Part 1

Gustave Flaubert

MADAME BOVARY

(1857)

Table of Contents

FIRST PART I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX SECOND PART I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV THIRD PART I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI

To Marie-Antoine-Jules Senard

MEMBER OF THE PARIS BAR FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY AND FORMER MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR

Dear and illustrious friend,

Permit me to inscribe your name at the head of this book and above even its dedication; for it is to you, above all, that I owe its publication. Through your magnificent plea, my work has acquired for me myself an unforeseen authority. Accept then here the tribute of my gratitude, which, great as it may be, will never equal your eloquence and your devotion.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Paris, 12 April 1857

To Louis Bouilhet

FIRST PART

I

We were in study hall when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed like a townsman and by a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and everyone rose as if caught in the middle of their work.

The headmaster motioned us to sit down again; then, turning toward the superintendent of studies:

— Mr. Roger, he said in a half-whisper, here is a pupil I commend to you; he is entering the fifth form. If his work and conduct are commendable, he will move up to the upper forms, where his age calls him.

Left in the corner behind the door, so well hidden that he could scarcely be seen, the new boy was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us all. He had his hair cut straight across the forehead, like a village chanter, with a sensible look and much embarrassment. Though he was not broad in the shoulders, his green cloth jacket with black buttons must have pinched him at the armholes and showed, through the slit of the cuffs, red wrists used to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, emerged from a yellowish pair of trousers pulled tight by the suspenders. He was shod in stout shoes, poorly polished, studded with nails.

The recitation of lessons began. He listened with all his ears, attentive as at a sermon, not daring even to cross his thighs or lean on his elbow, and at two o'clock, when the bell rang, the superintendent was obliged to warn him, so that he might fall into line with us.

It was our habit, on entering class, to throw our caps on the floor, so as to have our hands freer afterward; one had, from the threshold, to fling them under the bench, so as to strike against the wall and raise much dust; that was the style.

But whether he had not noticed this maneuver or had not dared to submit to it, the prayer was over and the new boy still held his cap on his two knees. It was one of those composite headpieces, in which one finds the elements of the fur cap, the shako, the round hat, the otter cap, and the cotton nightcap, one of those poor things, in short, whose mute ugliness has depths of expression like the face of an imbecile. Ovoid and swelled with whalebone, it began with three circular rolls; then alternated, separated by a red band, diamonds of velvet and rabbit fur; then came a sort of sack ending in a cardboard polygon, covered with a complicated braid embroidery, and from which hung, at the end of too thin a cord, a little gold-thread cross, by way of a tassel. It was new; the visor shone.

— Stand up, said the master.

He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh.

He bent down to pick it up. A neighbor knocked it down with an elbow, and he picked it up again.

— Get rid of your helmet, said the master, who was a man of wit.

There was a loud burst of laughter from the pupils, which disconcerted the poor boy, so that he did not know whether to keep his cap in his hand, leave it on the floor, or put it on his head. He sat down again and placed it on his knees.

— Stand up, the master resumed, and tell me your name.

The new boy articulated, in a stammering voice, an unintelligible name.

— Repeat!

The same stammering of syllables was heard, covered by the catcalls of the class.

— Louder! cried the master, louder!

The new boy, then taking an extreme resolution, opened a huge mouth and flung at full lungs, as if calling someone, this word: Charbovari.

It was an uproar that leapt at a bound, rose in crescendo, with shrill outcries (they howled, they barked, they stamped, they repeated: Charbovari! Charbovari!), then rolled in isolated notes, calming with difficulty, and sometimes breaking out again suddenly along a bench where, here and there, like a half-extinguished firecracker, some stifled laugh still protruded.

Meanwhile, under the rain of impositions, order was little by little restored in the class, and the master, having managed to catch the name of Charles Bovary, having had it dictated, spelled, and reread, at once ordered the poor devil to go sit on the dunce's bench, at the foot of the rostrum. He set himself in motion, but, before leaving, hesitated.

— What are you looking for? asked the master.

— My ca... said the new boy timidly, casting uneasy glances around him.

— Five hundred lines for the whole class! exclaimed a furious voice, checking, like the _Quos ego_, a fresh gust. — Do keep still! the indignant master continued, wiping his brow with the handkerchief he had just taken from his skullcap: As for you, new boy, you will copy out twenty times the verb _ridiculus sum_.

Then, in a gentler voice:

— Eh! you'll find your cap again; it hasn't been stolen from you!

