Part 7

At the foot of the hill, after the bridge, begins a causeway planted with young aspens, which leads you in a straight line to the first houses of the village. They are enclosed by hedges, amid yards full of scattered outbuildings, presses, cart-sheds and boiling-houses, dispersed under the thick trees bearing ladders, poles or scythes hung in their branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps pulled down over the eyes, descend to about a third of the low windows, whose bulging panes are adorned with a knot in the middle, in the fashion of bottle-ends. On the plaster wall, crossed diagonally by black sleepers, there sometimes clings some scrawny pear tree, and the ground floors have at their door a little turnstile to defend them from the chicks, which come to peck, on the threshold, crumbs of brown bread soaked in cider. Meanwhile the yards grow narrower, the dwellings draw closer, the hedges disappear; a bundle of ferns swings beneath a window at the end of a broom handle; there is a blacksmith's forge and then a wheelwright's with two or three new carts outside, encroaching on the road. Then, through a see-through fence, appears a white house beyond a round of lawn decorated with a Cupid, finger placed on mouth; two cast-iron vases stand at either end of the stoop; bright signs shine at the door; it is the notary's house, and the finest in the village.

The church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces farther, at the entrance to the square. The little cemetery that surrounds it, enclosed by a wall waist-high, is so well filled with tombs that the old stones flush with the ground make a continuous paving, where the grass has of itself traced regular green squares. The church was rebuilt anew in the last years of the reign of Charles X. The wooden vault is beginning to rot from above, and, here and there, has black hollows in its blue color. Above the door, where the organ would be, stands a rood-screen for the men, with a spiral staircase that resounds under hobnailed boots.

The daylight, entering through the plain glass windows, obliquely lights the benches ranged across the wall, which are here and there tapestried with some straw mat nailed up, having beneath it these words in large letters: 'Peculiar to Mr. So-and-so.' Farther on, where the nave narrows, the confessional hangs opposite a statuette of the Virgin, dressed in a satin gown, crowned with a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars, and all empurpled in the cheeks like an idol of the Sandwich Islands; finally a copy of the Holy Family, a gift of the Minister of the Interior, dominating the high altar between four candlesticks, terminates the perspective at the back. The choir stalls, of fir wood, remain unpainted.

The market halls, that is to say a tile roof supported by some twenty posts, occupy by themselves about half of the great square of Yonville. The town hall, built from the designs of a Paris architect, is a kind of Greek temple making the corner, next to the pharmacist's house. It has, on the ground floor, three Ionic columns and, on the first floor, a gallery with a full arch, while the tympanum that terminates it is filled by a Gallic rooster, resting one claw on the Charter and holding in the other the scales of justice.

But what most attracts the eye is, opposite the inn of the Golden Lion, the pharmacy of Mr. Homais! The evening especially, when his lamp is lit and the red and green jars that embellish his storefront cast their two colored lights far upon the ground; then, through them, as in Bengal fires, one catches sight of the shadow of the pharmacist, leaning on his desk. His house, from top to bottom, is plastered with inscriptions written in script, round hand, and block letters: 'Waters of Vichy, of Seltz and of Barèges, depurative syrups, Raspail medicine, Arab cocoa, Darcet lozenges, Regnault paste, bandages, baths, health chocolates, etc.' And the sign, which takes the whole width of the shop, bears in gold letters: Homais, Pharmacist. Then, at the back of the shop, behind the large scales set into the counter, the word laboratory unrolls above a glass door which, at half its height, repeats once more Homais, in gold letters, on a black ground.

There is then nothing more to see in Yonville. The street (the only one), a gunshot long and bordered by a few shops, stops short at the turn of the road. If one leaves it on the right and follows the bottom of the Saint-Jean hill, soon one arrives at the cemetery.

At the time of the cholera, to enlarge it, they knocked down a stretch of wall and bought three acres of land beside it; but all this new portion is almost uninhabited, the tombs, as before, continuing to pile up toward the gate. The keeper, who is at the same time gravedigger and beadle of the church (thus drawing a double benefit from the parish corpses), has profited from the empty ground to sow potatoes there. Year by year, however, his little field shrinks, and, when an epidemic comes, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or grieve at the burials.

'You feed on the dead, Lestiboudois!' the curé said to him one day at last.

This gloomy word made him reflect; it stopped him for some time; but, to this day, he continues the cultivation of his tubers, and even maintains with assurance that they grow naturally.

