Author: Gustave Flaubert
Category: Fiction
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“Ah! He’s a fine man,” said Emma.
“Indeed he is,” said the clerk.
And he began to talk about Madame Homais, whose very slovenly appearance usually inclined them to laugh.
“What does that matter?” Emma interrupted. “A good wife and mother doesn’t worry about how she looks.”
Then she fell silent again.
It was the same on the following days; her talk, her manner, everything changed. She was seen to take her housekeeping to heart, return to church regularly, and manage her servant more strictly.
She took Berthe back from the wet nurse. Félicité would bring her in when visitors came, and Madame Bovary would undress her to show off her arms and legs. She would declare that she adored children; they were her consolation, her joy, her folly, and she would accompany her caresses with lyrical effusions that, to anyone not from Yonville, would have recalled La Sachette in Notre-Dame de Paris.
When Charles came home, he would find his slippers placed next to the embers to warm. Now his vests no longer lacked a lining, nor his shirts buttons, and it was even a pleasure to look into the cupboard and contemplate all the cotton caps arranged in equal piles. She no longer sulked, as she once had, at taking a walk in the garden; whatever he proposed was always agreed to, even though she might not understand the wishes to which she submitted without a murmur;—and when Léon saw him by the fireside, after dinner, his hands on his stomach, his feet on the firedogs, his cheek flushed as he digested his food, his eyes moist from happiness, the child crawling over the carpet, and this woman with her slender figure leaning over the back of his chair to kiss him on the forehead:
“What madness!” he would say to himself. “And how can I reach her?”
Thus, she seemed to him so virtuous and inaccessible that all hope, even the faintest, abandoned him.
But by renouncing her in this way, he was placing her in an extraordinary situation. She was divested, in his eyes, of the fleshly attributes from which he had nothing to hope for; and in his heart, she rose higher and higher, withdrawing further from him in a magnificent, soaring apotheosis. His was one of those pure sentiments that do not impede the pursuit of one’s life, that one cultivates because they are so rare, and the loss of which would afflict one more than their possession delights.
Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black bands of hair, her large eyes, her straight nose, her birdlike step, always remaining silent now, did she not seem to pass through life scarcely touching it and to bear on her forehead the faint imprint of some sublime predestination? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that in her presence one felt captivated by an icy charm, the way one shivers in a church amid the fragrance of flowers mingling with the cold of the marble. Nor did others escape this seduction. The pharmacist liked to say:
“She’s a woman of great capacity. She would not be out of place as the wife of a subprefect.”
The village housewives admired her thrift, the patients her courtesy, the poor her charity.
But she was filled with desires, with rage, with hatred. That dress with its straight folds concealed a heart in turmoil, and those reticent lips said nothing about its torment. She was in love with Léon, and she wanted to be alone so as to delight more comfortably in his image. The sight of him in person disturbed the sensual pleasure of this meditation. Emma trembled at the sound of his footsteps; then, in his presence, her emotions subsided, leaving only an immense astonishment that ended in sadness.
Léon did not know, when he left her house in despair, that she would rise immediately after he went, in order to watch him in the street. She would concern herself with his comings and goings; she would study his face; she would invent an elaborate story to have a pretext for visiting his room. The pharmacist’s wife seemed to her very fortunate to sleep under the same roof; and her thoughts were continually settling on that house, like the pigeons of the Lion d’Or coming to dip their pink feet and white wings in the channels of its eaves. But the more conscious Emma was of her love, the more she suppressed it, to keep it from being visible and to diminish it. She would have liked Léon to suspect it; and she imagined chance events, catastrophes, that would have made that possible. What held her back was probably laziness or fear, and discretion, as well. She would think that she had kept him at too great a distance, that time had run out, that everything was lost. Then the pride, the joy of saying to herself, “I am virtuous,” and of adopting an air of resignation as she looked at herself in the mirror, would console her a little for the sacrifice she thought she was making.
Then her physical desires, her cravings for money, and the fits of melancholy born of her passion, all merged in a single torment;—and instead of putting it out of her mind, she clung to it more, provoking herself to the point of pain and seeking every opportunity to do so. She was irritated by a dish badly served or a door half open, lamented the velvet she did not have, the happiness that eluded her, her too-lofty dreams, her too-narrow house.
What exasperated her was that Charles seemed unaware of her suffering. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed an idiotic insult, and his certainty of this, ingratitude. For whom, then, was she being so good? Wasn’t he himself the obstacle to all happiness, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp-pointed prong of that complex belt that bound her on all sides?
And so she directed at him alone the manifold hatred born of her troubles, and every attempt she made to diminish that hatred only increased it; for her useless effort gave her yet another reason for despair and contributed even more to her estrangement from him. Her own gentleness goaded her to rebel. The mediocrity of her domestic life provoked her to sensual fantasies, matrimonial affection to adulterous desires. She wished Charles would beat her, so that she could more justly detest him, avenge herself. She was sometimes surprised at the shocking conjectures that entered her mind; and yet she had to keep smiling, hear herself say again and again that she was happy, pretend to be happy, let everyone believe it!
