Part 8

— The same is true of mountain landscapes, Léon went on. I have a cousin who travelled in Switzerland last year, and who told me one cannot imagine the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of an incredible size, across the torrents, cabins suspended over precipices, and, a thousand feet below you, whole valleys, when the clouds part. These sights must inspire enthusiasm, dispose one to prayer, to ecstasy! So I am no longer surprised at that famous musician who, to better excite his imagination, was accustomed to go and play the piano before some imposing scene.

— Do you play music? she asked.

— No, but I love it very much, he replied.

— Ah! do not listen to him, Madame Bovary, interrupted Homais, leaning over his plate, it is pure modesty. — How now, my dear! Why, the other day, in your room, you were singing the Guardian Angel to perfection. I heard you from the laboratory; you delivered it like an actor.

Léon, in fact, lodged with the chemist, where he had a small room on the second floor, overlooking the square. He blushed at this compliment from his landlord, who had already turned to the doctor and was enumerating to him one after another the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He told anecdotes, gave information; one did not exactly know the fortune of the notary, and there was the Tuvache household that made a great deal of fuss.

Emma resumed:

— And what music do you prefer?

— Oh! German music, the kind that makes one dream.

— Do you know the Italians?

— Not yet; but I shall see them next year, when I go to live in Paris, to finish my law studies.

— It is as I had the honour, said the chemist, of expressing to Mr. your husband, regarding that poor Yanoda who has run away; thanks to the follies he committed, you will enjoy, on account of them, one of the most comfortable houses in Yonville. What is chiefly convenient for a doctor about it is a door onto the Walk, which allows one to enter and leave unseen. Besides, it is supplied with everything agreeable for a household: laundry, kitchen with pantry, family sitting-room, fruit-room, etc. He was a gay fellow who did not look at the cost! He had a summer-house built for himself at the end of the garden, beside the water, expressly to drink beer in summer, and if Madame likes gardening, she will be able...

— My wife does not trouble herself much with that, said Charles; she prefers, though exercise is recommended to her, always to stay in her room, reading.

— Like me, replied Léon; for what better thing indeed than to be in the evening by the fireside with a book, while the wind beats against the panes and the lamp burns?...

— Is it not? said she, fixing on him her great black eyes wide open.

— One thinks of nothing, he continued, the hours pass. One walks motionless through lands one believes one sees, and your thought, entwining with the fiction, plays among the details or pursues the outline of adventures. It mingles with the characters; it seems as though it were you who palpitates beneath their costumes.

— True! true! she said.

— Has it happened to you sometimes, Léon went on, to meet in a book a vague idea one has had, some obscured image returning from far off, and as the full exposition of your most delicate feeling?

— I have experienced that, she answered.

— Which is why, he said, I especially love the poets. I find verse more tender than prose, and that they make one weep much better.

— Yet they tire in the long run, Emma rejoined; and now, on the contrary, I adore stories that follow one another in a single breath, where one is afraid. I detest common heroes and temperate feelings, such as there are in nature.

— Indeed, observed the clerk, these works not touching the heart, depart, it seems to me, from the true aim of Art. It is so sweet, amid the disenchantments of life, to be able to transport oneself in thought to noble characters, pure affections and pictures of happiness. As for me, living here, far from the world, it is my only distraction; but Yonville offers so few resources!

— Like Tostes, no doubt, Emma replied; so I was always subscribed to a lending library.

— If Madame will do me the honour of making use of it, said the chemist, who had just heard these last words, I myself have at her disposal a library composed of the best authors: Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the Echo of the Feuilletons, etc., and I receive besides various periodical sheets, among which the Rouen Beacon, daily, having the advantage of being its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel, Yonville and the surroundings.

Since half past two they had been at table; for the servant Artémise, dragging lazily over the tiles her list slippers, brought the plates one after another, forgot everything, listened to nothing and continually left ajar the door of the billiard-room, which banged against the wall at the end of its latch.

Without noticing it, while talking, Léon had placed his foot on one of the rungs of the chair on which Madame Bovary was seated. She wore a little blue silk neckerchief, which held upright like a ruff a pleated batiste collar; and, according to the movements of the head she made, the lower part of her face sank into the linen or emerged from it with softness. Thus, one near the other, while Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague conversations where the chance of phrases always brings you back to the fixed centre of a common sympathy. Spectacles of Paris, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know, Tostes where she had lived, Yonville where they were, they examined everything, spoke of everything until the end of dinner.

