Part 6

Paris, more vague than the Ocean, shimmered therefore before Emma's eyes in a vermilion atmosphere. The teeming life that stirred in that tumult was, however, divided into parts, classified into distinct pictures. Emma perceived but two or three of these, which hid all the others from her, and stood alone to represent complete humanity. The world of ambassadors walked on gleaming parquet floors, in salons paneled with mirrors, around oval tables covered with a velvet cloth fringed with gold. There were trains to gowns, great mysteries, anguishes concealed beneath smiles. Next came the society of duchesses; there one was pale; one rose at four o'clock; the women, poor angels! wore English lace at the hem of their petticoats, and the men, unrecognized talents beneath frivolous exteriors, wore out their horses in pleasure parties, went to spend the summer season at Baden, and, at forty at last, married heiresses. In the private rooms of restaurants where one sups after midnight laughed, by the light of candles, the motley crowd of men of letters and actresses. These were, for their part, prodigal as kings, full of ideal ambitions and fantastic delusions. It was an existence above the others, between heaven and earth, in the storms, something sublime. As for the rest of the world, it was lost, without precise place, and as if nonexistent. Moreover, the nearer things were, the more her thought turned away from them. All that immediately surrounded her, the tedious countryside, the imbecilic petty bourgeoisie, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her an exception in the world, a particular chance in which she was caught, while beyond stretched out of sight the immense land of felicities and passions. She confounded, in her desire, the sensualities of luxury with the joys of the heart, the elegance of habits with the delicacies of feeling. Did not love, like Indian plants, require prepared soils, a special temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands that are surrendered, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness were not, then, separate from the balcony of great châteaux that are full of leisure, from a boudoir with silk blinds and a very thick carpet, with filled flower stands, a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and the aiguillettes of livery.

The post boy, who came every morning to groom the mare, crossed the corridor in his heavy sabots; his smock had holes, his feet were bare in slippers. This was the groom in short breeches with whom she must content herself! When his work was done, he did not return for the day; for Charles, on coming home, put his horse in the stable himself, removed the saddle and passed the halter, while the maid brought a bundle of straw and threw it, as best she could, into the manger.

To replace Nastasie (who at last left Tostes, shedding streams of tears), Emma took into her service a young girl of fourteen, an orphan and of gentle countenance. She forbade her cotton caps, taught her that one must address her in the third person, bring a glass of water on a plate, knock at doors before entering, and in ironing, starching, dressing her, wished to make her her lady's maid. The new maid obeyed without murmur so as not to be dismissed; and, as Madame usually left the key in the sideboard, Félicité every evening took a small supply of sugar which she ate alone, in her bed, after saying her prayers.

In the afternoon, sometimes, she went to chat opposite with the postilions. Madame stayed upstairs, in her apartment.

She wore a dressing gown thrown wide open, which showed, between the cape revers of the bodice, a pleated chemisette with three gold buttons. Her belt was a cord with heavy tassels, and her little slippers of garnet color had a tuft of wide ribbons, which spread over the instep. She had bought herself a blotter, a writing case, a penholder and envelopes, though she had no one to write to; she dusted her shelf, looked at herself in the glass, took up a book, then, dreaming between the lines, let it fall on her knees. She felt like taking trips or going back to live in her convent. She wished at once to die and to live in Paris.

Charles, in snow and rain, rode by the crossroads. He ate omelets on the tables of farms, thrust his arm into damp beds, received in his face the warm jet of bleedings, listened to rattlings, examined basins, turned back much dirty linen; but he found, every evening, a blazing fire, the table laid, soft furniture, and a woman in fine dress, charming and smelling fresh, not even knowing whence came that odor, or if it were not her skin that perfumed her shirt.

She charmed him by a quantity of delicacies: it was now a new manner of fashioning paper shades for the candles, a flounce that she changed on her dress, or the extraordinary name of a very simple dish, which the maid had spoiled, but which Charles, to the last, swallowed with pleasure. She saw at Rouen ladies who wore at their watch a packet of trinkets; she bought trinkets. She wished for two large vases of blue glass on her mantelpiece, and, some time after, an ivory workbox, with a vermeil thimble. The less Charles understood these elegances, the more he submitted to their seduction. They added something to the pleasure of his senses and to the sweetness of his home. It was like a dust of gold which sanded all along the little path of his life.

