Part 2

The health officer, as he went along, gathered from his guide’s talk that M. Rouault must be one of the most well-to-do farmers. He had broken his leg the evening before, on his way back from a Twelfth Night celebration at a neighbor’s. His wife had been dead for two years. He had with him only his daughter, who helped him keep house.

The ruts grew deeper. They were nearing Les Bertaux. The little lad then slipped through a gap in the hedge and disappeared, then came back to open the gate at the end of a farmyard. The horse slipped on the wet grass; Charles bent down to pass under the branches. The watchdogs in their kennels barked, pulling at their chains. When he entered Les Bertaux, his horse took fright and shied violently.

It was a good-looking farm. In the stables, above the open doors, one could see big draft horses quietly eating from new racks. Along the buildings stretched a wide dungheap, from which steam rose, and among the hens and turkeys, five or six peacocks pecked upon it—the luxury of Cauchois farmyards. The sheepfold was long, the barn was high, with walls as smooth as a hand. Under the shed stood two large carts and four plows, with their whips, collars, and full harness, whose blue woolen fleeces were soiled by the fine dust falling from the granaries. The yard rose gently, planted with symmetrically spaced trees, and the merry noise of a flock of geese rang out near the pond.

A young woman, in a blue merino gown trimmed with three flounces, came to the threshold of the house to receive M. Bovary, and showed him into the kitchen, where a great fire was blazing. The servants’ dinner bubbled around it in small pots of uneven size. Damp garments were drying inside the chimney. The shovel, tongs, and poker of the bellows, all of colossal proportions, shone like polished steel, while along the walls extended an abundant array of kitchenware, where the bright flame of the hearth, joined with the first rays of the sun coming through the panes, gleamed unevenly.

Charles went up to the first floor to see the patient. He found him in bed, sweating under his covers and having flung his cotton nightcap far away. He was a stout little man of fifty, with fair skin, blue eyes, bald on the front of his head, and wearing earrings. At his side, on a chair, stood a large carafe of brandy, from which he poured himself some from time to time to keep his spirits up; but as soon as he saw the doctor, his excitement fell away, and instead of swearing as he had done for twelve hours, he began to groan feebly.

The fracture was simple, without any sort of complication. Charles could not have wished for an easier one. Then, recalling the manners of his teachers at the bedsides of the wounded, he comforted the patient with all manner of kind words; surgical caresses, which are like the oil with which one greases bistouries. To obtain splints, they went to fetch, from under the cart-shed, a bundle of laths. Charles chose one, cut it into pieces and polished it with a shard of glass, while the servant tore up sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew pads. As she was a long time finding her workbox, her father grew impatient; she answered nothing, but as she sewed, she pricked her fingers, which she then put to her mouth to suck.

Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shining, fine at the tip, cleaner than Dieppe ivory, and almond-shaped. Her hand, however, was not beautiful, perhaps not pale enough, and a little dry at the knuckles; it was too long besides, and without soft inflections of line along its contours. What was beautiful about her were her eyes; though brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her gaze met yours frankly with a candid boldness.

Once the bandaging was done, the doctor was invited by M. Rouault himself to take a bite before leaving.

Charles went down into the room on the ground floor. Two place settings, with silver tumblers, were laid on a small table, at the foot of a large canopy bed covered with an Indian print representing Turks. One smelled an odor of iris and damp linen, escaping from the tall oak wardrobe facing the window. On the floor, in the corners, stood upright sacks of wheat. It was the overflow of the nearby granary, reached by three stone steps. To decorate the apartment, hung on a nail, in the middle of the wall whose green paint was flaking under the saltpeter, was a head of Minerva in black pencil, framed in gilt, and bearing at the bottom, written in Gothic letters: “To my dear papa.”

They spoke first of the patient, then of the weather, of the great colds, of the wolves that ran the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not much enjoy the country, now especially that she was almost solely in charge of the farm’s care. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate, which slightly disclosed her fleshy lips, which she was wont to nibble in her moments of silence.

Her neck emerged from a white collar, turned back. Her hair, whose two black bands seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was parted in the middle of the head by a fine line, which sank slightly according to the curve of the skull; and, barely showing the tip of the ear, they went to merge behind in an abundant chignon, with a wavy movement toward the temples, which the country doctor noticed there for the first time in his life. Her cheekbones were pink. She wore, like a man, passed between two buttons of her bodice, a tortoiseshell lorgnette.

