Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

by Gustave Flaubert

  But, controlling himself suddenly:

  “I wanted, Doctor, to attempt an analysis, and primo, I delicately introduced a tube …”

  “It would have been of more value,” said the surgeon, “to have introduced your fingers into the throat.”

  His colleague kept quiet, having only a few moments ago received in confidence a serious reprimand concerning his emetic, so that this good Canivet, so arrogant and verbose at the time of the clubfoot, was very unassuming today; he smiled without pause, in an approving manner.

  Homais was full-blown in his pride as host, and the distressing notion of Bovary vaguely contributed to his pleasure, through some egoistical reflection on himself. And the doctor’s presence enraptured him. He made a show of his erudition, he cited a hodgepodge of Spanish fly, poison tree, manchineel tree, viper.

  “And I have even read that various people have been found poisoned, Doctor, and as if struck by a thunderbolt, due to blood puddings that had been too vehemently smoked. At least, it was in a very fine report, composed by one of our pharmaceutical leading lights, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de Gassicourt!”

  Madame Homais reappeared, bearing one of those shaky machines that are heated with spirits; for Homais liked to make his coffee on the dining table, having, moreover, roasted it himself, ground it himself, blended it himself.

  “Saccharum, Doctor,” he said, offering some sugar.

  Then he had all his children come downstairs, eager to have the surgeon’s opinion on their constitution.

  Finally, Monsieur Larivière was about to leave, when Madame Homais asked him for an opinion concerning her husband. His nodding-off each evening after dinner might encourage thickening of the vein.

  “Oh, it’s not the vain that is bothering him.”

  And, smiling a little at this unheeded pun, the doctor opened the door. But the pharmacy was overflowing with people; and he had much trouble in disentangling himself from Monsieur Tuvache, who feared his wife had an inflammation on the chest, because she had a habit of spitting in the embers; then from Monsieur Binet, who would feel a sudden great hunger from time to time; and from Madame Caron, who had tinglings; from Lheureux, who had trouble with giddiness; from Lestiboudois, who had rheumatism; from Madame Lefrançois, who had stomach acid. At last the three horses scampered away, and it was generally thought that he had not shown himself very obliging.

  Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur Bournisien, who passed through the market house with the holy oils.

  Homais, as he had to by his principles, compared priests to crows drawn by the odor of death; the sight of a clergyman was personally obnoxious to him, for the cassock made him muse on the winding-sheet, and he cursed the one partly out of terror of the other.

  Nevertheless, not recoiling from what he called his mission, he returned to Bovary’s house in the company of Canivet, whom Monsieur Larivière, before leaving, had vigorously bound to this action; and, but for his wife’s protests, he would even have brought his two sons along with him, so as to habituate them to serious cases, that it should be a lesson, an example, a solemn picture that would remain in their heads later on.

  The bedroom, when they entered, was full of a dismal solemnity. On the worktable, covered in a white napkin, there were five or six little balls of cotton in a silver plate, beside a large crucifix, between two burning candlesticks. Emma, chin on her chest, had her eyes open extravagantly wide: and her poor hands crawled over the sheets, with that dreadful and gentle movement of the dying who seem to want to cover themselves over already with the shroud. Pale as a statue, and eyes red as coals, Charles, without weeping, stood opposite her, at the foot of the bed, while the priest, down on one knee, mumbled words in a low tone.

  She slowly turned her face, and appeared struck with joy at suddenly seeing the violet stole, doubtless recognizing in the midst of an extraordinary calm the lost voluptuousness of her first mystical yearnings, together with incipient glimpses of eternal happiness.

  The priest got to his feet to take the crucifix; then she stretched forth her neck like someone thirsty, and, pressing her lips on the body of the man-God, she planted there with all her expiring force the most intense kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipping his right thumb in the oil and beginning the extreme unction: first on the eyes, that had lusted so after all the sumptuous things of earth; then on the nostrils, fond of warm breezes and the fragrances of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to lies, which had groaned with pride and shrieked in abandon; then on the hands, which would revel at each sweet touch; and finally on the soles of the feet, so swift in times past when she would run to glut her desires, and which walked no longer now.

