Part 18

Girard put on his new smock, tied his handkerchief around the apricots, and, walking with heavy strides in his large iron-clamped wooden shoes, quietly took the road to Yonville.

When he arrived at her house, Madame Bovary was arranging a bundle of linen on the kitchen table with Félicité.

"Here," said the servant, "is what our master sends you."

She was seized with apprehension, and, while searching for some small change in her pocket, she regarded the peasant with a wild eye, while he looked at her in turn with astonishment, not understanding how such a gift could so move anyone. At last he went out. Félicité could contain herself no longer; she ran into the sitting room as if to carry in the apricots, overturned the basket, tore off the leaves, found the letter, opened it, and, as if there were a terrible fire behind her, Emma began to flee to her room, utterly terrified.

Charles was there; she caught sight of him; he spoke to her, she heard nothing, and she continued briskly up the stairs; breathless, distraught, dizzy, and still holding that horrible sheet of paper, which crackled in her fingers like a sheet of tin. On the second floor, she stopped before the attic door, which was closed.

Then she tried to calm herself; she remembered the letter; she must finish it, she dared not. Besides, where? how? someone would see her.

"Ah no, here," she thought, "I shall be safe."

Emma pushed the door and entered.

The slate roof let fall straight down a heavy heat that pressed her temples and stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed dormer window, drew back its bolt, and the dazzling light sprang forth at a bound.

Opposite, above the rooftops, the open country spread as far as the eye could see. Below her, the village square was empty; the pebbles of the pavement glittered, the weathervanes of the houses stood motionless; from the corner of the street, there rose from a lower floor a kind of snoring with strident modulations. It was Binet turning his lathe.

She had leaned against the dormer frame, and she reread the letter with sneers of anger. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the more her ideas became confused. She saw him again, she heard him, she clasped him with both arms; and heartbeats that struck her under the breast like great blows of a battering ram quickened one after another, at uneven intervals. She cast her eyes around her with the wish that the earth would crumble. Why not end it? What held her back then? She was free. And she stepped forward, she looked at the paving stones, saying to herself:

"Come! come!"

The ray of light that rose directly from below drew the weight of her body toward the abyss. It seemed to her that the square pavement, oscillating, rose along the walls, and that the floor tilted at the end, like a ship that rolls. She stood quite at the edge, almost suspended, surrounded by a great space. The blue of the sky invaded her, the air circulated in her hollow head, she had only to yield, only to let herself be taken; and the snoring of the lathe did not cease, like a furious voice that called her.

"My wife! my wife!" cried Charles.

She stopped.

"Where are you then? Come!"

The thought that she had just escaped death almost made her faint with terror; she closed her eyes; then she shuddered at the touch of a hand on her sleeve: it was Félicité.

"Monsieur is waiting for you, Madame; the soup is served."

And she had to go down! she had to sit at table!

She tried to eat. The morsels choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as if to examine its darns and truly wished to apply herself to that task, to count the threads of the cloth. Suddenly, the memory of the letter came back to her. Had she lost it then? Where to find it? But she felt such weariness in her mind that she could never invent a pretext to leave the table. Then she had grown cowardly; she was afraid of Charles; he knew everything, surely! Indeed, he pronounced these words, singularly:

"We are not soon, it seems, to see M. Rodolphe."

"Who told you so?" she said, starting.

"Who told me?" he replied, a little surprised at this abrupt tone; "it is Girard, whom I met just now at the door of the Café Français. He has gone on a journey, or is to go."

She gave a sob.

"What is there to astonish you? He goes away thus from time to time to amuse himself, and, faith! I approve. When one has money and is a bachelor!... Besides, our friend enjoys himself finely; he is a joker. M. Langlois told me..."

He was silent out of propriety, because of the servant who was coming in.

The latter replaced in the basket the apricots scattered on the shelf; Charles, without noticing his wife's redness, had them brought to him, took one and bit into it.

"Oh! perfect!" he said. "Here, taste."

And he held out the basket, which she gently pushed away.

"Smell it: what a scent!" he said, passing it under her nose several times.

"I am suffocating!" she cried, springing up.

But, by an effort of will, the spasm disappeared; then:

"It is nothing!" she said, "it is nothing! it is nervous! Sit down, eat!"

For she dreaded lest they should question her, care for her, not leave her again.

Charles, to obey, had sat down again, and he spat into his hand the apricot stones, which he then deposited in his plate.

Suddenly, a blue tilbury passed at a full trot across the square. Emma uttered a cry and fell stiff to the ground, backward.

In fact, Rodolphe, after much reflection, had decided to set out for Rouen. Now, as there is, from La Huchette to Buchy, no other road than that through Yonville, he had had to cross the village, and Emma had recognized him by the glow of the lanterns that cut like lightning through the dusk.