When Charles, after going up to say farewell to old Rouault, came back into the room before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the window, looking out into the garden, where the bean stakes had been knocked over by the wind. She turned around.

“Are you looking for something?” she asked.

“My riding crop, if you please,” he answered.

And he began to rummage on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs; it had fallen to the ground, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma caught sight of it; she bent over the wheat sacks. Charles, out of gallantry, darted forward, and as he stretched out his arm in the same movement, he felt his chest brush the back of the young girl, bent beneath him. She straightened up all red and looked at him over her shoulder, handing him his oxhide whip.

Instead of returning to Les Bertaux three days later, as he had promised, it was the very next day that he went back, then twice a week regularly, not counting the unexpected visits he paid now and then, as if by mistake.

Everything, moreover, went well; the recovery proceeded according to rule, and when, at the end of forty-six days, old Rouault was seen trying to walk alone in his hovel, they began to regard M. Bovary as a man of great ability. Old Rouault said he would not have been better cured by the foremost doctors of Yvetot or even Rouen.

As for Charles, he did not seek to ask himself why he came to Les Bertaux with pleasure. Had he thought of it, he would no doubt have attributed his zeal to the gravity of the case, or perhaps to the profit he hoped to gain from it. Was it for that, however, that his visits to the farm made, among the poor occupations of his life, a charming exception? Those days he rose early, set off at a gallop, urged on his beast, then dismounted to wipe his feet on the grass, and pulled on his black gloves before entering. He loved to see himself arrive in the yard, to feel the gate turn against his shoulder, and the cock crowing on the wall, the lads coming to meet him. He loved the barn and the stables; he loved old Rouault, who clapped him on the hand calling him his savior; he loved Mademoiselle Emma’s little wooden shoes on the washed flagstones of the kitchen; her high heels made her a little taller, and when she walked before him, the wooden soles, lifting quickly, clacked with a dry sound against the leather of the boot.

She always saw him to the first step of the stoop. When his horse had not yet been brought, she remained there. They had said farewell, they spoke no more; the open air surrounded her, lifting in disorder the little stray hairs on her nape, or shaking on her hip the strings of her apron, which twisted like streamers. Once, in a thaw, the bark of the trees sweated in the yard, the snow on the building covers melted. She was on the threshold; she went to fetch her parasol, she opened it. The parasol, of pigeon-breast silk, through which the sun shone, lit with moving reflections the white skin of her face. She smiled beneath it at the tepid warmth; and one heard the drops of water, one by one, fall on the stretched moire.

In the early days of Charles’s frequenting Les Bertaux, the young Madame Bovary never failed to inquire after the patient, and even in the ledger she kept in double entry, she had chosen for M. Rouault a fine blank page. But when she learned he had a daughter, she went to gather information; and she learned that Mademoiselle Rouault, brought up at the convent with the Ursulines, had received, as they say, a fine education, that she knew, accordingly, dancing, geography, drawing, tapestry-work and playing the piano. That was the last straw!

“So that is why,” she said to herself, “he has such a beaming face when he goes to see her, and puts on his new waistcoat, at the risk of ruining it in the rain? Ah! that woman! that woman!...”

And she hated her, by instinct. First she eased herself with allusions, which Charles did not understand; then with incidental remarks which he let pass for fear of a storm; finally with point-blank apostrophes to which he knew not what to answer.

“How comes it he went back to Les Bertaux, since M. Rouault was cured and those people had not yet paid? Ah! it was because there was someone there, a person who knew how to talk, an embroideress, a fine mind. That was what he loved: he needed town young ladies! — And she went on:

“The daughter of old Rouault, a town young lady! Come now! their grandfather was a shepherd, and they have a cousin who nearly went before the assizes for a misdeed, in a quarrel. It is not worth making such a fuss, nor showing oneself at church on Sunday in a silk gown, like a countess. Poor fellow, besides, who, but for last year’s colza, would have been much embarrassed to pay his arrears!”

Out of weariness, Charles ceased to go back to Les Bertaux. Héloïse had made him swear he would go no more, his hand on her mass-book, after much sobbing and kissing, in a great outburst of love. He obeyed then; but the boldness of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct, and, by a sort of naive hypocrisy, he deemed that this prohibition from seeing her was for him like a right to love her. And then the widow was thin; she had long teeth; she wore in every season a small black shawl whose point descended between her shoulder blades; her stiff waist was sheathed in sheath-like gowns, too short, which uncovered her ankles, with the ribbons of her wide shoes crossing over grey stockings.