  The cleric wiped his fingers, threw the oil-soaked bits of cotton into the fire, and came back to sit next to the dying woman to tell her that she must presently join her sufferings to those of Jesus Christ and to surrender herself to the Divine mercy.

  Concluding these exhortations, he tried to place a consecrated taper in her hands, a symbol of the celestial glories by which she would shortly be encompassed. Emma, too weak, could not close her fingers, and the taper, without Monsieur Bournisien, would have fallen to the floor.

  Nevertheless she was no longer so pale, and her face bore a serene expression, as if the sacrament had healed her.

  The priest did not fail to observe this; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord, sometimes, prolonged the life of people when He judged it expedient for their salvation; and Charles recalled a day when, likewise close to death, she had received communion.

  “Perhaps we must not give ourselves up to despair,” he thought.

  Indeed, she was looking all about her, slowly, like someone waking from a dream; then, in a clear voice, she asked for her mirror, and she stayed bent over it for some time, up to the moment when large tears trickled from her eyes. Then she threw her head back with a sigh and fell against her pillow again.

  At once her chest began to heave rapidly. The whole of her tongue emerged from her mouth; her eyes, rolling, turned pale like two lamp globes being dimmed, so she might have been considered dead already, were it not for the dreadful accelerating movement of her ribs, racked by a furious breathing, as if the soul were skipping about to loosen itself. Félicité kneeled before the crucifix, and the pharmacist himself flexed his hams a little, while Monsieur Canivet gazed vaguely out upon the square. Bournisien set to praying again, face inclined against the edge of the bed, with his long cassock trailing behind him in the room. Charles was on the other side, kneeling, arms stretched toward Emma. He had taken her hands and was clasping them, starting at every beat of her heart, as if at the reverberation of a tumbling ruin. As the death rattle grew louder, the clergyman hastened on with his orisons; they mingled with Bovary’s stifled sobs, and sometimes everything seemed to vanish in the dull murmur of the Latin syllables, that tolled like a passing bell.

  All of a sudden, the sound of heavy clogs could be heard on the pavement, along with the scrape of a stick; and a voice rose, a hoarse voice, singing:

  A fair day’s heat does often move

  The thoughts of some young lass to love.

  Emma rose like a corpse galvanized by an electric current, hair unraveled, eyes staring, agape.

  So to gather with all care

  The ears of corn where sweeps the blade

  My Nanette shall be bending o’er

  The furrowed earth wherein they’re made.

  “The blind man!” she screamed.

  And Emma began to laugh, a dreadful laugh, frantic, despairing, thinking she could see the wretch’s hideous face, which reared up out of the eternal gloom like some appalling terror.

  It blew so hard that very day

  And the petticoat did fly away!

  A convulsion knocked her back onto the mattress. Everyone drew nearer. She no longer existed.

  IX

  There is always, afte
r someone’s death, a kind of stupefaction given off, so hard is it to take in this abrupt coming of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it. But, when he nevertheless became aware of her stillness, Charles threw himself upon her and cried:

  “Goodbye! Goodbye!”

  Homais and Canivet dragged him out of the bedroom.

  “Restrain yourself!”

  “Yes,” he said as he struggled, “I shall be reasonable, I won’t do anything wrong. But let me be. I want to see her. She’s my wife!”

  And he wept.

  “Weep,” replied the pharmacist, “give vent to nature, it will ease the pain.”

  Grown feebler than a child, Charles suffered himself to be led downstairs, into the parlor, and before long Monsieur Homais went back home.

  On the square he was accosted by the blind man, who, dragging himself as far as Yonville, hoping for the anti-inflammatory ointment, was asking each passerby where the apothecary lived.

  “Well, fine! As if I didn’t have other fish to fry. Ah, too bad, come back later!”

