Part 4

Far from being bored at the convent at first, she took pleasure in the society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, led her into the chapel, which was reached from the refectory by a long corridor. She played very little during recreation, understood the catechism well, and it was she who always answered the vicar in the difficult questions. Living thus never outside the tepid atmosphere of the classrooms and among those white-skinned women wearing brass-cross rosaries, she gently dozed into the mystical languor exhaled from the altar perfumes, the coolness of the holy-water fonts, and the glow of the candles. Instead of following the mass, she looked in her book at the pious vignettes edged with azure, and she loved the sick ewe, the Sacred Heart pierced with sharp arrows, or poor Jesus falling as he walks beneath his cross. She tried, by mortification, to remain a whole day without eating. She searched in her mind for some vow to fulfill.

When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order to stay there longer, on her knees in the shadow, hands joined, face at the grating beneath the priest's whispering. The comparisons of bridegroom, husband, heavenly lover, and eternal marriage, which recur in the sermons, aroused in the depths of her soul unexpected sweetness.

In the evening, before prayer, a religious reading was done in the study. On weekdays it was some summary of sacred history or the Conferences of Abbé Frayssinous, and on Sundays, passages from The Genius of Christianity, by way of recreation. How she listened, the first times, to the sonorous lament of romantic melancholies repeating through all the echoes of earth and eternity! If her childhood had slipped by in the back room of a shop in some merchant quarter, she might perhaps then have opened to the lyric invasions of nature, which ordinarily reach us only through the translation of writers. But she knew the countryside too well; she knew the bleating of flocks, the dairies, the plows. Accustomed to calm aspects, she turned, on the contrary, toward the broken and varied. She loved the sea only because of its storms, and green only when scattered among ruins. She needed to draw from things a kind of personal profit; and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate consumption of her heart — being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, seeking emotions and not landscapes.

There was at the convent an old maid who came every month, for a week, to work in the linen room. Protected by the archbishopric as belonging to an ancient family of gentlemen ruined under the Revolution, she ate in the refectory at the table of the good sisters, and chatted a little with them, after the meal, before going back up to her work. Often the boarding pupils escaped from the study to go see her. She knew by heart gallant songs of the last century, which she sang half-voice, while plying her needle. She told stories, gave news, ran your errands in town, and lent to the big girls, in secret, some novel she always had in the pockets of her apron, and which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters of, in the intervals of her labor. They were nothing but loves, lovers, mistresses, persecuted ladies fainting in solitary pavilions, postilions killed at every relay, horses foundered on every page, dark forests, troubles of the heart, oaths, sobs, tears and kisses, skiffs in the moonlight, nightingales in the groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as none ever are, always well dressed, and weeping like urns. For six months, at fifteen, Emma thus greased her hands with the dust of those old reading-rooms. With Walter Scott, later, she fell for historical things, dreamed of coffers, guardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor, like those chatelaines with long bodices, who, beneath the trefoil of the ogives, passed their days, elbow on the stone and chin in hand, watching from the depth of the country a cavalier with white plume galloping on a black horse. She had in that time the cult of Mary Stuart, and enthusiastic venerations for famous or unfortunate women. Joan of Arc, Héloïse, Agnès Sorel, the beautiful Ferronnière and Clémence Isaure, for her, stood out like comets on the dark immensity of history, where there still shone here and there, but more lost in shadow and with no relation between them, Saint Louis with his oak, Bayard dying, some cruelties of Louis XI, a bit of Saint Bartholomew, the plume of the Béarnais, and always the memory of painted plates where Louis XIV was praised.

In music class, in the romances she sang, it was only a question of little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers, peaceful compositions which let her glimpse, through the silliness of the style and the imprudences of the note, the enticing phantasmagoria of sentimental realities. Some of her schoolmates brought to the convent the keepsakes they had received as New Year's gifts. They had to be hidden, it was a business; they were read in the dormitory. Handling delicately their beautiful satin bindings, Emma fixed her dazzled gaze on the names of unknown authors who had signed, most often, counts or viscounts, at the bottom of their pieces.

