Part 16

He was there, moaning under his heavy blankets, pale, with a long beard, sunken eyes, and, from time to time, turning his sweating head on the dirty pillow where the flies kept alighting. Madame Bovary came to see him. She brought him cloths for his poultices, and consoled him, encouraged him. Besides, he lacked no company, especially on market days, when the peasants around him knocked the billiard balls about, fenced with the cues, smoked, drank, sang, and bawled.

— How are you? they said, slapping him on the shoulder. Ah! you're not so proud now, it seems! but it's your own fault. You ought to do this, do that.

And they told him stories of people who had all been cured by remedies other than his; then, by way of consolation, they added:

— It's just that you pamper yourself too much! get up, do! you're coddling yourself like a king! Ah! never mind, old joker! you don't smell good!

The gangrene, in fact, was climbing higher and higher. Bovary himself was sick over it. He came every hour, at every moment. Hippolyte looked at him with eyes full of terror and stammered, sobbing:

— When will I be cured?... Ah! save me!... How wretched I am! how wretched I am!

And the doctor went away, always recommending a strict diet.

— Don't you listen to him, my boy, Mother Lefrançois would say; they've martyred you quite enough already? you'll weaken yourself further. Here, swallow this!

And she offered him some good broth, a slice of leg of mutton, a bit of bacon, and now and then small glasses of brandy which he had not the courage to raise to his lips.

Abbé Bournisien, learning that he was growing worse, sent word asking to see him. He began by pitying him for his suffering, while declaring that he ought to rejoice at it, since it was the will of the Lord, and promptly take advantage of the occasion to be reconciled with heaven.

— For, said the ecclesiastic in a fatherly tone, you have rather neglected your duties; you were rarely seen at divine service; how many years is it since you approached the holy table? I understand that your occupations, that the whirl of the world, may have drawn you away from care for your salvation. But now is the hour to reflect upon it. Do not despair, however; I have known great sinners who, on the point of appearing before God (you are not yet there, I know well), had implored his mercy, and who certainly died in the best of dispositions. Let us hope that, like them, you will give us good example! So, as a precaution, who would prevent you from reciting morning and evening a 'Hail Mary, full of grace,' and an 'Our Father, who art in heaven'? Yes, do that! for my sake, to oblige me. What does it cost?... Do you promise me?

The poor devil promised. The curé came back on following days. He chatted with the innkeeper and even told anecdotes mingled with jests and puns that Hippolyte did not understand. Then, as soon as the circumstance permitted, he fell back upon matters of religion, assuming a suitable countenance.

His zeal appeared to succeed; for soon the clubfoot expressed the wish to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours, if he were cured: to which M. Bournisien replied that he saw no objection; two precautions were better than one. There was no risk.

The apothecary grew indignant at what he called the priest's maneuvers; they were harmful, he claimed, to Hippolyte's recovery, and he repeated to Madame Lefrançois:

— Leave him alone! Leave him alone! you're perturbing his mind with your mysticism!

But the good woman would hear no more of it. He was the cause of everything. Out of contrariness, she even hung at the sick man's bedside a holy-water font quite full, with a sprig of boxwood.

Yet religion no more than surgery seemed to help him, and the invincible rot kept mounting always from the extremities toward the belly. They might vary the potions and change the poultices as they would, the muscles detached themselves further every day, and at last Charles answered with an affirmative nod when Mother Lefrançois asked him whether, in desperation, she might not send for M. Canivet, of Neufchâtel, who was a celebrity.

Doctor of medicine, aged fifty, enjoying a good position and sure of himself, the colleague did not hesitate to laugh disdainfully when he uncovered that leg gangrened to the knee. Then, having flatly declared that it must be amputated, he went off to the chemist's to rail against the asses who could have reduced a poor man to such a state. Shaking M. Homais by the button of his redingote, he vociferated in the pharmacy:

— These are inventions from Paris! Here are the ideas of those gentlemen of the Capital! it's like strabismus, chloroform and lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the government ought to forbid! But they want to show off, and they stuff you with remedies without troubling about the consequences. We are not so clever as that, we others; we are not men of science, dandies, pretty fellows; we are practitioners, healers, and we should not dream of operating on someone who is doing marvelously well! To straighten clubfeet! can one straighten clubfeet? it's as if one wanted, for example, to make a hunchback straight!

Homais suffered on hearing this speech, and he hid his discomfort under a courtier's smile, having need to humor M. Canivet, whose prescriptions sometimes reached as far as Yonville; so he did not take Bovary's defense, made not even an observation, and, abandoning his principles, sacrificed his dignity to the more serious interests of his trade.

