Part 22

But as soon as she had gone, Emma soon began to astonish Bovary by her practical good sense. They would have to make inquiries, verify the mortgages, see whether there was cause for a forced sale or a liquidation. She threw out technical terms at random, pronounced the great words order, future, foresight, and continually exaggerated the difficulties of the inheritance; so that one day she showed him the draft of a general power of attorney 'to manage and administer his affairs, make all borrowings, sign and endorse all notes, pay all sums, etc.' She had profited by Lheureux's lessons.

Charles, naively, asked her where the paper came from.

'From M. Guillaumin.'

And, with the greatest composure in the world, she added:

'I don't trust it too much. Notaries have such a bad reputation! We ought perhaps to consult... We know no one but... Oh! nobody.'

'Unless Léon...' replied Charles, who was thinking.

But it was difficult to come to an understanding by correspondence. Then she offered to make the journey. He thanked her. She insisted. It was a contest of attentions. At last she cried out in a tone of feigned playfulness:

'No, I beg you, I will go.'

'How good you are!' said he, kissing her on the forehead.

The next day, she boarded the Hirondelle to go to Rouen to consult M. Léon; and she stayed there three days.

III

They were three full days, exquisite, splendid, a true honeymoon.

They were at the Hôtel de Boulogne, on the harbor. And there they lived, shutters closed, doors locked, with flowers on the floor and iced syrups that were brought to them early in the morning.

Toward evening they took a covered boat and went to dine on an island.

It was the hour when, along the shipyards, one hears the caulker's mallet resounding against the hulls of vessels. The tar smoke escaped from among the trees, and on the river one saw large greasy drops, undulating unevenly beneath the purple color of the sun, like plates of Florentine bronze, that floated.

They descended among the moored boats, whose long oblique cables lightly brushed the top of the skiff.

The noises of the city gradually withdrew, the rolling of carts, the tumult of voices, the barking of dogs on the ships' bridges. She untied her hat and they landed on their island.

They placed themselves in the low room of a tavern, which had black nets hung at its door. They ate a fry of smelts, cream, and cherries. They lay down on the grass; they kissed each other apart under the poplars; and they would have wished, like two Robinsons, to live perpetually in that little spot, which seemed to them, in their bliss, the most magnificent on earth. It was not the first time they had beheld trees, blue sky, grass, heard water flow and the breeze blowing through the leaves; but they had doubtless never admired all that, as if nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the fulfillment of their desires.

At night they set off again. The boat followed the edge of the islands. They remained in the stern, both hidden by the shadow, without speaking. The square oars rang between the iron rowlocks; and that marked the silence like the beat of a metronome, while at the stern the trailing rudder did not cease its little soft lapping in the water.

Once the moon appeared; then they did not fail to make phrases, finding the star melancholy and full of poetry; even she began to sing:

'One evening, do you remember? we sailed, etc.'

Her harmonious and faint voice was lost upon the waves; and the wind carried off the runs that Léon listened to pass, like beatings of wings, around him.

She stood facing him, leaning against the side of the skiff, where the moon entered through one of the open shutters. Her black dress, whose draperies spread out like a fan, made her slender, rendered her taller. She had her head raised, her hands joined, and her two eyes toward the sky. At times the shadow of the willows hid her entirely, then she reappeared suddenly, like a vision, in the moonlight.

Léon, on the ground beside her, encountered under his hand a ponceau silk ribbon.

The boatman examined it and finally said:

'Ah! it's perhaps from a party I took out the other day. There came a pack of jokers, gentlemen and ladies, with cakes, champagne, cornets-à-pistons, the whole shaking fit! There was one especially, a big handsome fellow, with little mustaches, who was mighty amusing! and they said like this: "Come on, tell us something..., Adolphe..., Dodolphe..., I believe."'

She shuddered.

'Are you suffering?' said Léon, drawing near her.

'Oh! it is nothing. No doubt, the coolness of the night.'

'And who must not lack for women, either,' the old sailor added softly, thinking to pay a compliment to the stranger.

Then, spitting in his hands, he took up his oars again.

They had to part, however! The farewells were sad. It was at Mother Rolet's that he was to send his letters; and she gave him such precise instructions about the double envelope that he greatly admired her loving cunning.

'So, you affirm all is well?' said she in the last kiss.

'Yes, certainly!' — 'But why then,' he thought afterward, returning alone through the streets, 'does she hold so firmly to this power of attorney?'

IV

Léon soon took before his comrades an air of superiority, abstained from their company, and neglected the files completely.

He awaited his letters; he reread them. He wrote to her. He evoked her with all the force of his desire and his memories. Instead of diminishing through absence, this wish to see her again grew, so that one Saturday morning he slipped away from his office.

