Part 19

Emma, no doubt, did not notice his silent attentiveness or his shyness. She had no inkling that love, vanished from her life, was beating there, close to her, beneath that coarse linen shirt, in that adolescent heart open to the emanations of her beauty. Besides, she now enveloped everything in such indifference, she had words so affectionate and glances so haughty, manners so varied, that one could no longer distinguish selfishness from charity, nor corruption from virtue. One evening, for example, she flew into a rage at her maid, who asked to go out and stammered in search of a pretext; then suddenly:

“So you’re in love?” she said.

And, without waiting for the reply of Félicité, who was blushing, she added in a sad tone:

“Go on, run along! amuse yourself!”

At the beginning of spring, she had the garden turned upside down from one end to the other, despite Bovary’s objections; he was happy, however, to see her at last manifest some sort of will. She showed even more of it as she recovered. First, she found a way to expel Mother Rolet, the nurse, who had taken to coming to the kitchen too often during her convalescence, with her two nurslings and her boarder, more toothed than a cannibal. Then she disentangled herself from the Homais family, successively dismissed all other visitors, and even attended church less assiduously, to the great approval of the apothecary, who then said to her amiably:

“You were giving a bit too much to the cloth!”

M. Bournisien, as in former days, would turn up every day on leaving catechism. He preferred to stay outside, taking the air in the middle of the grove, as he called the arbor. It was the hour when Charles came home. They were warm; sweet cider was brought, and they drank together to Madame’s full recovery.

Binet was there, that is to say a little lower down, against the terrace wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary invited him to refresh himself, and he was perfectly adept at uncorking the jugs.

“You must,” he said, casting around him and to the farthest edges of the landscape a satisfied glance, “hold the bottle upright on the table, and, after the strings are cut, push the cork with little taps, gently, gently, as one does, moreover, with seltzer water, in restaurants.”

But the cider, during his demonstration, often spurted right in their faces, and then the ecclesiastic, with a guttural laugh, never failed at this jest:

“Its goodness is plain to see!”

He was a good fellow, indeed, and even, one day, was not scandalized by the chemist, who advised Charles, to distract Madame, to take her to the theater at Rouen to see the illustrious tenor Lagardy. Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion, and the priest declared that he regarded music as less dangerous to morals than literature.

But the chemist took up the defense of letters. The theater, he claimed, served to flout prejudices, and, under the mask of pleasure, taught virtue.

“Castigat ridendo mores, Monsieur Bournisien! Thus, look at most of Voltaire’s tragedies; they are cleverly strewn with philosophical reflections which make of them, for the people, a veritable school of morality and diplomacy.”

“I,” said Binet, “once saw a play entitled The Paris Urchin, in which one notices the character of an old general who is really well drawn! He rebukes a young gentleman who had seduced a working girl, who at the end...”

“Certainly!” continued Homais, “there is bad literature as there is bad pharmacy, but condemning wholesale the most important of the fine arts seems to me a blunder, a Gothic notion, worthy of those abominable times when they locked up Galileo.”

“I know well,” objected the Curé, “that there exist good works, good authors; but were it only those persons of different sex reunited in an enchanted apartment, adorned with worldly pomp, and then those pagan disguises, that paint, those torches, those effeminate voices, all that must end by engendering a certain libertinism of spirit and give you dishonest thoughts, impure temptations. Such, at least, is the opinion of all the Fathers. Besides,” he added, suddenly taking on a mystical tone of voice, while he rolled a pinch of snuff on his thumb, “if the Church has condemned the spectacles, it is because she was right; we must submit to her decrees.”

“Why,” asked the apothecary, “does she excommunicate the actors? for, formerly, they openly took part in the ceremonies of worship. Yes, they played, they performed in the middle of the choir certain farces called mysteries, in which the laws of decency were often offended.”

The ecclesiastic contented himself with a groan, and the chemist pursued:

“It is like in the Bible; there are... you know..., more than one piquant detail... things... truly... risqué!”

And, at a gesture of irritation from M. Bournisien:

“Ah! you will agree it is not a book to put into the hands of a young person, and I should be sorry if Athalie...”

“But it is the Protestants, and not us, who recommend the Bible!” cried the other, impatient.

“No matter!” said Homais, “I am astonished that, in our day, in a century of lights, one still obstinately proscribes an intellectual relaxation which is innocuous, moralizing and even hygienic sometimes, is it not, doctor?”

“To be sure,” replied the physician nonchalantly, whether, having the same ideas, he wished to offend no one, or whether he had no ideas.

The conversation seemed finished, when the chemist judged it fitting to deliver a last thrust.

“I have known priests, I have, who dressed as bourgeois to go see dancers wiggle.”

“Come now!” said the curé.

