Madame Bovary
able to pay off his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any more
bills. A distraint became imminent. Then he appealed to his mother, who
consented to let him take a mortgage on her property, but with a great
many recriminations against Emma; and in return for her sacrifice she
asked for a shawl that had escaped the depredations of Félicité. Charles
refused to give it her; they quarrelled.
She made the first overtures of reconciliation by offering to have the
little girl, who could help her in the house, to live with her. Charles
consented to this, but when the time for parting came, all his courage
failed him. Then there was a final, complete rupture.
As his affections vanished, he clung more closely to the love of his
child. She made him anxious, however, for she coughed sometimes, and had
red spots on her cheeks.
Opposite his house, flourishing and merry, was the family of the
chemist, with whom everything was prospering. Napoleon helped him in the
laboratory, Athalie embroidered him a skullcap, Irma cut out rounds of
paper to cover the preserves, and Franklin recited Pythagoras’ table in
a breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men.
Not so! A secret ambition devoured him. Homais hankered after the cross
of the Legion of Honour. He had plenty of claims to it.
“First, having at the time of the cholera distinguished myself by a
boundless devotion; second, by having published, at my expense,
various works of public utility, such as” (and he recalled his pamphlet
entitled, “Cider, its manufacture and effects,” besides observation
on the lanigerous plant-louse, sent to the Academy; his volume of
statistics, and down to his pharmaceutical thesis); “without counting
that I am a member of several learned societies” (he was member of a
single one).
“In short!” he cried, making a pirouette, “if it were only for
distinguishing myself at fires!”
Then Homais inclined towards the Government. He secretly did the
prefect great service during the elections. He sold himself--in a word,
prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign
in which he implored him to “do him justice”; he called him “our good
king,” and compared him to Henri IV.
And every morning the druggist rushed for the paper to see if his
nomination were in it. It was never there. At last, unable to bear it
any longer, he had a grass plot in his garden designed to represent the
Star of the Cross of Honour with two little strips of grass running from
the top to imitate the ribband. He walked round it with folded arms,
meditating on the folly of the Government and the ingratitude of men.
From respect, or from a sort of sensuality that made him carry on his
investigations slowly, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer of
a rosewood desk which Emma had generally used. One day, however, he
sat down before it, turned the key, and pressed the spring. All Léon’s
letters were there. There could be no doubt this time. He devoured them
to the very last, ransacked every corner, all the furniture, all the
drawers, behind the walls, sobbing, crying aloud, distraught, mad. He
found a box and broke it open with a kick. Rodolphe’s portrait flew full
in his face in the midst of the overturned love-letters.
People wondered at his despondency. He never went out, saw no one,
refused even to visit his patients. Then they said “he shut himself up
to drink.”
Sometimes, however, some curious person climbed on to the garden hedge,
and saw with amazement this long-bearded, shabbily clothed, wild man,
who wept aloud as he walked up and down.
In the evening in summer he took his little girl with him and led her to
the cemetery. They came back at nightfall, when the only light left in
the Place was that in Binet’s window.
The voluptuousness of his grief was, however, incomplete, for he had no
one near him to share it, and he paid visits to Madame Lefrancois to be
able to speak of her.
But the landlady only listened with half an ear, having troubles
like himself. For Lheureux had at last established the “Favorites du
Commerce,” and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for doing errands,
insisted on a rise of wages, and was threatening to go over “to the
opposition shop.”
One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse--his
last resource--he met Rodolphe.
They both turned pale when they caught sight of one another. Rodolphe,
who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew
bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and
very hot) to the length of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the
public-house.
Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and
Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved. He seemed
to see again something of her in it. It was a marvel to him. He would
have liked to have been this man.
The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out
with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in. Charles
was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the
succession of memories that crossed his face. This gradually grew
redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at
last a moment when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on
Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon the same
look of weary lassitude came back to his face.
“I don’t blame you,” he said.
Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a
broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow--
“No, I don’t blame you now.”
He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made--
“It is the fault of fatality!”
Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand
from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean.
The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the arbour. Rays
of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their
shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were
blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was
suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled
his aching heart.
At seven o’clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon,
went to fetch him to dinner.
His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth
open, and in his hand was a long tress of black hair.
“Come along, papa,” she said.
And thinking he wanted to play; she pushed him gently. He fell to the
ground. He was dead.
Thirty-six hours after, at the druggist’s request, Monsieur Canivet came
thither. He made a post-mortem and found nothing.
When everything had been sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes
remained, that served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary’s going to
her grandmother. The good woman died the same year; old Rouault was
paralysed, and it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor, and
sends her to a cotton-factory to earn a living.
Since Bovary’s death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville
without any success, so severely did Homais attack them. He has an
enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and
public opinion protects him.
He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.