When, from the top of the hill, he perceived in the valley the steeple of the church with its sheet-iron flag turning in the wind, he felt that delectation mixed with triumphant vanity and selfish tenderness that millionaires must have when they return to visit their village.

He went to prowl around her house. A light shone in the kitchen. He watched for her shadow behind the curtains. Nothing appeared.

Mother Lefrançois, on seeing him, uttered great exclamations, and she found him 'grown and slimmed,' while Artémise, on the contrary, found him 'sturdier and browner.'

He dined in the little room, as formerly, but alone, without the tax-collector; for Binet, tired of waiting for the Hirondelle, had definitively advanced his meal by one hour, and now dined at five o'clock sharp, still claiming most often that the old rattletrap was late.

Léon nevertheless decided; he went to knock at the doctor's door: Madame was in her room, from which she did not come down until a quarter of an hour later. Monsieur seemed delighted to see him again; but he did not stir from the evening, nor all the next day.

He saw her alone, in the evening, very late, behind the garden, in the lane; — in the lane, as with the other! It was stormy, and they talked under an umbrella by the light of the lightning.

Their separation was becoming intolerable.

'Rather die!' said Emma.

She writhed on his arm, weeping all the while.

'Farewell!... farewell!... When shall I see you again?'

They retraced their steps to embrace once more; and it was then that she made him the promise to find soon, by whatever means, the permanent occasion to see each other freely, at least once a week. Emma did not doubt it. She was, besides, full of hope. Money was going to come to him.

Also, she bought for her room a pair of yellow curtains with broad stripes, which M. Lheureux had praised as cheap; she dreamed of a carpet, and Lheureux, affirming 'that it was not the sea to drink,' politely engaged to furnish her one. She could no longer do without his services. Twenty times in the day she sent for him, and at once he dropped his affairs, without allowing himself a murmur. One understood no better why Mother Rolet breakfasted with her every day, and even paid her visits in private.

It was toward this epoch, that is to say toward the beginning of winter, that she appeared seized with a great musical ardor.

One evening when Charles was listening, she began the same piece again four times in succession, always in vexation, while he, noticing no difference, cried:

'Bravo!..., very good!... You are wrong! go on!'

'Ah no! it is execrable! my fingers are rusty.'

The next day he begged her to play him something again.

'Very well, to please you!'

And Charles confessed that she had lost a little. She missed the pitch, blotted; then, stopping short:

'Ah! it is finished! I should have to take lessons; but...'

She bit her lips and added:

'Twenty francs a lesson, it is too dear!'

'Yes, indeed..., a little...,' said Charles, while simpering foolishly. 'Yet it seems to me one might for less; for there are artists without reputation who often are worth more than the celebrities.'

'Seek them out,' said Emma.

The next day, on returning, he contemplated her with a sly eye, and could at last not hold back this phrase:

'What stubbornness you have sometimes! I went to Barfeuchères today. Well, Madame Liégeard certified to me that her three young ladies, who are at the Miséricorde, take lessons for fifty sous the session, and from a famous mistress besides!'

She shrugged her shoulders, and opened her instrument no more.

But, when she passed by (if Bovary happened to be there), she sighed:

'Ah! my poor piano!'

And when people came to see her, she did not fail to inform you that she had abandoned music and could now not take it up again, for major reasons. Then they pitied her. It was a pity! she who had such a fine talent! It was even spoken of to Bovary. They shamed him, and above all the chemist:

'You are wrong! one must never let the faculties of nature lie fallow. Besides, think, my good friend, that by engaging Madame to study, you save later on the musical education of your child! I find that mothers ought to instruct their children themselves. It is an idea of Rousseau, perhaps still a little new, but which will end by triumphing, I am sure of it, like maternal nursing and vaccination.'

Charles therefore came back once more on this question of the piano. Emma answered, with acerbity, that it were better to sell it. That poor piano, which had caused her so many vain satisfactions, to see it go, was for Bovary like the indefinable suicide of a part of herself!

'If you wished...,' said he, 'from time to time, a lesson, that would not be, after all, extremely ruinous.'

'But lessons,' she replied, 'are profitable only when followed.'

And that is how she went about obtaining from her husband permission to go to the city, once a week, to see her lover. They even found, at the end of a month, that she had made considerable progress.

V

It was Thursday. She rose, and dressed herself silently so as not to awaken Charles, who would have made remarks on her preparing so early. Then she walked back and forth; she placed herself before the windows, she looked at the Square. The dawn circulated between the pillars of the market-halls, and the pharmacist's house, whose shutters were closed, let one perceive in the pale color of the aurora the capitals of his sign.