“Ah! I have known some!”

And, separating the syllables of his phrase, Homais repeated:

“I — have — known — some.”

“Well! they were wrong,” said Bournisien, resigned to hearing all.

“Of course! they do worse than that!” exclaimed the apothecary.

“Monsieur!” resumed the ecclesiastic with such fierce eyes that the chemist was intimidated.

“I only mean,” he then replied in a less brutal tone, “that tolerance is the surest means of drawing souls to religion.”

“That is true! that is true!” conceded the good man, sitting back down on his chair.

But he stayed there only two minutes. Then, as soon as he had left, M. Homais said to the doctor:

“There’s what you call a set-to! I rolled him over, you saw, in a manner!... Well, believe me, take Madame to the show, were it only to anger one of those ravens once in your life, dammit! If someone could replace me, I would accompany you myself. Hurry up! Lagardy is giving but a single performance; he is engaged in England at considerable salaries. He is, so they say, a famous dog! rolling in gold! he travels with three mistresses and his cook! All those great artists burn the candle at both ends; they need a dissipated existence that stirs the imagination a bit. But they die in the hospital, because they hadn’t the sense, when young, to save. Come, good appetite! till tomorrow!”

This idea of the spectacle quickly took root in Bovary’s head; for immediately he shared it with his wife, who refused at first, alleging fatigue, the disruption, the expense; but, extraordinarily, Charles did not give in, so much did he judge this recreation must be beneficial to her. He saw no obstacle; his mother had sent them three hundred francs which he no longer counted on, current debts were nothing enormous, and the due date of the notes payable to Monsieur Lheureux was still so far off that he need not think of it. Besides, imagining she was showing delicacy, Charles insisted all the more; so that she ended, under his importunities, by deciding. And, the next day at eight o’clock, they bundled into the Hirondelle.

The apothecary, whom nothing detained at Yonville, but who believed himself constrained not to stir from it, sighed as he saw them leave.

“Well, good journey!” he said to them, “happy mortals that you are!”

Then, addressing Emma, who wore a blue silk dress with four flounces:

“I find you pretty as a Cupid! You are going to make a splash at Rouen.”

The diligence stopped at the Red Cross inn, on the Beauvoisine square. It was one of those taverns such as are found in all the suburbs of the provinces, with great stables and small bedrooms, where one sees in the middle of the courtyard hens pecking at oats beneath the mud-splashed cabriolets of traveling salesmen; — good old lodgings with worm-eaten wooden balconies that creak in the wind on winter nights, continually full of people, of noise and of eating, whose black tables are greasy from the rum-and-coffee, the thick windowpanes yellowed by flies, the damp napkins stained with blue wine; and which, always smelling of the village, like farmhands dressed as bourgeois, have a café on the street side, and, toward the countryside, a vegetable garden. Charles immediately set off on errands. He confused the orchestra stalls with the galleries, the pit with the boxes, asked for explanations, did not understand them, was sent from the ticket-taker to the director, went back to the inn, returned to the office, and, several times thus, traversed the whole length of the city, from the theater to the boulevard.

Madame bought a hat, gloves, a bouquet. Monsieur was much afraid of missing the beginning; and, without having had time to swallow a broth, they presented themselves before the theater doors, which were still closed.

XV

The crowd stood against the wall, parked symmetrically between balustrades. At the corners of the neighboring streets, gigantic posters repeated in baroque lettering: “Lucie de Lamermoor... Lagardy... Opera..., etc.” The weather was fine; it was warm; sweat ran in the curls, and all the handkerchiefs drawn out wiped red foreheads; and sometimes a tepid wind, blowing from the river, gently agitated the border of the canvas awnings hung at the doors of the beerhouses. A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a glacial current that smelled of tallow, leather and oil. It was the exhalation of the Rue des Charrettes, full of great black shops where barrels are rolled.

For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma wanted, before going in, to take a turn walking on the port, and Bovary, prudently, kept the tickets in his hand, in the pocket of his trousers, which he pressed against his belly.

A flutter of the heart seized her in the vestibule. She smiled involuntarily with vanity, seeing the crowd that rushed to the right by the other corridor, while she climbed the staircase to the boxes. She took pleasure, like a child, in pushing open with her finger the wide upholstered doors; she inhaled with all her chest the dusty odor of the corridors, and, when she was seated in her box, she arched her waist with the nonchalance of a duchess.

The house began to fill, opera glasses were drawn from their cases, and the subscribers, catching sight of one another from afar, exchanged greetings. They came to unbend amid the fine arts from the worries of selling; but, not forgetting business, they still talked cottons, cheap brandy or indigo. One saw there old heads, inexpressive and peaceable, and which, whitish of hair and complexion, resembled silver medals tarnished by a vapor of lead. The young dandies strutted on the orchestra floor, displaying, in the opening of their waistcoats, their pink or apple-green cravats; and Madame Bovary admired them from above, leaning on gold-headed canes the outstretched palm of their yellow gloves.

