Madame Bovary
But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was stamping her feet as
she repeated--
“Oh! what manners! What a peasant!”
He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She stammered
“She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps worse!”
And she was for leaving at once if the other did not apologise. So
Charles went back again to his wife and implored her to give way; he
knelt to her; she ended by saying--
“Very well! I’ll go to her.”
And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity
of a marchioness as she said--
“Excuse me, madame.”
Then, having gone up again to her room, she threw herself flat on her
bed and cried there like a child, her face buried in the pillow.
She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of anything extraordinary
occurring, she should fasten a small piece of white paper to the blind,
so that if by chance he happened to be in Yonville, he could hurry to
the lane behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had been waiting
three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly caught sight of Rodolphe at
the corner of the market. She felt tempted to open the window and call
him, but he had already disappeared. She fell back in despair.
Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was walking on the
pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the yard. He
was there outside. She threw herself into his arms.
“Do take care!” he said.
“Ah! if you knew!” she replied.
And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly,
exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses
that he understood nothing of it.
“Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!”
“But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love like
ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They torture me! I can
bear it no longer! Save me!”
She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like flames
beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her so much, so
that he lost his head and said “What is, it? What do you wish?”
“Take me away,” she cried, “carry me off! Oh, I pray you!”
And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the
unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss.
“But--” Rodolphe resumed.
“What?”
“Your little girl!”
She reflected a few moments, then replied--
“We will take her! It can’t be helped!”
“What a woman!” he said to himself, watching her as she went. For she
had run into the garden. Someone was calling her.
On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at the
change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing herself more
docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for
pickling gherkins.
Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort of
voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness of the
things she was about to leave?
But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as lost in the
anticipated delight of her coming happiness.
It was an eternal subject for conversation with Rodolphe. She leant on
his shoulder murmuring--
“Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it be? It
seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it will be as if
we were rising in a balloon, as if we were setting out for the clouds.
Do you know that I count the hours? And you?”
Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had
that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from
success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances.
Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young
illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers
grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all
the plenitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for
her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong
inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner
of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down. One would have
thought that an artist apt in conception had arranged the curls of hair
upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the
changing chances of their adultery, that unbound them every day. Her
voice now took more mellow infections, her figure also; something subtle
and penetrating escaped even from the folds of her gown and from the
line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first married, thought her
delicious and quite irresistible.
When he came home in the middle of the night, he did not dare to wake
her. The porcelain night-light threw a round trembling gleam upon the
ceiling, and the drawn curtains of the little cot formed as it were a
white hut standing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles looked
at them. He seemed to hear the light breathing of his child. She would
grow big now; every season would bring rapid progress. He already saw
her coming from school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on
her jacket, and carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to
be sent to the boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to
be done? Then he reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the
neighbourhood, that he would superintend every morning on his way to his
patients. He would save up what he brought in; he would put it in the
savings-bank. Then he would buy shares somewhere, no matter where;
besides, his practice would increase; he counted upon that, for he
wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to be accomplished, to learn to play
the piano. Ah! how pretty she would be later on when she was fifteen,
when, resembling her mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats
in the summer-time; from a distance they would be taken for two sisters.
He pictured her to himself working in the evening by their side beneath
the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers; she would look
after the house; she would fill all the home with her charm and her
gaiety. At last, they would think of her marriage; they would find her
some good young fellow with a steady business; he would make her happy;
this would last for ever.
Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her
side she awakened to other dreams.
To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a
new land, whence they would return no more. They went on and on, their
arms entwined, without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there
suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and
ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose
pointed steeples were storks’ nests. They went at a walking-pace because
of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of
flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the
chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of
guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps
of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled
beneath playing waters. And then, one night they came to a fishing
village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and
in front of the huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live
in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a
gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and
their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and
star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in the
immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood
forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and
it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and bathed in
sunshine. But the child began to cough in her cot or Bovary snored
more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep till morning, when the dawn
whitened the windows, and when little Justin was already in the square
taking down the shutters of the chemist’s shop.
She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to him--
“I want a cloak--a large lined cloak with a deep collar.”
“You are going on a journey?” he asked.
“No; but--never mind. I may count on you, may I not, and quickly?”
He bowed.
“Besides, I shall want,” she went on, “a trunk--not too heavy--handy.”
“Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet by a foot and a half, as they
are being made just now.”
“And a travelling bag.”
“Decidedly,” thought Lheureux, “there’s a row on here.”
“And,” said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt, “take this;
you can pay yourself out of it.”
But the tradesman cried out that she was wrong; they knew one another;
did he doubt her? What childishness!
She insisted, however, on his taking at least the chain, and Lheureux
had already put it in his pocket and was going, when she called him
back.
“You will leave everything at your place. As to the cloak”--she seemed
to be reflecting--“do not bring it either; you can give me the maker’s
address, and tell him to have it ready for me.”
It was the next month that they were to run away. She was to leave
Yonville as if she was going on some business to Rouen. Rodolphe would
have booked the seats, procured the passports, and even have written to
Paris in order to have the whole mail-coach reserved for them as far as
Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and go on thence without
stopping to Genoa. She would take care to send her luggage to Lheureux
whence it would be taken direct to the “Hirondelle,” so that no one
would have any suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion
to the child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer
thought about it.
He wished to have two more weeks before him to arrange some affairs;
then at the end of a week he wanted two more; then he said he was ill;
next he went on a journey. The month of August passed, and, after all
these delays, they decided that it was to be irrevocably fixed for the
4th September--a Monday.
At length the Saturday before arrived.
Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual.
“Everything is ready?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit down near the
terrace on the kerb-stone of the wall.
“You are sad,” said Emma.
“No; why?”
And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion.
“It is because you are going away?” she went on; “because you are
leaving what is dear to you--your life? Ah! I understand. I have nothing
in the world! you are all to me; so shall I be to you. I will be your
people, your country; I will tend, I will love you!”
“How sweet you are!” he said, seizing her in his arms.
“Really!” she said with a voluptuous laugh. “Do you love me? Swear it
then!”
“Do I love you--love you? I adore you, my love.”
The moon, full and purple-coloured, was rising right out of the earth
at the end of the meadow. She rose quickly between the branches of the
poplars, that hid her here and there like a black curtain pierced with
holes. Then she appeared dazzling with whiteness in the empty heavens
that she lit up, and now sailing more slowly along, let fall upon the
river a great stain that broke up into an infinity of stars; and the
silver sheen seemed to writhe through the very depths like a heedless
serpent covered with luminous scales; it also resembled some monster
candelabra all along which sparkled drops of diamonds running together.
The soft night was about them; masses of shadow filled the branches.
Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in with deep sighs the fresh wind
that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in the rush of
their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came back to their hearts,