Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

by Jean Améry

  The man who writes about Emma Bovary knows nothing of what will happen to him later. He knows only that these things occur, that it is sad, but also suggests a lapse in the person affected. One must look after the household, as Charles’s mother insists, casting a suspicious glance at Emma. The son of the affluent doctor Achille-Cléophas Flaubert does not indulge in foolishness like her. His luxury keeps within limits—the bourgeois is a man of moderation. Mama cannot complain. It is absurd to say he senses something while he is at work on Bovary. But it may well be that he is afraid, since every bourgeois fears for his possessions. Only the lowborn and poor may be generous to the point of extravagance. If a man has nothing but his chains to lose, then so much for his chains, the gold ones, which he carts off to the pawnshop. But a rentier, a paper-shuffler, imagines his security as ever wobbly, feels the tremors shaking the earth beneath his feet. The disaster will not come. Or will it? What horror! And so one invents the merchant Lheureux, makes him a wingless God of thieves and tradesmen, an emissary of fatalité.

  Everything leads to a fate that is predetermined because inscribed in the characters themselves. Even Emma’s acquiescence to the vagaries of her passion, which will also become a passion in the Christian sense of the term, is hidden in the half-light: she made something from what she was made for, but this something, in the end, is nothing. Death, we call it—as though death were amenable to description. Gustave Flaubert will die on May 8, 1880, twenty-three years after the appearance of Madame Bovary. The circumstances are not quite clear. We may dismiss all talk of suicide as idle chatter: the author was found lifeless in his workroom after one of his very hot daily baths. It is nearly impossible, physically impossible, that he strangled himself, as some have intimated. Suicide is a reasonable conjecture only in a higher sense that requires no empirical verification: in the vague way oracles’ prophecies more or less come true. Everything seemed to turn out so badly in this existence, which was reduced, in a way that is hard to grasp, to its essence. Honors remained external. But defeat he experienced in his very depths. The great doctor’s son was “just a fool, just an artist.” [27] His assets—inherited, not earned—had vanished. If the book had been brought to its end, the hopeless imbeciles Bouvard and Pécuchet would have logically sought refuge in death. Their creator, who was not at all a coeur simple, but to the contrary, a heart complex beyond all measure, could just as well have vanquished himself, not through brutal self-strangulation, admittedly, but perhaps with the aid of a little powder; a doctor’s son, the grandchild of doctors, a seasoned sufferer of nervous illnesses, he had learned a thing or two about pharmacology.

  Unfettered musings at French fireplaces. Researchers know more, and at the same time less: Gustave Flaubert was working when he fell on the writers’ field of honor. How very inspiring. Depressing, but uplifting, too, like Charles’s expiration through a “grieving heart.” But this is wholly untrue. A broken heart is a mere metaphor when one is talking about a young, brawny, well-fed man like Charles. Here the concept of psychosomatic ailments strikes against its limits. Flaubert, a man without reality, lets his Charles, the schoolmate he mocked on the very first page of the novel, die implausibly, just as he had let him live implausibly and fail implausibly to act. The author was an object of the bourgeois era but had apprehended nothing of the bourgeois subject, the bearer of the values for a historical era and the unobtrusive, modest harbinger of a better future, unconcerned with making a spectacle of himself. However we might be deceived by his irony, which would prove fatal for false romanticism, he took the side of Emma and her finally murderous passion with its contempt for the bourgeois subject. He failed to see the citoyen, in both Homais and the country doctor; he only saw, only fashioned, the bourgeois that he himself was, endowing him with the repellent traits of the merchant Lheureux. This is how things turn out for one who doesn’t care for himself, who at best might use his scant knowledge of chemistry and pharmacology for a purpose as lugubre as Emma’s face in the act of lovemaking.

  Left in the lurch by his creator, Charles is utterly on his own. He can’t ask questions of his schoolmate Flaubert, who falls in with the mob that teases Charles in the classroom. Alone, he must discover his own meager, dignified reality. He is not the precocious son of a landed bourgeois like all the others, he knows no learned phrases, scribbles no stories into his Latin notebook. He is a poor, conscientious boy. But to recognize what befalls him through fatalité, which must be transcended—for that, his strength of mind is enough.