There were times, however, when she was disgusted by this hypocrisy. She would be seized by the temptation to run off with Léon, somewhere far away, to try out a new destiny; but immediately a formless chasm, full of darkness, would open in her soul.
“Besides, he doesn’t love me anymore,” she would think. “What will become of me? What help can I hope for, what consolation, what relief?”
She was left shattered, breathless, unmoving, quietly sobbing, tears running down her face.
“Why don’t you tell Monsieur?” the maid would ask, when she came in during one of these fits.
“It’s nerves,” Emma would answer. “Don’t say anything to him; it would upset him.”
“Oh, yes!” Félicité would say. “You’re just like the Guérin girl, Père Guérin’s girl, he was a fisherman from Le Pollet, I knew them at Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so very sad, that when you saw her standing in the doorway of her house, you would think you saw a funeral pall hanging in front of the door. What ailed her, it seemed, was a kind of fog she had in her head, and the doctors couldn’t do anything, nor the curé either. When it took her too hard, she would go off all alone to the seaside, such that the customs officer, when he made his rounds, would often enough find her lying flat on her face on the pebbles, in tears. Then, after she married, it left her, so they say.”
“But with me,” Emma would reply, “it was after I married that it began.”
[6]
One evening when the window was open and, sitting on the sill, she had just been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the boxwood hedge, she suddenly heard the chiming of the Angelus.
It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom; a warm wind tumbles over the newly spaded flower beds, and the gardens, like women, seem to be grooming themselves for the festivities of summer. Through the slats of the arbor and all around,
beyond, one could see the stream flowing through the meadows, tracing its sinuous, vagabond course over the grass. The evening mist was passing among the leafless poplars, softening their outlines with a tinge of violet, paler and more transparent than fine gauze caught in their branches. In the distance, cattle were walking; neither their steps nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell rang on and on, continuing in the air its peaceful lamentation.
With this steady chiming, the young woman’s thoughts strayed among old memories of her youth and boarding school. She recalled the great candelabras, which rose, on the altar, higher than the flower-filled vases and the tabernacle with its little columns. She wished that once again, as in the old days, she could be part of the long line of white veils marked here and there with black by the stiff cowls of the good sisters bending over their prie-dieux; on Sundays, at Mass, when she lifted her head, she would see the sweet face of the Virgin among the bluish eddies of rising incense. And now she was filled with tenderness; she felt soft and utterly abandoned, like the downy feather of a bird turning in a storm; and it was without conscious awareness that she made her way toward the church, inclined to any devotion, so long as her soul might be absorbed in it and all of life disappear into it.
On the square, she met Lestiboudois, who was returning; for rather than cut his day short, he preferred to interrupt his chore and then take it up again, with the result that he rang the Angelus at his own convenience. Besides, the ringing, when done earlier, alerted the children that it was time for catechism.
Already, a few who happened to have arrived were playing marbles on the slabs in the cemetery. Others, straddling the wall, were swinging their legs, their sabots felling the tall nettles that had grown up between the little enclosing wall and the nearest gravestones. This was the only green area; all the rest was stones, and always covered in fine dust, despite the vestry broom.
Children in slippers were running about there, as though on a parquet floor made just for them. Their shrill voices could be heard over the booming of the bell, which diminished with the oscillations of the thick rope that hung down from the top of the bell tower and trailed on the ground. Swallows flew past uttering little cries, cutting the air with the blades of their flights, and went swiftly back into their yellow nests under the tiles of the gutter overhang. At the far end of the church, a lamp was burning, or rather, the wick of a night-light in a hanging glass. Its glow, from far away, seemed like a whitish spot trembling on the oil. A long ray of sunlight crossed the whole of the nave and deepened the darkness of the side aisles and corners.
“Where is the curé?” Madame Bovary asked a young boy who was amusing himself by shaking the turnstile on its slack pivot.
“He’s coming,” he answered.
And indeed, the door of the presbytery creaked; Abbé Bournisien appeared; the children fled headlong into the church.
“Those scamps!” murmured the clergyman. “Always the same!”
And, picking up a tattered catechism that he had stumbled over:
“They’ve no respect!”
But as soon as he saw Madame Bovary:
“Excuse me,” he said, “I didn’t recognize you.”
He thrust the catechism into his pocket and stopped, continuing to swing between two fingers the heavy key to the sacristy.
The gleam of the setting sun struck him full in the face and lightened the color of his woolen cassock, shiny at the elbows, frayed at the hem. Spots of grease and snuff followed the line of little buttons over his broad chest and grew more numerous the farther they were from his neckband, on which rested the abundant folds of his red chin; his skin was scattered with yellow blotches that disappeared among the coarse hairs of his graying beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily.
“How are you faring?” he added.
“Not well,” answered Emma; “I’m in pain.”
