Madame Bovary
out white against the black background of the night. She seemed to
him extraordinarily beautiful and majestic as a phantom. Without
understanding what she wanted, he had the presentiment of something
terrible.
But she went on quickly in a love voice; in a sweet, melting voice, “I
want it; give it to me.”
As the partition wall was thin, they could hear the clatter of the forks
on the plates in the dining-room.
She pretended that she wanted to kill the rats that kept her from
sleeping.
“I must tell master.”
“No, stay!” Then with an indifferent air, “Oh, it’s not worth while;
I’ll tell him presently. Come, light me upstairs.”
She entered the corridor into which the laboratory door opened. Against
the wall was a key labelled Capharnaum.
“Justin!” called the druggist impatiently.
“Let us go up.”
And he followed her. The key turned in the lock, and she went straight
to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue
jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, and withdrawing it full of
a white powder, she began eating it.
“Stop!” he cried, rushing at her.
“Hush! someone will come.”
He was in despair, was calling out.
“Say nothing, or all the blame will fall on your master.”
Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity
of one that had performed a duty.
When Charles, distracted by the news of the distraint, returned home,
Emma had just gone out. He cried aloud, wept, fainted, but she did not
return. Where could she be? He sent Félicité to Homais, to Monsieur
Tuvache, to Lheureux, to the “Lion d’Or,” everywhere, and in the
intervals of his agony he saw his reputation destroyed, their fortune
lost, Berthe’s future ruined. By what?--Not a word! He waited till six
in the evening. At last, unable to bear it any longer, and fancying she
had gone to Rouen, he set out along the highroad, walked a mile, met no
one, again waited, and returned home. She had come back.
“What was the matter? Why? Explain to me.”
She sat down at her writing-table and wrote a letter, which she sealed
slowly, adding the date and the hour. Then she said in a solemn tone:
“You are to read it to-morrow; till then, I pray you, do not ask me a
single question. No, not one!”
“But--”
“Oh, leave me!”
She lay down full length on her bed. A bitter taste that she felt in her
mouth awakened her. She saw Charles, and again closed her eyes.
She was studying herself curiously, to see if she were not suffering.
But no! nothing as yet. She heard the ticking of the clock, the
crackling of the fire, and Charles breathing as he stood upright by her
bed.
“Ah! it is but a little thing, death!” she thought. “I shall fall asleep
and all will be over.”
She drank a mouthful of water and turned to the wall. The frightful
taste of ink continued.
“I am thirsty; oh! so thirsty,” she sighed.
“What is it?” said Charles, who was handing her a glass.
“It is nothing! Open the window; I am choking.”
She was seized with a sickness so sudden that she had hardly time to
draw out her handkerchief from under the pillow.
“Take it away,” she said quickly; “throw it away.”
He spoke to her; she did not answer. She lay motionless, afraid that
the slightest movement might make her vomit. But she felt an icy cold
creeping from her feet to her heart.
“Ah! it is beginning,” she murmured.
“What did you say?”
She turned her head from side to side with a gentle movement full of
agony, while constantly opening her mouth as if something very heavy
were weighing upon her tongue. At eight o’clock the vomiting began
again.
Charles noticed that at the bottom of the basin there was a sort of
white sediment sticking to the sides of the porcelain.
“This is extraordinary--very singular,” he repeated.
But she said in a firm voice, “No, you are mistaken.”
Then gently, and almost as caressing her, he passed his hand over her
stomach. She uttered a sharp cry. He fell back terror-stricken.
Then she began to groan, faintly at first. Her shoulders were shaken by
a strong shuddering, and she was growing paler than the sheets in which
her clenched fingers buried themselves. Her unequal pulse was now almost
imperceptible.
Drops of sweat oozed from her bluish face, that seemed as if rigid in
the exhalations of a metallic vapour. Her teeth chattered, her dilated
eyes looked vaguely about her, and to all questions she replied only
with a shake of the head; she even smiled once or twice. Gradually, her
moaning grew louder; a hollow shriek burst from her; she pretended she
was better and that she would get up presently. But she was seized with
convulsions and cried out--
“Ah! my God! It is horrible!”
He threw himself on his knees by her bed.
“Tell me! what have you eaten? Answer, for heaven’s sake!”
And he looked at her with a tenderness in his eyes such as she had never
seen.
“Well, there--there!” she said in a faint voice. He flew to the
writing-table, tore open the seal, and read aloud: “Accuse no one.” He
stopped, passed his hands across his eyes, and read it over again.
“What! help--help!”
