Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

by Jean Améry

  “Thank you.”

  “There’s no need for thanks. Quite the opposite. I should be thanking you, for your question has given me the opportunity to exercise my wisdom and clarify my own worries to myself. I know now that, should it prove necessary, I may once again, with a good conscience, write a letter to our Citizen King. [31] Borne up by the soft cushion of a conscience at peace, you can see the words of the common man have a certain wisdom. And so, at peace, I will say the same to you, and may you not be bitter with me, my worthy friend and colleague, if I show up less and less, and only when you summon me in need, because the truth is, I have enough hardship with my work and family, whom I have to feed; and as civic pride compels me to rise up and to avoid the abyss, I have no wish to see the cross of suffering, which recollects to me the Middle Ages and religious fanaticism. I trust in your insight, your reason, your doctor’s wisdom. The sympathy of a fellow man of medicine does nothing to lessen the pain: instead he damages his own body and soul, and the pain does not disappear.”

  He’s right, as always. His shrewd mind puts everything in order, helps him rise up, and brings peace to his soul. It was nonsense for Canivet to say he just twaddles on with commonplaces. Common means what belongs to all of us, in common. Common sense is the sense of the community. I knew that already back when we came from Tostes to Yonville and I profited from his civic virtues. Emma paid him little mind, because he was doughty but nothing else, while he spoke to me soberly about common illnesses and climate in the region. She gathered her skirts by the fire to warm her feet, still cold from the journey, you could see her little boots, then she began chatting with Léon, who loved the sea as she did, and wild scenery, and poems from Monsieur Lamartine. I was happy to learn from the clever apothecary, and covered my ears when they told me he saw patients illegally and treated them in his back room. He said the same things Doctor Larivière taught us in other ways and with finer words, underscored with elegant movements of his hand. It is probably true, what he said about bourgeois moderation and the abyss. True and common, in both senses of the term—common as mean, and common as something we all share. But I will not eschew the benighted medieval depths, as he does, guided by reason and striving for the heights. I have sunk down deep, it is lovely in the murk, and I will gladly pay the price, just add it to my list of debts. It is lovely in the shadows, they do me good, and if the little man stands up, longing for lubricity, then damn it all, I, will no longer deny myself the sin of my boyhood. In the abyss, in sin, in strangeness, I am with you, Emma, and here, you cannot push me away. Thanks, but I need no tincture, Doctor Larivière, you’ve hurried over in vain, I enjoy my flowing blood and the tacky, whitish liquid. I struck myself while playing, I have fallen down, and now it flows warmly through my fingers.

  This playing and ruminating grows tiresome. But there is no respite. Everything goes on, goes deeper. Is it bottomless? My throat is dry, my right hand is damp. Water. Sobriety. Lucidity. But only briefly, for the sweet depths know no pity and only let the shrill ray of reason shine in for a moment. The moment must be seized. No patient disturbs me. The creditors give peace for a day. Now is the time to find Charles Bovary, so he may lose himself again later, more dissolutely than before, in the chasm where low is high and the cross of suffering shines brighter than the Légion d’Honneur. Honneur. Honored be he who honor forgets.