When the clock struck a quarter past seven, she went to the Lion d'Or, whose door Artémise came yawning to open. She dug out for Madame the coals buried under the ashes. Emma remained alone in the kitchen. From time to time she went out. Hivert harnessed without hurrying, and moreover listening to Mother Lefrançois, who, passing her head in a cotton cap through a wicket, loaded him with commissions and gave him explanations to trouble any other man. Emma beat the soles of her boots against the paving-stones of the yard.

At last, when he had eaten his soup, put on his limousine, lit his pipe and seized his whip, he settled himself tranquilly on the seat.

The Hirondelle set off at a slow trot, and, for three quarters of a league, stopped from place to place to take travelers, who watched for it standing, at the edge of the road, before the barrier of the yards. Those who had given notice the evening before made themselves waited for; some even were still in bed in their houses; Hivert called, — cried, swore, then he descended from his seat and went to knock great blows against the doors. The wind blew through the cracked windows.

Meanwhile the four benches filled, the carriage rolled, the apple-trees in file succeeded one another; and the road, between its two long ditches full of yellow water, went continually narrowing toward the horizon.

Emma knew it from one end to the other; she knew that after a pasture there was a post, then an elm, a barn or a roadmender's hut; sometimes even, in order to make surprises for herself, she closed her eyes. But she never lost the clear sense of the distance to travel.

At last, the brick houses drew near, the earth resounded under the wheels, the Hirondelle glided between gardens where one perceived, through a lattice, statues, a vineyard, clipped yews and a swing. Then, at a single glance, the city appeared.

Descending like an amphitheater and drowned in fog, it spread out beyond the bridges, confusedly. The full countryside rose afterward with a monotonous movement, until touching in the distance the undecided base of the pale sky. Thus seen from above, the whole landscape was as motionless as a painting; the ships at anchor crowded in a corner; the river rounded its curve at the foot of the green hills, and the islands, oblong in shape, seemed upon the water like great black fish stopped. The factory chimneys pushed immense brown plumes that flew off at the end. One heard the rumbling of foundries with the clear carillon of churches that rose in the mist. The trees of the boulevards, without leaves, made violet thickets amid the houses, and the roofs, all shining with rain, glittered unevenly, according to the height of the quarters. Sometimes a gust of wind carried the clouds toward Sainte-Catherine hill, like aerial waves that broke in silence against a cliff.

Something vertiginous detached itself for her from these massed existences, and her heart swelled abundantly, as if the hundred twenty thousand souls that palpitated there had sent her all at once the vapor of the passions she supposed in them. Her love grew before the space, and filled with tumult at the vague buzzings that rose. She poured it outside, upon the squares, the promenades, the streets, and the old Norman city spread before her eyes like a measureless capital, like a Babylon where she entered. She leaned out with both hands through the window, inhaling the breeze; the three horses galloped, the stones grated in the mud, the diligence rocked, and Hivert, from afar, hailed the carts on the road, while the bourgeois who had passed the night at Bois-Guillaume descended the hill tranquilly, in their little family carriage.

They stopped at the barrier; Emma unbuckled her wooden shoes, put on other gloves, readjusted her shawl, and, twenty paces farther, she got out of the Hirondelle.

The city then awoke. Clerks, in Greek caps, rubbed the fronts of the shops, and women who held baskets on the hip pushed from time to time a sonorous cry, at the corner of the streets. She walked eyes on the ground, brushing the walls, and smiling with pleasure under her lowered black veil.

For fear of being seen, she did not usually take the shortest way. She plunged into the dark lanes, and arrived all in sweat toward the bottom of the Nationale street, near the fountain that is there. It is the quarter of the theater, the beer-houses and the girls. Often a cart passed near her, carrying some decor that trembled. Waiters in aprons poured sand on the flagstones, between green shrubs. One scented absinthe, the cigar and the oysters.

She turned a street; she recognized him by his curled hair escaping from his hat.

Léon, on the sidewalk, continued to walk. She followed him to the hotel; he went up, he opened the door, he entered... What an embrace!

Then the words, after the kisses, precipitated. They told each other the sorrows of the week, the presentiments, the worries for the letters; but now all was forgotten, and they looked at each other face to face, with laughter of voluptuousness and names of tenderness.

The bed was a great bed of mahogany in the shape of a nacelle. The Levantine red curtains, which descended from the ceiling, were cinched too low toward the flared head; — and nothing in the world was beautiful as her brown head and her white skin detaching against that purple color, when, by a gesture of modesty, she closed her two bare arms, hiding her face in her hands.