  THE BOURGEOIS AS LOVER

  NOW it is as though I had acted out a comedy of rage and pain, recited to myself the part written expressly for the betrayed husband. Emma’s rosewood desk, the secret drawer I opened only recently, out of respect for the dead, but also from my smoldering sensuality, which commanded me slowly, very, very slowly to savor everything left behind, to feel, to smell, to resurrect her reality. I turned the key, pressed the spring: a whole packet of letters lay there. I read. Appalled, and with burning desire. These were hardly the letters a gentleman on his heart’s knees would compose for a lady. They were not signed, “votre ami.” There it all is, clear as day, and whoever can read, must know everything. Pour toujours, ton Léon. Je t’aime comme jamais un homme a aimé une femme. Notre chambre à l’Hôtel de Boulogne. Notre lit. Le parfum de ton corps. [28]

  I drank these words the way a man dying from dehydration scoops up clear spring water with his hand. They tasted bitter enough to make me vomit, but I swallowed each one of them with a raw throat, a ravaged soul. I rummaged in every corner, in every drawer, behind walls, sobbing, howling, and the child ran from me terrified and cried softly to herself in the garden. I was out of my senses, or thought I was. I kicked the top off of a crate: Rodolphe’s name leapt at my eyes from among a pile of other letters, and his words too were unconcerned with chaste admiration.

