Part 29

Yet he was stifling within the narrow limits of journalism, and soon he needed the book, the work! Then he composed a General Statistics of the canton of Yonville, followed by climatological observations, and the statistics led him toward philosophy. He concerned himself with great questions: the social problem, the moralization of the poor classes, fish farming, rubber, railways, etc. He came to blush at being a bourgeois. He affected the artistic type, he smoked! He bought two chic Pompadour statuettes, to decorate his drawing room.

He did not abandon pharmacy; on the contrary! he kept abreast of discoveries. He followed the great movement of chocolates. He was the first to bring into the Seine-Inférieure cho-ca and revalentia. He was seized with enthusiasm for Pulvermacher's hydro-electric chains; he wore one himself; and, in the evening, when he removed his flannel waistcoat, Madame Homais remained quite dazzled before the spiral of gold beneath which he disappeared, and felt her ardor redouble for this man more bound than a Scythian and splendid as a magus.

He had fine ideas regarding Emma's tomb. He first proposed a section of column with a drapery, then a pyramid, then a temple of Vesta, a kind of rotunda... or else 'a heap of ruins'. And, in all the plans, Homais would not give up the weeping willow, which he considered the obligatory symbol of sadness.

Charles and he made a journey together to Rouen, to see tombs, at a funeral contractor's, — accompanied by a painter, a certain Vaufrylard, a friend of Bridoux, and who, the whole time, spouted puns. Finally, after examining a hundred drawings, having ordered an estimate and made a second trip to Rouen, Charles decided on a mausoleum which was to bear on its two principal faces 'a genius holding an extinguished torch'.

As for the inscription, Homais found nothing as fine as: Sta viator, and he stuck with that; he racked his imagination; he repeated continually: Sta viator... At last he discovered: amabilem conjugem calcas! which was adopted.

A strange thing it was, that Bovary, while thinking of Emma continually, forgot her; and he despaired at feeling this image escape his memory amid the efforts he made to retain it. Every night, however, he dreamed of her; it was always the same dream: he drew near to her; but, when he came to embrace her, she fell into putrefaction in his arms.

He was seen for a week entering the church in the evening. Monsieur Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then abandoned him. Besides, the old fellow was turning to intolerance, to fanaticism, said Homais; he fulminated against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every fortnight, in his sermon, to recount the death agony of Voltaire, who died devouring his excrement, as everyone knows.

Despite the economy in which Bovary lived, he was far from being able to amortize his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any notes. Seizure became imminent. Then he had recourse to his mother, who consented to let him take a mortgage on her property, but while sending him plenty of recriminations against Emma; and she asked, in return for her sacrifice, a shawl, escaped from the ravages of Félicité. Charles refused it to her. They quarreled.

She made the first overtures of reconciliation, by proposing to take the little girl into her home, who would help her with the housework. Charles consented. But, at the moment of departure, all courage abandoned him. Then it was a definitive, complete rupture.

As his affections disappeared, he clung more tightly to the love of his child. She worried him, however; for she coughed sometimes, and had red patches on her cheekbones.

Facing him spread out, flourishing and merry, the family of the pharmacist, whom all the world contributed to satisfy. Napoléon helped him in the laboratory, Athalie embroidered a Greek cap for him, Irma cut out paper rounds to cover the jams, and Franklin recited in one breath the table of Pythagoras. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men.

Error! a secret ambition gnawed at him: Homais desired the cross. The credentials were not lacking:

I° Having, during the cholera, distinguished himself by boundless devotion; 2° having published, at my own expense, various works of public utility, such as... (and he recalled his memoir entitled: On cider, its fabrication and its effects; plus, observations on the woolly aphis, sent to the Academy; his volume of statistics, and even his pharmacy thesis); not to mention that I am a member of several learned societies (he was a member of one alone).

— In short, he cried, making a pirouette, if it were only to distinguish myself at fires!

Then Homais inclined toward the Powers That Be. He rendered secretly to the Prefect great services in the elections. He sold himself finally, he prostituted himself. He even addressed to the sovereign a petition wherein he implored him to do him justice; he called him our good king and compared him to Henri IV.

