Part 20

They spoke at first of his illness, though Emma now and then interrupted Charles — for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Léon; and the latter told them that he had come to Rouen to spend two years in a busy law office, so as to toughen himself for business, which was different in Normandy from what was done in Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais family, and Mother Lefrançois; and, having nothing more to say to each other in the husband's presence, the conversation soon came to a halt.

People leaving the theater went by on the sidewalk, all humming or bawling at the top of their lungs: O lovely angel, my Lucie! Then Léon, to play the man of taste, began to talk music. He had seen Tamburini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi; and next to them, Lagardy, despite his great outbursts, was worth nothing.

— And yet, interrupted Charles, who was nibbling his rum sherbet in small bites, they say that in the last act he is quite admirable; I regret having left before the end, for it was beginning to amuse me.

— Besides, resumed the clerk, he will soon give another performance.

But Charles replied that they were leaving the next day.

— Unless, he added, turning to his wife, you would like to stay alone, my little cat?

And, changing his tactics before this unexpected opportunity that offered itself to his hope, the young man launched into praise of Lagardy in the final piece. It was something superb, sublime! Then Charles insisted:

— You would come back on Sunday. Come now, decide! You are wrong if you feel the least bit that it does you good.

Meanwhile the tables around them were emptying; a waiter came and discreetly stationed himself near them. Charles, who understood, drew out his purse; the clerk held him by the arm, and even did not forget to leave, besides, two white coins, which he made ring upon the marble.

— I am truly sorry, murmured Bovary, for the money you...

The other made a disdainful gesture full of cordiality, and, taking his hat:

— It is settled, is it not, tomorrow at six o'clock?

Charles protested once more that he could not be away any longer; but nothing prevented Emma...

— It is just that..., she stammered with a singular smile, I do not quite know...

— Well! you think it over, we shall see, night brings counsel...

Then, to Léon, who was accompanying them:

— Now that you are in our parts, you will come, I hope, now and then, to ask us to dinner?

The clerk affirmed that he would not fail, having moreover need to go to Yonville on business for his office. And they parted before the Passage Saint-Herbland, at the moment when half past eleven was striking on the cathedral.

THIRD PART

I

Monsieur Léon, while studying law, had fairly frequented the Chaumière, where he even met with rather pretty successes among the grisettes, who found him distinguished-looking. He was the most proper of students: he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, did not eat on the first of the month the money of his quarter's allowance, and kept on good terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always abstained from them, as much from pusillanimity as from delicacy.

Often, when he stayed to read in his room, or seated in the evening under the lindens of the Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But little by little this feeling weakened, and other desires piled up on top of it, though it persisted nevertheless through them; for Léon did not lose all hope, and there was for him like an uncertain promise that balanced itself in the future, such as a golden fruit suspended from some fantastic foliage.

Then, seeing her again after three years of absence, his passion awoke. He must, he thought, at last resolve to possess her. Besides, his timidity had worn away through contact with frolicsome company, and he was returning to the provinces, despising all that did not tread with a varnished foot the asphalt of the boulevard. Beside a Parisienne in lace, in the salon of some illustrious doctor, a person with decorations and a carriage, the poor clerk would no doubt have trembled like a child; but here, at Rouen, on the docks, before the wife of this little doctor, he felt at ease, sure in advance that he would dazzle her. Assurance depends on the milieu where it rests: one does not speak on the entresol as on the fourth floor, and the rich woman seems to have around her, to guard her virtue, all her banknotes, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.

On leaving Monsieur and Madame Bovary the evening before, Léon had followed them from afar in the street; then, having seen them stop at the Croix Rouge, he had turned on his heel and spent the whole night meditating a plan.

The next day, then, toward five o'clock, he entered the kitchen of the inn, his throat tight, his cheeks pale, and with the resolution of cowards that nothing stops.

— The master is not here, answered a servant.

That seemed to him of good omen. He went up.

She was not disconcerted at his approach; on the contrary, she apologized for having forgotten to tell him where they were staying.

— Oh! I guessed it, replied Léon.

— How?

He pretended to have been guided toward her, by chance, by an instinct. She began to smile, and at once, to repair her foolishness, Léon related that he had spent his morning looking for her successively in all the hotels of the city.

— So you have decided to stay? he added.

— Yes, said she, and I was wrong. One must not grow accustomed to impracticable pleasures, when one has a thousand demands around one...

— Oh! I imagine...

— Eh! no, for you are not a woman, you.

But men had their sorrows too, and the conversation opened with some philosophical reflections. Emma dwelt much on the misery of earthly affections and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains buried.

