore, the laws of nature are bearing down on my chest, it is caving in, and no mustard poultice will relieve the pressure, I need the white powder that Emma mistook for sugar, neighbor, take care of me, if it’s money you want, I will get hold of it, someone will sign for me, my young friend Léon, who is happily married and a notary as well, will stand surety, I still have my horse I can sell. . . .”

  “Anything to oblige. In such attacks, the entire nervous system is deeply shaken, I have read about syndromes of this sort. Just recently, our esteemed colleague, le docteur Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, reported in the Yearbook of Practical Medicine on the physiological consequences of mental anguish. I recommend bed rest. The use of a soporific tea, which I will send for from my laboratory forthwith. It works without fail. And no dark thoughts. The dead enter into nature and form part of her already familiar cycles; whoever is alive must stick to living. Piety demands we give our elegies to the dearly departed, that is the natural order of things. But reason must put an end to our mourning. Philosophy: the wisdom of life, not of death. Here, a cold cloth on your forehead will do you good. I will hurry to bring you my tried and true sleeping tea—”