The chemist, at the uproar in the house, rushed in. The table, with all the plates, was overturned; sauce, meat, knives, the saltcellar and the oil cruet littered the room; Charles called for help; Berthe, terrified, cried; and Félicité, whose hands trembled, was unlacing Madame, who had convulsive movements along her body.

"I am going," said the apothecary, "to fetch in my laboratory a little aromatic vinegar."

Then, as she reopened her eyes breathing the flask:

"I was sure of it," he said; "that would wake the dead."

"Speak to us!" said Charles, "speak to us! Recover yourself! It is I, your Charles who loves you! Do you know me? See, here is your little girl: kiss her then!"

The child held out her arms to her mother to cling to her neck. But, turning her head away, Emma said in a broken voice:

"No, no... no one!"

She fainted again. They carried her to her bed.

She lay stretched out, mouth open, eyelids closed, hands flat, motionless, and white as a wax statue. From her eyes flowed two streams of tears that slowly coursed down the pillow.

Charles, standing, kept to the back of the alcove, and the chemist, near him, kept that meditative silence which is proper to have in the serious occasions of life.

"Be reassured," he said, pushing his elbow against him; "I believe the paroxysm is past."

"Yes, she rests a little now!" replied Charles, who watched her sleep. "Poor woman!... poor woman!... there she has fallen back again!"

Then Homais asked how this accident had occurred. Charles answered that it had seized her suddenly, while she was eating apricots.

"Extraordinary!..." resumed the chemist. "But it could be that the apricots caused the syncope! There are natures so impressionable to certain odors! and this would even be a fine question to study, as much under the pathological as under the physiological aspect. The priests knew their importance, they who have always mingled aromatics with their ceremonies. It is to stupefy the understanding and provoke ecstasies, a thing moreover easy to obtain among persons of the female sex, who are more delicate than others. One cites some who faint at the smell of burnt horn, of fresh bread..."

"Take care not to wake her!" Bovary said in a low voice.

"And not only," continued the apothecary, "are humans exposed to these anomalies, but animals also. Thus, you are not unaware of the singularly aphrodisiac effect produced by nepeta cataria, commonly called catmint, on the feline race; and on the other hand, to cite an example that I guarantee authentic, Bridoux (one of my former comrades, now established in the rue Malpalu) owns a dog that falls into convulsions as soon as a snuffbox is presented to him. Often even he makes the experiment before his friends, at his pavilion in the Bois Guillaume. Would one believe that a simple sternutatory could exercise such ravages in the organism of a quadruped? It is extremely curious, is it not true?"

"Yes," said Charles, who was not listening.

"That proves to us," resumed the other, smiling with a benignly superior air, "the countless irregularities of the nervous system. As for Madame, she has always appeared to me, I confess, a true sensitive. Thus I shall not counsel you, my good friend, any of those pretended remedies which, under pretext of attacking the symptoms, attack the temperament. No, no idle medication! regimen, that is all! sedatives, emollients, dulcifiers. Then do you not think one should perhaps strike the imagination?"

"How? in what way?" said Bovary.

"Ah! that is the question! That indeed is the question: _That is the question!_ as I was reading lately in the newspaper."

But Emma, waking, cried:

"And the letter? and the letter?"

They thought she was delirious; she was so from midnight on: a cerebral fever had declared itself.

For forty-three days, Charles did not leave her. He abandoned all his patients; he no longer went to bed, he was continually feeling her pulse, applying sinapisms to her, cold-water compresses. He sent Justin as far as Neufchâtel to fetch ice; the ice melted on the way; he sent him back. He called M. Canivet in consultation; he had the doctor Larivière of Rouen brought, his former master; he was in despair. What frightened him most was Emma's prostration; for she did not speak, heard nothing, and even seemed to suffer not at all, — as if her body and her soul had together rested from all their agitations.

Toward the middle of October, she could sit up in her bed, with pillows behind her. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first slice of bread with jam. Her strength returned; she got up for a few hours in the afternoon, and, one day when she felt better, he tried to make her, on his arm, take a turn in the garden. The sand of the paths disappeared under dead leaves; she walked step by step, dragging her slippers, and, leaning her shoulder against Charles, she continued to smile.

They went thus to the far end, near the terrace. She straightened slowly, put her hand before her eyes, to look; she looked far off, very far off; but there was on the horizon only great grass fires, that smoked on the hills.

"You will tire yourself, my dear," said Bovary.

And, gently pushing her to make her enter under the arbor:

"Do sit on this bench: you will be comfortable."

"Oh! no, not there, not there!" she said in a failing voice.

She grew dizzy, and from that evening her illness recommenced, with a more uncertain course, it is true, and more complex characters. At times she suffered in the heart, then in the chest, in the brain, in the limbs; there came upon her vomitings in which Charles thought he perceived the first symptoms of a cancer.