When coffee was served, Félicité went to prepare the room in the new house, and the guests soon rose from the seat. Madame Lefrançois slept near the ashes, while the stable-boy, a lantern in his hand, waited for Mr. and Madame Bovary to conduct them home. His red hair was intermingled with strands of straw, and he limped on his left leg. When he had taken in his other hand the curé's umbrella, they set out.

The village was asleep. The pillars of the market stretched long shadows. The earth was all grey, as on a summer night.

But, the doctor's house being fifty paces from the inn, they had almost immediately to wish each other good night, and the company dispersed.

Emma, from the vestibule, felt fall upon her shoulders, like a damp cloth, the cold of the plaster. The walls were new, and the wooden stairs creaked. In the room, on the first floor, a whitish light passed through the uncurtained windows. One glimpsed tops of trees, and farther off the meadow, half drowned in the mist, which smoked in the moonlight, according to the course of the river. In the middle of the apartment, pell-mell, there were commode drawers, bottles, rods, gilded sticks with mattresses on chairs and basins on the floor, — the two men who had brought the furniture having left everything there, negligently.

It was the fourth time she slept in an unknown place. The first had been the day of her entrance to the convent, the second that of her arrival at Tostes, the third at La Vaubyessard, the fourth was this one; and each had seemed in her life like the inauguration of a new phase. She did not believe things could present themselves the same in different places, and, since the lived portion had been bad, no doubt what remained to be consumed would be better.

III

The next day, on waking, she caught sight of the clerk on the square. She was in her dressing-gown. He looked up and bowed. She made a quick inclination and closed the window.

Léon waited all day for six o'clock in the evening to arrive; but, on entering the inn, he found no one but Mr. Binet, seated at a table.

This dinner of the previous evening was for him a considerable event; never until then had he chatted for two hours at a stretch with a lady. How then had he been able to expose to her, and in such language, a quantity of things he would not have said so well before? he was timid by habit and kept that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and dissimulation. They found at Yonville that he had proper manners. He listened to mature people reason, and did not appear excited in politics, a remarkable thing for a young man. Then he possessed talents, he painted in watercolour, knew how to read the treble clef, and occupied himself willingly with literature after his dinner, when he was not playing cards. Mr. Homais esteemed him for his learning; Madame Homais liked him for his complaisance, for often he accompanied the little Homais to the garden, brats always dirty-faced, very ill-bred and somewhat lymphatic, like their mother. They had to care for them, besides the maid, Justin, the apprentice in pharmacy, a distant cousin of Mr. Homais whom they had taken into the house out of charity, and who served at the same time as domestic.

The apothecary showed himself the best of neighbours. He informed Madame Bovary about the suppliers, had his cider merchant come expressly, tasted the drink himself, and watched in the cellar that the casks were well placed; he also indicated the way to proceed to have a provision of butter at a good price, and concluded an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the sacristan, who, besides his sacerdotal and mortuary functions, tended the principal gardens of Yonville by the hour or the year, according to the taste of persons.

The need to occupy himself with others did not alone push the chemist to so much obsequious cordiality, and there was a plan underneath.

He had infringed the law of 19 Ventôse Year XI, article I, which forbids any individual not holding a diploma the practice of medicine; so much so that, on obscure denunciations, Homais had been summoned to Rouen, to Mr. the King's prosecutor, in his private cabinet. The magistrate had received him standing, in his robe, ermine on the shoulder and cap on head. It was in the morning, before the audience. One heard in the corridor the heavy boots of the gendarmes pass, and like a distant noise of big locks closing. The chemist's ears rang to believe he would fall of a stroke; he foresaw dungeons, his family in tears, the pharmacy sold, all the jars scattered; and he was obliged to enter a café to take a glass of rum with Seltzer water, to recover his spirits.

Little by little, the memory of this admonition weakened, and he continued, as before, to give harmless consultations in his back-shop. But the mayor bore him a grudge, colleagues were jealous, he had to fear everything; by attaching Mr. Bovary through politeness, it was to win his gratitude, and prevent him from speaking later, if he noticed something. So, every morning, Homais brought him the newspaper, and often, in the afternoon, left the pharmacy for an instant to go to the health officer's to make conversation.

Charles was sad: the clientele did not arrive. He remained seated for long hours, without speaking, went to sleep in his study or watched his wife sew. To distract himself, he employed himself at home as a labourer, and even tried to paint the attic with a remainder of colour the painters had left. But money matters preoccupied him. He had spent so much for the repairs at Tostes, for Madame's toilets and for the moving, that all the dowry, more than three thousand écus, had flowed away in two years. Then, so many things damaged or lost in the transport from Tostes to Yonville, not counting the plaster curé, who, falling from the cart at too hard a jolt, had crushed into a thousand pieces on the pavement of Quincampoix!

A better care came to distract him, namely his wife's pregnancy. As the term approached, he cherished her more. It was another bond of the flesh establishing itself and like the continuous feeling of a more complex union. When he saw from afar her lazy gait and her waist turning softly on her uncorseted hips, when face to face with each other he contemplated her at ease and she took, seated, tired poses in her armchair, then his happiness could not contain itself; he rose, kissed her, passed his hands over her face, called her little mama, wanted to make her dance, and delivered, half laughing, half crying, all sorts of caressing jokes that came to his mind. The idea of having engendered delighted him. Nothing was lacking to him now. He knew human existence from end to end, and he sat down to it on both elbows with serenity.

Emma at first felt a great astonishment, then had a desire to be delivered, to know what kind of thing it was to be a mother. But, not being able to make the expenses she wanted, to have a cradle in a basket with pink silk curtains and embroidered caps, she renounced the layette in a fit of bitterness, and ordered it all at once from a village seamstress, without choosing or discussing anything. She therefore did not amuse herself with these preparations where mothers' tenderness whets its appetite, and her affection, from the origin, was perhaps attenuated thereby of something.

However, as Charles, at every meal, spoke of the little one, soon she thought of it more continuously.

She wished for a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this idea of having a male child was like a revenge in hope for all her past impotences. A man, at least, is free; he can traverse passions and countries, cross obstacles, bite into the most distant happiness. But a woman is continually hindered. Inert and flexible at once, she has against her the softnesses of the flesh with the dependencies of the law. Her will, like the veil of her hat held by a cord, flutters at all winds; there is always some desire that draws, some convention that retains.

She gave birth on a Sunday, towards six o'clock, at sunrise.

— It is a girl! said Charles.

She turned her head and fainted.

Almost immediately, Madame Homais ran up and kissed her, as did Mother Lefrançois, of the Golden Lion. The chemist, as a discreet man, addressed her only a few provisional congratulations, through the half-open door. He wanted to see the child, and found it well formed.

During her convalescence, she occupied herself much with seeking a name for her daughter. First, she reviewed all those with Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she rather liked Galsuinde, more still Yseult or Léocadie. Charles wished the child to be called like his mother; Emma opposed it. They went through the calendar from one end to the other, and consulted foreigners.

— Mr. Léon, said the chemist, with whom I was speaking of it the other day, is surprised that you do not choose Madeleine, which is excessively in fashion now.

But Mother Bovary cried out strongly against that name of a sinner. Mr. Homais, for his part, had in predilection all those that recalled a great man, an illustrious fact or a generous conception, and it was on that system that he had baptised his four children. Thus, Napoléon represented glory and Franklin liberty; Irma, perhaps, was a concession to romanticism; but Athalie, a homage to the most immortal masterpiece of the French stage. For his philosophical convictions did not prevent his artistic admirations, the thinker in him did not stifle the sensitive man; he knew how to establish differences, make a place for imagination and one for fanaticism. Of this tragedy, for example, he blamed the ideas, but admired the style; he cursed the conception, but applauded all the details, and exasperated himself against the characters, while enthusing over their speeches. When he read the great passages, he was transported; but, when he reflected that the black-cassocked ones drew advantage for their shop, he was desolate, and in this confusion of sentiments wherein he embroiled himself, he would have liked at once to crown Racine with both hands and discuss with him for a good quarter of an hour.

Finally, Emma remembered that at La Vaubyessard she had heard the marquise call Berthe a young woman; from then this name was chosen, and, as Father Rouault could not come, they asked Mr. Homais to be godfather. He gave as gifts all products of his establishment, namely: six boxes of jujubes, an entire jar of racahout, three coffins of marshmallow paste, and, besides, six sticks of sugar candy that he had found again in a cupboard. The evening of the ceremony, there was a grand dinner; the curé was there; they warmed up. Mr. Homais, towards the liqueurs, intoned the God of Good People. Mr. Léon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary mother, who was the godmother, a romance of the Empire time; finally old Mr. Bovary insisted that the child be brought down, and set about baptising it with a glass of champagne that he poured from on high onto its head. This derision of the first of sacraments indignant the Abbé Bournisien; the father Bovary answered with a quotation from the War of the Gods, the curé wanted to leave; the ladies entreated; Homais interposed; and they managed to make the ecclesiastic sit down again, who quietly resumed, in his saucer, his half-finished cup of coffee.

Old Mr. Bovary remained another month at Yonville, where he dazzled the inhabitants by a superb police cap with silver braid, which he wore in the morning, to smoke his pipe on the square. Having also the habit of drinking much brandy, often he sent the servant to the Golden Lion to buy him a bottle, which was put on his son's account; and he used up, to perfume his scarves, all the provision of eau de Cologne that his daughter-in-law had.