To make himself valued, or by a naive imitation of that melancholy which provoked her own, the young man declared that he had been prodigiously bored all the time of his studies. Procedure irritated him, other callings attracted him, and his mother never ceased, in every letter, to torment him. For they made more and more precise the motives of their sorrow, each, as he spoke, growing somewhat excited in this progressive confidence. But they stopped sometimes before the complete exposition of their idea, and sought then to imagine a phrase that might nevertheless translate it. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not say that he had forgotten her.

Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers after the ball, with dock-women; and she no doubt no longer remembered the old rendezvous, when she ran in the morning through the grass, toward her lover's château. The noises of the city scarcely reached them; and the room seemed small, expressly to tighten still more their solitude. Emma, dressed in a dimity dressing-gown, leaned her chignon against the back of the old armchair; the yellow paper of the wall made like a ground of gold behind her; and her bare head was repeated in the mirror with the white parting in the middle, and the tips of her ears showing under her bands of hair.

— But pardon, said she, I am wrong! I weary you with my eternal complaints!

— No, never! never!

— If you knew, she resumed, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes that rolled a tear, all that I had dreamed!

— And I, then! Oh! I have suffered much! Often I went out, I left, I dragged myself along the quays, stunning myself at the noise of the crowd without being able to banish the obsession that pursued me. There is on the boulevard, at a print-seller's, an Italian engraving representing a Muse. She is draped in a tunic and she looks at the moon, with forget-me-nots in her loosened hair. Something incessantly drew me there; I have stayed there whole hours.

Then, in a trembling voice:

— She resembled you a little.

Madame Bovary turned away her head, so that he might not see on her lips the irresistible smile that she felt rising.

— Often, he resumed, I wrote you letters that I then tore up.

She did not answer. He continued:

— I imagined sometimes that a chance might bring you. I thought I recognized you at the street corners; and I ran after all the hackney-coaches where there fluttered at the door a shawl, a veil like yours...

She seemed determined to let him speak without interrupting him. Crossing her arms and lowering her face, she considered the rosette of her slippers, and she made in their satin little movements, at intervals, with the toes of her foot.

However, she sighed:

— What is most lamentable, is it not, is to drag, like me, a useless existence? If our sorrows could serve someone, one would console oneself in the thought of the sacrifice!

He began to extol virtue, duty, and silent self-immolations, having himself an incredible need of devotion that he could not satisfy.

— I should much like, said she, to be a hospital nun.

— Alas! replied he, men have none of those holy missions, and I see nowhere any profession... unless perhaps that of physician...

With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to complain of her illness where she had nearly died; what a pity! she would suffer no more now. Léon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and even, one evening, he had written his will recommending that he be buried in that beautiful coverlet, with velvet stripes, that he held from her; for thus they would have wished to have been, both of them making themselves an ideal on which they now adjusted their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always lengthens feelings.

But at this invention of the coverlet:

— Why so? asked she.

— Why?

He hesitated.

— Because I have loved you well!

And, applauding himself for having crossed the difficulty, Léon, from the corner of his eye, watched her countenance.

It was like the sky, when a gust of wind drives away the clouds. The mass of sad thoughts that darkened them seemed to withdraw from her blue eyes; all her face shone.

He waited. Finally she answered:

— I had always suspected it...

Then they told each other the little events of that distant existence, whose pleasures and melancholies they had just summed up, by a single word. He remembered the clematis cradle, the dresses she had worn, the furniture of her room, all her house.

— And our poor cactuses, where are they?

— The cold killed them last winter.

— Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? Often I saw them again as before, when, on summer mornings, the sun struck the blinds... and I caught sight of your two bare arms passing among the flowers.

— Poor friend! said she, holding out her hand.

Léon quickly pressed his lips to it. Then, when he had breathed deeply:

— You were, in those days, for me, I know not what incomprehensible force that captivated my life. Once, for example, I came to your house; but you do not remember it, no doubt?

— Yes, said she. Continue.

— You were below, in the anteroom, ready to go out, on the last step; — you even had a hat with little blue flowers; and, without any invitation from you, in spite of myself, I accompanied you. Every minute, however, I became more and more conscious of my foolishness, and I continued to walk near you, not daring to follow you quite, and not wishing to leave you. When you went into a shop, I stayed in the street, I watched you through the pane undo your gloves and count the change on the counter. Then you rang at Madame Tuvache's, they opened to you, and I remained like an idiot before the heavy door, which had fallen shut behind you.

Madame Bovary, listening to him, wondered at being so old; all these things reappearing seemed to her to enlarge her existence; that made like sentimental immensities where she carried herself back; and she said from time to time, in a low voice and her eyelids half closed:

— Yes, it is true!... it is true!... it is true...