He was well, he looked well; his reputation was quite established. The country people cherished him because he was not proud. He petted the children, never entered the tavern, and, besides, inspired confidence by his morality. He succeeded particularly in catarrhs and chest complaints. Greatly fearing to kill his patients, Charles, in fact, scarcely prescribed anything but soothing potions, now and then an emetic, a foot bath or leeches. Not that surgery frightened him; he bled people freely, like horses, and he had a devil of a grip for the extraction of teeth.

Finally, to keep up with things, he took a subscription to the Ruche médicale, a new paper of which he had received the prospectus. He read a little of it after his dinner; but the heat of the apartment, joined to digestion, made that at the end of five minutes he fell asleep; and he remained there, his chin on his two hands, and his hair spread like a mane to the foot of the lamp. Emma looked at him, shrugging her shoulders. If only she had, for husband, one of those men of taciturn ardor who work at night in books, and finally, at sixty years, when the age of rheumatisms comes, wear a cluster of crosses on their ill-made black coat. She would have wished that this name of Bovary, which was hers, were illustrious, see it displayed at the booksellers, repeated in the newspapers, known throughout France. But Charles had no ambition! A doctor from Yvetot, with whom lately he had been in consultation, had somewhat humiliated him, at the bedside of the patient, before the assembled relatives. When Charles told her, in the evening, this anecdote, Emma flew into a rage against the colleague. Charles was touched thereby. He kissed her on the forehead with a tear. But she was exasperated with shame, she felt like beating him, she went into the corridor to open the window and breathed the fresh air to calm herself.

'What a poor man! what a poor man!' she said softly, biting her lips.

She felt, moreover, more irritated with him. He took, with age, coarse ways; he cut, at dessert, the cork of empty bottles; he passed, after eating, his tongue over his teeth; he made, in swallowing his soup, a clucking at each gulp, and, as he began to grow fat, his eyes, already small, seemed drawn up toward the temples by the puffiness of his cheekbones.

Emma, sometimes, tucked into his waistcoat the red border of his knitted vests, readjusted his cravat, or threw aside the faded gloves that he was about to put on; and this was not, as he believed, for him; it was for herself, by expansion of egoism, nervous irritation. Sometimes, too, she spoke to him of things she had read, like a passage from a novel, a new play, or the anecdote of high society that was told in the feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was someone, an ear always open, an approval always ready. She made many confidences to her greyhound! She would have made them to the logs of the fireplace and to the pendulum of the clock.

At the bottom of her soul, however, she awaited an event. Like shipwrecked sailors, she cast over the solitude of her life desperate eyes, seeking afar some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, the wind that would push it to her, toward what shore it would lead her, whether it was a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguishes or full of felicities to the portholes. But, every morning, on waking, she hoped for it for the day, and she listened to all noises, started up, wondered that it did not come; then, at sunset, always sadder, wished for the morrow.

Spring returned. She had suffocations at the first heats, when the pear trees blossomed.

At the beginning of July, she counted on her fingers how many weeks remained to her to arrive at the month of October, thinking that the Marquis d'Andervilliers, perhaps, would give another ball at La Vaubyessard. But all September passed without letters or visits.

After the tedium of this disappointment, her heart was again empty, and then the series of the same days recommenced.

They were going then now to follow thus in a row, always alike, innumerable, and bringing nothing! The other existences, however plain they might be, had at least the chance of an event. An adventure sometimes brought infinite peripeteias, and the decor changed. But, for her, nothing happened, God had willed it! The future was a corridor all black, and which had at its end its door well closed.

She abandoned music. Why play? who would hear her? Since she could never, in a velvet dress with short sleeves, on an Érard piano, in a concert, striking with her light fingers the ivory keys, feel, like a breeze, circulate around her a murmur of ecstasy, it was not worth the trouble to bore herself studying. She left in the wardrobe her drawing portfolios and the tapestry. What for? what for? Sewing irritated her.

'I have read everything,' she said to herself.

And she remained making the tongs glow, or watching the rain fall.

How sad she was on Sundays, when they rang vespers! She listened, in an attentively stupid state, to the cracked strokes of the bell ring one by one. Some cat on the roofs, walking slowly, arched its back in the pale rays of the sun. The wind, on the high road, blew trails of dust. Afar, sometimes, a dog howled: and the bell, at equal times, continued its monotonous pealing which was lost in the countryside.

Meanwhile one came out of the church. The women in waxed sabots, the peasants in new blouses, the little children who hopped bareheaded before them, all went home. And, until night, five or six men, always the same, remained to play at the cork, before the great door of the inn.