“Why, so am I,” replied the clergyman. “These first warm days weaken one terribly, don’t they? Well, there’s nothing to be done! We’re born to suffer, as Saint Paul says. But, now, what does Monsieur Bovary think about this?”
“Oh, him!” she said with a gesture of disdain.
“What!” replied the simple man, quite surprised; “hasn’t he prescribed something for you?”
“Ah!” said Emma; “it isn’t earthly remedies I need.”
But the curé kept looking away, into the church, where the children, on their knees, were shoving one another with their shoulders and toppling over like a row of ninepins.
“I would like to know …,” she went on.
“Just you wait, Riboudet,” shouted the clergyman angrily, “I’ll box your ears for you, you miserable scalawag!”
Then, turning to Emma:
“That’s young Boudet, the carpenter’s son; his parents are very well off and let him do as he likes. And yet he’d be a quick learner if he chose to; he’s very bright. Sometimes, as a joke, I call him Riboudet (like the hill on the way to Maromme); sometimes I even say ‘mon Riboudet.’ Ha, ha! Mont-Riboudet! The other day, I reported my little witticism to His Grace, and he laughed … he was kind enough to laugh at it.—And Monsieur Bovary, how is he?”
She did not seem to hear him. He went on:
“Always has his hands full, no doubt? Because he and I are certainly the two busiest people in the parish. But he treats the body,” he added with a heavy laugh, “while I treat the soul!”
Emma fixed her supplicating eyes on the priest.
“Yes …,” she said, “you offer comfort for every sort of misery.”
“Ah! Don’t talk to me about that, Madame Bovary! Just this morning, I had to go to Bas-Diauville for a cow that had the bloat; they thought it was bewitched. Every one of their cows, for some reason or other … Oh, I beg your pardon! Longuemarre and Boudet! Blast you! Stop that!”
And with one bound, he plunged into the church.
The boys, by now, were crowding around the high lectern, climbing onto the cantor’s stool, opening the missal; some, moving stealthily, were about to venture into the confessional. But the curé descended on them suddenly, raining down a shower of slaps right and left. Seizing them by their jacket collars, he lifted them off the ground and set them back down on their knees on the choir pavement, hard, as if he were trying to plant them there.
“Well, now,” he said when he returned to Emma, opening his large calico handkerchief and putting a corner of it between his teeth, “the farmers certainly deserve our sympathy!”
“Others do, too,” she answered.
“Assuredly! The working folk in the towns, for instance.”
“I didn’t mean them …”
“I beg your pardon! But I’ve known poor mothers of families, virtuous women I assure you, veritable saints, who hadn’t even a crust of bread.”
“But what about those women,” Emma replied (and the corners of her mouth twisted as she spoke), “those women, Monsieur le curé, who have bread, but have no …”
“Fire in winter,” said the priest.
“Oh! What does it matter?”
“What! What does it matter? It seems to me, don’t you know, that when one is warm, and well fed … because, really …”
“My God! My God!” she sighed.
“Are you feeling unwell?” he asked, coming closer with a worried look; “it’s probably something you ate, isn’t it? You should go back home, Madame Bovary, and have a little tea; that’ll pick you up; or perhaps a glass of cool water with some brown sugar.”
“Why?”
And she looked like someone waking from a dream.
“You were putting your hand to your forehead. I thought you were feeling faint.”
Then, recollecting:
“But you were asking me something, weren’t you? What was it? I can’t remember.”
“I? Oh, nothing … nothing …,” Emma repeated.
And her g
aze, which was wandering around, slowly came to rest on the old man in his cassock. They contemplated each other, face-to-face, without speaking.
“Well, Madame Bovary,” he said at last, “please excuse me, but duty before everything, you know; I must see to my little scapegraces. First Communion looms already. We’ll still be caught unprepared, I’m afraid! Which is why, from Ascension on, I keep them every Wednesday precisely one hour longer. Poor things! It’s never too early to guide them in the way of the Lord, as, in fact, He himself advised, through the mouth of His divine Son … Good health, madame; my respects to Monsieur, your husband!”
And he went into the church, genuflecting at the door.
Emma saw him disappear between the double rows of pews, walking with heavy steps, his head a little tipped toward one shoulder, his hands half open hanging by his sides.
Then she turned on her heels, in a single motion like a statue on a pivot, and set off for home. But the curé’s stern voice, the clear voices of the children, still reached her ears and continued sounding behind her:
“Are you a Christian?”
“Yes, I am a Christian.”
“What is a Christian?”
“A Christian is one who, being baptized … baptized … baptized …”
She climbed her stairs holding on to the railing, and when she reached her bedroom, she let herself fall back into an armchair.
The wan light from the windows was fading in gentle undulations. The pieces of furniture, each in its place, seemed to have grown stiller and to be sinking into an ocean of shadow. The fire was out, the clock ticked on, and Emma vaguely marveled that these things should be so calm while within herself she felt such turmoil. But between the window and the sewing table, there was little Berthe, tottering in her knitted booties, trying to reach her mother, to catch hold of the ends of her apron strings.