And the poor fellow, besides, had money worries!

XIV

At first, he did not know how to compensate M. Homais for all the medicines taken from him; and, though he might, as physician, not pay them, nevertheless he blushed a little at this obligation. Then the household expense, now that the cook was mistress, became frightful; bills rained into the house; the suppliers murmured; M. Lheureux, especially, harassed him. Indeed, at the height of Emma's illness, the latter, profiting from the circumstance to exaggerate his bill, had quickly brought the mantle, the traveling bag, two boxes instead of one, a quantity of other things besides. Charles might well say he had no need of them, the merchant answered arrogantly that all these articles had been ordered and that he would not take them back; besides, it would be to thwart Madame in her convalescence; Monsieur would reflect; in short, he was resolved to sue him rather than abandon his rights and carry off his goods. Charles later ordered them sent back to his shop; Félicité forgot; he had other cares; it was thought of no more; M. Lheureux returned to the charge, and, alternately threatening and moaning, maneuvered so well that Bovary ended by subscribing a bill at six months' date. But scarcely had he signed this bill than a bold idea occurred to him: it was to borrow a thousand francs from M. Lheureux. So he asked, with an embarrassed air, whether there was not a way to have them, adding that it would be for a year and at whatever rate one wished. Lheureux ran to his shop, brought back the crowns and dictated another bill, by which Bovary declared himself owing to his order, on the 1st of September next, the sum of one thousand seventy francs; which, with the hundred eighty already stipulated, made exactly twelve hundred fifty. Thus, lending at six per cent, increased by a quarter commission, and the supplies bringing him a good third at least, this was to yield, in twelve months, a hundred thirty francs profit; and he hoped the affair would not stop there, that the bills could not be paid, that they would be renewed, and that his poor money, having fed at the physician's like in a health resort, would return to him one day considerably fatter, and big enough to burst the sack.

Everything, moreover, succeeded for him. He was adjudicated a supply of cider for the hospital of Neufchâtel; M. Guillaumin promised him shares in the peat bogs of Grumesnil, and he dreamed of establishing a new diligence service between Argueil and Rouen, which would not be long, no doubt, in ruining the rattletrap of the Lion d'Or, and which, going faster, being at lower price and carrying more baggage, would thus put into his hands all the trade of Yonville.

Charles asked himself several times by what means, next year, he could repay so much money; and he sought, imagined expedients, such as having recourse to his father or selling something. But his father would be deaf, and he, for his part, had nothing to sell. Then he discovered such embarrassments that he quickly put away from his conscience a subject of meditation so unpleasant. He reproached himself for forgetting Emma; as if, all his thoughts belonging to that woman, it would have been to rob her of something not to reflect upon her continually.

The winter was harsh. Madame's convalescence was long. When it was fine, she was pushed in her armchair near the window, the one overlooking the Square; for she now had the garden in antipathy, and the shutter on that side remained constantly closed. She wished the horse sold; what she had loved formerly now displeased her. All her ideas seemed to confine themselves to the care of herself. She stayed in her bed taking little collations, rang for her servant to inquire after her herbal teas or to chat with her. Meanwhile the snow on the market roof cast into the room a white, motionless reflection; then came the rain that fell. And Emma daily awaited, with a sort of anxiety, the infallible return of trifling events, which yet mattered little to her. The most considerable was, in the evening, the arrival of the Hirondelle. Then the innkeeper cried out and other voices answered, while Hippolyte's lantern, searching for trunks on the tarpaulin, made like a star in the darkness. At noon Charles came in; then he went out; then she took a broth, and, toward five o'clock, at nightfall, the children coming back from school, dragging their wooden shoes on the pavement, struck all with their rulers the clapper of the shutters, one after another.

It was at that hour that M. Bournisien came to see her. He inquired after her health, brought her news and exhorted her to religion in a little coaxing chat that was not without charm. The mere sight of his cassock comforted her.

One day, at the height of her illness, believing herself agorizing, she had asked for communion; and, as they made in her chamber the preparations for the sacrament, as they arranged as an altar the chest of drawers cluttered with syrups and as Félicité strewed on the floor dahlia flowers, Emma felt something very penetrating pass over her, that delivered her from her pains, from all perception, from all feeling. Her flesh lightened weighed no more, another life began; it seemed to her that her being, rising toward God, was about to annihilate itself in that love like a lighted incense that dissipates in vapor. They sprinkled the bed sheets with holy water; the priest drew from the holy ciborium the white host; and it was fainting with a celestial joy that she advanced her lips to accept the body of the Savior that presented itself. The curtains of her alcove swelled softly, around her, in fashion of clouds, and the rays of the two candles burning on the chest of drawers appeared to her like dazzling glories. Then she let her head fall back, believing she heard in the spaces the song of the seraphic harps and perceived in an azure sky, on a throne of gold, in the midst of saints holding green palms, God the Father all resplendent with majesty, and who by a sign made descend toward the earth angels with wings of flame to carry her off in their arms.