Everything grew calm again. Heads bent over the slates, and the new boy remained for two hours in exemplary posture, though now and then some paper pellet launched from a pen-nib would come spatter on his face. But he wiped it with his hand, and stayed motionless, eyes lowered.

That evening, at study, he pulled his sleeve-ends from his desk, put his little belongings in order, carefully ruled his paper. We saw him working conscientiously, looking up all the words in the dictionary and giving himself much trouble. Thanks, no doubt, to this good will he showed, he escaped being put down into the lower class; for, though he knew his rules passably, he had little elegance in his phrasing. It was the curate of his village who had begun his Latin, his parents, out of economy, having sent him to college as late as possible.

His father, M. Charles-Denis-Bartholomé Bovary, former assistant surgeon-major, compromised, around 1812, in conscription affairs, and forced, about that time, to leave the service, had then profited from his personal advantages to seize, in passing, a dowry of sixty thousand francs, offered in the person of a hosier's daughter, who had fallen in love with his figure. A handsome man, a braggart, jingling his spurs loudly, wearing side-whiskers joined to his moustache, his fingers always ringed and dressed in loud colors, he had the look of a fine fellow, with the easy briskness of a traveling salesman. Once married, he lived two or three years on his wife's fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking in large china pipes, not coming home till after the play and frequenting cafés. The father-in-law died and left little; he was indignant at this, launched into manufacturing, lost some money there, then retired to the country, where he meant to do well. But, as he understood farming no better than printed calicoes, as he rode his horses instead of sending them to plough, drank his cider in bottles instead of selling it in casks, ate the finest fowls of his yard and greased his hunting shoes with the lard of his pigs, he soon perceived that it was better to drop all speculation.

For two hundred francs a year, he therefore found to rent, in a village on the borders of the Pays de Caux and Picardy, a sort of dwelling half farmhouse, half manor; and, sorrowful, eaten by regrets, accusing heaven, jealous of everyone, he shut himself up from the age of forty-five, disgusted with men, he said, and decided to live in peace.

His wife had been mad about him formerly; she had loved him with a thousand submissive attentions which had detached him from her all the more. Lively once, expansive and all-loving, she had, with age, become (like wine gone flat that turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, shrill, nervous. She had suffered so much, without complaining at first, when she saw him running after all the village wenches and twenty bad houses sent him back in the evening, blasé and reeking of drink! Then pride had rebelled. Then she had held her tongue, swallowing her rage in a mute stoicism, which she kept till her death. She was constantly on errands, on business. She went to the attorneys', to the president's, remembered the due dates of notes, obtained delays; and, at home, ironed, sewed, washed, supervised the workmen, settled the bills, while Monsieur, caring for nothing, continually numbed in a sulky doze from which he woke only to say disagreeable things to her, stayed to smoke in the corner of the fire, spitting into the ashes.

When she had a child, it had to be put out to nurse. Back at home, the brat was spoiled like a prince. His mother fed him on preserves; his father let him run without shoes, and, to play the philosopher, even said he might well go naked, like the beasts' children. Contrary to the mother's tendencies, he had in his head a certain virile ideal of childhood, according to which he tried to form his son, wishing him brought up hardly, Spartan-style, to make him a good constitution. He sent him to bed without fire, taught him to take great swigs of rum and to insult processions. But, naturally peaceable, the little one answered poorly to his efforts. His mother always dragged him after her; she cut out cardboard for him, told him stories, conversed with him in endless monologues, full of melancholy gaieties and babbling endearments. In the isolation of her life, she transferred onto that child's head all her scattered, broken vanities. She dreamed of high positions; she already saw him tall, handsome, witty, established, in bridges and roads or in the magistracy. She taught him to read, and even taught him, on an old piano she had, to sing two or three little romances. But, to all this, M. Bovary, little concerned with letters, said it was not worth the trouble! Would they ever have enough to keep him in the government schools, buy him a post or a business? Besides, with cheek, a man always succeeds in the world. Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child wandered about the village.

He followed the plowmen, and chased with clods of earth the crows that flew off. He ate blackberries along the ditches, watched the turkeys with a switch, made hay at harvest, ran in the woods, played hopscotch under the church porch on rainy days, and, on the great feast days, begged the beadle to let him ring the bells, to hang with all his weight on the great rope and feel himself carried away by it in its peal.

Thus he grew like an oak. He acquired strong hands, fine colors.