  And he hurried into the pharmacy.

  He had two letters to write, a calming draft to prepare for Bovary, a lie to think up that might conceal the poisoning and an article for the Beacon to compose, not counting the people awaiting him, for news; and, when the Yonvillais had all heard his story of the arsenic which she had mistaken for sugar, when making vanilla custard, Homais returned again to Bovary’s house.

  He found him alone (Monsieur Canivet had just left), seated in the easy chair, by the window, and contemplating the room’s flagstones with an idiot gaze.

  “You must now,” said the pharmacist, “fix an hour for the ceremony yourself.”

  “Why? What ceremony?”

  Then, in a stammering and appalled voice:

  “Oh no, surely not! No, I want to keep her.”

  Homais, to hide his confusion, took down a carafe from the shelf to water the geraniums.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Charles, “you are good!”

  And he did not finish, suffocating under a wealth of recollections that the pharmacist’s action brought to his mind.

  Then, to distract him, Homais deemed it fitting to talk about gardening a little; the plants needed to be kept moist. Charles lowered his head as a sign of approval.

  “What’s more, fine days will be back again now.”

  “Ah,” said Bovary.

  The apothecary, out of ideas, gradually began to open the window’s little curtains.

  “Look, there’s Monsieur Tuvache passing by.”

  Charles repeated like a machine:

  “Monsieur Tuvache passing by.”

  Homais did not dare speak to him again of funeral arrangements; it was the clergyman who succeeded in persuading him to it.

  He shut himself up in his surgery, took a pen, and, after having sobbed for a while, he wrote:

  I want her to be buried in her wedding dress, with her white slippers, a crown. Her hair should be spread out on her shoulders; three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. As long as no one says anything to me, I shall be strong. A great piece of green velvet should be lain over everything. I wish it. Do it.

  These gentlemen were most astonished at Bovary’s romantic ideas, and straightaway the pharmacist went to tell him:

  “This velvet seems to me a superfluity. The expense, moreover …”

  “Is that any of your business?” shouted Charles. “Leave me be! You did not love her! Go away!”

  The clergyman took him by the arm for a turn in the garden. He expounded on the vanity of earthly things. God was very great, very good; one must submit to his decrees without a murmur, even thank him.

  Charles exploded into blasphemy.

  “I curse him, your God!”

  “The spirit of revolt is within you still,” sighed the clergyman.

  Bovary was off. He took great strides beside the wall, near the espalier, and he ground his teeth, he raised cursing eyes to heaven; but not a single leaf stirred.

  A light rain fell. Charles, who was bare-chested, ended up shivering with cold; he went inside to sit in the kitchen.

  At six o’clock, a rattling noise could be heard in the square: it was the Hirondelle arriving; and he stayed with his forehead pressed to the windowpane, to see all the passengers alight one after the other. Félicité spread a mattress for him in the sitting room; he threw himself on it and fell asleep.

  Although a philosopher, Monsieur Homais respected the dead. And, without bearing any ill will toward poor Charles, he came back in the evening to keep vigil over the body, bearing with him three volumes, and a pocketbook, in order to make notes.

  Monsieur Bournisien was there, and two tall tapers burned at the head of the bed, which had been pulled out of the alcove.

  The apothecary, for whom the silence weighed, was not long in formulating a few doleful words concerning this “unhappy young woman”; and the priest replied that there was nothing left now but to pray for her.

  “Nevertheless,” continued Homais, “it is one of two things: either she died in a state of grace (as the Church puts it), and so she has no need for our prayers; or else she died impenitent (I believe that’s the ecclesiastical term), and so …”

  Bournisien interrupted him, replying in a testy tone that it was no less necessary to pray.

  “But,” the pharmacist objected, “since God knoweth all our need, what profiteth prayer?”

  “What! Prayer!” said the clergyman. “You are not Christian then?”

  “Forgive me,” said Homais. “I admire Christianity. First of all it freed the slaves, brought a morality into the world …”

  “That is not the question. All the texts …”

  “Oh, oh! As for the texts, open the history books; we know that they were falsified by the Jesuits.”

