Part 14

Rodolphe remained standing; and Emma scarcely answered his first words of politeness.

— As for me, he said, I have had business. I have been ill.

— Seriously? she cried.

— Well, said Rodolphe, sitting down beside her on a stool, no!... It is just that I did not want to come back.

— Why?

— Do you not guess?

He looked at her once more, but with so violent a gaze that she lowered her head, blushing. He resumed:

— Emma...

— Sir! she said, drawing back a little.

— Ah! you see well, he replied in a melancholy voice, that I was right not to return; for that name, that name which fills my soul and which escaped me, you forbid it to me! Madame Bovary!... Eh! everyone calls you thus!... It is not your name, besides; it is the name of another!

He repeated:

— Of another!

And he hid his face in his hands.

— Yes, I think of you continually!... Your memory drives me to despair! Ah! pardon!... I leave you... Farewell!... I shall go far away, so far, that you will hear no more of me!... And yet..., today, I know not what force again has pushed me toward you! For one does not struggle against heaven, one does not resist the smile of angels! One lets oneself be carried away by what is beautiful, charming, adorable!

It was the first time Emma heard such things said to her; and her pride, like someone relaxing in a vapor bath, stretched itself languidly and wholly in the warmth of that language.

— But, if I did not come, he continued, if I could not see you, ah! at least I have contemplated well what surrounds you. At night, every night, I would rise again, I would come here, I would look at your house, the roof shining under the moon, the trees of the garden swaying at your window, and a little lamp, a gleam, shining through the panes, in the shadow. Ah! you little knew that there, so near and so far, was a poor wretch...

She turned toward him with a sob.

— Oh! you are good! she said.

— No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt it! Tell me so; one word! a single word!

And Rodolphe, insensibly, let himself slide from the stool to the ground; but the sound of clogs was heard in the kitchen, and the door of the room, he noticed, was not shut.

— How charitable you would be, he pursued, rising, to satisfy a whim!

It was to visit his house; he wished to know it; and, Madame Bovary seeing no inconvenience in it, they both rose, when Charles entered.

— Good day, doctor, said Rodolphe to him.

The physician, flattered by this unexpected title, overflowed with obsequiousness, and the other took advantage of it to compose himself a little.

— Madame was telling me, he said then, of her health...

Charles interrupted him: he had a thousand anxieties, in fact; his wife's oppressions were returning. Then Rodolphe asked whether exercise on horseback would not be good.

— Certainly! excellent, perfect!... There is an idea! You should follow it.

And, as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered one; she refused his offers; he did not insist; then, to justify his visit, he related that his carter, the bloodletter, still experienced dizziness.

— I will pass by, said Bovary.

— No, no, I will send him to you; we will come, it will be more convenient for you.

— Ah! very well. I thank you.

And, as soon as they were alone:

— Why do you not accept Monsieur Boulanger's proposals, which are so gracious?

She put on a sulky look, sought a thousand excuses, and finally declared that perhaps it would seem odd.

— Ah! I care not a fig! said Charles, executing a pirouette. Health before all! You are wrong!

— Eh! how do you expect me to ride, since I have no riding habit?

— You must order one! he answered.

The riding habit decided her.

When the costume was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his disposal, and that they counted on his kindness.

The next day, at noon, Rodolphe arrived before Charles's door with two gentleman's horses. One bore pink pompoms at the ears and a woman's saddle in deerskin.

Rodolphe had put on soft long boots, saying to himself that no doubt she had never seen the like; indeed, Emma was charmed by his figure, when he appeared on the landing with his great velvet coat and his white knit breeches. She was ready, she awaited him.

Justin slipped out of the pharmacy to see her, and the apothecary also stirred himself. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger recommendations:

— A mishap comes so quickly! Take care! Your horses perhaps are high-spirited!

She heard a noise above her head: it was Félicité drumming on the windowpanes to amuse little Berthe. The child sent a kiss from afar; her mother answered her with a sign of her riding-whip handle.

— Good ride! cried Monsieur Homais. Prudence, above all! prudence!

And he waved his newspaper as he watched them depart.

As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse broke into a gallop. Rodolphe galloped at her side. At moments they exchanged a word. Her face somewhat lowered, her hand high and her right arm outstretched, she abandoned herself to the cadence of the movement that rocked her on the saddle.

At the foot of the slope, Rodolphe loosened the reins; they set off together, in a single bound; then, suddenly, at the top, the horses stopped, and her great blue veil fell back.

It was the first days of October. There was mist over the countryside. Vapors stretched along the horizon, between the outlines of the hills; and others, tearing, rose, lost themselves. Sometimes, in an opening of the clouds, under a ray of sun, one glimpsed in the distance the roofs of Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the courtyards, the walls, and the church steeple. Emma half-closed her eyelids to recognize her house, and never had this poor village where she lived seemed so small to her. From the height where they were, the whole valley appeared like an immense pale lake, evaporating into the air. The clumps of trees, here and there, jutted out like black rocks; and the tall lines of poplars, surpassing the mist, figured shores that the wind stirred.

Beside them, on the lawn, between the firs, a brown light circulated in the tepid atmosphere. The earth, reddish-brown like tobacco powder, deadened the sound of steps; and, with the tips of their shoes, walking, the horses pushed before them fallen pine cones.

Rodolphe and Emma thus followed the edge of the wood. She turned aside from time to time to avoid his gaze, and then she saw only the trunks of the firs aligned, whose continual succession slightly dazzled her. The horses breathed. The saddle leather creaked.

At the moment they entered the forest, the sun appeared.

— God protect us! said Rodolphe.

— You think so? said she.

— Forward! forward! he resumed. And he clicked his tongue. The two beasts ran.

Long ferns, at the edge of the path, caught in Emma's stirrup. Rodolphe, while going, leaned and drew them out as he went. At other times, to push aside branches, he passed near her, and Emma felt his knee brush her leg. The sky had become blue. The leaves did not move. There were great spaces full of heather all in flower; and stretches of violets alternated with the tangle of trees, which were gray, fawn, or golden, according to the diversity of their foliage. Often one heard, under the bushes, a little beating of wings slip, or else the raucous and soft cry of crows, who flew off among the oaks.

They descended. Rodolphe tied the horses. She went ahead, on the moss, between the ruts.

But her too-long gown embarrassed her, though she wore it hitched up at the back, and Rodolphe, walking behind her, contemplated between this black cloth and the black boot, the delicacy of her white stocking, which seemed to him something of her nakedness.

She stopped.

— I am tired, said she.

— Come, try again! he resumed. Courage!

Then, a hundred steps further, she stopped again; and, through her veil, which from her man's hat descended obliquely upon her hips, one distinguished her face in a bluish transparency, as if she had been swimming beneath floods of azure.

— Where are we going, then?

He answered nothing. She breathed in a jerky way. Rodolphe cast his eyes around and bit his mustache.

They arrived at a wider spot, where one had felled young trees. They sat on an overturned tree trunk, and Rodolphe began to speak to her of his love.

He did not at first frighten her with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.

Emma listened, head low, and while moving, with the tip of her foot, shavings on the ground.

But, at this phrase:

— Is it that our destinies now are not common.

— Eh no! she answered. You know it well. It is impossible.

She rose to leave. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having considered him some minutes with an amorous and all-humid eye, she said quickly:

— Ah! there, let us speak no more of it... Where are the horses? Let us return.

He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated:

— Where are the horses? where are the horses?

Then, smiling a strange smile and with fixed pupils, teeth clenched, he advanced, spreading his arms. She drew back trembling. She stammered:

— Oh! you frighten me! you hurt me! Let us go.

— Since it must be, he resumed, changing countenance. And he at once became respectful again, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm. They returned. He said:

— What ailed you then? Why? I did not understand! You mistake yourself, no doubt? You are in my soul like a madonna on a pedestal, in a high, solid, immaculate place. But I need you to live! I need your eyes, your voice, your thought. Be my friend, my sister, my angel!

And he lengthened his arm and encircled her waist with it. She tried to disengage herself softly. He supported her thus, while walking.

But they heard the two horses browsing the foliage.

— Oh! again, said Rodolphe. Let us not go! Stay!

He drew her further, around a little pond, where duckweed made a greenness on the waves. Withered water lilies held themselves motionless among the rushes. At the noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped to hide.

— I am wrong, I am wrong, said she. I am mad to listen to you.

— Why?... Emma! Emma!

— Oh! Rodolphe... slowly breathed the young woman, leaning on his shoulder.

The cloth of her gown caught on the velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, which swelled with a sigh; and, fainting, all in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she abandoned herself.

The shadows of evening descended; the horizontal sun, passing between the branches, dazzled her eyes. Here and there, all around her, on the leaves or on the ground, luminous spots trembled, as if hummingbirds, in flying, had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beatings recommenced, and the blood circulate in her flesh like a river of milk. Then she heard far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, a vague and prolonged cry, a voice that dragged, and she listened to it silently, mingling like a music with the last vibrations of her moved nerves. Rodolphe, the cigar between his teeth, mended with his penknife one of the two broken bridles.

They returned to Yonville, by the same road. They saw again on the mud the traces of their horses, side by side, and the same bushes, the same pebbles in the grass. Nothing around them had changed; and yet, for her, something had occurred more considerable than if the mountains had shifted. Rodolphe, from time to time, leaned and took her hand to kiss it.

She was charming, on horseback! Straight, with her slender waist, the knee bent on the mane of her beast and a little colored by the open air, in the redness of the evening.

Entering Yonville, she caracoled on the paving stones. She was watched from the windows.

Her husband, at dinner, found her looking well; but she seemed not to hear him when he inquired about her ride; and she remained elbow on the edge of her plate, between the two candles that burned.

— Emma! said he.

— What?

— Well, I passed this afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre's; he has an old mare still quite fine, only a little foundered, and which one could have, I am sure, for a hundred ecus...

He added:

— Thinking even that it would please you, I reserved it..., I bought it... Did I do well? Tell me then.

She moved her head in sign of assent; then, a quarter of an hour later:

— Are you going out this evening? she asked.

— Yes. Why?

— Oh! nothing, nothing, my friend.

And, as soon as she was rid of Charles, she went up to lock herself in her room.

At first, it was like a dizziness; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she still felt the clasp of his arms, while the foliage trembled and the rushes whistled.

But, on perceiving herself in the glass, she was astonished at her face. Never had she had eyes so large, so black, nor of such depth. Something subtle spread over her person transfigured her.

She repeated to herself: "I have a lover! a lover!" delighting in this idea as in that of another puberty that would have come to her. She was going then to possess at last those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired. She entered into something marvelous where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium; a bluish immensity surrounded her, the summits of feeling sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only far off, down below, in the shadow, between the intervals of those heights.

Then she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and the lyric legion of those adulterous women set to singing in her memory with voices of sisters that charmed her. She became herself like a true part of those imaginings and realized the long dream of her youth, in considering herself in that type of lover she had so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of vengeance. Had she not suffered enough! But she triumphed now, and love, so long contained, sprang forth wholly with joyful boilings. She savored it without remorse, without worry, without trouble.

The next day passed in a new sweetness. They made vows to each other. She told him her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with his kisses; and she asked him, contemplating him with half-closed lids, to call her again by her name and to repeat that he loved her. It was in the forest, as the eve, under a clog-maker's hut. The walls were of straw and the roof descended so low that one had to keep bent. They were seated one against the other, on a bed of dry leaves.

From that day on, they wrote to each other regularly every evening. Emma carried her letter to the end of the garden, near the river, in a fissure of the terrace. Rodolphe came to fetch it there and placed another, which she always accused of being too short.

One morning, when Charles had gone out before dawn, she was seized by the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. One could arrive promptly at La Huchette, stay an hour and be back in Yonville while everyone would still be asleep. This idea made her pant with covetousness, and she soon found herself in the middle of the meadow, where she walked with rapid steps, without looking behind her.

Day began to appear. Emma, from afar, recognized her lover's house, whose two swallow-tailed weathervanes stood out in black against the pale twilight.

Beyond the farmyard, there was a main building which must be the château. She entered it, as if the walls, at her approach, had parted of themselves. A straight grand staircase rose toward a corridor. Emma turned the latch of a door, and suddenly, at the back of the room, she perceived a man who was sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She gave a cry.

— Here you are! here you are! he repeated. How did you manage to come?... Ah! your gown is wet!

— I love you! she answered, passing her arms around his neck.

This first boldness having succeeded, each time now that Charles went out early, Emma dressed quickly and descended on wolf's paws the steps that led to the edge of the water.

But, when the cow plank was raised, she had to follow the walls that lined the river; the bank was slippery; she clung with her hand, so as not to fall, to the tufts of faded wild radish. Then she took across plowed fields, where she sank, stumbled and entangled her thin boots. Her scarf, tied on her head, fluttered in the wind in the grass; she was afraid of the oxen, she began to run; she arrived breathless, cheeks pink, and exhaling from all her person a fresh perfume of sap, of greenness and of open air. Rodolphe, at that hour, was still sleeping. It was like a spring morning that entered his room.