Winter was cold. The panes, every morning, were charged with frost, and the light, whitish through them, as through frosted glasses, sometimes did not vary all day. From four o'clock in the afternoon, one had to light the lamp.

On the fine days, she went down into the garden. The dew had left on the cabbages silver guipures with long clear threads which extended from one to the other. No birds were heard, all seemed to sleep, the espalier covered with straw and the vine like a great sick serpent under the coping of the wall, where one saw, on approaching, woodlice with numerous legs dragging themselves. In the little firs, near the hedge, the curate in tricorne who read his breviary had lost the right foot and even the plaster, scaling in the frost, had made white scabs on his face.

Then she went up again, closed the door, spread the coals, and, fainting at the heat of the hearth, felt the boredom heavier which fell back on her. She would have liked to go down to chat with the maid, but a modesty restrained her.

Every day, at the same hour, the schoolmaster, in black silk cap, opened the shutters of his house, and the rural guard passed, carrying his sword over his blouse. Evening and morning, the post horses, three by three, crossed the street to go drink at the pond. From time to time, the door of a cabaret made its bell tinkle, and, when there was wind, one heard creak on their two rods the little copper basins of the barber, which served as sign to his shop. She had for decoration an old fashion engraving pasted against a pane and a bust of a woman in wax, whose hair was yellow. He too, the barber, he lamented his stopped vocation, his lost future, and, dreaming of some shop in a great city, as at Rouen for example, on the port, near the theater, he remained all day to walk at length, from the mayor's office to the church, gloomy, and awaiting clientele. When Madame Bovary raised her eyes, she saw him always there, like a sentinel on post, with his Greek cap on the ear and his lasting jacket.

In the afternoon, sometimes, a man's head appeared behind the panes of the room, a tanned head, with black whiskers, and who smiled slowly a broad soft smile with white teeth. A waltz immediately began, and, on the organ, in a little salon, dancers as tall as the finger, women in pink turban, Tyroleans in jacket, monkeys in black coat, gentlemen in short breeches, turned, turned between the armchairs, the sofas, the consoles, repeating themselves in the bits of mirror which a strip of gilded paper joined at their angles. The man worked his crank, looking right, left and toward the windows. From time to time, while throwing against the curb a long jet of brown spittle, he lifted with his knee his instrument, whose hard strap fatigued his shoulder; and, now doleful and dragging, or joyous and hurried, the music of the box escaped humming through a pink taffeta curtain, under a brass trellis in arabesque. They were airs that were played elsewhere in the theaters, that were sung in the salons, that were danced in the evening under lighted chandeliers, echoes of the world which arrived as far as Emma. Sarabands without end unrolled in her head; and, like a bayadere on the flowers of a carpet, her thought bounded with the notes, balanced from dream to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had received the alms in his cap, he let fall an old blue woolen blanket, passed his organ on his back and went away with a heavy step. She watched him leave.

But it was especially at the meal hours that she could no more, in that little room on the ground floor, with the stove that smoked, the door that creaked, the walls that sweated, the damp flagstones; all the bitterness of existence, it seemed to her, was served on her plate, and, at the steam of the boiled beef, there rose from the bottom of her soul like other puffs of insipidity. Charles was long at eating; she nibbled some hazelnuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, amused herself, with the point of her knife, making lines on the oilcloth.

She now let everything go in her household, and Madame Bovary mother, when she came to spend at Tostes part of Lent, was much astonished at this change. She, indeed, so careful formerly and delicate, remained now whole days without dressing, wore gray cotton stockings, lit herself with the candle. She repeated that one must economize, since they were not rich, adding that she was very content, very happy, that Tostes pleased her much, and other new speeches which closed the mother-in-law's mouth. Besides, Emma no longer seemed disposed to follow her advice; once even, Madame Bovary having ventured to pretend that masters should supervise the religion of their servants, she had answered her with an eye so angry and a smile so cold, that the good woman did not meddle again.

Emma became difficult, capricious. She ordered dishes for herself, did not touch them, one day drank only pure milk, and, the next, cups of tea by the dozen. Often she insisted on not going out, then suffocated, opened the windows, dressed in light gown. When she had well bullied her servant, she made her presents or sent her to walk at the neighbors', just as she threw sometimes to the poor all the white pieces of her purse, though she was not very tender however, nor easily accessible to the emotion of others, like most people issued from country folk, who always keep in the soul something of the callosity of the paternal hands.