  Charles came in, and, moving toward the bed, he slowly drew back the curtains.

  Emma’s head was resting on her right shoulder. The corner of her mouth, which was held open, made a sort of black hole in her lower face, the two thumbs remained inflected in the palms of her hands; a kind of white dust was sprinkled over her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to disappear into a viscous wanness that was like a fine web, as if spiders had been spinning over them. The sheet was hollowed out from the breasts to the knees, then rose again at the tips of the toes; and to Charles it seemed that infinite weights lay heavy upon her, an enormous load.

  The church clock struck two. The loud murmur of the river could be heard flowing through the darkness, at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur Bournisien, from time to time, noisily blew his nose, and Homais scratched his pen across the paper.

  “Now then, my good friend,” he said, “come away, this sight is tearing you apart!”

  Once Charles had left, the pharmacist and the priest started their discussion once more.

  “Read Voltaire!” said one; “read some Holbach, read the Encyclopedia!”

  “Read the Letters of Certain Portuguese Jews!” said the other; “read The Proof of Christianity, by Nicolas, former justice of the peace!”

  They were becoming heated, they were red-faced, they spoke at the same time, without listening to each other; Bournisien was scandalized by such audacity; Homais was amazed at such stupidity; and they were not far off calling each other names, when all of a sudden Charles reappeared. A fascination drew him. He was continually coming up the stairs.

  He positioned himself opposite her to see better, and he lost himself in this contemplation, which by virtue of its profundity was no longer painful.

  He remembered stories of catalepsy, the miracles of magnetism; and he told himself that by willing it to the extreme, he might succeed in raising her from the dead. One time he even leaned toward her, and he cried out very softly, “Emma! Emma!” His breath, blowing hard, made the tapers’ flames tremble on the wall.

  In the small hours, Madame Bovary senior arrived; Charles, when he embraced her, had a fresh overflow of
tears. She attempted, just as the pharmacist had tried, to make a few observations on the funeral expenses. He flew into such a rage that she held her tongue, and he even charged her with heading off immediately to the town to buy what was needed.

  Charles stayed on his own all afternoon; Berthe had been taken to Madame Homais’s house; Félicité stayed upstairs, in the bedroom, with Mère Lefrançois.

  In the evening, he received visitors. He would get up, clasp your hands without being able to speak, then one would sit down with the others, who formed a semicircle in front of the fire. With lowered faces and knees crossed, they jiggled one leg from side to side, while intermittently heaving a great sigh; and each was inordinately bored; yet no one would be the first to leave.

  Homais, when he returned at nine o’clock (he would be all you saw on the square, for the last two days), was loaded with a supply of camphor, gum benjamin and aromatic herbs. He was also carrying a vase full of chlorine, to dismiss noxious vapors. At that moment, the maid, Madame Lefrançois and Mère Bovary were moving about Emma, to finish dressing her; and they lowered the long stiff veil, that covered her down to her satin slippers.

  Félicité was sobbing:

  “Ah! My poor mistress! My poor mistress!”

  “Look at her,” said the innkeeper, sighing, “how pretty she still is! If you wouldn’t swear she’s about to get up.”

  Then they leaned over, to put her crown on.

  They had to lift her head a little, and so a torrent of black fluids poured, like a vomiting, out of her mouth.

  “Ah, dear God! Mind the dress!” shouted Madame Lefrançois. “Help us then!” she said to the pharmacist. “Are you frightened, by chance?”

  “Me, frightened?” he replied, shrugging his shoulders. “Ah well, yes! I saw the like at the Hôtel-Dieu, when I was studying pharmacy. We prepared punch in the dissecting theater. Nothingness does not scare a philosopher; and, I often say it, I even intend to bequeath my body to a hospital, to be of some use later on to Science.”

  On arrival, the priest asked how Monsieur was; and, when the apothecary replied, he resumed: