Author: Gustave Flaubert
Category: Fiction
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A more agreeable concern came to distract him, namely, his wife’s pregnancy. As her term drew near, she became all the more dear to him. Another bond of the flesh was being established between them, and something like a pervasive sense of a more complex union. When, from a distance, he watched her indolent steps and her waist turning gently above her uncorseted hips, when, across from her, he contemplated her at his ease, as she sat tired in her armchair, his happiness could no longer be contained; he would stand up, he would kiss her, run his hands over her face, call her “little mama,” try to get her to dance, and, half laughing, half crying, babble all sorts of fond pleasantries that came into his head. The idea of having engendered a child delighted him. Nothing was lacking to him now. He knew the entire scope of human existence, and he sat down to it serenely with both elbows on the table.
Emma felt great surprise at first, then wanted to be delivered, so as to know what it was like to be a mother. But since she could not spend the money that she would have liked, to have a boat-shaped cradle with pink silk curtains and embroidered baby bonnets, she gave up on the layette in a fit of bitterness and ordered the whole of it from a seamstress in the village, without choosing or discussing anything. And so she did not enjoy those preparations that stimulate a mother’s tenderness, and her affection, from the beginning, was perhaps somewhat attenuated by this.
However, since at every meal Charles talked about the little one, she soon began to give the thought of it more constant attention.
She wanted a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this idea of having a male child was a sort of hoped-for compensation for all her past helplessness. A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.
She gave birth one Sunday, at about six o’clock, as the sun was rising.
“It’s a girl!” said Charles.
She turned her head away and fainted.
Almost immediately, Madame Homais rushed in and kissed her, as did Mère Lefrançois, of the Lion d’Or. The pharmacist, being a man of discretion, merely offered her some provisional congratulations, through the half-open door. He asked to see the child and deemed it well formed.
During her convalescence, she spent a good deal of time thinking of a name for her daughter. First, she reviewed all those with Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she quite liked Galsuinde, and better still Yseult or Léocadie. Charles wanted the child named after his mother; Emma was opposed. They went through the calendar from end to end, and they consulted people outside the family.
“Monsieur Léon,” said the pharmacist, “with whom I was talking about this the other day, is surprised that you haven’t chosen Madeleine, which is so exceedingly fashionable these days.”
But the elder Madame Bovary protested loudly against this sinner’s name. As for Monsieur Homais, his predilection was for all those names that recalled a great man, an illustrious deed, or a noble idea, and it was according to this system that he had baptized his four children. Thus, Napoléon represented glory, and Franklin freedom; Irma, perhaps, was a concession to romanticism; but Athalie, a tribute to the most immortal masterpiece of the French stage. For his philosophical convictions did not impede his artistic enthusiasms; the thinker in him did not in the least stifle the man of feeling; he was able to make distinctions, differentiate imagination from fanaticism. In the tragedy in question, for example, he found fault with the ideas but admired the style; he condemned the conception but applauded all the details; and he was incensed by the characters, though he raved about their speeches. When he read the great passages, he was transported; but when he thought how the pulpiteers were profiting from it to sell their goods, he was grieved, and in this confusion of feelings in which he found himself entangled, he would have liked simultaneously to set the laurel wreath on Racine’s head with his own two hands and to argue with him for a good quarter of an hour.
At last, Emma remembered that at the La Vaubyessard château she had heard the marquise address a young woman as Berthe; from that moment, the name was decided, and since Père Rouault could not come, they asked Monsieur Homais to be godfather. The gifts he gave were all products of his establishment, namely, six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three pans of marshmallow paste, and, in addition, six sticks of sugar candy that he had found in a cupboard. The evening of the ceremony, there was a large dinner; the curé was there; the company became excited. Over the liqueurs, Monsieur Homais intoned “The God of Good Folks.” Monsieur Léon sang a barcarolle, and the elder Madame Bovary, who was godmother, a romantic ballad from the time of the Empire; finally the elder Monsieur Bovary demanded that the child be brought downstairs, and he proceeded to baptize her with a glass of Champagne, pouring it over her head from above. This mockery of the first sacrament filled the Abbé Bournisien with indignation; Père Bovary responded with a quotation from “The War of the Gods,” and the curé tried to leave; the ladies pleaded; Homais intervened; and they succeeded in getting the clergyman to return to his seat, where he tranquilly picked up from his saucer his half-drunk demitasse of coffee.
The elder Monsieur Bovary stayed on for another month at Yonville, dazzling its inhabitants with a superb silver-braided policeman’s cap that he wore in the mornings when he smoked his pipe in the square. Being also in the habit of drinking a good deal of eau-de-vie, he would often send the maid to the Lion d’Or to buy him a bottle, which would be written down on his son’s account; and to perfume his foulards, he used up his daughter-in-law’s entire supply of eau de Cologne.