Charles’s mother came to see them now and then; but, after a few days, the daughter-in-law seemed to whet her to her edge; and then, like two knives, they were at scarifying him with their remarks and observations. He was wrong to eat so much! Why always offer a drop to the first comer? What obstinacy not to want to wear flannel!

It happened that at the beginning of spring, a notary of Ingouville, holder of the funds of the widow Dubuc, embarked, on a fine tide, carrying off with him all the money of his practice. Héloïse, it is true, still possessed, besides a share in a boat valued at six thousand francs, her house in the rue Saint-François; and yet, of all that fortune which had been sounded so high, nothing, save a little furniture and some trinkets, had appeared in the household. The matter had to be cleared up. The house at Dieppe was found worm-eaten with mortgages even to its piles; what she had put with the notary, God alone knew, and the boat share exceeded not a thousand crowns. So she had lied, the good lady! In his exasperation, old M. Bovary, breaking a chair against the pavement, accused his wife of having made their son’s unhappiness by yoking him to such a jade, whose harness was not worth her hide. They came to Tostes. Explanations were had. There were scenes. Héloïse, in tears, throwing herself into her husband’s arms, conjured him to defend her from his parents. Charles wished to speak for her. They grew angry, and they departed.

But the blow was struck. Eight days later, as she was spreading linen in her yard, she was seized with a spitting of blood, and the next day, while Charles had his back turned to close the window curtain, she said: “Ah! my God!” gave a sigh and fainted. She was dead! What astonishment!

When all was finished at the cemetery, Charles went back home. He found no one below; he went up to the first floor, into the bedroom, saw her gown still hanging at the foot of the alcove; then, leaning against the desk, he remained until evening lost in a painful reverie. She had loved him, after all.

III

One morning, old Rouault came to bring Charles the payment for his leg set right: seventy-five francs in forty-sous pieces, and a turkey. He had learned his misfortune, and consoled him as best he could.

“I know what it is!” said he, tapping him on the shoulder; “I was like you, myself! When I lost my poor departed, I went into the fields to be all alone; I fell at the foot of a tree, I wept, I called on the good Lord, I said foolish things to Him; I would have liked to be like the moles, that I saw on the branches, who had worms crawling in their bellies, burst, at last. And when I thought that others, at that moment, were with their good little wives holding them embraced against them, I struck great blows on the ground with my stick; I was nigh mad, that I ate no more; the very idea of going to the café disgusted me, you wouldn’t believe it. Well, slowly, one day chasing another, a spring upon a winter and an autumn over a summer, it drained bit by bit, crumb by crumb; it went away, it departed, it sank down, I mean, for there always remains something in the bottom of you, as if to say... a weight, there, on the chest! But, since that is the lot of us all, we must not let ourselves waste away either, and, because others are dead, want to die... You must shake yourself, M. Bovary; it will pass! Come see us; my daughter thinks of you now and then, d’you know, and she says like this that you forget her. Here’s spring soon; we’ll have you shoot a rabbit in the warren, to divert you a little.”

Charles followed his advice. He went back to Les Bertaux; he found everything as the day before, as it had been five months ago, that is to say. The pear trees were already in bloom, and old Rouault, now on his feet, went to and fro, which made the farm more lively.

Believing it his duty to lavish on the doctor as many courtesies as possible, because of his painful position, he begged him not to uncover his head, spoke to him in a low voice, as if he had been ill, and even pretended to be angry that something a little lighter than all the rest, such as little pots of cream or stewed pears, had not been prepared for him. He told stories. Charles caught himself laughing; but the memory of his wife, suddenly returning, darkened him.

Coffee was brought; he thought no more of it.

He thought of it less, as he grew accustomed to living alone. The new pleasure of independence soon made solitude more bearable to him. He could now change his meal hours, come in or go out without giving reasons, and, when he was quite tired, stretch out his four limbs, all spread, in his bed. So he pampered himself, cosseted himself and accepted the consolations offered him. On the other hand, the death of his wife had not ill served him in his practice, for it had been repeated for a month: “That poor young man! what a misfortune!” His name had spread, his clientele had increased; and then he went to Les Bertaux quite at his ease. He had a purposeless hope, a vague happiness; he found his face more agreeable in brushing his side-whiskers before his mirror.