Since the events that shall be told, indeed nothing has changed at Yonville. The tricolored sheet-iron flag still turns at the top of the church steeple; the novelty shop still waves its two calico streamers in the wind; the pharmacist's fetuses, like packets of white tinder, rot more and more in their muddy alcohol, and, above the great door of the inn, the old golden lion, faded by the rains, still shows passers-by its poodle-like curls.

The evening the Bovary spouses were to arrive at Yonville, widow Lefrançois, the mistress of this inn, was so busy that she sweated great drops in stirring her pots. It was the next day market day in the borough. The meats had to be cut in advance, the chickens emptied, soup and coffee made. She had, besides, the meal of her boarders, that of the doctor, his wife and their maid; the billiard table rang with bursts of laughter; three millers, in the small room, called for brandy to be brought them; the wood flamed, the embers cracked, and, on the long kitchen table, among the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that trembled at the shocks of the block where one chopped spinach. One could hear, in the farmyard, the fowl crying that the servant girl pursued to cut their throats.

A man in green leather slippers, somewhat marked with smallpox and capped with a velvet bonnet with a gold tassel, warmed his back against the chimney. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he seemed as calm in life as the goldfinch suspended above his head, in a wicker cage: it was the pharmacist.

'Artémise!' cried the innkeeper, 'break some kindling, fill the carafes, bring the brandy, hurry up! At least, if I knew what dessert to offer the company you're expecting! Good heavens! the moving men are starting their racket again at the billiard table! And their cart that's stayed under the great door! The Swallow is capable of smashing it on arriving! Call Polyte to put it in the shed!... To think that, since morning, Mr. Homais, they've maybe played fifteen games and drunk eight pots of cider!... But they're going to tear my cloth,' she continued, looking at them from afar, her skimmer in hand.

'The harm wouldn't be great,' answered Mr. Homais, 'you'd buy another.'

'Another billiard table!' exclaimed the widow.

'Since this one no longer holds, Madame Lefrançois; I repeat it to you, you're doing yourself harm! you're doing yourself great harm! And then the amateurs, nowadays, want tight blouses and heavy cues. They no longer play the ball; all is changed! One must keep up with the century! Look at Tellier, rather...'

The hostess turned red with spite. The pharmacist added:

'His billiard, say what you will, is prettier than yours; and to think, for example, of mounting a patriotic pool for Poland or the flooded of Lyon...'

'They're not beggars like him who frighten us!' interrupted the hostess, shrugging her heavy shoulders. 'Go on! go on! Mr. Homais, as long as the Golden Lion lives, folks will come. We've hay in our boots, we others! Whereas one of these sailors you'll see the French Café closed, and with a fine poster on the blinds!... Change my billiard table,' she continued, speaking to herself, 'him who's so handy for me to pile my wash on, and on whom, in hunting season, I've put up to six travelers to sleep!... But that laggard Hivert who doesn't arrive!'

'Are you waiting for him for your gentlemen's dinner?' asked the pharmacist.

'Wait for him? And Mr. Binet then! At six on the dot you'll see him come in, for his like doesn't exist on earth for punctuality. He must always have his place in the small room! You'd sooner kill him than make him dine elsewhere! And squeamish as he is! and so particular about the cider! It's not like Mr. Léon; he arrives sometimes at seven, seven-thirty even; he doesn't even look at what he eats. What a good young man! never a word louder than another.'

'That's because there's a fine difference, see you, between someone who's had an education and a former carabineer who's a tax collector.'

Six o'clock struck. Binet entered.

He was dressed in a blue greatcoat, falling straight of itself all around his lean body, and his leather cap, with flaps tied by strings at the top of his head, let one see, under the raised visor, a bald forehead, depressed by the habit of the helmet. He wore a black cloth waistcoat, a horsehair collar, gray trousers, and, in every season, well-waxed boots that had two parallel bulges, because of the protrusion of his toes. Not a hair passed beyond the line of his blond necklace, which, curving around the jaw, framed like the border of a flowerbed his long dull face, whose eyes were small and nose hooked. Strong at all card games, a good hunter and possessing a fine hand, he had at home a lathe, where he amused himself turning napkin rings which he cluttered his house with, with the jealousy of an artist and the selfishness of a bourgeois.

He headed for the small room; but first they had to make the three millers leave; and, during all the time they were laying his place, Binet remained silent in his seat, near the stove; then he closed the door and removed his cap, as usual.

'It's not politeness that will wear out his tongue!' said the pharmacist, as soon as he was alone with the hostess.