Meanwhile, the candles of the orchestra were lit; the chandelier descended from the ceiling, pouring, with the radiance of its facets, a sudden gaiety into the hall; then the musicians entered one after another, and it was first a long charivari of basses rumbling, of violins screeching, of cornets trumpeting, of flutes and flageolets that piped. But three knocks were heard on the stage; a roll of the timpani began, the brass struck chords, and the curtain, rising, disclosed a landscape.

It was the crossroads of a wood, with a fountain, to the left, shaded by an oak. Peasants and gentlemen, a plaid on the shoulder, sang all together a hunting song; then a captain appeared who invoked the angel of evil raising his two arms to heaven; another came on; they went away, and the hunters resumed.

She found herself back in the readings of her youth, in the thick of Walter Scott. It seemed to her she heard, through the mist, the sound of Scottish bagpipes repeating over the heather. Besides, the memory of the novel facilitating the understanding of the libretto, she followed the plot phrase by phrase, while ungraspable thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once under the gusts of the music. She let herself go with the rocking of the melodies and felt herself vibrate through her whole being as if the violin bows had traveled over her nerves. She had not enough eyes to contemplate the costumes, the sets, the characters, the painted trees that trembled when one walked, and the velvet toques, the mantles, the swords, all those imaginings that stirred in the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young woman advanced, throwing a purse to a green squire. She remained alone, and then was heard a flute that made like a murmur of fountain or like the warbling of birds. Lucie began, with a brave air, her cavatina in G major; she complained of love, she asked for wings. Emma, likewise, would have liked, fleeing life, to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly, Edgar-Lagardy appeared.

He had one of those splendid pallors which give something of the majesty of marble to the ardent races of the South. His vigorous waist was encased in a brown-colored doublet; a chiseled little dagger beat against his left thigh, and he rolled his eyes languorously, disclosing his white teeth. They said that a Polish princess, hearing him sing one evening on the beach at Biarritz, where he was caulking shallops, fell in love with him on that account. She ruined herself for him. He had left her there for other women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to serve his artistic reputation. The diplomatist mountebank even took care always to slip into the notices a poetic phrase about the fascination of his person and the sensibility of his soul. A fine organ, an imperturbable assurance, more temperament than intelligence and more bombast than lyricism, completed the heightening of this admirable nature of charlatan, where there was something of the hairdresser and of the bullfighter.

From the first scene, he enthused. He pressed Lucie in his arms, he left her, he returned, he seemed despairing; he had bursts of anger, then elegiac rattlings of an infinite sweetness, and the notes escaped from his bare neck, full of sobs and kisses. Emma leaned forward to see him, scratching with her nails the velvet of her box. She filled her heart with those melodious lamentations that trailed to the accompaniment of the double basses, like the cries of shipwrecked men in the tumult of a tempest. She recognized all the intoxications and the anguishes of which she had nearly died. The voice of the singer seemed to her but the reverberation of her conscience, and this illusion that charmed her something even of her life. But no one on earth had loved her with such a love. He did not weep like Edgar, the last evening, in the moonlight, when they said to each other: “Till tomorrow; till tomorrow!...” The house cracked under the bravos; they recommenced the entire stretta; the lovers spoke of the flowers of their tomb, of vows, of exile, of fate, of hopes, and when they uttered the final farewell, Emma threw a shrill cry, which mingled with the vibration of the last chords.

“Why then,” asked Bovary, “is this gentleman persecuting her?”

“But no,” she replied; “it is her lover.”

“Yet he swears to avenge himself on her family, whereas the other, the one who came just now, said:

‘I love Lucie and believe myself loved.’ Besides, he left with his father, arm in arm. For that is surely his father, is it not, the ugly little one who wears a cock’s feather in his hat?”

Despite Emma’s explanations, from the recitative duet where Gilbert reveals to his master Ashton his abominable maneuvers, Charles, seeing the false betrothal ring which is to deceive Lucie, believed it was a love token sent by Edgar. He admitted, moreover, not understanding the story, — because of the music — which greatly hindered the words.

“What does it matter?” said Emma. “Be quiet!”

“It is that I like,” he resumed, leaning over her shoulder, “to understand, you know.”

“Be quiet! be quiet!” she said, impatient.

Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, an orange-blossom crown in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her dress. Emma dreamed of the day of her wedding; and she saw herself again there, among the wheat, on the little path, when they walked toward the church. Why then had she not, like that one, resisted, entreated? She was joyful, on the contrary, without perceiving the abyss into which she was precipitating herself... Ah! if, in the freshness of her beauty, before the stains of marriage and the disillusion of adultery, she had been able to place her life on some solid great heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness and duty blending, never would she have descended from so high a happiness. But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie imagined for the despair of every desire. She knew now the pettiness of the passions that art exaggerates. Striving therefore to turn her thought from it, Emma wished to see in this reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fancy good to amuse the eyes, and even she smiled inwardly with a disdainful pity, when at the back of the theater, beneath the velvet curtain, a man appeared in a black cloak.

His large Spanish hat fell in a gesture he made; and at once the instruments and the singers struck up the sextet. Edgar, sparkling with fury, dominated all the others with his clearer voice. Ashton hurled at him, in deep notes, homicidal provocations, Lucie uttered her shrill plaint, Arthur modulated apart in middle tones, and the bass of the minister rumbled like an organ, while the women’s voices, repeating his words, took up in chorus, deliciously. They were all on the same line, gesticulating; and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, mercy and stupor exhaled at once from their half-open mouths. The outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure collar rose by fits, according to the movements of his chest, and he went from right to left, in long strides, making ring against the boards the vermilion spurs of his soft boots, which flared at the ankle. He must have, she thought, an inexhaustible love, to pour of it over the crowd in such broad effluvia. All her inclinations to disparage evaporated under the poetry of the role that invaded him, and, drawn toward the man by the illusion of the character, she tried to imagine his life, that resounding, extraordinary, splendid life, and which she could have led nevertheless, if chance had willed it. They would have known each other, they would have loved each other! With him, through all the kingdoms of Europe, she would have traveled from capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, gathering the flowers thrown to him, embroidering herself his costumes; then, every evening, at the back of a box, behind the gilded trellis, she would have gathered, agape, the outpourings of that soul which would have sung only for her alone; from the stage, while playing, he would have looked at her. But a madness seized her: he was looking at her, surely! She had a desire to run into his arms to take refuge in his strength, as in the very incarnation of love, and to say to him, to cry: “Carry me off, take me away, let us go! Yours, yours! all my ardors and all my dreams!”

The curtain fell.

The smell of gas mingled with the breaths; the wind of the fans rendered the atmosphere more stifling. Emma wanted to leave; the crowd encumbered the corridors, and she fell back into her seat with palpitations that suffocated her. Charles, afraid of seeing her faint, ran to the refreshment room to get her a glass of barley water.

He had great difficulty regaining his place, for they jostled his elbows at every step, because of the glass he held between his hands, and he even spilled three quarters of it on the shoulders of a Rouen woman in short sleeves, who, feeling the cold liquid run down her back, uttered peacock cries, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband, who was a spinner, flew into a rage at the clumsy fellow; and, while with her handkerchief she sponged the stains on her fine cherry-taffeta dress, he murmured in a surly tone the words indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At last, Charles arrived near his wife, saying to her quite out of breath:

“I thought, faith, I’d never get back! There’s a crowd! a crowd!”

He added:

“Guess who I met up there? M. Léon!”

“Léon?”

“Himself! He is coming to pay his respects to you.”

And, as he finished these words, the former clerk of Yonville entered the box.

He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman: and Madame Bovary mechanically advanced hers, no doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening when it rained on the green leaves, when they said farewell, standing at the edge of the window. But, quickly, recalling the propriety of the situation, she shook off in an effort that torpor of her memories and began to stammer rapid phrases.

“Ah! good day... How! here you are?”

“Silence!” cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.

“So you are in Rouen?”

“Yes.”

“And since when?”

“At the door! at the door!”

They turned toward them; they fell silent.

But, from that moment, she listened no more; and the chorus of guests, the scene of Ashton and his valet, the great duet in D major, all passed for her in the distance, as if the instruments had become less sonorous and the characters more remote; she recalled the card games at the chemist’s, the walk at the nurse’s, the readings under the arbor, the tête-à-têtes at the corner of the fire, all that poor love so calm and so long, so discreet, so tender, and which she had forgotten nevertheless. Why then did he return? what combination of adventures replaced him in her life? He stood behind her, leaning his shoulder against the partition; and, from time to time, she felt herself shiver under the tepid breath of his nostrils that descended into her hair.

“Does this amuse you?” he said, leaning over her so close that the tip of his mustache grazed her cheek.

She replied nonchalantly:

“Oh! my God, no! not much.”

Then he sighed:

“It is warm...”

“Unbearable! it’s true.”

“Are you uncomfortable?” asked Bovary.

“Yes, I’m stifling; let’s go.”

M. Léon delicately placed his long lace shawl on her shoulders, and all three went to sit on the port, in the open air, before the glazing of a café.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”