Madame Bovary
few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a
serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of
scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our
peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur
Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your
science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse
to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the
doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad,
and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I
have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade
at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or
otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a
matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of
Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on
the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous
vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle
in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say,
nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and
which sucking up into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together
all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say,
and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when
there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender
insalubrious miasmata--this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered
on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come--that is to
say, the southern side--by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled
themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like
breezes from Russia.”
“At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?” continued
Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.
“Oh, very few,” he answered. “There is a place they call La Pâture, on
the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I
go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.”
“I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets,” she resumed; “but
especially by the side of the sea.”
“Oh, I adore the sea!” said Monsieur Léon.
“And then, does it not seem to you,” continued Madame Bovary, “that the
mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of
which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?”
“It is the same with mountainous landscapes,” continued Léon. “A cousin
of mine who travelled in Switzerland last year told me that one could
not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the
waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of
incredible size across torrents, cottages suspended over precipices,
and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such
spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I
no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire
his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some
imposing site.”
“You play?” she asked.
“No, but I am very fond of music,” he replied.
“Ah! don’t you listen to him, Madame Bovary,” interrupted Homais,
bending over his plate. “That’s sheer modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the
other day in your room you were singing ‘L’Ange Gardien’ ravishingly. I
heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor.”
Léon, in fact, lodged at the chemist’s where he had a small room on the
second floor, overlooking the Place. He blushed at the compliment of his
landlord, who had already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to
him, one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He
was telling anecdotes, giving information; the fortune of the notary
was not known exactly, and “there was the Tuvache household,” who made a
good deal of show.
Emma continued, “And what music do you prefer?”
“Oh, German music; that which makes you dream.”
“Have you been to the opera?”
“Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish
reading for the bar.”
“As I had the honour of putting it to your husband,” said the chemist,
“with regard to this poor Yanoda who has run away, you will find
yourself, thanks to his extravagance, in the possession of one of the
most comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience for a
doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can go in and out unseen.
Moreover, it contains everything that is agreeable in a household--a
laundry, kitchen with offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He
was a gay dog, who didn’t care what he spent. At the end of the garden,
by the side of the water, he had an arbour built just for the purpose of
drinking beer in summer; and if madame is fond of gardening she will be
able--”
“My wife doesn’t care about it,” said Charles; “although she has
been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room
reading.”
“Like me,” replied Léon. “And indeed, what is better than to sit by
one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against
the window and the lamp is burning?”
“What, indeed?” she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon
him.
“One thinks of nothing,” he continued; “the hours slip by. Motionless we
traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with
the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the
adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were
yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.”
“That is true! That is true?” she said.
“Has it ever happened to you,” Léon went on, “to come across some vague
idea of one’s own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from
afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?”
“I have experienced it,” she replied.
“That is why,” he said, “I especially love the poets. I think verse more
tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears.”
“Still in the long run it is tiring,” continued Emma. “Now I, on the
contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one.
I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are
in nature.”
“In fact,” observed the clerk, “these works, not touching the heart,
miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all
the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble
characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself,
living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but Yonville
affords so few resources.”
“Like Tostes, no doubt,” replied Emma; “and so I always subscribed to a
lending library.”
“If madame will do me the honour of making use of it”, said the chemist,
who had just caught the last words, “I have at her disposal a library
composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter
Scott, the ‘Echo des Feuilletons’; and in addition I receive various
periodicals, among them the ‘Fanal de Rouen’ daily, having the advantage
to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel,
Yonville, and vicinity.”
For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant
Artémis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags,
brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and constantly
left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat against
the wall with its hooks.
Unconsciously, Léon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the
bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting. She wore a small
blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar,
and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently
sunk into the linen or came out from it. Thus side by side, while
Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague
conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to
the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of
novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where
she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked
of everything till to the end of dinner.
When coffee was served Félicité went away to get ready the room in the
new house, and the guests soon raised the siege. Madame Lefrancois was
asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was
waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home. Bits of straw
stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg. When he had
taken in his other hand the cure’s umbrella, they started.
The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the
earth was all grey as on a summer’s night. But as the doctor’s house was
only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost
immediately, and the company dispersed.
As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster
fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls were new and the
wooden stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish
light passed through the curtainless windows.
She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields,
half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight along
the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were
scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses
on the chairs and basins on the ground--the two men who had brought the
furniture had left everything about carelessly.
This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place.
The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her
arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth.
And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in
her life. She did not believe that things could present themselves in
the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life
lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be
better.
Chapter Three
The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the Place. She
had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and bowed. She nodded quickly and
reclosed the window.
Léon waited all day for six o’clock in the evening to come, but on going
to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur Binet, already at table. The
dinner of the evening before had been a considerable event for him; he
had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a “lady.” How
then had he been able to explain, and in such language, the number of
things that he could not have said so well before? He was usually
shy, and maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and
dissimulation.
At Yonville he was considered “well-bred.” He listened to the arguments
of the older people, and did not seem hot about politics--a remarkable
thing for a young man. Then he had some accomplishments; he painted in
water-colours, could read the key of G, and readily talked literature
after dinner when he did not play cards. Monsieur Homais respected him
for his education; Madame Homais liked him for his good-nature, for
he often took the little Homais into the garden--little brats who were
always dirty, very much spoilt, and somewhat lymphatic, like their
mother. Besides the servant to look after them, they had Justin, the
chemist’s apprentice, a second cousin of Monsieur Homais, who had been
taken into the house from charity, and who was useful at the same time
as a servant.
The druggist proved the best of neighbours. He gave Madame Bovary
information as to the trades-people, sent expressly for his own cider
merchant, tasted the drink himself, and saw that the casks were properly