He could only keep repeating the word: “Poisoned! poisoned!” Félicité
ran to Homais, who proclaimed it in the market-place; Madame Lefrancois
heard it at the “Lion d’Or”; some got up to go and tell their
neighbours, and all night the village was on the alert.
Distraught, faltering, reeling, Charles wandered about the room. He
knocked against the furniture, tore his hair, and the chemist had never
believed that there could be so terrible a sight.
He went home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to Doctor Lariviere. He
lost his head, and made more than fifteen rough copies. Hippolyte went
to Neufchâtel, and Justin so spurred Bovary’s horse that he left it
foundered and three parts dead by the hill at Bois-Guillaume.
Charles tried to look up his medical dictionary, but could not read it;
the lines were dancing.
“Be calm,” said the druggist; “we have only to administer a powerful
antidote. What is the poison?”
Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic.
“Very well,” said Homais, “we must make an analysis.”
For he knew that in cases of poisoning an analysis must be made; and the
other, who did not understand, answered--
“Oh, do anything! save her!”
Then going back to her, he sank upon the carpet, and lay there with his
head leaning against the edge of her bed, sobbing.
“Don’t cry,” she said to him. “Soon I shall not trouble you any more.”
“Why was it? Who drove you to it?”
She replied. “It had to be, my dear!”
“Weren’t you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!”
“Yes, that is true--you are good--you.”
And she passed her hand slowly over his hair. The sweetness of this
sensation deepened his sadness; he felt his whole being dissolving
in despair at the thought that he must lose her, just when she was
confessing more love for him than ever. And he could think of nothing;
he did not know, he did not dare; the urgent need for some immediate
resolution gave the finishing stroke to the turmoil of his mind.
So she had done, she thought, with all the treachery; and meanness,
and numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a
twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly
noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor
heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying away.
“Bring me the child,” she said, raising herself on her elbow.
“You are not worse, are you?” asked Charles.
“No, no!”
The child, serious, and still half-asleep, was carried in on the
servant’s arm in her long white nightgown, from which her bare
feet peeped out. She looked wonderingly at the disordered room, and
half-closed her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning on the table. They
reminded her, no doubt, of the morning of New Year’s day and Mid-Lent,
when thus awakened early by candle-light she came to her mother’s bed to
fetch her presents, for she began saying--
“But where is it, mamma?” And as everybody was silent, “But I can’t see
my little stocking.”
Félicité held her over the bed while she still kept looking towards the
mantelpiece.
“Has nurse taken it?” she asked.
And at this name, that carried her back to the memory of her adulteries
and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned away her head, as at the
loathing of another bitterer poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe
remained perched on the bed.
“Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you are! how hot you are!”
Her mother looked at her. “I am frightened!” cried the child, recoiling.
Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled.
“That will do. Take her away,” cried Charles, who was sobbing in the
alcove.
Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed less agitated; and at
every insignificant word, at every respiration a little more easy, he
regained hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his
arms.
“Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See! look at
her.”
His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he said of
himself, “never beating about the bush,” he prescribed, an emetic in
order to empty the stomach completely.
She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were
convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse
slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string
nearly breaking.
After this she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, railed
at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust away with her stiffened
arms everything that Charles, in more agony than herself, tried to make
her drink. He stood up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling
sound in his throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his whole
body. Félicité was running hither and thither in the room. Homais,
motionless, uttered great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, always retaining
his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy.
“The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the moment that the cause
ceases--”
“The effect must cease,” said Homais, “that is evident.”
“Oh, save her!” cried Bovary.
And, without listening to the chemist, who was still venturing the
hypothesis, “It is perhaps a salutary paroxysm,” Canivet was about to
administer some theriac, when they heard the cracking of a whip; all the
windows rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to
their ears in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of the market. It
was Doctor Lariviere.
The apparition of a god would not have caused more commotion. Bovary
raised his hands; Canivet stopped short; and Homais pulled off his
skull-cap long before the doctor had come in.
He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of Bichat, to that
generation, now extinct, of philosophical practitioners, who, loving
their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with enthusiasm and
wisdom. Everyone in his hospital trembled when he was angry; and his
students so revered him that they tried, as soon as they were themselves
in practice, to imitate him as much as possible. So that in all the
towns about they were found wearing his long wadded merino overcoat
and black frock-coat, whose buttoned cuffs slightly covered his brawny
hands--very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be
more ready to plunge into suffering. Disdainful of honours, of titles,
and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospitallers, generous,
fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, he
would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect
had not caused him to be feared as a demon. His glance, more penetrating
than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected every