Author: Gustave Flaubert
Category: Fiction
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“Are you the doctor?” asked the child.
And at Charles’s answer, he took his wooden shoes in his hands and began to run in front of him.
The officer of health, as he went along, learned from what his guide said that Monsieur Rouault must be an extremely well-to-do farmer. He had broken his leg the evening before, as he was returning from celebrating Twelfth Night at the home of a neighbor. His wife had been dead for two years. He had only his young lady living with him; she helped him run the house.
The ruts became deeper. They were approaching Les Bertaux. The little boy, gliding through a hole in a hedge, disappeared, then reappeared at the far end of a farmyard to open the gate. The horse was slipping on the wet grass; Charles bent low to pass under the branches. The watchdogs in the kennel were barking and pulling on their chains. When he entered Les Bertaux, his horse took fright and shied violently.
It was a prosperous-looking farm. In the stables, one could see, through the open upper halves of the doors, great workhorses feeding tranquilly from new racks. Along the sides of the buildings extended a large dung heap, steam was rising from it, and, among the hens and turkeys, five or six peacocks were scratching about on top of it, a luxury in a Caux poultry yard. The sheepfold was long, the barn was lofty, with walls as smooth as a hand. In the shed were two large carts and four plows, with their whips, their collars, their full harnesses, whose blue wool fleeces were dirtied by the fine dust that fell from the lofts. The yard sloped away upward, planted with symmetrically spaced trees, and the cheerful din of a flock of geese resounded near the pond.
A young woman in a blue merino dress embellished with three flounces came to the door of the house to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she showed into the kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The farmhands’ breakfast was bubbling all around it, in little pots of unequal sizes. Damp clothes were drying inside the hearth. The fire shovel, the tongs, and the nose of the bellows, all of colossal proportions, shone like polished steel, while along the walls extended an abundant array of kitchen utensils, on which glimmered unevenly the bright flame of the hearth, joined by the first gleams of sunlight coming in through the windowpanes.
Charles went up to the second floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed, sweating under the covers, having hurled his cotton nightcap far away from him. He was a stout little man of fifty, with white skin and blue eyes, bald in front, and wearing earrings. He had by his side, on a chair, a large carafe of eau-de-vie from which he would help himself from time to time to keep up his courage; but as soon as he saw the doctor, his excitement subsided, and instead of swearing as he had been doing for the past twelve hours, he began to groan feebly.
The fracture was simple, without complications of any kind. Charles could not have dared to hope for an easier one. And so, recalling his teachers’ manners at the bedsides of the injured, he comforted the patient with all sorts of lively remarks—a surgeon’s caresses that are like the oil with which he greases his scalpel. For splints, they went off to fetch, from the cart shed, a bundle of laths. Charles chose one, cut it into pieces, and polished it with a shard of window glass, while the maidservant tore up some sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma worked at sewing some pads. She was a long time finding her needle case, and her father grew impatient; she said nothing in response; but, as she sewed, she kept pricking her fingers, which she then raised to her mouth to suck.
Charles was surprised by the whiteness of her fingernails. They were glossy, delicate at the tips, more carefully cleaned than Dieppe ivories, and filed into almond shapes. Yet her hand was not beautiful, not pale enough, perhaps, and a little dry at the knuckles; it was also too long and without soft inflections in its contours. What was beautiful about her was her eyes: although they were brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her gaze fell upon you openly, with a bold candor.
Once the bandaging was done, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to have a bite before leaving.
Charles went down into the parlor, on the ground floor. Two places, with silver mugs, were laid there on a little table, at the foot of a large canopied bed hung in calico printed with figures representing Turks. One caught a scent of orrisroot and damp sheets escaping from the tall oak cupboard that faced the window. On the floor, in the corners, stowed upright, were sacks of wheat. This was the overflow from the nearby granary, which one reached by three stone steps. As decoration for the room, there hung from a nail, in the middle of the wall whose green paint was flaking off under the saltpeter, a head of Minerva in black pencil, framed in gilt and bearing on the bottom, written in Gothic letters: “To my dear Papa.”
They talked first about the patient, then about the weather they were having, about the severe cold spells, about the wolves that roamed the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not enjoy herself much at all in the country, especially now that she was almost solely responsible for the care of the farm. Because the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate, revealing her full lips, which she had a habit of biting in her moments of silence.
Her neck rose out of a white, turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two black bands were so smooth they seemed each to be of a single piece, was divided down the middle of her head by a thin part that dipped slightly following the curve of her skull; and just barely revealing the lobes of her ears, it went on to merge in the back in an abundant chignon, with a wavy movement near the temples that the country doctor noticed for the first time in his life. Her cheeks were pink. She wore, like a man, tucked between two buttons of her bodice, a tortoiseshell lorgnette.