She trembled, lifting with her breath the tissue-paper of the engravings, which rose half-folded and fell softly back against the page. It was, behind the balustrade of a balcony, a young man in a short coat who held in his arms a young girl in a white dress, wearing a purse at her waist; or else the anonymous portraits of English ladies with blond curls, who, under their round straw hats, look at you with their large clear eyes. Some were seen sprawled in carriages, gliding amid parks, where a greyhound leapt before the team drawn at a trot by two small postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming on sofas near an unsealed letter, contemplated the moon, through the half-open window, half-draped with a black curtain. The naive ones, a tear on the cheek, pecked a turtledove through the bars of a Gothic cage, or, smiling head on shoulder, stripped a daisy with their pointed fingers, turned up like poulaine shoes. And there were you also, sultans with long pipes, fainting under bowers, in the arms of bayaderes, djiaours, Turkish sabers, Greek caps, and you above all, pallid landscapes of dithyrambic regions, which often show us at once palm trees, firs, tigers to the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon, in the foreground Roman ruins, then crouching camels; — all framed by a neatly cleared virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam quivering in the water, where stand out in white gashes, on a grey steel ground, here and there, swans swimming.

And the shade of the lamp, hung on the wall above Emma's head, lit all those pictures of the world, which passed before her one after another, in the silence of the dormitory and to the distant sound of some belated fiacre still rolling on the boulevards.

When her mother died, she cried much the first days. She had a funerary picture made with the deceased's hair, and, in a letter she sent to the Bertaux, full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried later in the same tomb. The old man thought her ill and came to see her. Emma was inwardly satisfied to feel herself arrived at one stroke at that rare ideal of pale existences, which mediocre hearts never attain. She let herself therefore slide into the meanderings of Lamartine, listened to the harps on the lakes, all the songs of dying swans, all the falling of leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing in the valleys. She grew bored by it, would not admit it, continued from habit, then from vanity, and was finally surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness in her heart than wrinkles on her brow.

The good nuns, who had so well presumed upon her vocation, noticed with great astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to escape their care. They had, in fact, so lavished offices, retreats, novenas and sermons upon her, so well preached the respect due to saints and martyrs, and given so much good counsel for the modesty of the body and the salvation of her soul, that she did like the horses one pulls by the bridle: she stopped short and the bit came out of her teeth. That spirit, positive amid its enthusiasms, which had loved the church for its flowers, music for the words of the romances, and literature for its passionate excitements, rebelled before the mysteries of faith, just as she was the more irritated against discipline, which was something antipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her from boarding school, they were not sorry to see her go. The superior even found that she had become, of late, lacking in reverence toward the community.

Emma, returned home, at first liked commanding the servants, then took a disgust to the country and regretted her convent. When Charles came to the Bertaux for the first time, she considered herself quite disillusioned, having nothing more to learn, owing nothing more to feel.

But the anxiety of a new state, or perhaps the irritation caused by the presence of that man, had sufficed to make her believe that she at last possessed that marvelous passion which until then had kept itself like a great bird with pink plumage hovering in the splendor of poetic skies; — and she could not imagine now that this calm wherein she lived was the happiness she had dreamed of.

VII

She sometimes thought that these, however, were the finest days of her life, the honeymoon, as they said. To taste its sweetness, it would have been needful, no doubt, to go off to those lands with sonorous names where the morrows of marriage have softer languors! In post-chaises, beneath blue silk blinds, one mounts at a walk the steep roads, listening to the postilion's song, which repeats in the mountain with the tinkling of the goats' bells and the dull noise of the waterfall. When the sun sets, one breathes on the shores of gulfs the scent of lemon trees; then, in the evening, on the terraces of villas, alone and fingers intertwined, one looks at the stars making plans. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like a plant particular to the soil and which grows badly anywhere else. Why could she not lean on the balcony of Swiss chalets or shut her sadness in a Scottish cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and who wears soft boots, a pointed hat and ruffles!

Perhaps she would have wished to make confession of all these things to someone. But how to say an ungraspable unease, which changes aspect like the clouds, which whirls like the wind? Words therefore failed her, the occasion, the boldness.

If Charles had wished it, however, if he had suspected it, if his glance, a single time, had met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden abundance would have detached itself from her heart, as falls the crop of an espalier when one lays a hand on it. But, as the intimacy of their life tightened further, an inward detachment formed which unbound her from him.

Charles's conversation was flat as a street pavement, and the ideas of everyone filed through it in their ordinary dress, without exciting emotion, laughter or reverie. He had never been curious, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go see at the theater the actors from Paris. He knew neither how to swim, nor fence, nor fire a pistol, and he could not, one day, explain to her an equestrian term she had met in a novel.