  Love. Léon, a handsome, tender boy. Rodolphe, the hardy hunter and rider. So they lay in your arms while I rode out in the country in rain, heat, frost, and storms, to my groaning patients, obediently doing my duty. Where were you, gentil petit Léon, viril Monsieur Rodolphe, when her skin turned blue and black and she screamed for God and for relief from the burrowing pain that rent her stomach and belly and heart? Where was your love? Boorish Léon, soon to enter into holy matrimony, not only with a fat dowry but perhaps also with cold feet, as young Charbovaricharbovaricharbovari once did, when he was fobbed off with the haggard widow; et vous, Monsieur Rodolphe, imbécile, pauvre imbécile, who chose some common, venial tramp in Rouen or Paris over lugubre passion unto death? You two were off roving like a pair of fools while she stroked my hair and said: yes, you are good. How can you rest and shutter your eyes when there my love so frigid lies? Charles Bovary numquam ridiculus erat: when the time came, the officier de santé was there at his post; the lover stepped up to the bed to render a last service to his dying bride. Howling and cursing, because that was what custom demanded. As if I hadn’t known it all, without knowing, from the beginning. You read her tender poetry, petit Léon, while I played dominoes with Homais and always lost; it was at the start of my practice in Yonville, the village was as desolate as Tostes had been before, and I didn’t begrudge your winsome tributes. She rode off with you, Monsieur Rodolphe, to where? Some forest clearing, perhaps, where a person is as hidden from view as in a fiacre or a hotel in Rouen. I gave it my unholiest blessing, against morals, religion, and reason, so the fatalité of her beauty could be fulfilled. The letters only brought to me in words what my wordless world had been. When I read them, I bellowed like a pig being dragged to slaughter, but I bellowed as a matter of form; duty is duty, after all. Léon: Je sens toujours ton corps contre le mien et compte les heures pour que mon rêve s’accomplisse. [29] Rodolphe: Lorsque je vous enveloppais dans mon grand manteau, je me jurais qu’aucune autre femme jamais. . . . [30] You both had it good. I had no greatcoat to wrap her up in, as she deserved, and so I had it bad, even if I sometimes felt fate had chosen me to toil o
utside and collect my wages at home in our marriage bed, where I took off my nightcap and my unkempt hair mixed with hers, supple and straight. I had it bad, and also good. That was my reality, so I imagine it, and no twaddle will convince me otherwise. Notre lit, ton lit, petit Léon, votre lit, Léon et Emma, Emma et Rodolphe, it’s all the same. That is why, oh God, oh Reason of Humankind, he bestirs himself while I still have tears in my eyes: of rage, as is proper, and of decorous sorrow. He stands up, as if trying to burst my trousers, which are still too tight, though I am emaciated and hollow-cheeked from pain, he stirs and begs for something slippery and soft, for him, for me, for he is no less I than the hand I pull teeth with. He knows what he’s doing, for more than once, beneath his scepter, she has briefly and haltingly moaned from bliss. But what we managed to do, you and I, was always too little and too modest, too decent. You, who shamefully stirred just now, when it is too late, and we have been charged with the criminal offense of necrophilia; I, the ego, slumbering after the fluid resolution; I didn’t realize it, I guessed wrongly, but it was a matter of duty: hard outside, soft in Mother’s coarse sheets; but for her, softness and ferment and feeling had to mingle, until the shouts struck the drawn curtains of the hotel room and echoed mutely as he begged for more and more. Hence—to my disgrace, to my honor—the ice-cold fruit drinks and déjeuners au champagne in the late afternoon, which I received the bill for. Don’t fear: I will pay. The amount is correct. I will stand for it, stand . . . stand down, damn it, you’re useless to me now! Am I to I fall back into the sins of my boyhood in Rouen, when the others slunk off to their girls and I had to make do alone? I saw the seam of a petticoat, which peeked out from a lady’s broad skirt, saw a farm girl in her blouse leaning on the sill of the open window in the dusk, and here and there soft flesh poked out from the faded linen. I saw and did: then I was bitterly ashamed and did not dare to think of Mother. A miserable apprenticeship, when I think how, while I was sinning in my room, ignorant of the where-fores of my longing and that viscous liquid, Monsieur Rodolphe was opening the bodice of some voluptuous woman with strong, adroit fingers, and Léon bedding a dainty worker girl in a shed at the factory atop bundles of calico fabric. The high point of my experience came later, when I was already dissecting cadavers under the stern eyes of Doctor Larivière, and climbed up to the second floor of a house of ill repute where there lay an old hag, tired and impatient. Then la Veuve Dubuc with her cold feet. Nothing prepared me for the fortune, the beauty, which befell me, quite undeservedly. Emma. Père Rouault’s farm, well-fed beasts in the fields, a squeaky-clean kitchen. The father with the broken leg, which I capably placed in a splint. Amid the pots and cleanly scoured kettles, she served me a glass of liqueur at a table polished to a gleam, as is the custom among such folk, and she politely drank with me, a farm girl, so I thought naïvely, when instead I should have seen: there was more to take in than the words “farmer’s daughter” implied, far more; even then I knew she’d been raised by the bonnes soeurs, with books and lace-making and piano lessons. Une élégante? La fille du Père Rouault? Don’t make me laugh! That was the tinny voice of dead Héloïse, chastising me from beyond the grave. Unforgiveable that I should listen to a voice from the grave instead of recognizing what I had before me! She, the farmer’s daughter, the élégante, fetched two glasses out of the cabinet along with the bottle of curacao. My glass full to the brim. Clinking, after the country custom, but with urbane frivolity. She barely poured any for herself, either they’d taught her that or her sense of decorum told her it was proper. And when her tiny glass was almost empty, she had to toss her head back to take a sip, and she smiled, her neck tense, as she enjoyed the sweet liquor, and licked the bottom of the glass clean with little flicks of her tongue. The country doctor, unlearned and obtuse, fell mute and was enthralled. Today, as he lusts for a cadaver, he knows: that was the kiss never given and never received, Charbovaricharbovaricharbovari ridiculus erat. Little flicks of the tongue in the glass of curacao, between the lips of Monsieur Rodolphe, in little Léon’s soft mouth. And now, the useless creature isn’t supposed to get worked up? Couche-toi, imbécile. It is too late, and it is against the law. Necrophilia. It cannot happen: the bourgeois is a man of moderation.

  “Homais, friend and neighbor, your good counsel is dear. Come to me, as you did so often in the past, I pray you, I beg. You are the only one who—”

  “At your service, though sadly, my time is short, the shop is filled with customers, my wisdom and words are in demand. What I see here pains me. You’re letting yourself go. Your beard is growing wildly, your eyes look deranged. Dignity, for heaven’s sake! Philosophy! People are starting to gossip. The man of learning must always be on guard, he has to set a good example. What is the point of enlightenment if our clear heads do not rise above the turmoil of life to brighten the darkness in the hours of difficulty?”

  “C’est bien cela! I beg your pardon for the disturbance. Your customers will wait patiently, especially as there’s no longer a doctor about to compete with the apothecary’s knowledge. I won’t carry on whining to you, I would just like your advice in a matter which—”

  “A medical matter? Certainly. While I may not be a doctor, I am not lacking in experience either—”

  “A general question, with all due respect. You must know better than I, since you went to lycée and obtained your baccalaureate, while I’m nothing more than a barber surgeon—”

  “Come now, Monsieur Bovary! Officier de santé, that is a learned profession. But still, if it’s a general question, maybe my erudition will be of use to you. I have torn through and digested the Encyclopedists, and classical literature is a touch-stone of my mental cogitations. August Corneille, great, pure Racine, are no less familiar to me than the pharmacology handbook. If only I had more leisure, I would try my hand at poetry and playwriting myself.”