She was not displeased in his company. He had roamed the world: he spoke of Berlin, of Vienna, of Strasbourg, of his time as an officer, of the mistresses he had had, of the grand lunches he had made; then he showed himself amiable, and sometimes, either on the staircase or in the garden, he seized her waist crying:

— Charles, mind yourself!

Then Mother Bovary grew alarmed for her son's happiness, and, fearing that her husband, in the long run, might have an immoral influence on the young woman's ideas, she hastened to press his departure. Perhaps she had more serious uneasiness. Old Mr. Bovary was a man to respect nothing.

One day, Emma was suddenly seized with the need to see her little girl, who had been put out to nurse at the carpenter's wife; and, without looking at the almanac whether the six weeks of the Virgin still lasted, she made her way towards Rolet's dwelling, which was at the extremity of the village, at the bottom of the slope, between the high road and the meadows.

It was noon; the houses had their shutters closed, and the slate roofs, which shone under the harsh light of the blue sky, seemed at the ridge of their gables to sparkle sparks. A heavy wind blew. Emma felt weak walking; the pebbles of the pavement hurt her; she hesitated whether to return home, or enter somewhere to sit.

At that moment, Mr. Léon came out of a neighbouring door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came to bow to her and placed himself in the shade before Lheureux's shop, under the grey awning that jutted out.

Madame Bovary said she was going to see her child, but that she was beginning to be tired.

— If..., Léon went on, not daring to continue.

— Do you have business somewhere? she asked.

And, on the clerk's answer, she begged him to accompany her. From that evening, it was known in Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's wife, declared before her servant that Madame Bovary was compromising herself.

To arrive at the nurse's it was necessary, after the street, to turn left, as if to gain the cemetery, and follow, between little houses and courtyards, a small path bordered with privet. They were in flower and the speedwells too, the eglantines, the nettles, and the light brambles that sprang from the bushes. Through the holes of the hedges, one perceived, in the hovels, some pig on a dung-heap, or cows in yokes, rubbing their horns against the trunk of the trees. The two of them, side by side, walked slowly, she leaning on him and he restraining his step that he measured on hers; before them, a swarm of flies hovered, buzzing in the warm air.

They recognised the house by an old walnut tree that shaded it. Low and covered with brown tiles, it had outside, under the garret dormer, a rosary of onions suspended. Some faggots, standing against the thorn fence, surrounded a square of lettuces, some lavender plants and flower-pots mounted on sticks. Dirty water flowed spreading over the grass, and there were all around several indistinct rags, knitted stockings, a red calico vest, and a large cloth of thick linen spread lengthwise on the hedge. At the noise of the gate, the nurse appeared, holding on her arm a child who was sucking. She pulled with the other hand a poor sickly brat, covered with scrofula on the face, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents too occupied with their trade left in the country.

— Come in, she said; your little one is there asleep.

The room, on the ground floor, the only one in the dwelling, had at the back against the wall a large bed without curtains, while the kneading-trough occupied the side of the window, of which a pane was mended with a sun of blue paper. In the corner, behind the door, some hobnailed ankle-boots were ranged under the slab of the wash-house, near a bottle full of oil which bore a feather at its neck; a Mathieu Laensberg lay on the dusty mantelpiece, among flint-stones, candle-ends and bits of tinder. Finally the last superfluity of this apartment was a Renown blowing into trumpets, image cut out no doubt from some perfumery prospectus, and which six clog-points nailed to the wall.

Emma's child slept on the ground, in an osier cradle. She took her with the blanket that wrapped her, and began to sing softly while dandling herself.

Léon walked about the room; it seemed strange to him to see this beautiful lady in a nankin dress, right in the middle of this misery. Madame Bovary turned red; he turned away, believing that his eyes perhaps had had some impertinence. Then she laid the little one down again, who had just vomited on her tucker. The nurse immediately came to wipe it, protesting that it would not show.

— She does me plenty others, she said, and I am only occupied with rinsing her continually! If you would therefore have the complaisance to order Camus the grocer, that he let me take a little soap when I need some? it would be even more convenient for you, that I not disturb you.

— Very well, very well! said Emma. Goodbye, Mother Rolet!

And she went out, wiping her feet on the threshold.

The good woman accompanied her to the end of the yard, all the while speaking of the trouble she had to get up at night.

— I am so worn out sometimes, that I fall asleep on my chair; also, you should at least give me a small pound of ground coffee which would make a month and that I would take in the morning with milk.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”