At twelve, his mother obtained that his studies be begun. The curate was charged with them. But the lessons were so short and so poorly followed that they could serve little. They were given in lost moments, in the sacristy, standing, in haste, between a baptism and a burial; or else the curate sent for his pupil after the Angelus, when he had not to go out. They went up to his room, settled in: the midges and night-butterflies circled around the candle. It was warm, the child fell asleep; and the good man, dozing hands on belly, soon snored, mouth open. Other times, when the curate, returning from carrying the viaticum to some sick person in the neighborhood, caught sight of Charles fooling about in the fields, he called him, sermonized him a quarter of an hour and profited from the occasion to have him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree. Rain came to interrupt them, or an acquaintance passing by. Besides, he was always pleased with him, said even that the young man had a good memory.

Charles could not stop there. Madame was energetic. Ashamed, or rather tired, Monsieur gave in without resistance, and they waited yet another year for the lad to have made his first communion.

Six months more passed; and the following year Charles was definitively sent to the college at Rouen, where his father brought him himself, toward the end of October, at the time of the Saint-Romain fair.

It would now be impossible for any of us to recall anything of him. He was a boy of moderate temperament, who played at recess, worked in study, listened in class, slept well in the dormitory, ate well in the refectory. He had for correspondent a wholesale hardware dealer of the rue Ganterie, who let him out once a month, on Sunday, after his shop was closed, sent him to walk on the docks to look at the boats, then brought him back to college by seven o'clock, before supper. Every Thursday evening, he wrote a long letter to his mother, with red ink and three wafer seals; then he reviewed his history notebooks, or read an old volume of Anacharsis that lay about in study. On walks, he chatted with the servant, who was from the country like him.

By dint of applying himself, he kept always about the middle of the class; once even he won a first prize in natural history. But at the end of his third form, his parents took him from college to have him study medicine, persuaded that he could push on alone to the baccalaureate.

His mother chose him a room, on the fourth floor, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec, at a dyer's of her acquaintance. She settled the arrangements for his board, procured furniture, a table and two chairs, brought from home an old mahogany bed, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove, with the supply of wood that was to heat her poor child. Then she left at the end of the week, after a thousand recommendations to behave well, now that he was to be abandoned to himself.

The program of courses, which he read on the notice, made him dizzy: anatomy course, pathology course, physiology course, pharmacy course, chemistry, and botany, and clinical, and therapeutics, not counting hygiene nor materia medica, all names whose etymologies he ignored and which were like so many doors of sanctuaries full of august shadows.

He understood nothing of it; though he listened, he could not grasp. He worked nonetheless, he had bound notebooks, he followed all the courses; he missed not a single visit. He accomplished his little daily task in the manner of the treadmill horse, which turns in place with blindfolded eyes, unaware of the work it grinds.

To spare him expense, his mother sent him every week, by the carrier, a piece of veal roasted in the oven, with which he breakfasted in the morning; when he came back from the hospital, stamping his feet against the wall. Then he had to run to the lectures, to the amphitheater, to the infirmary, and return home, through all the streets. In the evening, after his thin landlord's dinner, he went back up to his room and set to work again, in his wet clothes that smoked on his body, before the glowing stove.

On the fine summer evenings; at the hour when the warm streets are empty, when the servant girls play shuttlecock on the doorsteps, he opened his window and leaned on his elbows. The river, which makes of this quarter of Rouen a sort of ignoble little Venice, flowed below him, yellow, violet or blue, between its bridges and its railings. Workmen, squatting at the edge, washed their arms in the water. On poles starting from the top of the granaries, skeins of cotton dried in the air. Opposite, beyond the roofs, the great pure sky spread, with the red sun setting. How good it must be out there! What freshness under the beech grove! And he opened his nostrils to breathe the good country smells, which did not reach him.

He grew thin, his figure lengthened, and his face took a sort of doleful expression that made it almost interesting.

Naturally, from laziness, he came to loosen all the resolutions he had made. Once, he missed the visit, the next day his course, and, savoring idleness, little by little, went no more.

He took to the tavern, with a passion for dominoes. To shut himself each evening in a filthy public room, to tap on marble tables little sheep bones marked with black dots, seemed to him a precious act of his freedom, which raised him in his own esteem. It was like initiation into the world, access to forbidden pleasures; and, on entering, he laid his hand on the door handle with an almost sensual joy. Then, many things compressed in him dilated; he learned by heart couplets he sang at welcomes, grew enthusiastic for Béranger, knew how to make punch and at last knew love.