When Charles, after going up to say goodbye to Père Rouault, came back into the parlor before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the window, gazing out into the garden, where the beanpoles had been blown down by the wind. She turned around.
“Are you looking for something?” she asked.
“My riding crop, please,” he answered.
And he began hunting around on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs; it had fallen to the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma saw it; she leaned over the sacks of wheat. Charles, gallantly, hurried over, and as he, too, stretched out his arm in the same gesture, he felt his chest brush against the girl’s back, stooping beneath him. She straightened up quite red in the face and looked at him over her shoulder, holding out his whip.
Instead of returning to Les Bertaux three days later, as he had promised, he went back the very next day, then twice a week regularly, not counting the unexpected visits he made from time to time, as though by chance.
Everything, moreover, went well; healing progressed according to the book, and when, after forty-six days, Père Rouault was seen trying to walk alone in his farmyard, people began to consider Monsieur Bovary a man of great ability. Père Rouault said that he would not have been better treated by the foremost doctors of Yvetot or even Rouen.
As for Charles, he did not try to ask himself why he took such pleasure in going to Les Bertaux. Had he thought about it, he would no doubt have attributed his zeal to the gravity of the case, or perhaps to the profit he hoped to make from it. Still, was this why his visits to the farm formed, among all the drab occupations of his life, such a charming exception? On these days he would rise early, set off at a gallop, urge on his animal; then he would dismount to wipe his feet on the grass, and put on his black gloves before going in. He liked to find himself arriving at the farmyard, to feel the gate against his shoulder as it turned, and the rooster crowing on the wall, the boys coming to meet him. He liked the barn and the stables; he liked Père Rouault, who would clap him in the palm of the hand, calling him his savior; he liked Mademoiselle Emma’s small clogs on the washed flagstones of the kitchen; her raised heels made her a little taller, and when she walked in front of him, the wooden soles, lifting quickly, would clack with a dry sound against the leather of her ankle boots.
She would always see h
im out as far as the foot of the front steps. When his horse had not yet been brought around, she would stay there. They had said goodbye, they did not go on talking; the fresh air surrounded her, lifting in disarray the stray wisps of hair on the nape of her neck or tossing her apron strings so that they snaked like banners about her hips. Once, during a thaw, the bark of the trees was oozing in the yard, the snow on the tops of the buildings was melting. She was on the doorsill; she went to get her parasol, she opened it. The parasol, of dove-gray iridescent silk, with the sun shining through it, cast moving glimmers of light over the white skin of her face. She was smiling beneath it in the mild warmth; and they could hear the drops of water, one by one, falling on the taut moiré.
During the early days of Charles’s visits to Les Bertaux, Madame Bovary the younger never failed to ask after the patient, and she had even, in the double-columned book she kept, chosen for Monsieur Rouault a nice blank page. But when she found out that he had a daughter, she made inquiries; and she learned that Mademoiselle Rouault, raised in a convent, among the Ursulines, had received, as they say, a fine education, that she knew, consequently, dancing, geography, drawing, how to do tapestry work and play the piano. That was the limit!
“So,” she said to herself, “that’s why he has such a smile on his face when he goes to see her, and why he wears his new waistcoat, even though it might get ruined by the rain? Oh, that woman, that woman! …”
And she detested her instinctively. At first she relieved her feelings by making allusions that Charles did not understand; then with parenthetical remarks that he allowed to pass for fear of a storm; finally with point-blank reproaches that he did not know how to answer.—How was it that he kept going back to Les Bertaux, seeing as Monsieur Rouault was healed and those people hadn’t paid yet? Ah! Because there was a certain person there, someone who knew how to make small talk, who did embroidery, who had a fine mind. That was what he liked: he wanted young ladies! And she went on:
“Old Rouault’s daughter, a young lady! Come now! The grandfather was a shepherd, and they have a cousin who was nearly taken to court for striking a man viciously during a quarrel. She needn’t bother to put on such airs, nor show herself at church on Sunday in silk, like a countess. Poor old fellow, anyway—without last year’s rapeseed, he’d have had a hard enough time paying his arrears!”
Out of lassitude, Charles stopped going back to Les Bertaux. Héloïse, after much sobbing and many kisses, in a great explosion of love, had made him swear, his hand on his prayer book, that he would not go there anymore. He therefore obeyed; but the boldness of his desire protested against the servility of his behavior, and, with a sort of naïve hypocrisy, he felt that this prohibition against seeing her gave him, in some way, the right to love her. Also, the widow was thin; she had long teeth; in every season she wore a little black shawl whose point hung down between her shoulder blades; her hard body was wrapped in dresses like sheaths that were too short for her and showed her ankles, with the ribbons of her wide shoes crisscrossing over her gray stockings.
Charles’s mother would come see them from time to time; but after a few days, it would seem that the daughter-in-law had sharpened her mother-in-law against her own hard edge; and then, like two knives, they would set about scarifying him with their remarks and their observations. He was wrong to eat so much! Why offer a drink to everyone who stopped in? How stubborn not to wear flannel!