This splendid vision remained in her memory as the most beautiful thing it were possible to dream; so well that now she strove to recapture the sensation, which nevertheless continued, but in a less exclusive manner and with a sweetness as deep. Her soul, stiff from pride, rested at last in Christian humility; and, savoring the pleasure of being weak, Emma contemplated within herself the destruction of her will, which was to make for the encroachments of grace a wide entrance. There existed then in place of the happiness of felicities greater, another love above all loves, without intermission or end, and which would grow eternally! She glimpsed, amid the illusions of her hope, a state of purity floating above the earth, mingling with the sky, and where she aspired to be. She wished to become a saint. She bought rosaries, she wore amulets; she desired to have in her chamber, at the head of her bed, a reliquary set with emeralds, to kiss it every evening.

The Curate marveled at these dispositions, although Emma's religion, he found, might, by dint of fervor, end by bordering on heresy and even extravagance. But, not being very versed in such matters as soon as they passed a certain measure, he wrote to M. Boulard, bookseller to Monseigneur, to send him something famous for a person of the female sex, who was full of spirit. The bookseller, with as much indifference as if he had been shipping hardware to negroes, packed you pell-mell all that was then in course in the trade of pious books. They were little manuals by question and answer, pamphlets of a gruff tone in the manner of M. de Maistre, and species of novels with pink boards and a mawkish style, fabricated by troubadour seminarians or repentant blue-stockings. There was the _Think Well of It_; _The Man of the World at the Feet of Mary_, by M. de***, decorated with several orders; _The Errors of Voltaire, for the Use of Young People_, etc.

Madame Bovary had not yet intelligence clear enough to apply herself seriously to anything whatever; besides, she undertook these readings with too much precipitation. She grew irritated against the prescriptions of worship; the arrogance of the polemical writings displeased her by their eagerness to pursue people she did not know; and the profane tales heightened with religion seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world, that they estranged her insensibly from the truths of which she awaited the proof. She persisted nevertheless, and, when the volume fell from her hands, she believed herself seized by the finest Catholic melancholy that an ethereal soul could conceive.

As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had lowered it to the bottom of her heart; and it remained there, more solemn and more immobile than a king's mummy in a vault. An exhalation escaped from that great embalmed love and which, passing through all, perfumed with tenderness the atmosphere of immaculation where she wished to live. When she knelt on her Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same words of suavity that she had once murmured to her lover, in the outpourings of adultery. It was to bring forth belief; but no delight descended from the heavens, and she rose, her limbs tired, with the vague feeling of an immense deception. This search, she thought, was but one merit more; and in the pride of her devotion Emma compared herself to those great ladies of old, whose glory she had dreamed on a portrait of La Vallière, and who, dragging with so much majesty the embroidered train of their long robes, retired into solitudes to there pour at the feet of Christ all the tears of a heart wounded by existence.

Then, she gave herself to excessive charities. She sewed garments for the poor; she sent wood to women in childbed; and Charles, one day on returning, found in the kitchen three vagabonds seated who were eating a soup. She brought back home her little girl, whom her husband, during her illness, had sent back to the nurse. She wished to teach her to read; Berthe might well weep, she no longer grew angry. It was a settled resolve of resignation, a universal indulgence. Her language, about everything, was full of ideal expressions. She said to her child:

"Has your colic passed, my angel?"

Madame Bovary mother found nothing to blame, save perhaps this mania of knitting waistcoats for orphans, instead of mending her dishcloths. But, weary of domestic quarrels, the good woman was pleased in this tranquil house, and even she stayed there until after Easter, in order to avoid the sarcasms of old man Bovary, who never failed, every Good Friday, to order himself an andouille.

Besides the company of her mother-in-law, who strengthened her a little by her soundness of judgment and grave ways, Emma, almost every day, had yet other society. It was madame Langlois, madame Caron, madame Dubreuil, madame Tuvache and, regularly, from two to five o'clock, the excellent madame Homais, who had never, that one, wished to believe any of the tittle-tattle retailed about her neighbor. The little Homais also came to see her; Justin accompanied them. He went up with them into the chamber, and he remained standing near the door, motionless, without speaking. Often even, madame Bovary, not heeding it, set about her toilette. She began by taking out her comb, shaking her head with a brusque movement; and, when he perceived for the first time that whole hair descending to the calves of her legs in unrolling its black rings, it was for the poor child like the sudden entrance into something extraordinary and new whose splendor frightened him.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”