The yellow curtains, along the windows, let pass softly a heavy blond light. Emma groped, blinking her eyes, while the drops of dew suspended at her locks made like an aureole of topazes all around her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him and took her on his heart.

Afterward, she examined the apartment, she opened the drawers of the furniture, she combed herself with his comb and looked at herself in the shaving mirror. Often even, she put between her teeth the stem of a large pipe that was on the night table, among lemons and pieces of sugar, near a carafe of water.

They needed a good quarter of an hour for the farewells. Then Emma wept; she would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than her pushed her toward him, so well that one day, seeing her arrive unexpectedly, he furrowed his brow like someone annoyed.

— What is the matter with you? said she. Do you suffer? Speak to me!

Finally he declared, with a serious air, that her visits were becoming imprudent and that she was compromising herself.

X

Little by little, these fears of Rodolphe gained her. Love had intoxicated her at first, and she had thought of nothing beyond. But, now that he was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose something of him, or even that he might be troubled. When she returned from his place, she cast anxious glances all around, spying each form that passed on the horizon and each dormer of the village from which one could perceive her. She listened to steps, cries, the noise of plows; and she stopped paler and more trembling than the leaves of the poplars that swayed above her head.

One morning, as she was returning thus, she thought she suddenly distinguished the long barrel of a carbine that seemed to aim at her. It passed obliquely beyond the edge of a small barrel, half buried among the grasses, on the margin of a ditch. Emma, ready to faint from terror, advanced however, and a man came out of the barrel, like those sausage-devils that rise from the bottom of boxes. He had gaiters buckled to the knees, his cap pulled down to the eyes, trembling lips and a red nose. It was Captain Binet, lying in wait for wild ducks.

— You should have spoken from afar! he cried. When one perceives a gun, one must always give warning.

The tax collector, thereby, tried to disguise the fear he had just felt; for, a prefectoral order having forbidden the hunting of ducks otherwise than by boat, Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, found himself in violation. Also he believed each minute to hear the rural guard arrive. But this uneasiness irritated his pleasure, and, alone in his barrel, he applauded himself for his good fortune and his roguery.

At the sight of Emma, he appeared relieved of a great weight, and at once, opening conversation:

— It is not warm, it bites!

Emma answered nothing. He pursued:

— And you are out very early?

— Yes, said she, stammering; I come from the nurse where my child is.

— Ah! very well! very well! As for me, such as you see me, from the break of day I am here; but the weather is so beastly, that unless one has the feather right at the tip...

— Good evening, Monsieur Binet, she interrupted, turning on her heels.

— Your servant, Madame, he replied in a dry tone.

And he re-entered his barrel.

Emma repented having left the tax collector so abruptly. No doubt, he was going to make unfavorable conjectures. The nurse story was the worst excuse, everyone at Yonville well knowing that little Bovary, for a year, had returned to her parents. Besides, no one lived in the surroundings; this path led only to La Huchette; Binet therefore had guessed where she came from, and he would not be silent, he would gossip, that was certain! She remained until the evening torturing her mind in all imaginable projects of lies, and having constantly before her eyes that imbecile with his game bag.

Charles, after dinner, seeing her thoughtful, wished, by distraction, to take her to the apothecary's; and the first person she perceived in the pharmacy, it was again him, the tax collector! He was standing before the counter, lit by the light of the red jar, and he said:

— Give me, if you please, half an ounce of vitriol.

— Justin, cried the apothecary, bring us the sulfuric acid.

Then, to Emma, who wished to go up into Madame Homais's apartment:

— No, stay, it is not worth it, she is coming down. Warm yourself at the stove while waiting... Excuse me... Good day, doctor (for the pharmacist much liked to pronounce this word doctor, as if addressing it to another, he had made something of the pomp he found there rebound upon himself)... But take care not to overturn the mortars! go rather fetch the chairs from the little room; you know well one does not disturb the armchairs of the salon.

And, to put his armchair back in place, Homais rushed out from behind the counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.

— Sugar acid? said the pharmacist disdainfully. I do not know, I ignore it! You perhaps want oxalic acid? It is oxalic, is it not?

Binet explained that he needed a mordant to compose himself a copper water with which to remove rust from various hunting fittings. Emma started. The pharmacist began to say:

— Indeed, the weather is not favorable, because of the humidity.

— However, resumed the tax collector with a knowing air, there are persons who arrange themselves with it.

She was suffocating.

— Give me again...

— Will he never go! she thought.

— Half an ounce of rosin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and three half-ounces of animal black, if you please, to clean the varnished leathers of my equipment.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”