Madame Bovary
Yesterday he had given his word; he would not break it. And she already
saw herself at Lheureux’s spreading out her three bank-notes on his
bureau. Then she would have to invent some story to explain matters to
Bovary. What should it be?
The nurse, however, was a long while gone. But, as there was no clock
in the cot, Emma feared she was perhaps exaggerating the length of time.
She began walking round the garden, step by step; she went into the path
by the hedge, and returned quickly, hoping that the woman would have
come back by another road. At last, weary of waiting, assailed by fears
that she thrust from her, no longer conscious whether she had been here
a century or a moment, she sat down in a corner, closed her eyes, and
stopped her ears. The gate grated; she sprang up. Before she had spoken
Mere Rollet said to her--
“There is no one at your house!”
“What?”
“Oh, no one! And the doctor is crying. He is calling for you; they’re
looking for you.”
Emma answered nothing. She gasped as she turned her eyes about
her, while the peasant woman, frightened at her face, drew back
instinctively, thinking her mad. Suddenly she struck her brow and
uttered a cry; for the thought of Rodolphe, like a flash of lightning in
a dark night, had passed into her soul. He was so good, so delicate, so
generous! And besides, should he hesitate to do her this service, she
would know well enough how to constrain him to it by re-waking, in a
single moment, their lost love. So she set out towards La Huchette, not
seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while
ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution.
Chapter Eight
She asked herself as she walked along, “What am I going to say? How
shall I begin?” And as she went on she recognised the thickets,
the trees, the sea-rushes on the hill, the château yonder. All the
sensations of her first tenderness came back to her, and her poor aching
heart opened out amorously. A warm wind blew in her face; the melting
snow fell drop by drop from the buds to the grass.
She entered, as she used to, through the small park-gate. She reached
the avenue bordered by a double row of dense lime-trees. They were
swaying their long whispering branches to and fro. The dogs in their
kennels all barked, and the noise of their voices resounded, but brought
out no one.
She went up the large straight staircase with wooden balusters that led
to the corridor paved with dusty flags, into which several doors in a
row opened, as in a monastery or an inn. His was at the top, right
at the end, on the left. When she placed her fingers on the lock her
strength suddenly deserted her. She was afraid, almost wished he
would not be there, though this was her only hope, her last chance of
salvation. She collected her thoughts for one moment, and, strengthening
herself by the feeling of present necessity, went in.
He was in front of the fire, both his feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a
pipe.
“What! it is you!” he said, getting up hurriedly.
“Yes, it is I, Rodolphe. I should like to ask your advice.”
And, despite all her efforts, it was impossible for her to open her
lips.
“You have not changed; you are charming as ever!”
“Oh,” she replied bitterly, “they are poor charms since you disdained
them.”
Then he began a long explanation of his conduct, excusing himself in
vague terms, in default of being able to invent better.
She yielded to his words, still more to his voice and the sight of him,
so that, she pretended to believe, or perhaps believed; in the pretext
he gave for their rupture; this was a secret on which depended the
honour, the very life of a third person.
“No matter!” she said, looking at him sadly. “I have suffered much.”
He replied philosophically--
“Such is life!”
“Has life,” Emma went on, “been good to you at least, since our
separation?”
“Oh, neither good nor bad.”
“Perhaps it would have been better never to have parted.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“You think so?” she said, drawing nearer, and she sighed. “Oh, Rodolphe!
if you but knew! I loved you so!”
It was then that she took his hand, and they remained some time, their
fingers intertwined, like that first day at the Show. With a gesture of
pride he struggled against this emotion. But sinking upon his breast she
said to him--
“How did you think I could live without you? One cannot lose the habit
of happiness. I was desolate. I thought I should die. I will tell you
about all that and you will see. And you--you fled from me!”
For, all the three years, he had carefully avoided her in consequence
of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex. Emma went
on, with dainty little nods, more coaxing than an amorous kitten--
“You love others, confess it! Oh, I understand them, dear! I excuse
them. You probably seduced them as you seduced me. You are indeed a man;
you have everything to make one love you. But we’ll begin again, won’t
we? We will love one another. See! I am laughing; I am happy! Oh,
speak!”
And she was charming to see, with her eyes, in which trembled a tear,
like the rain of a storm in a blue corolla.
He had drawn her upon his knees, and with the back of his hand was
caressing her smooth hair, where in the twilight was mirrored like a
golden arrow one last ray of the sun. She bent down her brow; at last he
kissed her on the eyelids quite gently with the tips of his lips.
“Why, you have been crying! What for?”