  “Literature isn’t what I have in mind, I can’t grasp a word of it. My eternal beloved had clever thoughts on the subject, she was a tireless reader. What I wanted to ask is rather—how should I put it? Well, then, of a political nature.”

  “Ah, good, very good. I see, you’re gathering your mind to penetrate the realm where our destinies are forged. Politics, a matter for all! Speak, my good man! With me, you’ve come knocking on the right door.”

  “Indeed. I would like to know how things stand with the bourgeois. Strictly moderate, that is what I was taught at home and at school. He must be moderate.”

  “Moderate and free. I agree.”

  “But sadly, mon ami, I find myself unbalanced. I fear I have burst the bonds of my moderation. Madame Bovary’s death has left me in a disorderly, bizarre state. Between us, and I beg your discretion: I’ve let myself go, not just with my untrimmed beard and my slovenly clothes, but in my thoughts, as well. So I ask you now: Can the bourgeois permit himself such a thing?”

  “Hmm. Look now, Bovary, believe it or not, I am in a similar position myself. I want the cross of the Legion of Honor. It is my right. My columns for the Fanal, my scientific works on climate and nourishment in our region alone are worthy of recognition, not to mention my endeavors on behalf of public health. I have written petitions, climbed from one stage to the next, from the sous-préfecture up to our citizen king, whom I called the great in a humble address, comparing him with Henri Quatre. The plebs flap their jaws over it because word has gotten out, it seems the walls of the chancellery are porous. They call me vain, ambitious, I have no choice but to bear it. Why should I care? Flim-flam from know-nothings. The vulgus can’t possibly grasp that it is my pride as a citizen that compels me to soar in the heights. Distinctions, fine-sounding titles, aiguillettes, there was a time when all that was reserved for the nobility, before the undying principles of 1789 established the rights of the citizen. Only the disciples of Loyola, people like that nitwit Abbé Bournisien, refuse to accept how things are today: that we, les bourgeois, are also citoyens, and no less worthy than the seigneurs of yesterday, hehehe, hehe, ça ira, ça ir
a, ça ira. . . .”

  “I know. But for me, it’s not the same. I have no ambition.”

  “And that is a mistake, my dear man.”

  “Mistake or no, that’s how it is and how it always was with me from an early age. I wanted to ask you about moderation. The bourgeois should practice moderation, that’s what I was taught. But since the death of my bride, I have grown immoderate. My sorrow is what drives me toward the heights, or the extremes. You said so yourself, and chastised my dissoluteness.”

  “Here the two of us are united, Bovary, this is where the questions arise, and not even I, an enlightened citoyen, can find my way with my customary clarity. Between us, and sealed in confidence: it is said here and there that my ambition knows no bounds. The cross of the Legion, which they will award me one of these days, if justice prevails, and your cross of mourning, which you take up of your own free will, both lie past the border of moderation. So what do I tell myself? That the boundaries may be shifted. It is we who decide what moderation is. We broaden the field of possibilities. This comes with our pride in our class and the rights of the citizen: we may govern ourselves freely, in moderation, as we see fit—and we may freely long to ascend. It’s just that I doubt your fervor for your own cross does lead upwards. Rather it strikes me, hélas, that it is dragging you down, and that worries me deeply. In the heights, we may choose without reservations what bourgeois moderation means, in accordance with the guarantees of the rights of man. But in the lowlands, we must accept it as custom, tradition, and good common sense defines it. My cross will uplift me, yours will debase you, mon pauvre ami. These are things I have thought through myself, for from the great authors, I sought answers in vain. I do not say I am so sure of my ambitions as when I prepare an analgesic salve. But I wish to think I have chosen the right path and that the commoners’ whispers can do me no harm, whereas, and don’t take this the wrong way, in your case, it is likely that the rumblings among the people reflect the voice of reason. Dignity, for heaven’s sake! Philosophy! In me, you have an example of how man can overcome the trickiest circumstances. Pull yourself together: break through moderation when it comes to ascent and progress; hold fast to it when the abyss opens up before you. There’s my good advice, given free of charge.”