Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  “Hush! Hush!” she said, provoked.

  Lucie came forward, partly borne up by her servants, a crown of orange blossom in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her dress. Emma dreamed of her marriage day; and she saw herself back there, in the midst of the cornfields, on the little path, when they were walking to the church. Why then had she not similarly resisted, entreated, like this woman? On the contrary, she was glad, not perceiving the abyss she was throwing herself into. Ah! If, in the bloom of her beauty, before the stain of marriage and the disillusion of adultery, she had been able to lay her life upon some great, stout heart, thus mingling virtue, love, voluptuousness and duty, never would she have fallen from so supreme a bliss. But that happiness was doubtless a lie contrived as the despair of all desire. She knew now the pettiness of passions that art exaggerated. Forcing herself therefore to avert her thoughts, Emma no longer wished to see in this reproduction of her sorrows anything but an artificial fancy fit for keeping the eye entertained, and she was even smiling inwardly out of scornful pity, when at the back of the stage, beneath the velvet curtain, a man appeared in a black cloak.

  With a single movement he swept off his great Spanish hat; and immediately the instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury, dominated everyone else with his clearer voice. Ashton hurled murderous, deep-noted provocations at him, Lucie sang her high-pitched plaint, Arthur intoned to one side in the middle range, and the minister’s bass-baritone pealed like a church organ, while the women’s voices, reprising their words, resumed deliciously, in chorus. They were all in a line, gesticulating; and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, forgiveness and stupefaction breathed simultaneously from their half-open mouths. The outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his lace collar rose in jerks, to the movements of his chest, and he strode from right to left, making the gilded ankle spurs on his soft flared boots ring against the boards. He must, she thought, bear an inexhaustible love, to cast it upon the crowd in such vast outpourings. All her feeble desire to be disparaging faded away under the poetry of the role breaking in upon her, and, impelled toward the man by the illusion of the character, she strove to imagine his life, this resounding, extraordinary, splendid life, and which she might yet have led, if chance had ordained it. They would have known each other, they would have loved each other! She might have traveled with him through all the kingdoms of Europe, from capital to capital, sharing his hardships and his pride, gathering up the flowers tossed to him, embroidering his costumes herself; then, each evening, in the depths of a theater box, behind the gold lattice of a balustrade, she would have gathered, wide-eyed, the grand effusions of this heart singing for her alone; from the stage, acting all the while, he would have gazed up at her. But a madness gripped her: he was gazing at her, for certain! She longed to run into his arms to take shelter in his strength, as in the embodiment of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out: “Take me away, bear me away, let us begone! Yours, yours, all my fervor and all my dreams!”

  The curtain fell.

  The smell of the gas mingled with people’s breath; the breeze from the fans rendered the atmosphere more stifling. Emma wanted to go out; the crowd was blocking the corridors, and she fell back into her chair suffocating under the pounding of her heart. Charles, fearful that she was about to faint, ran to the refreshment room to fetch her a glass of orgeat syrup.

  He had great difficulty in returning to his seat, being struck on the elbows at every step, because of the glass he was holding with both hands, and he even spilled three-quarters of it over the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who, feeling the cold liquid trickling down her back, shrieked like a peacock, as though someone were intent on murdering her. Her husband, owner of a spinning mill, railed against the clumsy fellow; and, while she was dabbing with her handkerchief at the stains on her lovely, cherry-taffeta dress, he was testily muttering the words indemnity, charges, reimbursement. At length, Charles reached his wife, all out of breath and saying to her:

  “I thought, well, that I would be stopping there. There were so many people … so many people …”

  He added:

  “Just guess who I met upstairs? Monsieur Léon!”

  “Léon?”

  “The self-same! He’s coming to pay his compliments.”

  And, as he finished his words, the former clerk of Yonville entered the box.

  He held out his hand in the casual manner of a gentleman: and Madame Bovary advanced her own mechanically, no doubt obedient to the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening when it rained on the green leaves, and they bid each other goodbye, standing at the window. But, quickly, recalled to propriety, with an effort she shook herself free of this torpor of memories and began to stammer out rapid phrases.

  “Ah, good day … What! Is it you?”

  “Silence!” shouted a voice in the pit, for the third act was under way.

  “So you’re in Rouen?”

  “Yes.”

  “And since when?”

  “Out with them! Out with them!”

  People were turning to look at them; they held their tongues.

  But, from this moment, she no longer listened; and the chorus of wedding guests, the scene with Ashton and his lackey, the great duet in D major, everything went by for her at a distance, as if the instruments had become less sonorous and the characters more remote; she remembered the card games at the pharmacist’s, and the walk to the wet nurse’s house, the readings in the arbor, the tête-à-têtes by the fireside, all that wretched love, so calm and so slow, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten. Why then had he returned? What combination of fortune was placing him back in her life? He stayed behind her, his shoulder leaning against the partition; and, from time to time, she felt herself shiver in the warm breath from his nostrils falling on her hair.

  “Do you find that entertaining?” he said, stooping over her so close, that the tip of his mustache grazed her jaw.