The tepid apartment, with its discreet carpet, its frolicsome ornaments and its tranquil light, seemed altogether convenient for the intimacies of passion. The arrow-ended sticks, the brass hooks and the large balls of the firedogs shone suddenly, if the sun entered. There was on the mantelpiece, between the candelabra, two of those great pink shells where one hears the noise of the sea when one applies them to the ear.

How they loved that good room full of gaiety, despite its splendor a little faded! They always found the furniture in its place, and sometimes hairpins that she had forgotten, the other Thursday, under the pedestal of the clock. They lunched at the corner of the fire, on a little guéridon inlaid with rosewood. Emma cut up, put the pieces in his plate, uttering all sorts of caresses; and she laughed a sonorous and libertine laugh when the foam of the Champagne overflowed from the light glass onto the rings of her fingers. They were so completely lost in the possession of themselves, that they believed themselves there in their particular house, and before living there until death, like two eternal young spouses. They said our room, our carpet, our armchairs, even she said my slippers, a gift from Léon, a fancy she had had. They were slippers in pink satin, edged with swan. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too short, hung in the air; and the dainty shoe, which had no heel, held only by the toes to her bare foot.

He savored for the first time the inexpressible delicacy of feminine elegances. Never had he met this grace of language, this reserve of garment, these poses of a dozing dove. He admired the exaltation of her soul and the laces of her skirt. Besides, was she not a woman of the world, and a married woman! a true mistress finally?

By the diversity of her humor, now mystical or joyous, babbling, taciturn, impetuous, nonchalant, she went recalling in him a thousand desires, evoking instincts or reminiscences. She was the lover of all novels, the heroine of all dramas, the vague She of all volumes of verse. He found again on her shoulders the amber color of the odalisque at her bath; she had the long bodice of feudal chatelaines; she resembled also the pale woman of Barcelona, but she was above all an Angel!

Often, in looking at her, it seemed to him that his soul, escaping toward her, spread like a wave over the contour of her head, and descended drawn into the whiteness of her breast.

He placed himself on the ground, before her; and, the two elbows on his knees, he considered her with a smile, and his brow tense.

She leaned toward him and murmured, as if suffocated with intoxication:

'Oh! do not move! do not speak! look at me! There comes from your eyes something so sweet, that does me so much good!'

She called him child:

'Child, do you love me?'

And she scarcely heard his answer, in the precipitation of her lips that rose to his mouth.

There was on the clock a little Cupid of bronze, who minced in rounding the arms under a gilded garland. They laughed at it many times; but, when they had to separate, all seemed serious to them.

Immobile one before the other, they repeated to each other:

'Until Thursday!... until Thursday!'

Suddenly she took his head in both hands, kissed him quickly on the forehead crying: 'Farewell!' and sprang into the staircase.

She went to the rue de la Comédie, to a hairdresser's, to have her bands arranged. Night fell; they lit the gas in the shop.

She heard the little bell of the theater calling the strollers to the performance; and she saw, opposite, pass white-faced men and women in faded dress, who entered by the stage door.

It was warm in that little apartment too low, where the stove hummed amid the wigs and pomades. The smell of the irons, with those greasy hands that handled her head, soon made her dizzy, and she fell asleep a little under her peignoir. Often the boy, in doing her hair, proposed to her tickets for the masked ball.

Then she went away! She went up the streets; she arrived at the Red Cross; she took up her wooden shoes, which she had hidden in the morning under a bench, and packed herself in her place among the impatient travelers. Some descended at the bottom of the hill. She remained alone in the carriage.

At each turn, one perceived more and more all the lights of the city which made a large luminous vapor above the confused houses. Emma knelt on the cushions, and strayed her eyes in that dazzlement. She sobbed, called Léon, and sent him tender words and kisses that were lost in the wind.

There was in the hill a poor devil wandering with his stick, all amid the diligences. A heap of rags covered his shoulders, and an old burst beaver, rounding like a basin, hid his face; but when he withdrew it, he uncovered, in place of eyelids, two gaping eye-sockets all bloodstained. The flesh frayed in red strips; and there flowed from them liquids that congealed in green scabs down to the nose, whose black nostrils sniffed convulsively. To make you pity him, he threw back his head with an idiot laugh; — then his bluish pupils, rolling with a continuous movement, went to strike, toward the temples, on the edge of the raw wound.

He sang a little song in following the carriages:

'Often the heat of a fine day / Makes a young girl dream of love.'

And there was in all the rest birds, sun and foliage.

Sometimes he appeared all at once behind Emma, head bare. She drew back with a cry. Hivert came to jest with him. He invited him to take a booth at the Saint-Romain fair, or else asked him, laughing, how his good friend was doing.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”