This amputation of the thigh by Doctor Canivet was a considerable event in the village! All the inhabitants, that day, had risen earlier than usual, and the Grande-Rue, though full of people, had something lugubrious about it as if it had been a capital execution. They discussed Hippolyte's illness at the grocer's; the shops sold nothing, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's wife, did not stir from her window, in her impatience to see the operator come.

He arrived in his cabriolet, which he drove himself. But, the spring on the right side having in time sunk under the weight of his corpulence, it came about that the carriage leaned a little as it went, and one could see on the other cushion beside him a large box, covered with red basan, whose three brass clasps shone magistrally.

When he entered like a whirlwind under the porch of the Lion d'or, the doctor, crying very loud, ordered his horse unharnessed, then went into the stable to see whether it was eating its oats well; for, on arriving at his patients', he occupied himself first with his mare and his cabriolet. It was even said in this connection: 'Ah! M. Canivet, he's an original!' And he was the more esteemed for this unshakable composure. The universe might have perished to the last man, he would not have failed in the least of his habits.

Homais presented himself.

— I'm counting on you, said the doctor. Are we ready? Let's go!

But the apothecary, blushing, confessed that he was too sensitive to assist at such an operation.

— When one is a mere spectator, said he, the imagination, you know, is struck! And then I have the nervous system so...

— Nonsense! interrupted Canivet, you seem to me, on the contrary, prone to apoplexy. And, besides, that doesn't surprise me; for you gentlemen apothecaries are continually stuck in your shop, which must end by altering your constitution. Look at me, rather: every day I get up at four, I shave with cold water (I never catch cold), and I wear no flannel, I take no cold, the chest is good! I live now one way, now another, like a philosopher, at the hazard of the fork. That's why I'm not delicate like you, and it's all the same to me to carve up a Christian as the first fowl that comes along. After that, you'll say, habit..., habit!

Then, without any regard for Hippolyte, who was sweating with anguish between his sheets, these gentlemen engaged in a conversation wherein the apothecary compared the coolness of a surgeon to that of a general; and this comparison was agreeable to Canivet, who launched out in words upon the demands of his art. He considered it a priesthood, though the health officers dishonored it. Finally, returning to the patient, he examined the bandages brought by Homais, the same that had appeared at the clubfoot, and asked for someone to hold the limb. They sent for Lestiboudois, and M. Canivet, having rolled up his sleeves, passed into the billiard room, while the apothecary remained with Artémise and the innkeeper, both paler than their aprons, and ear strained toward the door.

Bovary, meanwhile, dared not stir from his house. He kept below, in the room, seated in the corner of the fireplace without fire, chin on his chest, hands joined, eyes fixed. What a misadventure! he thought, what a disappointment! Yet he had taken all imaginable precautions. Fate had meddled with it. No matter! if Hippolyte later came to die, it would be he who had murdered him. And then, what reason would he give in his visits, when questioned? Perhaps, however, he had been mistaken in something? He searched, found nothing. But the most famous surgeons were mistaken well enough! That is what no one would ever believe! on the contrary, they would laugh, wag their tongues! It would spread as far as Forges! as far as Neufchâtel! as far as Rouen! everywhere! Who knows if colleagues would not write against him? A polemic would follow, he would have to answer in the newspapers. Hippolyte even might bring suit against him. He saw himself dishonored, ruined, lost! And his imagination, assailed by a multitude of hypotheses, tossed amid them like an empty barrel carried out to sea and rolling on the waves.

Emma, facing him, looked at him; she did not share his humiliation, she felt another: it was at having imagined that such a man could amount to anything, as if twenty times already she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity.

Charles was walking back and forth, in the room. His boots creaked on the parquet.

— Sit down, said she, you're annoying me!

He sat down again.

How then had she (she who was so intelligent!) managed to be mistaken once more? And, besides, by what deplorable mania thus to have wrecked her existence in continual sacrifices? She recalled all her instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the basenesses of marriage, of housekeeping, her dreams falling into the mud like wounded swallows, all she had desired, all she had denied herself, all she might have had! and why? why?

In the midst of the silence that filled the village, a piercing cry crossed the air. Bovary turned pale to fainting. She frowned with a nervous gesture, then continued. It was for him, however, for that being, for that man who understood nothing, who felt nothing! for he was there, quite tranquilly, and without even suspecting that the ridiculousness of his name was henceforth to sully her as it did him. She had made efforts to love him, and she had repented in tears at having yielded to another.

— But it was perhaps a valgus! suddenly exclaimed Bovary, who was meditating.