  Charles Bovary, why did you not kiss the glass of curacao? Why could you not find the words: ma chatte, tendre petite chatte? Why did you stammer out nonsense to Père Rouault like a moron when you asked for her hand? What tied your tongue, your hands, the little man who stood up straight on your first visit to the farm, when you were with your Emma looking for your riding crop behind a sack of grain and your bodies touched? But why? Why? Did you do what you could then? No: all you managed was what the moderation of a bourgeois sitting room allowed. You shrugged off your duty to love as if it were work, and when she moaned in your arms, seldom enough, in any case, the shame rose up in you, you thought you had done something wrong. Maybe you thought of Father, flirting with the maids and waitresses, saw Mother’s stern judge’s face before you or the sharp surgeon’s gaze of Doctor Larivière, who would have shown delicate consideration to Madame and advised her against any stimulation. Il n’y a que les putains qui jouissant, [32] as they say. Jouir, jouer. Ton corps contre le sien, Léon; le corps d’Emma enveloppé dans le large manteau de Monsieur Rodolphe. The others taught me what must be done, what must be whispered, out in the garden and in the big bed in the Hôtel de Boulogne. I never broadened the field of possibilities, never aimed with civic pride for the heights or plumbed the depths. But why? Why? I did not do what I could, that’s that, and so the bluish-black blotches ruined your exquisite skin, and three coffins descended bumpily into the earth with your body, which I never gave what it deserved; I fed it and clothed it with honest wages from the sweat of my brow, but that was not the same as the sweat of love; I relished you as if you were nothing more than the roast quail I wolfed down noisily at the dinner table, annoying you with my chewing and swallowing and wiping my mouth on the back of my hand, no gourmet, just a country doctor, the same one who gobbled up the ham omelets the farmers made after I’d given them their cures. Gentil petit Léon, viril Monsieur Rodolphe, you taught me: too late, that was neither your fault, nor hers, but mine, for I was a ridiculus, a pauvre homme, with nothing to bear me up but Father’s awkward words and Mother’s diligence. Born poor, little earned besides, brought up dumb, little learned besides. Your penknife, Gustave Flaubert, and oui and merci, all too mean and too meager. I should have asked: What are you scribbling in your Latin notebook, while the droning comes endlessly from the teacher’s desk: Caesar venit in Galliam? I saw the title: Passion et vertu, but vertu was all I understood, because the teacher had spoken to us of virtue and at home there was always the rasping rodomontade about les vertus du soldat de l’Empereur from the paterfamilias, who clamored constantly for his apple brandy, his words raining down on Mother’s reluctant, work-weary back like a storm.

  Now I know what passion is, when I have ceaselessly before my eyes the big bed in the hotel and the greatcoat of the man who is also a lord. I was barely an apprentice at that grim house in Rouen with the tired old hags who were all my miserable pocket money could afford, I hadn’t known the bachelor’s life when I brought my wife, the prettiest girl in the region, in her wedding-and-funeral dress to Tostes and left the plebeians slack-jawed. It was all play-acting. When the time came to prove myself as husband and gentleman, wild and tender, master and servant, I was nothing more than Mother’s obedient son, a hardworking student to my teachers, who never attracted their attention. I knew about bourgeois moderation, but lacked that civic pride that aspires for the honorary cross on the red ribbon. Bound by tradition, as if Danton’s words had never thundered forth, Robespierre had never brought Dr. Guillotin’s invention down over and over, and Father’s Great Emperor never made the earth shake with his grognards. Only now am I a bourgeois, bourgeois-citoyen, bourgeois-amant, fully conscious of his human rights and exercising them with a passion that is no longer the sacred privilege of the distinguished classes. Good Homais put into words what I was shyly on the edge of thinking. Passion et vertu—and in truth, the former is the latter. Virtue in the marriage bed, no longer bound to decorum, that is what I should have practiced and mastered; obliged to bow before beauty, there is no lord who cannot choose to become a slave. Je suis et reste pour l’éternité l’esclave de notre amour. [33] Well said, petit Léon. He made her soul and her body melt, and she came back from Rouen, where she hadn’t taken a single piano lesson, more beautiful and radiant than ever, and I got my part, too, for she demanded my strength hungrily, mine too; everyman’s, every man’s, it was her right as a person and as flesh. I did what I could, but not what I should have, that was the shame of it. So come now, Emma, let me show you master and slave, the bourgeois as lover who does not tremble before the abyss. Open the door, come in softly, but hurry, tea
r your taffeta and lace gown from your lovely body. Make sure the door is locked, so no straying hotel guest surprises us. Yearn no more, but lie in my arms, with the sweat pearling on your forehead, and give your face over to that extreme, vague, lugubrious feeling that envelopes passion: like a white dress on a girl at first communion, like a black habit veiling a bride of Christ. He is there now stretching upward, the erectus, let him stand for my civic pride. Gentil petit Léon, newly wed to his dowry of ducats, was nothing but a bourgeois himself. Monsieur Rodolphe was no nobleman, he was from la Huchette, but he wasn’t de la Huchette. I’m no worse than they, I will do you better than the two of them, will outshine all that happened before. Emma!

  I am brave now, as I promised, but in my own way. Not tactfully silent, but screaming madly, irrespective of what they say in the village, even if rumor has it I’ve turned to drink; they don’t know this higher drunkenness, they know nothing of the citizen’s right to the elusive and the extreme. Charles Bovary non ridiculus est. He has learned what no one taught him. And his memory still holds all he’ll ever need to know of chemistry and pharmacology. No dessert crème with arsenic sugar. Something mild that will leave no brown or black spots on the skin, for beauty longs for beauty, even as it rots away in its funeral-wedding dress.

  Beauty and virility. Père Rouault wanted a bit manlier son-in-law, I am sure of it. But was little Léon manly? It doesn’t matter. Mirror on the wall, speak your word, it shall not be quibbled with. The pale, hollow cheeks are not manly, but they do say something about the ways passion mangles a man. The fine clothes crumpled, so it goes when you’ve indulged your ardor. The eyes transfixed, as if turned inward toward a single burning point, which only now will overflow to two bodies. Vain effort of love, the inquiry before the smooth glass. He used to look different, that country doctor I once was and ceased to be, ever since good Homais, in his bourgeois industriousness, started consulting all the patients I’d neglected in his backroom. For a long time, I remained that new boy who’d joined the lycée class in Rouen, in coarse, oiled, hobnailed shoes, his countenance earnest and terribly bashful. I could imagine how I looked: I recognized myself in the mocking and crude gazes of the others. Does one have to look the way others wish? Is this the secret of the flesh, that one is only well or badly made in the eyes of those walking past? But so many have walked past. Veuve Dubuc among them, she must have thought me handsome, else she wouldn’t have peered through the keyhole when women sought my counsel, wouldn’t have flown into a rage when I rode out to the Bertaux farm, where there was a woman, daughter of Père Rouault, who longed to be a city girl and left Rouen in silk gowns to go to church on Sundays, like a countess. That was also foolish and negligent of me, that I never looked in the mirror and tried, as I did so, to make my own gaze strange, as if it belonged to another. Maybe then I would have known the nature of the civil right my flesh accorded to me and taken a buxom babe from another farm, haggled calmly over the dowry, like one of the many who become lords of their manor simply because they are men who bring home a good day’s pay for a good day’s work. Charles Bovary was no gangly, broad-shouldered, blond Norman like his indifferent classmate Gustave Flaubert, who did not despise me, but did not prize me, either. I was simply one of many bound by bourgeois fate and the laws of the flesh. Another girl from another farm would have been pleased for me to lay my doctor’s daily wages on the table, nod off over a badly cooked ham, even snore, and then paw at her body in bed without much beating around the bush. Good teeth that gnawed fearlessly at chicken bones, bit into big apples; wide hands, mature, but not fine and white as those of Doctor Larivière, I wasn’t a master surgeon, just an ordinary country doctor, who smoothed down laths with shards of glass when it was time to splint a broken leg. I clung to moderation in work and in marital love, it wasn’t my lot to strive for the heights, like good Homais after his coveted cross. Bovary, the bourgeois, should have stayed a bourgeois without asking too much of his civil rights: then he wouldn’t have crashed down here, where I endlessly writhe.