A man, on the contrary, ought he not to know everything, excel in multiple activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all the mysteries? But he taught nothing, that one, knew nothing, wished nothing. He believed her happy; and she resented him for that so well-settled calm, for that serene heaviness, for the very happiness she gave him.

She sometimes drew; and it was for Charles a great amusement to remain there, standing, watching her bent over her cardboard, blinking her eyes to see her work better, or rounding, on her thumb, pellets of bread crumb. As for the piano, the faster the fingers ran over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with assurance, and traversed from top to bottom the whole keyboard without stopping. Thus shaken by her, the old instrument, whose strings were warped, was heard to the end of the village if the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk passing on the high road, bareheaded and in slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in hand.

Emma, on the other hand, knew how to run her house. She sent to the sick the bills for visits, in well-turned letters, which did not smell of the invoice. When they had, on Sunday, some neighbor to dine, she found means to offer a dainty dish, knew how to set on vine leaves the pyramids of greengages, served the jam pots overturned on a plate, and even spoke of buying finger-bowls for dessert. Much consideration for Bovary resulted from all this.

Charles ended by esteeming himself the more for possessing such a wife. He showed with pride, in the room, two little pencil sketches of her, which he had framed in very wide frames and hung against the wallpaper on long green cords. On coming out of mass, one saw him at his door in handsome embroidered slippers.

He came home late, at ten o'clock, midnight sometimes. Then he asked for something to eat, and, as the maid was in bed, it was Emma who served him. He took off his greatcoat to dine more at ease. He told, one after another, all the people he had met, the villages where he had been, the prescriptions he had written, and satisfied with himself, he ate the rest of the miroton, peeled his cheese, crunched an apple, emptied his carafe, then went to bed, lay on his back and snored.

As he had long been used to the cotton nightcap, his scarf did not stay over his ears; so his hair, in the morning, was flung pell-mell over his face and whitened by the down of his pillow, whose strings came untied during the night. He always wore heavy boots, which had at the instep two thick folds obliquing toward the ankles, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight line, stretched as if by a wooden foot. He said that was good enough for the country.

His mother approved him in this economy; for she came to see him as of old, when there had been at her house some rather violent squall; but Madame Bovary mother seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She found her a style too elevated for their fortune; the wood, the sugar and the candle slipped away like in a great house, and the quantity of embers burned in the kitchen would have sufficed for twenty-five dishes! She arranged her linen in the cupboards and taught her to watch the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma received these lessons; Madame Bovary lavished them; and the words "my daughter" and "my mother" were exchanged all the long day, accompanied by a little quivering of the lips, each launching sweet words in a voice trembling with anger.

In the time of Madame Dubuc, the old woman still felt herself the preferred; but, at present, Charles's love for Emma seemed to her a desertion of her tenderness, an encroachment on what belonged to her; and she observed her son's happiness with a sad silence, like someone ruined who looks, through the panes, at people seated at table in his former house. She recalled to him, by way of memories, her pains and her sacrifices, and, comparing them to Emma's negligences, concluded that it was not reasonable to adore her in so exclusive a fashion.

Charles knew not what to answer; he respected his mother, and he loved his wife infinitely; he considered the one's judgment infallible, and yet found the other irreproachable. When Madame Bovary had left, he tried timidly to hazard, and in the same terms, one or two of the most harmless observations he had heard his mamma make; Emma, proving to him in a word that he was mistaken, sent him back to his patients.

Meanwhile, according to theories she believed good, she wished to give herself some love. In the moonlight, in the garden, she recited all she knew by heart of passionate rhymes and sang to him, sighing, melancholy adagios; but she found herself afterward as calm as before, and Charles seemed neither more in love nor more moved.

When she had thus struck the flint a little on her heart without drawing a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not feel, as of believing in all that did not manifest itself by conventional forms, she persuaded herself without trouble that Charles's passion had nothing exorbitant more. His outpourings had become regular; he kissed her at certain hours. It was a habit among the others, and like a dessert foreseen in advance, after the monotony of dinner.

A gamekeeper, cured by Monsieur of a chest inflammation, had given Madame a little Italian greyhound; she took it to walk, for she went out sometimes, in order to be alone an instant and to have no longer before her eyes the eternal garden with the dusty road.