  She replied nonchalantly:

  “Oh, dear God, no. Not very.”

  So he suggested they leave the theater, to go and get ices somewhere.

  “Ah, not yet! Let’s stay,” said Bovary. “Her hair is untied: that promises to be tragic.”

  But the mad scene did not interest Emma, and the singer’s acting seemed to her overdone.

  “She’s squealing too loudly,” she said, turning to Charles who was listening.

  “Yes … maybe … a bit,” he replied, wavering between the frankness of his enjoyment and the respect he showed for his wife’s opinions.

  Then Léon said with a sigh:

  “The heat is …”

  “Unbearable! That’s true.”

  “Are you uncomfortable?” asked Bovary

  “Yes, I’m suffocating: let us go.”

  Monsieur Léon set her long lace shawl delicately upon her shoulders, and they all three went to sit by the harbor, in the open air, before a café window.

  The first subject was her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, from fear, she said, of wearying Monsieur Léon; and the latter told them that he had come to Rouen to spend two years in a large law practice, to be broken in with cases which in Normandy were unlike those handled in Paris. Then he inquired about Berthe, the Homais family, Mère Lefrançois; and, as they had no more to say to each other in the presence of the husband, the conversation soon came to an end.

  People coming out of the show went by on the pavement, all humming or bawling out O lovely angel, my Lucie! at full throat. Then Léon, acting the amateur connoisseur, began to talk music. He had seen Tamburini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi; and compared to them, Lagardy, for all his great booming, was good for nothing.

  “Nevertheless,” interrupted Charles, taking little bites at his rum sherbet, “they claim he’s really to be admired in the final act; I regret leaving before the end, as I was starting to enjoy it.”

  “Anyway,” the c
lerk continued, “he’ll be giving another performance soon.”

  But Charles replied that they were off and away the next morning.

  “Unless,” he added, turning toward his wife, “you might not want to stay on your own, my kitten?”

  And, presented with this unexpectedly promising opportunity, the young man changed stratagem, starting to eulogize Lagardy in the final section. It was something superb, sublime! So Charles insisted:

  “You might return on Sunday. Come, make up your mind! You’re wrong not to do so, if you feel in the least bit that it will do you good.”

  Meanwhile the surrounding tables were emptying; a waiter came to station himself discreetly near them; Charles, who understood, drew his purse out; the clerk held him back by the arm, and even remembered to leave, in addition, two silver coins, that he chinked against the marble.

  “I am angry, really I am,” muttered Bovary, “about the money that you …”

  The other made a dismissive, thoroughly cordial gesture, and, taking up his hat:

  “It’s agreed, is it, tomorrow, at six o’clock?”

  Charles exclaimed yet again that he could not stay away any longer; but nothing was preventing Emma …

  “It’s just that …” she stammered with a peculiar smile, “I am not too sure …”

  “Ah well! Think on it, we shall see, seek advice with your pillow …”

  Then to Léon, who was accompanying them:

  “Now you are here in our region, you’ll call from time to time, I hope, to dine with us?”

  The clerk affirmed that he would not fail to, being required moreover to go to Yonville on a legal case for his practice. And they parted in front of the Passage Saint-Herbland, just as half past eleven was tolling from the cathedral bells.

  PART THREE

  I

  Monsieur Léon, while studying the law, was a not infrequent regular at the Chaumière, where he was remarkably successful with the grisettes, who thought he looked distinguished. He was the most proper of students: his hair was neither too long nor too short, he did not run through his term’s allowance on the first of the month, and he kept on good terms with his teachers. As for overindulging, he had always refrained from doing so, as much out of faintheartedness as from scruples.

  Often, while he stayed reading in his room, or else seated in the evening under the Luxembourg’s linden trees, he would let his law book fall to the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But, little by little, this feeling grew weaker, and other lusts accumulated on top, even though it still persisted through them; for Léon did not entirely lose hope, and he felt a kind of uncertain promise that swung in the future, like a golden fruit hanging from some chimerical foliage.

  Then, when he saw her again after three years’ absence, his passion revived. He must, he thought, finally make up his mind to try to possess her. Moreover, contact with wanton company had worn away his shyness, and he returned to the provinces, scornful of whatever did not graze the asphalt of the boulevard with a patent-leather boot. Around a Parisienne in lace, in the salon of some illustrious doctor, a personage with medals and coach, the wretched clerk would doubtless have trembled like a child; but here, in Rouen, on the waterfront, before the wife of this insignificant doctor, he felt comfortable, certain in advance that he would dazzle. Aplomb depends on the milieu into which it pitches itself; the idiom of the mezzanine is not that of the fourth floor, and the wealthy woman, to preserve her virtue, seems to have all her bank notes around her, like a breastplate, inside the lining of her corset.

  On leaving Monsieur and Madame Bovary the previous evening, Léon had followed them along the street, from afar; then having seen them stop at the Croix Rouge, he turned on his heels and spent the entire night contemplating a plan.

  So the next day, at about five o’clock, he entered the inn’s kitchen, a lump in his throat, cheeks pale, and with that coward’s resolve that nothing holds back.