At the unforeseen shock of that phrase falling upon her thought like a lead ball in a silver dish, Emma, starting, raised her head to guess what he meant; and they looked at one another in silence, almost dumbfounded at seeing each other, so far were they separated by their consciousness. Charles regarded her with the troubled gaze of a drunken man, while listening, motionless, to the last cries of the amputee which followed one another in dragging modulations, broken by sharp jerks, like the distant howling of some beast being slaughtered. Emma bit her livid lips, and, rolling between her fingers one of the branches of the coral she had broken, fixed upon Charles the burning point of her pupils, like two arrows of fire ready to fly. Everything in him irritated her now, his face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his very existence finally. She repented, as of a crime, her past virtue, and what remained of it crumbled under the furious blows of her pride. She delighted in all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover came back to her with vertiginous attractions; she flung her soul into it, carried toward that image by a new enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as detached from her life, as absent forever, as impossible and annihilated, as if he were about to die and were agonizing before her eyes.

There was a noise of steps on the pavement. Charles looked; and, through the lowered blind, he perceived at the edge of the market, in full sunlight, Doctor Canivet wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. Homais, behind him, carried in his hand a large red box, and they were both making their way toward the pharmacy.

Then, by sudden tenderness and discouragement, Charles turned toward his wife, saying:

— Do kiss me, my dear!

— Leave me alone! she said, all red with anger.

— What is the matter with you? what is it? he repeated, stupefied. Calm yourself! pull yourself together!... You know well that I love you!... come!

— Enough! she cried with a terrible air.

And escaping from the room, Emma shut the door so hard that the barometer bounded from the wall and smashed on the floor.

Charles collapsed in his armchair, distraught, seeking what she could have, imagining a nervous illness, weeping, and vaguely feeling circulate around him something fatal and incomprehensible.

When Rodolphe, in the evening, arrived in the garden, he found his mistress waiting for him at the foot of the steps, on the first stair. They embraced, and all their rancor melted like snow under the heat of that kiss.

XII

They began to love one another again. Often even, in the middle of the day, Emma would suddenly write to him; then, through the panes, would make a sign to Justin, who, quickly untying his mop, flew off to La Huchette. Rodolphe arrived; it was to tell him that she was bored, that her husband was odious and her existence dreadful!

— Can I help it? he cried one day, impatient.

— Ah! if you would!...

She was sitting on the ground, between his knees, her bands unbound, her gaze lost.

— What then? said Rodolphe.

She sighed.

— We would go live elsewhere..., somewhere...

— You are mad, truly! he said laughing. Is it possible?

She came back to this; he pretended not to understand and turned the conversation.

What he did not understand was all that disturbance in a thing as simple as love. She had a motive, a reason, and as an auxiliary to her attachment.

This tenderness, in fact, grew greater each day under the repulsion of her husband. The more she gave herself to the one, the more she execrated the other; never had Charles seemed to her so disagreeable, to have fingers so square, mind so heavy, ways so common, as after her rendezvous with Rodolphe, when they were together. Then, while playing the wife and the virtuous, she inflamed herself at the idea of that head whose black hair turned in a curl toward the tanned forehead, of that figure at once so robust and so elegant, of that man finally who possessed so much experience in reason, so much impetuosity in desire! It was for him that she filed her nails with a goldsmith's care, and that there was never enough cold-cream on her skin, nor patchouli in her handkerchiefs. She loaded herself with bracelets, rings, necklaces. When he was to come, she filled with roses her two large blue-glass vases, and arranged her apartment and her person like a courtesan awaiting a prince. The servant had to be continually bleaching linen; and, all day long, Félicité did not stir from the kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept her company, watched her work.

Elbow on the long board where she ironed, he avidly considered all those women's things spread around him: the calico petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawstring trousers, wide at the hips and narrowing toward the bottom.

— What is it for? asked the young boy, passing his hand over the crinoline or the fasteners.

— Haven't you ever seen anything? answered Félicité laughing. As if your mistress, Madame Homais, doesn't wear the like.

— Ah! yes indeed! Madame Homais!

And he added in a meditative tone:

— Is she a lady like Madame?

But Félicité grew impatient at seeing him hang about her thus. She was six years older, and Théodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, was beginning to court her.

— Leave me be! she said, moving her starch pot. Go pound almonds instead; you're always rummaging around the women; wait till you meddle with that, wicked imp, till you've hair on your chin.

— Come now, don't be angry, I'm going to do your boots for you.

And at once he reached from the doorframe Emma's shoes, all caked with mud — the mud of the rendezvous — which came off in powder under his fingers, and which he watched rise softly in a sunbeam.

— How afraid you are of spoiling them! said the cook, who did not stand on such ceremony when she cleaned them herself, because Madame, as soon as the cloth was no longer fresh, gave them to her.