They heard eight o'clock strike on the different clocks of the Beauvoisine quarter, which is full of boarding-schools, churches, and great abandoned hotels. They no longer spoke to each other; but they felt, in looking at one another, a rustling in their heads, as if something sonorous had reciprocally escaped from their fixed pupils. They had just joined their hands; and the past, the future, the reminiscences and the dreams, all were confounded in the sweetness of this ecstasy. Night was thickening on the walls, where still shone, half lost in the shadow, the heavy colors of four prints representing four scenes from the Tour de Nesle, with a legend at the bottom, in Spanish and French. Through the sash-window, one saw a corner of black sky between pointed roofs.

She rose to light two candles on the commode, then came back to sit down.

— Well then... said Léon.

— Well then? she answered.

And he sought how to renew the dialogue, interrupted, when she said to him:

— Whence comes it that no one, until now, has ever expressed to me such feelings?

The clerk protested that ideal natures were difficult to understand. He, at first glance, had loved her; and he despaired in thinking of the happiness they would have had if, by a grace of chance, meeting earlier, they had attached themselves to one another in an indissoluble manner.

— I have thought of it sometimes, she resumed.

— What a dream! murmured Léon.

And, delicately handling the blue edging of her long white belt, he added:

— What, then, prevents us from beginning again?

— No, my friend, she answered, I am too old... you are too young... forget me! Others will love you... you will love them.

— Not like you! cried he.

— Child that you are! Come, let us be wise! I wish it!

She represented to him the impossibilities of their love, and that they must hold themselves, as before, within the simple terms of a brotherly friendship.

Was it seriously that she spoke thus? No doubt Emma did not know herself, wholly occupied by the charm of the seduction and the necessity of defending herself from it; and, contemplating the young man with a tender glance, she gently repelled the timid caresses that his trembling hands tried.

— Ah! pardon, said he, drawing back.

And Emma was seized with a vague fright, before this timidity, more dangerous for her than the boldness of Rodolphe when he advanced with open arms. Never had any man seemed to her so handsome. An exquisite candor escaped from his bearing. He lowered his long fine lashes that curled. His cheek of suave epidermis reddened — she thought — with the desire of her person, and Emma felt an invincible wish to press her lips there. Then, leaning toward the clock as if to look at the hour:

— How late it is, my God! said she; how we chatter!

He understood the allusion and sought his hat.

— I have even forgotten the spectacle! That poor Bovary who left me on purpose! Monsieur Lormeaux, of the rue Grand-Pont, was to take me there with his wife.

And the opportunity was lost, for she was leaving the next day.

— Truly? said Léon.

— Yes.

— Yet I must see you again, he resumed, I had to tell you...

— What?

— Something... grave, serious. Oh! no, besides, you will not leave, it is impossible! If you knew... Listen to me... You have not understood me then? you have not guessed?

— Yet you speak well, said Emma.

— Ah! jests! Enough, enough! Do, for pity, that I see you again... once... only once.

— Well...

She stopped; then, as if reconsidering:

— Oh! not here!

— Where you wish.

— Will you...

She seemed to reflect, and, in a curt tone:

— Tomorrow, at eleven o'clock, in the cathedral.

— I shall be there! he cried, seizing her hands, which she disengaged.

And, as they found themselves standing both, he placed behind her and Emma lowering her head, he leaned toward her neck and kissed her long at the nape.

— But you are mad! ah! you are mad! said she with little sonorous laughs, while the kisses multiplied.

Then, advancing her head over his shoulder, she seemed to seek the consent of his eyes. They fell upon him, full of a glacial majesty.

Léon took three steps backward, to leave. He remained on the threshold. Then he whispered in a trembling voice:

— Till tomorrow.

She answered by a nod, and disappeared like a bird into the next room.

Emma, in the evening, wrote the clerk an interminable letter wherein she released herself from the rendezvous: all now was finished, and they must no longer, for their happiness, meet. But, when the letter was closed, as she did not know Léon's address, she found herself much embarrassed.

— I shall give it to him myself, said she; he will come.

Léon, the next day, window open and humming on his balcony, varnished himself his pumps, and in several coats. He put on white trousers, fine socks, a green coat, spread in his handkerchief all the scents he possessed, then, having had himself curled, uncurled, to give his hair more natural elegance.

— It is still too early! he thought, looking at the barber's cuckoo clock, which marked nine o'clock.

He read an old fashion paper, went out, smoked a cigar, went up three streets, thought it was time and directed himself lightly toward the parvis of Notre-Dame.

It was a fine summer morning. Silverware glittered in the goldsmiths' shops, and the light that came obliquely upon the cathedral cast shimmerings on the fracture of the gray stones; a company of birds whirled in the blue sky, around the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with cries, smelled of the flowers that bordered its pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissuses and tuberoses, unequally spaced by damp greens, catmint and chickweed for the birds; the fountain, in the middle, gurgled, and, under large umbrellas, among cantaloupes staged in pyramids, bare-headed market-women turned in paper bouquets of violets.