'Never does he talk more,' she answered; 'he came here, last week, two travelers in cloth, bright young fellows who told, in the evening, a heap of jokes that I laughed till I cried; well, he stayed there, like a shad, without saying a word.'

'Yes,' said the pharmacist, 'no imagination, no wit, nothing of what makes a man of society!'

'They say though he has means,' objected the hostess.

'Means? replied Mr. Homais; 'him! means? In his line, possibly,' he added in a calmer tone.

And he resumed:

'Ah! that a merchant who has considerable connections, that a jurist, a doctor, a pharmacist be so absorbed as to become whimsical and surly even, I understand; they cite traits of it in histories! But, at least, it's that they're thinking of something. Me, for example, how many times has it happened to me to look for my pen on my desk to write a label, and to find, in the end, that I'd placed it at my ear!'

Meanwhile, Madame Lefrançois went to the threshold to see if the Swallow was arriving. She started. A man dressed in black suddenly entered the kitchen. One could distinguish, in the last gleams of twilight, that he had a ruddy face and an athletic body.

'What can I do for you, Mr. Curé?' asked the hostess, while reaching on the chimney one of the brass candlesticks that stood there ranged in a colonnade with their candles; 'will you take something? a finger of cassis, a glass of wine?'

The ecclesiastic very civilly refused. He had come to fetch his umbrella, which he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and, after asking Madame Lefrançois to have it brought to the presbytery in the evening, he went out to go to the church, where the Angelus was ringing.

When the pharmacist no longer heard the sound of his shoes on the square, he found his conduct of a moment ago most improper. This refusal to accept a refreshment seemed to him one of the most odious hypocrisies; the priests all loafed about without being seen, and sought to bring back the time of the tithe.

The hostess took up her curé's defense:

'Besides, he'd bend four like you over his knee. He has, last year, helped our folks bring in the straw; he carried up to six bundles at once, so strong is he!'

'Bravo!' said the pharmacist. 'Send your girls to confession to fellows of a temperament like that! Me, if I were the government, I'd have the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrançois, every month, a good phlebotomy, in the interest of the police and of morals!'

'Hush there, Mr. Homais, you're an infidel! you have no religion!'

The pharmacist answered:

'I have a religion, my religion, and even I have more of it than all those, with their mummeries and their juggling! I adore God, on the contrary! I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whoever he be, little I care, who placed us here below to fulfill our duties as citizen and as father of a family; but I've no need to go, in a church, kiss silver plates, and fatten with my purse a pack of mountebanks who eat better than we! For one can honor him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the ethereal vault, like the ancients. My God, for me, is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire and of Béranger! I am for the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar and the immortal principles of '89! Also, I admit not a goodman-of-God who strolls in his parterre cane in hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies crying out and rises again after three days: things absurd in themselves and completely opposed, besides, to all the laws of physics; which demonstrates to us, in passing, that priests have always wallowed in a turpid ignorance, where they strive to engulf with them the populations.'

He fell silent, seeking a public around him with his eyes, for, in his effervescence, the pharmacist had for a moment thought himself in full municipal council. But the hostess listened no more; she stretched her ear to a distant rumbling. One made out the noise of a carriage mingled with a clacking of loose irons beating the earth, and the Swallow finally stopped before the door.

It was a yellow boot carried by two large wheels which, rising to the height of the tilt, prevented the travelers from seeing the road and soiled their shoulders. The little panes of its narrow windows trembled in their frames when the carriage was closed, and kept mud stains, here and there, amid their old layer of dust, that even storm rains did not quite wash. It was hitched to three horses, the first in shafts, and, when one went down the hills, it touched bottom jolting.

Some bourgeois of Yonville came onto the square; they all spoke at once, asking for news, explanations and baskets; Hivert knew not which to answer. It was he who did the town errands for the country. He went into the shops, brought back rolls of leather to the cobbler, scrap iron to the smith, a barrel of herring for his mistress, bonnets from the milliner, toupees from the hairdresser; and, along the road, coming back, he distributed his parcels, which he threw over the courtyard fences, standing on his seat, and crying at full breast, while his horses went by themselves.

An accident had delayed him: Madame Bovary's greyhound had fled across the fields. They had whistled for her a good quarter of an hour. Hivert had even gone back half a league, thinking he saw her every minute; but they had had to continue the road. Emma had wept, flown into a passion; she had blamed Charles for this misfortune. Mr. Lheureux, cloth merchant, who was with her in the carriage, had tried to console her with a quantity of examples of lost dogs recognizing their master after long years. One cited a dog, said he, that had come back from Constantinople to Paris. Another had made fifty leagues in a straight line and crossed four rivers swimming; and his own father had possessed a poodle who, after twelve years of absence, had suddenly jumped on his back, one evening in the street, as he was going to dine in town.