  Drivel. She is in eternity, not I. Bones, decay. You hold her in your pitiless hands, God! I loathe thee, for thou wilt not return her, and on her deathbed, hast rendered her stupidly pious, in contradiction to her beauty. For even when she was reverent and knelt on the carved prayer stool, which I had made on her express wishes, her submission was ardent, to the indignation of Bournisien, and had nothing of the ignorant veneration the bonnes soeurs demanded of her at the convent school, which she couldn’t bear in the end, preferring the novels of Monsieur Dumas over the lives of the saints in the school library. In prayer, she was ardent, and in love she was ardent, too, and there I was helpless, I never learned what to do. But now, my beloved, I know everything, mon adorée, and I call you that undaunted, because that’s how it was in the letters, they addressed you thus; how ludicrous it seems to me that I stuck with custom, calling you ma bonne or else ma femme, as Jean out in the field called his Jeanne when they were loading up the hay. Now that I am enlightened, through mourning and the letters in the secret drawer, I would say to you, as your ear yearned in its ardor to hear, ma petite chatte, tendre petite chatte, je t’aime comme jamais un homme a aimé une femme, mon adorée, je compte les heures. . . . [34]

  I count every hour, for it can’t last much longer, there is no money left in the house, the child’s clothes are all tattered, the patients have vanished, Homais cures them as well or as badly as I. How many more times will the pendulum clock strike? Just as well that one hasn’t forgotten all one’s pharmacology, the ticking away of time that makes me frantic must come to an end, and there will be no eternity to bring us together, we who were never one.

  “Put your faith in God! You will see your bride again, up there! Pain is brief, joy in the Lord’s peace is eternal.”

  “See her again! What do I care to see her again to sing Hosanna, where I can no more hear her laughter, her laughter, her words?”

  “Pray! On your knees, Bovary, but in submissiveness. The Lord dispenses according to His wishes, and whether it is love or loss, we must praise and give thanks, for both come from His hands!”

  Bournisien. Wan solace for the disconsolate. He is happy to hold up time, which is yet to reach its end, he takes its side, the zealot!

  “Madame enjoys riding horseback with the fine gentleman de la Huchette! One hears their merry voices from the forest’s edge all the way down into the village. Not everyone has it so good. Among our sort, women must stand at the stove, light fires, pluck hens.”

  “To each his own, kind lady, the varicose veins will recede if you just apply a foalsfoot ointment and keep your foot raised at night. My poor wife suffers from nerves, you know. That is worse than a little hemorrhoid. Many who are nerve-sick waste away, and we doctors never manage to find a cure. Madame Bovary’s pleasure in riding is restorative, no worse than the baths in Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, which I always recommend.”

  “Lately, one has seen your dear wife on the arm of the handsome little notary’s clerk, smoking a cigarette, no less! Who here ever heard of such a thing? People get to talking, you know, and it’s been said that Madame Bovary has debased herself. You should take care to set her right.”

  “Right is what is right to me, and that’s all I’ll hear of it. My wife is cut from a different cloth, you see. A doctor’s wife is not some farm girl, even if her father’s a farmer a hundred times over. Cigarette smoking wards off mosquitos, I’ve prescribed it myself when the insects get irksome.”

  And Madame this and Madame that. I held my arm over her protectively and shielded her reputation, so that no one was missing at the funeral and the women brought their kerchiefs to their eyes as the clods of earth tumbled down. The murmurs always reached me, and I always stifled them. Did you think I would never find out Monsieur Rodolphe courted you at the agricultural exhibition, while the councilor from the prefecture gave his address? Did you think I didn’t see how your mood grew dim when Léon left us to pursue the raffish student life in P
aris? I’d have had to be deaf and blind as well. When we met him again in the theater in Rouen, and suddenly you no longer cared about the stirring tale of the bride of Lammermoor, but conversed in the loge in whispers until the people on the parquet below us hissed “Silence!” You found it unbearably hot then, you wanted to get some air, and so we took a place with Léon in front of a café and cooled off with a raspberry ice, though I would happily have stayed behind to see the gripping events at the Scottish moor. But I saw that you saw. Your eyes were no longer wandering. They came to rest on the effeminate face of the little gentleman, unexpectedly met again. And I didn’t take it hard, at least young Léon would have been an understanding schoolmate, devoted and ready to serve, nothing like the haughty, highborn Gustave. Léon, esclave de ton amour, comptant les heures, ton corps contre le sien. [35]