And every morning, the apothecary flung himself upon the newspaper to discover his appointment; it did not come. At last, unable to bear it longer, he had drawn in his garden a turf figured as the star of honor, with two little twists of grass starting from the top to imitate the ribbon. He walked around it, arms crossed, meditating on the ineptitude of the government and the ingratitude of men.

Out of respect, or a sort of sensuality that made him slow in his investigations, Charles had not yet opened the secret compartment of a rosewood desk which Emma used habitually. One day, at last, he sat before it, turned the key and pushed the spring. All Léon's letters were there. No more doubt, this time! He devoured them to the last, rummaged in every corner, every piece of furniture, every drawer, behind the walls, sobbing, howling, distraught, mad. He discovered a box, burst it open with a kick. Rodolphe's portrait sprang full in his face, amid the disordered love notes.

They wondered at his discouragement. He no longer went out, received no one, refused even to go see his patients. Then it was said that he locked himself in to drink.

Sometimes, however, a curious person hoisted himself above the garden hedge, and perceived with astonishment this long-bearded man, covered in sordid clothes, wild, and weeping aloud as he walked.

In the evening, in summer, he took his little girl with him and led her to the cemetery. They came back at nightfall, when there was no longer any light on the Square except the dormer window of Binet.

However the voluptuousness of his grief was incomplete, for he had no one around him to share it; and he paid visits to Mother Lefrançois in order to be able to speak of her. But the innkeeper listened with only one ear, having like him her sorrows, for Monsieur Lheureux had finally established the Favorites of Commerce, and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for errands, demanded an increase in wages and threatened to hire on with 'the Competition'.

One day when he had gone to the Argueil market to sell his horse, — last resort, — he met Rodolphe.

They grew pale on seeing one another. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, stammered at first some excuses, then grew bold and even pushed his assurance (it was very hot, it was the month of August) to the point of inviting him to take a bottle of beer at the tavern.

Leaning on his elbows opposite him, he chewed his cigar while talking, and Charles lost himself in reveries before this face that she had loved. It seemed to him he saw again something of her. It was an enchantment. He would have liked to be this man.

The other continued to talk cultivation, cattle, fertilizers, plugging with banal phrases all the interstices where an allusion might slip in. Charles did not listen; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed on the mobility of his face the passage of memories. It grew flushed by degrees, the nostrils beat quickly, the lips trembled; there was even a moment when Charles, full of a dark fury, fixed his eyes on Rodolphe who, in a sort of fright, broke off. But soon the same funereal lassitude reappeared on his face.

— I bear you no ill will, he said.

Rodolphe had remained mute. And Charles, head in his two hands, resumed in an extinguished voice and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrows:

— No, I bear you no ill will!

He even added a grand phrase, the only one he ever said:

— It is the fault of fate!

Rodolphe, who had conducted that fate, found him very meek for a man in his situation, even comic, and a bit base.

The next day, Charles went to sit on the bench, in the arbor. Days passed through the trellis; the vine leaves traced their shadows on the sand, the jasmine perfumed, the sky was blue, cantharides buzzed around the flowering lilies, and Charles suffocated like an adolescent beneath the amorous waves of effluvia that swelled his sorrowful heart.

At seven o'clock, little Berthe, who had not seen him all afternoon, came to fetch him for dinner.

He had his head thrown back against the wall, eyes closed, mouth open, and held in his hands a long lock of black hair.

— Papa, do come! said she.

And, believing he wanted to play, she pushed him gently. He fell to the ground. He was dead.

Thirty-six hours later, at the apothecary's request, Monsieur Canivet hurried over. He opened him and found nothing.

When everything was sold, there remained twelve francs seventy-five centimes which served to pay mademoiselle Bovary's journey to her grandmother's. The old woman died within the year itself; old Rouault being paralyzed, it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor and sends her, to earn her living, to a cotton mill.

Since Bovary's death, three doctors have succeeded one another at Yonville without being able to succeed there, so quickly has Monsieur Homais beaten them down. He does a hellish clientele; authority spares him and public opinion protects him.

He has just received the cross of honor.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”