She went as far as the beech grove of Banneville, near the abandoned pavilion which makes the corner of the wall, on the side of the fields. There are in the dry moat, among the grasses, long reeds with cutting leaves.

She began by looking all around, to see if nothing had changed since the last time she came. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and the wild mustard, the bunches of nettles surrounding the big pebbles, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters always closed crumbled with rot, on their rusty iron bars. Her thought, aimless at first, wandered at hazard, like her greyhound, which made circles in the country, yapped after the yellow butterflies, gave chase to the shrews or nibbled the poppies on the edge of a wheat field. Then her ideas little by little fixed, and, seated on the grass, which she dug with small taps of the tip of her parasol, Emma repeated to herself:

— Why, my God! did I marry?

She asked herself if there would not have been a means, by other combinations of chance, to meet another man; and she sought to imagine what those unrisen events would have been, that different life, that husband she did not know. All, indeed, did not resemble that one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as they no doubt were, those her former schoolmates at the convent had married. What were they doing now? In the city, with the noise of the streets, the humming of theaters and the lights of the ball, they had existences where the heart dilates, where the senses expand. But she, her life was cold as an attic whose skylight faces north, and boredom, silent spider, spun its web in the shadow at all corners of her heart. She recalled the prize-giving days, when she mounted the platform to go fetch her little crowns. With her hair in braids, her white dress and her prunella shoes showing, she had a pretty way, and the gentlemen, when she regained her place, leaned to pay her compliments; the courtyard was full of calashes, they said farewell to her through the doors, the music master passed bowing, with his violin case. How far off, all that! how far off!

She called Djali, took her between her knees, passed her fingers over her long fine head and said to her:

— Come, kiss mistress, you who have no sorrows.

Then, considering the melancholy air of the slender animal who yawned slowly, she softened, and, comparing her to herself, spoke to her aloud, like to some afflicted person one consoles.

There came sometimes gusts of wind, breezes of the sea which, rolling at a bound over all the plateau of the Pays de Caux, brought, far into the fields, a salty freshness. The rushes whistled at ground level, and the leaves of the beeches rustled in a quick shiver, while the tops, ever swaying, continued their great murmur. Emma drew her shawl over her shoulders and rose.

In the avenue, a green day dimmed by the foliage lit the short moss which cracked softly under her feet. The sun was setting; the sky was red between the branches, and the like trunks of trees planted in straight line seemed a brown colonnade detaching on a ground of gold; a fear took her, she called Djali, returned quickly to Tostes by the high road, collapsed in an armchair, and all the evening spoke not.

But, toward the end of September, something extraordinary fell into her life: she was invited to Vaubyessard, at the Marquis d'Andervilliers's.

Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, seeking to re-enter political life, was preparing at long hand his candidacy to the Chamber of Deputies. He made, in winter, numerous distributions of fagots, and, at the General Council, claimed with exaltation always roads for his district. He had had, during the great heats, an abscess in the mouth, of which Charles had relieved him as by miracle, giving at the right moment a lancet prick. The man of business, sent to Tostes to pay the operation, related in the evening that he had seen in the doctor's little garden superb cherries. Now, the cherry trees grew poorly at Vaubyessard, Monsieur the Marquis asked Bovary for some shoots, made it a duty to thank him in person, perceived Emma, found she had a pretty figure and that she did not curtsy like a peasant; so that one believed not at the château to overstep the bounds of condescension, nor on the other hand to commit an awkwardness, in inviting the young couple.

One Wednesday, at three o'clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, mounted in their gig, set off for Vaubyessard, with a large trunk tied behind and a hatbox which was placed before the apron. Charles had, besides, a cardboard box between his legs.

They arrived at nightfall, as they began to light lampions in the park, in order to illuminate the carriages.

VIII

The château, of modern construction, in the Italian style, with two advancing wings and three perrons, spread at the foot of an immense lawn where some cows grazed, between clumps of large spaced trees, while baskets of shrubs, rhododendrons, lilacs and snowballs bulged their unequal tufts of green on the curved line of the sanded path. A river passed under a bridge; through the mist, one distinguished thatched-roof buildings, scattered in the meadow, which was bordered by a gentle slope of two wooded hills, and behind, in the thickets, stood, on two parallel lines, the coach-houses and stables, preserved remains of the old demolished château.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”