It happened that early in the spring, a notary in Ingouville, custodian of the Widow Dubuc’s capital, sailed off on a favorable tide, taking away with him all the money in his keeping. Héloïse, it is true, also possessed, besides a share in a ship valued at six thousand francs, her house in the rue Saint-François; and yet, of all that fortune that had been so loudly vaunted, nothing, except a few pieces of furniture and some rags of clothing, had ever appeared in the household. The thing had to be cleared up. The house in Dieppe was found to be riddled with mortgages down to its pilings; what she had placed with the notary, God only knew, and her share in the ship did not amount to more than a thousand ecus. So she had lied, the fine lady! In his anger, the elder Monsieur Bovary, breaking a chair on the flagstones, accused his wife of having brought calamity down upon their son by hitching him to an old nag whose harness wasn’t worth her skin. They came to Tostes. They had it out. There were scenes. Héloïse, in tears, throwing herself into her husband’s arms, begged him to defend her from his parents. Charles tried to speak up for her. His parents became furious, and they left.
But the blow had struck home. A week later, as she was hanging the wash in her yard, she began spitting blood, and the next day, while Charles, his back turned, was at the window closing the curtain, she said: “Oh, my God!,” sighed, and lost consciousness. She was dead! How astonishing it was!
When everything was over at the cemetery, Charles went back to his house. He found no one downstairs; he went up to the second floor, into the bedroom, saw her dress still hanging at the foot of the alcove; then, leaning on the writing desk, he remained there till evening, lost in a sorrowful reverie. She had loved him, after all.
[3]
One morning, Père Rouault came to bring Charles the payment for setting his leg: seventy-five francs in forty-sou coins, and a turkey. He had heard about his misfortune and consoled him as best he could.
“I know how it is!” he said, clapping him on the shoulder; “I was like you, too! When I lost my poor dear late wife, I would go off into the fields to be all alone; I would fling myself down under a tree, I would cry, I would call out to the good Lord, I would tell him all kinds of nonsense; I wanted to be like the moles, I saw them up there in the branches, they had worms wriggling around in their insides, dead, you know. And when I thought that other men were with their good little wives at that very moment, holding them in their arms, I would beat the ground with my stick; I was half crazy, couldn’t eat; the idea of going to the café made me sick, you can’t imagine. Well, very quietly, as one day nosed along on the heels of the next, spring coming on top of winter and fall after summer, it passed, bit by bit, drop by drop; it went away, it disappeared, it died down, I mean, because you’re always left with something on the bottom, a sort of a … weight, here, on your chest! But since that’s our fate, all of us, you mustn’t let yourself waste away, you mustn’t want to die yourself, just because someone else has died. You must shake it off, Monsieur Bovary; it’ll pass! Come see us; my daughter thinks of you from time to time, you know, and she says you’re forgetting her. Here we are, it’s nearly spring; we’ll have you come out and shoot a rabbit in the warren, to divert you a little.”
Charles followed his advice. He returned to Les Bertaux. He found everything the same as the day before—that is, as five months before. The pear trees were already in bloom, and old Rouault was on his feet now, coming and going, which made the farm livelier.
Believing that it was his duty to lavish on the doctor as many polite attentions as possible, because of his painful situation, he begged him not to take his hat off, spoke to him softly, as though he were ill, and even pretended to lose his temper because they had not prepared him something a bit more delicate than all the rest, such as little custards or poached pears. He told stories. Charles caught himself laughing; but the memory of his wife, returning to him suddenly, sobered him. They brought in the coffee; he stopped thinking about her.
He thought about her less, as he became used to living alone. The novel pleasure of independence soon made solitude more tolerable. He could now change the hours of his meals, come home or go out without giving reasons, and, when he was very tired, stretch his arms and legs out to the sides, in his bed. And so he coddled himself, pampered himself, and accepted the consolations offered him. On the other hand, his wife’s death had been rather useful to him professionally, because for a month people had said over and over: “That poor young man! What a misfortune!” His name had gotten around, his practice had increased; and in addition he cou
ld go to Les Bertaux as he liked. He had an aimless sort of hope; a vague happiness; he thought his face better looking as he brushed his whiskers in front of the mirror.
He arrived one day at about three o’clock; everyone was in the fields; he entered the kitchen but at first did not notice Emma; the shutters were closed. Through the slits in the wood, the sun cast over the flagstones long, narrow stripes that broke at the angles of the furniture and trembled on the ceiling. On the table, flies were walking up the used glasses and buzzing as they drowned at the bottom, in the dregs of cider. The daylight that came down the chimney, turning the soot on the fireback to velvet, touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth, Emma was sewing; she was not wearing a scarf, and one could see, on her bare shoulders, little drops of sweat.