Madame Bovary
once before on the road of Saint-Victor when he had parted from her. The
windows of the village were all on fire beneath the slanting rays of the
sun sinking behind the field. He put his hand over his eyes, and saw
in the horizon an enclosure of walls, where trees here and there formed
black clusters between white stones; then he went on his way at a gentle
trot, for his nag had gone lame.
Despite their fatigue, Charles and his mother stayed very long that
evening talking together. They spoke of the days of the past and of the
future. She would come to live at Yonville; she would keep house for
him; they would never part again. She was ingenious and caressing,
rejoicing in her heart at gaining once more an affection that had
wandered from her for so many years. Midnight struck. The village as
usual was silent, and Charles, awake, thought always of her.
Rodolphe, who, to distract himself, had been rambling about the wood all
day, was sleeping quietly in his château, and Léon, down yonder, always
slept.
There was another who at that hour was not asleep.
On the grave between the pine-trees a child was on his knees weeping,
and his heart, rent by sobs, was beating in the shadow beneath the load
of an immense regret, sweeter than the moon and fathomless as the night.
The gate suddenly grated. It was Lestiboudois; he came to fetch his
spade, that he had forgotten. He recognised Justin climbing over the
wall, and at last knew who was the culprit who stole his potatoes.
Chapter Eleven
The next day Charles had the child brought back. She asked for her
mamma. They told her she was away; that she would bring her back some
playthings. Berthe spoke of her again several times, then at last
thought no more of her. The child’s gaiety broke Bovary’s heart, and he
had to bear besides the intolerable consolations of the chemist.
Money troubles soon began again, Monsieur Lheureux urging on anew his
friend Vincart, and Charles pledged himself for exorbitant sums; for he
would never consent to let the smallest of the things that had belonged
to HER be sold. His mother was exasperated with him; he grew even more
angry than she did. He had altogether changed. She left the house.
Then everyone began “taking advantage” of him. Mademoiselle Lempereur
presented a bill for six months’ teaching, although Emma had never taken
a lesson (despite the receipted bill she had shown Bovary); it was an
arrangement between the two women. The man at the circulating library
demanded three years’ subscriptions; Mere Rollet claimed the postage due
for some twenty letters, and when Charles asked for an explanation, she
had the delicacy to reply--
“Oh, I don’t know. It was for her business affairs.”
With every debt he paid Charles thought he had come to the end of them.
But others followed ceaselessly. He sent in accounts for professional
attendance. He was shown the letters his wife had written. Then he had
to apologise.
Félicité now wore Madame Bovary’s gowns; not all, for he had kept some
of them, and he went to look at them in her dressing-room, locking
himself up there; she was about her height, and often Charles, seeing
her from behind, was seized with an illusion, and cried out--
“Oh, stay, stay!”
But at Whitsuntide she ran away from Yonville, carried off by Theodore,
stealing all that was left of the wardrobe.
It was about this time that the widow Dupuis had the honour to inform
him of the “marriage of Monsieur Léon Dupuis her son, notary at Yvetot,
to Mademoiselle Leocadie Leboeuf of Bondeville.” Charles, among the
other congratulations he sent him, wrote this sentence--
“How glad my poor wife would have been!”
One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the
attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper. He opened it
and read: “Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your
life.” It was Rodolphe’s letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes,
where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had just
blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in
the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even
than he, had thought of dying. At last he discovered a small R at the
bottom of the second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodolphe’s
attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained air when they
had met two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter
deceived him.
“Perhaps they loved one another platonically,” he said to himself.
Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he
shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity
of his woe.
Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have
coveted her. She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he
was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his
despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable.
To please her, as if she were still living, he adopted her
predilections, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots and took to
wearing white cravats. He put cosmetics on his moustache, and, like her,
signed notes of hand. She corrupted him from beyond the grave.
He was obliged to sell his silver piece by piece; next he sold the
drawing-room furniture. All the rooms were stripped; but the bedroom,
her own room, remained as before. After his dinner Charles went up
there. He pushed the round table in front of the fire, and drew up her
armchair. He sat down opposite it. A candle burnt in one of the gilt
candlesticks. Berthe by his side was painting prints.
He suffered, poor man, at seeing her so badly dressed, with laceless
boots, and the arm-holes of her pinafore torn down to the hips; for the
charwoman took no care of her. But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her
little head bent forward so gracefully, letting the dear fair hair fall
over her rosy cheeks, that an infinite joy came upon him, a happiness
mingled with bitterness, like those ill-made wines that taste of
resin. He mended her toys, made her puppets from cardboard, or sewed up
half-torn dolls. Then, if his eyes fell upon the workbox, a ribbon lying
about, or even a pin left in a crack of the table, he began to dream,
and looked so sad that she became as sad as he.
No one now came to see them, for Justin had run away to Rouen, where he
was a grocer’s assistant, and the druggist’s children saw less and less
of the child, Monsieur Homais not caring, seeing the difference of their
social position, to continue the intimacy.
The blind man, whom he had not been able to cure with the pomade, had
gone back to the hill of Bois-Guillaume, where he told the travellers of
the vain attempt of the druggist, to such an extent, that Homais when
he went to town hid himself behind the curtains of the “Hirondelle” to
avoid meeting him. He detested him, and wishing, in the interests of his
own reputation, to get rid of him at all costs, he directed against
him a secret battery, that betrayed the depth of his intellect and the
baseness of his vanity. Thus, for six consecutive months, one could read
in the “Fanal de Rouen” editorials such as these--
“All who bend their steps towards the fertile plains of Picardy have, no
doubt, remarked, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a wretch suffering from
a horrible facial wound. He importunes, persecutes one, and levies a
regular tax on all travellers. Are we still living in the monstrous
times of the Middle Ages, when vagabonds were permitted to display in
our public places leprosy and scrofulas they had brought back from the
Crusades?”
Or--
“In spite of the laws against vagabondage, the approaches to our great
towns continue to be infected by bands of beggars. Some are seen going
about alone, and these are not, perhaps, the least dangerous. What are
our ediles about?”
Then Homais invented anecdotes--
“Yesterday, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a skittish horse--” And then
followed the story of an accident caused by the presence of the blind
man.
He managed so well that the fellow was locked up. But he was released.
He began again, and Homais began again. It was a struggle. Homais won
it, for his foe was condemned to life-long confinement in an asylum.
This success emboldened him, and henceforth there was no longer a dog
run over, a barn burnt down, a woman beaten in the parish, of which
he did not immediately inform the public, guided always by the love of
progress and the hate of priests. He instituted comparisons between the
elementary and clerical schools to the detriment of the latter; called
to mind the massacre of St. Bartholomew a propos of a grant of one
hundred francs to the church, and denounced abuses, aired new views.
That was his phrase. Homais was digging and delving; he was becoming
dangerous.
However, he was stifling in the narrow limits of journalism, and soon a
book, a work was necessary to him. Then he composed “General Statistics
of the Canton of Yonville, followed by Climatological Remarks.” The
statistics drove him to philosophy. He busied himself with great
questions: the social problem, moralisation of the poorer classes,
pisciculture, caoutchouc, railways, etc. He even began to blush at being
a bourgeois. He affected the artistic style, he smoked. He bought two
chic Pompadour statuettes to adorn his drawing-room.
He by no means gave up his shop. On the contrary, he kept well abreast
of new discoveries. He followed the great movement of chocolates; he
was the first to introduce “cocoa” and “revalenta” into the
Seine-Inferieure. He was enthusiastic about the hydro-electric
Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off
his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden
spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for
this man more bandaged than a Scythian, and splendid as one of the Magi.
He had fine ideas about Emma’s tomb. First he proposed a broken column
with some drapery, next a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta, a sort of
rotunda, or else a “mass of ruins.” And in all his plans Homais always
stuck to the weeping willow, which he looked upon as the indispensable
symbol of sorrow.
Charles and he made a journey to Rouen together to look at some tombs
at a funeral furnisher’s, accompanied by an artist, one Vaufrylard, a
friend of Bridoux’s, who made puns all the time. At last, after having
examined some hundred designs, having ordered an estimate and made
another journey to Rouen, Charles decided in favour of a mausoleum,
which on the two principal sides was to have a “spirit bearing an
extinguished torch.”
As to the inscription, Homais could think of nothing so fine as _Sta
viator_,[23] and he got no further; he racked his brain, he constantly
repeated _Sta viator_. At last he hit upon _Amabilen conjugem
calcas_,[24] which was adopted.
[23] Rest traveler.
[24] Tread upon a loving wife.
A strange thing was that Bovary, while continually thinking of Emma, was
forgetting her. He grew desperate as he felt this image fading from his
memory in spite of all efforts to retain it. Yet every night he dreamt
of her; it was always the same dream. He drew near her, but when he was
about to clasp her she fell into decay in his arms.
For a week he was seen going to church in the evening. Monsieur
Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then gave him up.
Moreover, the old fellow was growing intolerant, fanatic, said Homais.
He thundered against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every
other week, in his sermon, to recount the death agony of Voltaire, who
died devouring his excrements, as everyone knows.
In spite of the economy with which Bovary lived, he was far from being