She was not in the least displeased with his company. He had been around the world: he would talk about Berlin, Vienna, Strasbourg, his time as an officer, the mistresses he had had, the grand luncheons he had enjoyed; then, too, he was charming toward her and would even, sometimes, in the stairway or the garden, seize her around the waist, exclaiming:
“Look out, Charles!”
Then the elder Madame Bovary became alarmed for her son’s happiness, and, fearing that her husband would in the long run exert an immoral influence on the young woman’s ideas, she hastened to advance their departure. Perhaps she had graver fears. Monsieur Bovary was a man to whom nothing was sacred.
One day, Emma felt a sudden need to see her little daughter, who had been put out to nurse with the carpenter’s wife; and without looking at the almanac to see if the six weeks of the Virgin had elapsed, she set off toward Rolet’s house, which lay at the far end of the village, at the bottom of the hill, between the main road and the meadows.
It was noon; the shutters of the houses were closed, and the slate roofs, gleaming under the raw light of the blue sky, seemed to give off glittering sparks at the crests of their gables. A sultry wind was blowing. Emma felt weak as she walked; the stones of the sidewalk hurt her; she wondered if she should not return home, or go inside somewhere and sit down.
At that moment, Monsieur Léon appeared from a nearby door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came up to greet her and stood in the shade in front of Lheureux’s shop, under the gray awning that projected from it.
Madame Bovary said that she was going to see her child, but that she was beginning to feel tired.
“If …,” said Léon, not daring to continue.
“Do you have business somewhere?” she asked.
And when the clerk answered, she asked him to go with her. By evening, it was known throughout Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife, declared in her maid’s presence that Madame Bovary was compromising herself.
To reach the wet nurse’s house, one had to turn left, after leaving the
street, as though going to the cemetery, and follow a little path, between cottages and yards, bordered by privets. These were in flower, and the speedwell, too, the hawthorns, the nettles, and the slender wild blackberries that arced up out of the thickets. Through holes in the hedges, one could see, in the farmyards, a hog on a dunghill, or cows in their wooden collars, rubbing their horns against the trunks of the trees. The two of them walked slowly, side by side, she leaning on him and he slowing his step to match hers; in front of them flitted a swarm of flies, buzzing in the warm air.
They recognized the house by an old walnut tree that shaded it. It was low and roofed in brown tiles, and outside, beneath its attic dormer, hung a string of onions. Bundles of brushwood, leaning against the thorn hedge, surrounded a bed of lettuces, a few stalks of lavender, and some sweet peas tied up on sticks. Dirty water trickled out over the grass, and all around were odds and ends of tattered old garments, knitted stockings, a red calico wrapper, and a large, coarse linen sheet spread lengthwise on the hedge. At the sound of the gate, the wet nurse appeared, holding on her arm a nursing child. With her other hand, she was pulling along behind her a poor, sickly little boy whose face was covered with scrofulous sores, the son of a Rouen knit-goods dealer, left here in the country by his parents, who were too occupied with their business.
“Come in,” she said. “Your little one is over there sleeping.”
The bedroom, on the ground floor, the only one in the house, had a wide curtainless bed at its back wall, while the kneading trough occupied the side containing the window, one pane of which had been patched with a round of blue paper. In the corner, behind the door, a row of boots with gleaming hobnails stood under the slab of the washbasin, next to a bottle full of oil which bore a feather at its neck; a copy of Mathieu Laensberg was flung on the dusty mantelpiece among gunflints, candle stubs, and pieces of tinder. Lastly, the final superfluous touch to this room was a picture of Fame blowing her trumpets, cut out, no doubt, from some perfume company’s prospectus and nailed to the wall with six shoe tacks.
Emma’s child was sleeping on the floor, in a wicker cradle. She picked her up along with the blanket that was wrapped around her and began to sing softly as she swayed back and forth.
Léon walked about in the room; it seemed strange to him to see this lovely lady in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this wretchedness. Madame Bovary blushed; he turned away, thinking that perhaps his eyes had expressed some impertinence. Then she laid the child back down; it had just spit up on her collar. The wet nurse immediately came over to wipe it off, assuring her that it would not show.
“Over and over again, she does this to me,” she said, “and I’m forever cleaning her off! Might you be so kind as to leave an order with Camus the grocer, that he would let me take a little soap when I need it? ’Twould be still more of a convenience to you, that I wouldn’t be bothering you.”
“Very well, very well!” said Emma. “Goodbye, Mère Rolet!”
And she went out, wiping her feet on the doorsill.
The good woman went with her as far as the end of the yard, all the while talking about the trouble she had getting up during the night.
“It wears me out so, sometimes I fall asleep in my chair; so you might also at least let me have just a pound of ground coffee, that would do me for a month? I would have it in the morning with some milk.”
After having submitted to her thanks, Madame Bovary went off; and she was a little way down the path when, at the sound of sabots, she turned her head: it was the wet nurse!