He arrived one day toward three o’clock; everyone was in the fields; he went into the kitchen, but did not at first perceive Emma; the shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood, the sun lengthened upon the flagstones great thin rays, which broke at the angles of the furniture and trembled on the ceiling. Flies, on the table, climbed along the glasses that had been used, and buzzed as they drowned at the bottom, in the cider left. The daylight descending by the chimney, velveting the soot of the fireback, blued a little the cold ashes. Between the window and the hearth, Emma was sewing; she had no kerchief, one saw on her bare shoulders little drops of sweat.

After the country fashion, she offered him something to drink. He refused, she insisted, and at last offered him, laughing, to take a glass of liqueur with her. She went therefore to fetch from the cupboard a bottle of curaçao, reached two small glasses, filled one to the brim, poured scarcely any into the other, and, after clinking, raised it to her mouth. As it was almost empty, she tipped back to drink; and, her head thrown back, her lips advanced, her neck stretched, she laughed at feeling nothing, while the tip of her tongue, passing between her fine teeth, licked in little strokes the bottom of the glass.

She sat down again and took up her work, which was a white cotton stocking in which she was darning; she worked with her brow lowered; she spoke not, nor did Charles. The air, passing under the door, pushed a little dust upon the flags; he watched it creep, and heard only the inner beating of his head, with the cry of a hen, far off, that was laying in the yards. Emma, now and then, refreshed her cheeks by applying the palm of her hands; which she then cooled on the knob of the great andirons.

She complained of feeling, since the beginning of the season, dizzy spells; she asked if sea-baths would be of use to her; she fell to talking of the convent, Charles of his college, phrases came to them. They went up into her room. She showed him her old music notebooks, the little books given her as prizes and the oak-leaf crowns, abandoned in the bottom of a wardrobe. She spoke to him again of her mother, of the cemetery, and even showed him in the garden the flowerbed from which she gathered flowers, every first Friday of each month, to go place them on her tomb. But the gardener they had understood nothing of it; one was so poorly served! She would have liked, if only at least during the winter, to live in town, though the length of the fine days perhaps made the country still more tedious during the summer; — and, according as she spoke, her voice was clear, shrill, or, covering itself with languor all at once, trailed modulations which ended almost in murmurs, when she spoke to herself, — sometimes joyful, opening naive eyes, then half-closing the lids, the gaze drowned in boredom, the thought wandering.

In the evening, returning home, Charles took up one by one the phrases she had said, trying to recall them, to complete their sense, so as to make himself the portion of existence she had lived in the time he did not yet know her. But never could he see her in his mind, differently than he had seen her the first time, or as he had just left her a moment ago. Then he asked himself what she would become, if she married, and to whom? alas! old Rouault was quite rich, and she! — so beautiful! But Emma’s face kept coming back to place itself before his eyes, and something as monotonous as the humming of a spinning top buzzed in his ears: “If you were to marry, though! if you were to marry!” At night, he did not sleep, his throat was tight, he was thirsty; he got up to drink from his water jug and opened the window; the sky was covered with stars, a warm wind passed, far off dogs barked. He turned his head toward Les Bertaux.

Thinking after all one risked nothing, Charles promised himself to make the proposal when the occasion offered; but, each time it offered, the fear of not finding the proper words glued his lips.

Old Rouault would not have been displeased to be rid of his daughter, who served him little in his house. He excused her inwardly, finding she had too much wit for farming, a cursed trade, since one never saw a millionaire in it; far from having made a fortune there, the good man lost some every year; for, if he excelled in bargains, where he delighted in the tricks of the trade, on the other hand the actual farming, with the internal management of the farm, suited him less than anyone. He did not willingly withdraw his hands from his pockets, and spared no expense for all that concerned his living, wishing to be well fed, well heated, well bedded. He loved thick cider, bloody leg of mutton, and long-beaten glorias. He took his meals in the kitchen, alone, facing the fire, on a small table brought to him all served, as at the theater.

When therefore he noticed that Charles had red cheekbones near his daughter, which meant that one of these days she would be asked of him in marriage, he ruminated the whole affair in advance. He found him rather a bit puny, and that was not a son-in-law as he could have wished; but he was said to be of good conduct, economical, very learned, and no doubt he would not haggle too much over the dowry. Now, as old Rouault was going to be forced to sell twenty-two acres of his property, that he owed much to the mason, much to the harness-maker, and the cider-press beam was to be renewed:

“If he asks me for her,” said he to himself, “I give her to him.”

“Stories of the world, in your language.”