II

Emma got down first, then Félicité, Mr. Lheureux, a nurse, and they were obliged to wake Charles in his corner, where he had fallen completely asleep as soon as night had come.

Homais presented himself; he offered his respects to Madame, his courtesies to Monsieur, said he was charmed to have been able to render them some service, and added in a cordial air that he had dared invite himself, his wife moreover being absent.

Madame Bovary, when she was in the kitchen, approached the chimney. With the tips of her two fingers, she took her dress at the height of the knee, and, having thus raised it to the ankles, she held out to the flame, above the leg of mutton that was turning, her foot shod in a black half-boot. The fire lit her entirely, penetrating with a crude light the weave of her dress, the even pores of her white skin and even the eyelids of her eyes that she blinked from time to time. A great red color passed over her, according to the breath of the wind that came through the half-open door.

On the other side of the chimney, a young man with blond hair looked at her silently.

As he was much bored at Yonville, where he was clerk to Master Guillaumin, often Mr. Léon Dupuis (it was he, the second regular of the Golden Lion) put off the instant of his meal, hoping that some traveler would come to the inn with whom to chat in the evening. The days his work was finished he had perforce, for lack of knowing what to do, to arrive at the exact hour, and endure from the soup to the cheese the tete-a-tete of Binet. It was thus with joy that he accepted the hostess's proposition to dine in the company of the new arrivals, and they passed into the large room, where Madame Lefrançois, for display, had had the four places set.

Homais asked permission to keep his Greek cap, for fear of coryzas.

Then, turning to his neighbor:

'Madame, no doubt, is a little tired? One is so frightfully jolted in our Swallow!'

'It is true,' answered Emma; 'but the change always amuses me; I like to change place.'

'It is so dreary a thing,' sighed the clerk, 'to live pinned to the same spots!'

'If you were like me,' said Charles, 'constantly obliged to be on horseback...'

'But,' resumed Léon, addressing Madame Bovary, 'nothing is more agreeable, it seems to me; when one can,' he added.

'Besides,' said the apothecary, 'the exercise of medicine is not very hard in our parts; for the state of our roads permits the use of the gig, and, generally, one pays fairly well, the farmers being well-off. We have, on the medical side, apart from the ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., from time to time some intermittent fevers at harvest, but, in sum, little of anything serious, nothing special to note, unless much cold humors, and which hold no doubt to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our peasant lodgings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Mr. Bovary; many stubbornnesses of routine, where daily all the efforts of your science will clash, for one still has recourse to novenas, to relics, to the curé, rather than come naturally to the doctor or the pharmacist. The climate, however, is not, to tell the truth, bad, and even we count in the commune some nonagenarians. The thermometer (I have made the observations) descends in winter to four degrees, and, in the high season, touches twenty-five, thirty centigrade at most, which gives us twenty-four Réaumur at the maximum, or otherwise fifty-four Fahrenheit (English measure), no more! — and, indeed, we are sheltered from the north winds by the Argueil forest on one side, from the west winds by the Saint-Jean hill on the other, and this heat, however, which because of the vapor discharged by the river and the considerable presence of cattle in the meadows, which exhale, as you know, much ammonia, that is to say nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen only), and which, sucking to it the humus of the earth, confounding all these different emanations, reuniting them in a bundle, so to speak, and combining of itself with the electricity spread in the atmosphere, when there is any, could in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender unwholesome miasmas; — this heat, I say, is justly tempered on the side it comes from, or rather where it would come from, that is to say from the south, by the southeast winds, which, having refreshed themselves in passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once, like breezes from Russia!'

'Have you at least some Walks in the surroundings?' continued Madame Bovary speaking to the young man.

'Oh! very few,' he answered. 'There is a spot called the Pasture, on the top of the hill, at the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sunday, I go there, and stay with a book, watching the setting sun.'

'I find nothing admirable like setting suns,' she replied, 'but by the sea, especially.'

'Oh! I adore the sea,' said Mr. Léon.

'And then does it not seem to you,' replied Madame Bovary, 'that the mind voyages more freely on that limitless expanse, whose contemplation elevates your soul and gives ideas of the infinite, of the ideal?'

“Stories of the world, in your language.”