The young man took one. It was the first time he bought flowers for a woman; and his chest, in breathing them, swelled with pride, as if this homage that he destined for another had turned back toward him.

However he was afraid of being noticed; he entered the church resolutely.

The verger, then, held himself on the threshold, in the middle of the portal to the left, below the dancing Marianne with plume in cap, rapier at the calf, cane in hand, more majestic than a cardinal and shining like a holy ciborium.

He advanced toward Léon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity that ecclesiastics assume when they question children:

— Monsieur, no doubt, is not from here? Monsieur wishes to see the curiosities of the church?

— No, said the other.

And he first made the tour of the side-aisles. Then he came to look upon the square. Emma did not arrive. He went up as far as the choir.

The nave mirrored itself in the full holy-water stoups, with the beginning of the ogives and some portions of stained glass. But the reflection of the paintings, breaking at the edge of the marble, continued farther, upon the flagstones, like a variegated carpet. The great daylight of outdoors lengthened into the church in three enormous rays, through the three open portals. From time to time, at the back, a sacristan passed making before the altar the oblique genuflection of hurried worshippers. The crystal chandeliers hung motionless. In the choir, a silver lamp burned; and, from the side chapels, the dark parts of the church, there escaped now and then like exhalations of sighs, with the sound of a grating that fell back, echoing under the high vaults.

Léon, with serious step, walked near the walls. Never had life seemed so good to him. She was going to come presently, charming, agitated, spying behind her at the looks that followed her, — and with her flounced dress, her gold lorgnette, her thin boots, in every sort of elegance that he had not tasted, and in the ineffable seduction of virtue that succumbs. The church, like a gigantic boudoir, disposed itself around her; the vaults inclined to gather in the shadow the confession of her love; the stained glass shone to illuminate her face, and the censers were going to burn so that she might appear like an angel, in the smoke of the perfumes.

However she did not come. He placed himself on a chair and his eyes met a blue window where one sees boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at it long, attentively, and counted the scales of the fish and the buttonholes of the doublets, while his thought wandered in search of Emma.

The verger, apart, was inwardly indignant at this individual, who permitted himself to admire the cathedral alone. He seemed to him to behave in a monstrous way, to rob him in some sort, and almost to commit a sacrilege.

But a rustle of silk on the flagstones, the edge of a hat, a black cape... It was she! Léon rose and ran to meet her.

Emma was pale. She walked quickly.

— Read! said she, holding out a paper... Oh no!

And abruptly she withdrew her hand, to enter the chapel of the Virgin, where, kneeling against a chair, she began to pray.

The young man was irritated at this bigoted fancy; then he nevertheless felt a certain charm in seeing her, in the midst of the rendezvous, thus lost in orisons like an Andalusian marchioness; then he was not long in growing bored, for she did not finish.

Emma prayed, or rather strove to pray, hoping that there would descend to her from heaven some sudden resolution; and, to attract divine aid, she filled her eyes with the splendors of the tabernacle, she breathed the perfume of the white stocks in bloom in the great vases, and lent her ear to the silence of the church, which only increased the tumult of her heart.

She rose, and they were about to leave, when the verger approached briskly, saying:

— Madame, no doubt, is not from here? Madame wishes to see the curiosities of the church?

— Eh no! cried the clerk.

— Why not? she resumed.

For she clung from her faltering virtue to the Virgin, to the sculptures, to the tombs, to all the occasions.

Then, in order to proceed in order, the verger led them to the entrance near the square, where, showing them with his cane a great circle of black paving-stones, without inscriptions or chiseling:

— Here, said he majestically, is the circumference of the beautiful bell of Amboise. It weighed forty thousand pounds. There was not its equal in all Europe. The workman who cast it died of joy...

— Let us go, said Léon.

The good man set himself again in motion; then, returned to the chapel of the Virgin, he spread his arms in a synthetic gesture of demonstration, and, prouder than a country proprietor showing you his espaliers:

— This simple slab covers Pierre de Brézé, lord of La Varenne and of Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou and governor of Normandy, dead at the battle of Montlhéry, 16 July 1465.

Léon, biting his lips, fidgeted.

— And, to the right, this gentleman all armored in iron, on a horse that rears, is his grandson Louis de Brézé, lord of Breval and of Montchauvet, count of Maulevrier, baron of Mauny, chamberlain to the king, knight of the Order and likewise governor of Normandy, dead 23 July 1531, a Sunday, as the inscription bears; and, below, this man ready to descend into the tomb exactly figures to you the same. It is not possible, is it not, to see a more perfect representation of nothingness?

“Stories of the world, in your language.”