Toward the end of February, Father Rouault, in memory of his cure, brought himself to his son-in-law a superb turkey, and he stayed three days at Tostes. Charles being at his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the room, spat on the andirons, talked cultivation, calves, cows, poultry and municipal council; so that she closed the door, when he was gone, with a sentiment of satisfaction which surprised herself. Besides, she no longer hid her contempt for anything, nor for anyone; and she began sometimes to express singular opinions, blaming what was approved, and approving perverse or immoral things: which made her husband's eyes open wide.

Would this misery last always? would she not get out of it? She was worth however all those who lived happy! She had seen duchesses at La Vaubyessard who had a heavier waist and commoner manners, and she execrated the injustice of God; she leaned her head against the walls to weep; she envied the tumultuous existences, the masked nights, the insolent pleasures with all the abandonments that she did not know and that they must give.

She grew pale and had palpitations. Charles administered her valerian and camphor baths. All that was tried seemed to irritate her more.

On certain days, she chattered with a febrile abundance; to these exaltations succeeded suddenly torpors where she remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was to pour on her arms a flask of eau de Cologne.

As she complained of Tostes continuously, Charles imagined that the cause of her illness was doubtless in some local influence, and, stopping at this idea, he seriously thought of going to settle elsewhere.

Thenceforth she drank vinegar to make herself thin, contracted a little dry cough and lost completely the appetite.

It cost Charles to abandon Tostes after four years of stay and at the moment when he began to establish himself there. If it must be, however! He took her to Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous illness: she must be changed of air.

After turning from side to side, Charles learned that there was in the arrondissement of Neufchâtel, a large bourg named Yonville-l'Abbaye, whose doctor, who was a Polish refugee, had decamped the preceding week. Then he wrote to the pharmacist of the place to know what was the figure of the population, the distance where the nearest colleague was found, how much per year his predecessor gained, etc.; and, the answers having been satisfactory, he resolved to move toward spring, if Emma's health did not improve.

One day that, in anticipation of her departure, she was making order in a drawer, she pricked her fingers at something. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust, and the satin ribbons, with silver edge, were fraying at the border. She threw it in the fire. It flamed faster than a dry straw. Then it was like a red bush on the ashes, and which gnawed itself slowly. She watched it burn. The little cardboard berries burst, the brass wires twisted, the braid melted; and the paper corollas, shriveled, balancing along the plate like black butterflies, finally flew off by the chimney.

When one left Tostes, in the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant.

SECOND PART

I

Yonville-l'Abbaye (thus named because of an ancient abbey of Capuchins of which the ruins do not even exist) is a bourg eight leagues from Rouen, between the road of Abbeville and that of Beauvais, at the bottom of a valley watered by the Rieule, a little river which throws itself into the Andelle, after having turned three mills toward its mouth, and where there are some trout, that the boys, on Sundays, amuse themselves to fish with a line.

One leaves the high road at La Boissière and one continues level until the top of the côte des Leux, whence one discovers the valley. The river which crosses it makes like two regions of distinct physiognomy: all that is to the left is in meadow, all that is to the right is in tillage. The prairie lengthens under a swell of low hills to reattach behind to the pastures of the Bray country, while, on the east side, the plain, rising gently, goes broadening and spreads out of sight its blond pieces of wheat. The water which runs at the edge of the grass separates with a white line the color of the meadows and that of the furrows, and the countryside thus resembles a great mantle unfolded which has a collar of green velvet, bordered with a silver braid.

At the end of the horizon, when one arrives, one has before oneself the oaks of the forest of Argueil, with the escarpments of the côte Saint-Jean, striped from top to bottom by long red trails, unequal; these are the traces of the rains, and these brick tones, cutting in thin threads on the gray color of the mountain, come from the quantity of ferruginous springs which flow beyond, in the surrounding country.

One is here on the confines of Normandy, of Picardy and of the Île-de-France, a bastard country where the language is without accentuation, like the landscape without character. It is there that one makes the worst Neufchâtel cheeses of the whole arrondissement, and, on the other hand, cultivation is costly there, because it is necessary much manure to fatten these friable lands full of sand and gravel.

Until 1835, there was no practicable road to arrive at Yonville; but one established toward this epoch a great vicinal road which joins the road of Abbeville to that of Amiens, and serves sometimes the carriers going from Rouen into Flanders. However, Yonville-l'Abbaye has remained stationary, despite its new outlets. Instead of improving the cultures, one persists there still in the meadows, however depreciated they are, and the lazy bourg, withdrawing from the plain, has continued naturally to enlarge toward the river. One perceives it from afar, all lying long on the bank, like a cowherd who takes a siesta at the edge of the water.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”