  “Monsieur is no longer here,” a servant replied.

  That seemed to him a good omen. He went up.

  She was unperturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she offered her excuses for having forgotten to tell him where they were staying.

  “Oh, I guessed it,” answered Léon.

  “What?”

  He pretended to have been guided toward her, by chance, by an instinct. She began to smile, and at once, to make up for his nonsense, Léon related how he had spent his morning searching for her successively in all the city’s hotels.

  “So you’ve decided to stay?” he added.

  “Yes,” she said, “and I was wrong to. One mustn’t grow used to unfeasible pleasures, surrounded as one is by a thousand pressing demands …”

  “Oh, I can imagine …”

  “Ah no, for you are not a woman.”

  But men also had their sorrows, and the conversation began with a few philosophical reflections. Emma expatiated a great deal on the wretchedness of earthly affections and the eternal loneliness in which the heart remained entombed.

  To show himself to advantage, or by an unaffected imitation of this melancholy that in turn provoked his own, the young man declared himself to have been prodigiously bored throughout his studies. Legal proceedings irritated him, other vocations attracted him, and his mother never left off tormenting him in each letter. They were growing more and more explicit about the grounds for their suffering, each of them, the more they talked, becoming increasingly overexcited by the progressive confiding of their secrets. But sometimes they came to a stop before the full exposure of a thought, and then endeavored to contrive a phrase which might yet explain it. She did not own to her passion for another; he did not say that he had forgotten her.

  Perhaps he no longer recalled his suppers after the dance, with the stevedore-trousered girls; and she doubtless did not remember the assignations of former times, when she would run through the morning pastures, toward her lover’s chateau. The noises of the city scarcely reached them; and the room seemed small, expressly to keep their solitude in even closer confinement. Emma, in a dimity dressing gown, rested her chignon against the back of an old armchair; the wall’s yellow paper made a kind of golden ground beyond her; and her bare head repeated itself in the mirror with the white parting in the middle, and the tips of her ears peeping below her bandeaux.

  “But, forgive me,” she said, “this is wrong of me. I’m boring you with my endless complaints.”

  “No, never. Never!”

  “If you knew,” she went on, lifting to the ceiling her lovely eyes with their trickle of a tear, “all that I had dreamed of.”

  “And me, too. Oh, I have truly suffered! I would go out, I’d sneak out, I’d trudge along the quayside, deafening myself in the noise of the crowd without being able to banish the obsession that pursued me. In a print seller’s on the boulevard, there’s an Italian engraving depicting a Muse. She’s draped in a tunic and she’s gazing at the moon, with forget-me-nots in her loose hair. Something urged me there incessantly; I stayed whole hours.”

  Then, in a trembling voice:

  “She looked a little like you.”

  Madame Bovary turned her head away, so he might not see on her lips the irresistible smile she could feel rising there.

  “Often,” he continued, “I would write letters to you that I then tore up.”

  She made no reply. He went on:

  “Sometimes I’d imagine that chance would bring you. I thought I recognized you at street corners: and I would run after all the coaches where a shawl fluttered from the door, a veil matching yours …”

  She seemed determined to let him talk without interrupting him. Crossing her arms and lowering her head, she contemplated the bows on her slippers, and made little movements in their satin interior, at intervals, with her toes.

  Still, she sighed:

  “Is it not quite the saddest thing, to be spinning out, as I am doing, a useless existence? If our sorrows could be of use to someone, we might cons
ole ourselves with thoughts of sacrifice.”

  He began to praise virtuousness, duty and mute self-immolation, having himself an incredible need for devotion that he could not assuage.

  “I would very much like,” she said, “to be a hospital nun.”

  “Alas!” he replied, “men have no such saintly missions, and I see no calling anywhere … save perhaps that of doctor …”

  With a little shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to complain of her illness from which she had almost died; what a shame! She would no longer be suffering now. Léon immediately desired the quiet of the tomb, and one night he had even written his will, requesting that he be buried in that lovely coverlet, striped with velvet, that he had received from her; for this is how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal against which they were now adjusting their past life. Besides, words are a rolling mill that always stretch out one’s feelings.

  But at this contrivance of the coverlet:

  “Why so?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  He hesitated.

  “Because I truly loved you!”

  And, congratulating himself on having surmounted the obstacle, Léon, out of the corner of his eye, spied on her expression.

  It was like the sky, when a gust chases away the clouds. The massed banks of sad thoughts that had cast a gloom seemed to withdraw from her blue eyes; her whole face beamed.

  He waited. At last she replied:

  “I had always suspected it …”

  They then recounted to one another the little happenings of that far-off existence, whose pleasures and dejections they had just summed up in a single word. They remembered the clematis arbor, the dresses she wore, her room’s furniture, the whole house.

  “And our poor cactus plants, where are they?”

  “The cold killed them this last winter.”

  “Ah, how I thought of them, did you know that? Often I used to see them again as in the old days, when, on summer mornings, the sun struck the window blinds … and I glimpsed your two bare arms slipping between the flowers.”