Thanks to these preparatory labors, he failed completely at his examination for health officer. He was expected at home that very evening to celebrate his success.

He set out on foot and stopped near the entrance of the village, where he sent for his mother, told her all. She excused him, throwing the failure onto the injustice of the examiners, and braced him a little, undertaking to arrange matters. Only five years later did M. Bovary know the truth; it was old, he accepted it, being unable besides to suppose that a man issuing from him was a fool.

Charles therefore took up work again and prepared without interruption the subjects of his exam, of which he learned all the questions by heart in advance. He passed with a fairly good grade. What a fine day for his mother! They gave a grand dinner.

Where would he practice his art? At Tostes. There was there only an old doctor. For long Madame Bovary had watched for his death, and the good man had not yet packed up when Charles was installed opposite, as his successor.

But it was not enough to have brought up her son, to have had him learn medicine and discovered Tostes for him to practice: he needed a wife. She found him one: the widow of a bailiff of Dieppe, who was forty-five and had twelve hundred pounds of income.

Though she was ugly, dry as a faggot, and budded like a spring, certainly Madame Dubuc lacked not suitors to choose from. To attain her ends, Mother Bovary had to outmaneuver them all, and she even very cleverly foiled the intrigues of a pork butcher who was supported by the priests.

Charles had glimpsed in marriage the advent of a better condition, imagining he would be freer and could dispose of his person and his money. But his wife was master; he must before the world say this, not say that, eat lean every Friday, dress as she saw fit, harass by her order the clients who did not pay. She unsealed his letters, spied on his goings, and listened, through the partition, to him giving his consultations in his office, when there were women.

She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She complained ceaselessly of her nerves, her chest, her humors. The noise of steps hurt her; one went away, solitude became odious to her; did one come near her, it was to see her die, no doubt. In the evening, when Charles came home, she drew from under the sheets her long thin arms, passed them around his neck, and, having made him sit on the bed's edge, began to talk to him of her sorrows: he forgot her, he loved another! She had been told she would be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for some syrup for her health and a little more love.

II

One night, toward eleven o'clock, they were awakened by the noise of a horse that stopped right at the door. The maid opened the attic window and parleyed some time with a man left below, in the street. He had come for the doctor; he had a letter. Nastasie went down the stairs shivering, and went to open the lock and the bolts, one after the other. The man left his horse, and, following the maid, came in suddenly behind her. He drew from inside his bonnet of gray-tufted wool a letter wrapped in a rag, and presented it delicately to Charles, who leaned on his pillow to read it. Nastasie, near the bed, held the light. Madame, from modesty, remained turned toward the foot of the bed and showed her back.

This letter, sealed with a small blue wax seal, begged M. Bovary to come immediately to the Bertaux farm, to set a broken leg. Now there are, from Tostes to the Bertaux, a good six leagues across country, by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. The night was black. The young Madame Bovary feared accidents for her husband. Therefore it was decided that the stable boy would go ahead. Charles would leave three hours later, at moonrise. They would send a lad to meet him, so as to show him the way to the farm and open the fences before him.

Toward four in the morning, Charles, well wrapped in his cloak, set out for the Bertaux. Still drowsy from the warmth of sleep, he let himself be rocked by the peaceful trot of his beast. When she stopped of herself before those holes bordered with thorns that are dug at the edge of the furrows, Charles, starting awake, quickly recalled the broken leg, and tried to bring back to mind all the fractures he knew. The rain no longer fell; day was beginning to come, and, on the branches of the leafless apple trees, birds stayed motionless, bristling their little feathers in the cold morning wind. The flat country spread as far as the eye could see, and the clumps of trees around the farms made, at distant intervals, spots of blackish violet on this great gray surface, which was lost at the horizon in the dreary tone of the sky. Charles, now and then, opened his eyes; then, his mind tiring and sleep returning of itself, soon he entered a sort of doze where, his recent sensations mingling with memories, he perceived himself double, at once student and married, lying in his bed as just now, crossing an operating ward as formerly. The warm smell of poultices mixed in his head with the green smell of dew; he heard the iron rings of the beds roll on their rods and his wife sleeping... As he passed through Vassonville, he noticed, at the edge of a ditch, a young boy seated on the grass.

— Are you the doctor? asked the child.

And, on Charles's answer, he took his clogs in his hands and set off running before him.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”