She burst into tears. Rodolphe thought this was an outburst of her
love. As she did not speak, he took this silence for a last remnant of
resistance, and then he cried out--
“Oh, forgive me! You are the only one who pleases me. I was imbecile and
cruel. I love you. I will love you always. What is it. Tell me!” He was
kneeling by her.
“Well, I am ruined, Rodolphe! You must lend me three thousand francs.”
“But--but--” said he, getting up slowly, while his face assumed a grave
expression.
“You know,” she went on quickly, “that my husband had placed his whole
fortune at a notary’s. He ran away. So we borrowed; the patients don’t
pay us. Moreover, the settling of the estate is not yet done; we shall
have the money later on. But to-day, for want of three thousand francs,
we are to be sold up. It is to be at once, this very moment, and,
counting upon your friendship, I have come to you.”
“Ah!” thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, “that was what she came for.”
At last he said with a calm air--
“Dear madame, I have not got them.”
He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them,
although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand
for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and
most destructive.
First she looked at him for some moments.
“You have not got them!” she repeated several times. “You have not got
them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me.
You are no better than the others.”
She was betraying, ruining herself.
Rodolphe interrupted her, declaring he was “hard up” himself.
“Ah! I pity you,” said Emma. “Yes--very much.”
And fixing her eyes upon an embossed carabine, that shone against its
panoply, “But when one is so poor one doesn’t have silver on the butt of
one’s gun. One doesn’t buy a clock inlaid with tortoise shell,” she went
on, pointing to a buhl timepiece, “nor silver-gilt whistles for one’s
whips,” and she touched them, “nor charms for one’s watch. Oh, he wants
for nothing! even to a liqueur-stand in his room! For you love yourself;
you live well. You have a château, farms, woods; you go hunting; you
travel to Paris. Why, if it were but that,” she cried, taking up two
studs from the mantelpiece, “but the least of these trifles, one can get
money for them. Oh, I do not want them, keep them!”
And she threw the two links away from her, their gold chain breaking as
it struck against the wall.
“But I! I would have given you everything. I would have sold all, worked
for you with my hands, I would have begged on the highroads for a smile,
for a look, to hear you say ‘Thanks!’ And you sit there quietly in your
arm-chair, as if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you,
and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made you do it? Was
it a bet? Yet you loved me--you said so. And but a moment since--Ah!
it would have been better to have driven me away. My hands are hot with
your kisses, and there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you
swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years you
held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! Eh! Our plans for
the journey, do you remember? Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my
heart! And then when I come back to him--to him, rich, happy, free--to
implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and
bringing back to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would
cost him three thousand francs!”
“I haven’t got them,” replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with
which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield.
She went out. The walls trembled, the ceiling was crushing her, and she
passed back through the long alley, stumbling against the heaps of dead
leaves scattered by the wind. At last she reached the ha-ha hedge in
front of the gate; she broke her nails against the lock in her haste to
open it. Then a hundred steps farther on, breathless, almost falling,
she stopped. And now turning round, she once more saw the impassive
château, with the park, the gardens, the three courts, and all the
windows of the facade.
She remained lost in stupor, and having no more consciousness of herself
than through the beating of her arteries, that she seemed to hear
bursting forth like a deafening music filling all the fields. The earth
beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed
to her immense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her
head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand pieces of
fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux’s closet, their room at home,
another landscape. Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and
managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did
not in the least remember the cause of the terrible condition she was
in, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her
love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory; as wounded men,
dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds.
Night was falling, crows were flying about.
Suddenly it seemed to her that fiery spheres were exploding in the air
like fulminating balls when they strike, and were whirling, whirling,
to melt at last upon the snow between the branches of the trees. In the
midst of each of them appeared the face of Rodolphe. They multiplied and
drew near her, penetrating her. It all disappeared; she recognised the
lights of the houses that shone through the fog.
Now her situation, like an abyss, rose up before her. She was panting as
if her heart would burst. Then in an ecstasy of heroism, that made
her almost joyous, she ran down the hill, crossed the cow-plank, the
foot-path, the alley, the market, and reached the chemist’s shop. She
was about to enter, but at the sound of the bell someone might come, and
slipping in by the gate, holding her breath, feeling her way along the
walls, she went as far as the door of the kitchen, where a candle stuck
on the stove was burning. Justin in his shirt-sleeves was carrying out a
dish.
“Ah! they are dining; I will wait.”
He returned; she tapped at the window. He went out.
“The key! the one for upstairs where he keeps the--”
“What?”
And he looked at her, astonished at the pallor of her face, that stood