Emma had a quantity of them in her wardrobe, and wasted them as they came, without Charles ever permitting himself the least remark.

Thus it was that he laid out three hundred francs for a wooden leg which she judged fitting to give Hippolyte as a present. The shank was lined with cork, and there were spring joints, a complicated mechanism covered by a black trouser, terminated by a varnished boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use so fine a leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to procure him another, more convenient. The doctor, of course, again bore the cost of this purchase.

So the stable boy by degrees took up his trade again. He was seen, as formerly, traversing the village, and when Charles heard from afar, on the pavements, the dry sound of his stick, he quickly took another road.

It was M. Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had charged himself with the order; this furnished him the occasion to frequent Emma. He talked with her of the new unpackings from Paris, of a thousand feminine curiosities, showed himself very obliging, and never demanded money. Emma abandoned herself to this facility of satisfying all her whims. Thus, she wished to have, to give to Rodolphe, a very handsome riding-crop which was to be found in Rouen in an umbrella shop. M. Lheureux, the following week, set it on her table.

But the next day he presented himself at her house with a bill of two hundred seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was much embarrassed: all the drawers of the desk were empty; they owed more than a fortnight to Lestiboudois, two quarters to the servant, a quantity of other things besides, and Bovary impatiently awaited the remittance from M. Derozerays, who had the custom, each year, of paying him toward Saint-Peter's day.

She succeeded at first in putting Lheureux off; at last he lost patience; he was being pursued, his capital was out, and, if he did not collect on some, he would be forced to take back all the goods she had.

— Eh! take them back! said Emma.

— Oh! it's a joke! replied he. Only, I regret but the riding-crop. My word! I'll ask it of Monsieur.

— No! no! she said.

— Ah! I've got you! thought Lheureux.

And, sure of his discovery, he went out repeating half under his breath and with his habitual little whistle:

— Very well! we shall see! we shall see!

She was dreaming how to get out of it, when the cook entering, set on the mantelpiece a small roll of blue paper, from M. Derozerays. Emma sprang at it, opened it. There were fifteen napoleons. It was the account. She heard Charles on the stairs; she threw the gold to the bottom of her drawer and took the key.

Three days later, Lheureux reappeared.

— I have an arrangement to propose to you, said he; if, instead of the agreed sum, you cared to take...

— There it is, said she, placing fourteen napoleons in his hand.

The shopkeeper was stupefied. Then, to hide his disappointment, he lavished excuses and offers of service which Emma refused all; then she remained a few minutes fingering in the pocket of her apron the two hundred-sou pieces he had given her back. She promised herself to economize, in order to repay later...

— Ah bah! she thought, he'll think no more of it.

Besides the vermeil-headed riding-crop, Rodolphe had received a seal with the motto: _Amor nel cor_; further, a scarf to make himself a neck-wrap, and finally a cigar-case exactly like the one the Vicomte had once dropped on the road and which Emma kept. Yet these gifts humiliated him. He refused several; she insisted, and Rodolphe ended by obeying, finding her tyrannical and too encroaching.

Then she had strange ideas:

— When midnight strikes, said she, you will think of me!

And, if he confessed to not having thought of it, there were abundant reproaches, always ending in the eternal word:

— Do you love me?

— But yes, I love you! he answered.

— A great deal?

— Certainly!

— You've loved no others, eh?

— Do you think you had me a virgin? he exclaimed laughing.

Emma wept, and he strove to console her, embellishing his protestations with puns.

— Oh! it's that I love you! she resumed; I love you to not being able to do without you, do you know? I have sometimes desires to see you again where all the angers of love tear me. I ask myself: 'Where is he? Perhaps he speaks to other women? They smile at him, he draws near...' Oh! no, isn't it so, none please you? There are some more beautiful; but, I know better how to love! I am your servant and your concubine! You are my king, my idol! you are good! you are handsome! you are intelligent! you are strong!

He had so often heard these things said, that they had for him nothing original. Emma resembled all mistresses; and the charm of novelty, little by little falling like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, which always has the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man so full of practice, the dissimilarity of sentiments beneath the parity of expressions. Because libertine or venal lips had murmured to him similar phrases, he believed but weakly in the candor of those; one must discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow by the emptiest metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his pains, and human speech is like a cracked kettle where we beat melodies to make bears dance, when we would fain move the stars.

But, with that superiority of criticism belonging to him who, in whatever engagement, holds himself back, Rodolphe perceived in this love other enjoyments to exploit. He judged all modesty inconvenient. He treated her without ceremony. He made of her something supple and corrupted. It was a sort of idiotic attachment full of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that dulled him; and her soul sank into this intoxication and drowned there, shriveled, like the Duke of Clarence in his barrel of malmsey.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”