“What is it?”
Then the countrywoman, drawing her aside, behind an elm tree, began talking to her about her husband, who, with his job and the six francs a year that the captain …
“Get on with it,” said Emma.
“Well,” the wet nurse resumed, heaving a sigh after every word, “I’m afraid he’ll be vexed to see me drinking coffee on my own—you know, men …”
“But you will have some,” repeated Emma. “I will give you some! … You are bothering me!”
“Alas! My poor dear lady, it’s just that, on account of his wounds, he has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider makes him feel weak.”
“Now, do hurry up, Mère Rolet!”
“Well, then,” the wet nurse resumed, with a curtsy, “if it wasn’t too much to ask of you”—she curtsied again—“if you would”—and her eyes were pleading—“a little jug of eau-de-vie,” she said at last, “and I’ll rub your little one’s feet with it, for they’re as tender as my tongue.”
Having got rid of the wet nurse, Emma took Monsieur Léon’s arm again. She walked quickly for some time; then she slowed down, and her glance, which had been roaming about before her, rested on the shoulder of the young man, who was wearing a frock coat with a black velvet collar. His chestnut hair fell over it, straight and neatly combed. She noticed his fingernails, which were longer than was customary in Yonville. It was one of the clerk’s great occupations, to care for them; and he kept, for that purpose, a special penknife in his writing desk.
They returned to Yonville along the water’s edge. In the warm season, the wider banks revealed the garden walls down to their bases, with short flights of steps descending to the stream. It flowed noiselessly, swift and cold to the eye; tall, slender grasses bent over together, pushed by the current and, like loosened green manes of hair, spread through its limpid waters. Now and then, a thin-legged insect walked or settled on the tip of a reed or the blade of a water lily. The sun pierced with a ray the little blue droplets of the waves that came collapsing one after another; old lopped willows mirrored their gray bark in the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was dinnertime on the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard nothing as they walked but the cadence of their steps on the earth of the path, the words they said to each other, and the brushing of Emma’s dress as it rustled around her.
The garden walls, their copings stuck with pieces of bottle, were as warm as the panes of a greenhouse. In among the bricks, wallflowers had grown up; and with the edge of her open parasol, Madame Bovary, as she passed, crumbled a few of their faded flowers into yellow dust, or a branch of the honeysuckle and the clematis that hung outside would trail for a moment over the silk and catch on the fringe.
They were talking about a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected soon at the theater in Rouen.
“Will you be going?” she asked.
“If I can,” he answered.
Had they nothing else to say to each other? Yet their eyes were full of a more serious conversation; and while they forced themselves to find commonplace remarks, they felt the same languor invading them both; it was like a murmur of the soul, deep, continuous, louder than the murmur of their voices. Surprised by a sweetness new to them, they did not think of describing the sensation to each other or of discovering its cause. Future joys, like tropical shores, project over the immensity that lies before them their native softness, a fragrant breeze, and one grows drowsy in that intoxication without even worrying about the horizon one cannot see.
In one spot, the ground had been churned up by the trampling of the cattle; they had to walk on large green stones, spaced at intervals in the mud. Often she would stop for a minute to look where to place her little boot,—and, tottering on the unsteady rock, her elbows in the air, her body bent, her eye irresolute, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles.
When they reached her garden, Madame Bovary pushed open the small gate, ran up the steps, and disappeared.
Léon went back into his office. The boss was not there; he glanced at the files, then trimmed a quill pen for himself, and at last picked up his hat and left.
He went out into the Pasture, at the top of the Argueil hill, at the edge of the forest; he lay down on the ground under the firs and looked at the sky through his fingers.
“How bored I am!” he said to himself
; “how bored I am!”
He felt he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais for a friend and Monsieur Guillaumin for a master. The latter, entirely occupied with business, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and red side-whiskers against his white cravat, understood nothing about the finer subtleties of the intellect, although he affected a stiff English manner that had dazzled the clerk at first. As for the pharmacist’s wife, she was the best wife in Normandy, as gentle as a sheep, cherishing her children, her father, her mother, her cousins, weeping over the misfortunes of others, letting everything go in her household, and detesting corsets;—but she was so slow to move, so boring to listen to, so common in her looks and so limited in her conversation that he had never dreamed, even though she was thirty years old, he was twenty, they slept in neighboring rooms, and he talked to her every day, that she could be a woman for someone, or that she possessed any attributes of her sex except the dress she wore.
And who else was there? Binet, a few merchants, two or three tavern keepers, the curé, and lastly Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his two sons, wealthy, loutish, dim-witted men who worked their own lands, feasted by themselves at home, were pious besides, and altogether intolerable company.
But against the shared background of all these human faces, Emma’s stood out, isolated and yet more distant; for he sensed between her and him something like a formless chasm.