Madame Bovary
top by a garland of pale flowers, was puckered everywhere over the badly
stretched canvas; white calico curtains with a red border hung crossways
at the length of the window; and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with
a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two plate candlesticks
under oval shades. On the other side of the passage was Charles’s
consulting room, a little room about six paces wide, with a table,
three chairs, and an office chair. Volumes of the “Dictionary of Medical
Science,” uncut, but the binding rather the worse for the successive
sales through which they had gone, occupied almost along the six shelves
of a deal bookcase.
The smell of melted butter penetrated through the walls when he saw
patients, just as in the kitchen one could hear the people coughing in
the consulting room and recounting their histories.
Then, opening on the yard, where the stable was, came a large
dilapidated room with a stove, now used as a wood-house, cellar, and
pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements
past service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to
guess.
The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud walls with espaliered
apricots, to a hawthorn hedge that separated it from the field. In the
middle was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal; four flower beds with
eglantines surrounded symmetrically the more useful kitchen garden bed.
Right at the bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a cure in plaster
reading his breviary.
Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second,
which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red
drapery. A shell box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary
near the window a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin
ribbons stood in a bottle. It was a bride’s bouquet; it was the other
one’s. She looked at it. Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it
up to the attic, while Emma seated in an arm-chair (they were putting
her things down around her) thought of her bridal flowers packed up in
a bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she
were to die.
During the first days she occupied herself in thinking about changes in
the house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper
put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the
sundial; she even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain
and fishes. Finally her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out,
picked up a second-hand dogcart, which, with new lamps and splashboard
in striped leather, looked almost like a tilbury.
He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together,
a walk in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her
hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and
many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now
made up the endless round of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, by
her side, on the pillow, he watched the sunlight sinking into the down
on her fair cheek, half hidden by the lappets of her night-cap. Seen
thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on
waking up, she opened and shut them rapidly many times. Black in the
shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, depths of
different colours, that, darker in the centre, grew paler towards the
surface of the eye. His own eyes lost themselves in these depths; he saw
himself in miniature down to the shoulders, with his handkerchief round
his head and the top of his shirt open. He rose. She came to the window
to see him off, and stayed leaning on the sill between two pots of
geranium, clad in her dressing gown hanging loosely about her. Charles,
in the street buckled his spurs, his foot on the mounting stone, while
she talked to him from above, picking with her mouth some scrap of
flower or leaf that she blew out at him. Then this, eddying, floating,
described semicircles in the air like a bird, and was caught before
it reached the ground in the ill-groomed mane of the old white mare
standing motionless at the door. Charles from horseback threw her a
kiss; she answered with a nod; she shut the window, and he set off. And
then along the highroad, spreading out its long ribbon of dust, along
the deep lanes that the trees bent over as in arbours, along paths where
the corn reached to the knees, with the sun on his back and the morning
air in his nostrils, his heart full of the joys of the past night, his
mind at rest, his flesh at ease, he went on, re-chewing his happiness,
like those who after dinner taste again the truffles which they are
digesting.
Until now what good had he had of his life? His time at school, when
he remained shut up within the high walls, alone, in the midst of
companions richer than he or cleverer at their work, who laughed at his
accent, who jeered at his clothes, and whose mothers came to the school
with cakes in their muffs? Later on, when he studied medicine, and never
had his purse full enough to treat some little work-girl who would have
become his mistress? Afterwards, he had lived fourteen months with the
widow, whose feet in bed were cold as icicles. But now he had for life
this beautiful woman whom he adored. For him the universe did not extend
beyond the circumference of her petticoat, and he reproached himself
with not loving her. He wanted to see her again; he turned back quickly,
ran up the stairs with a beating heart. Emma, in her room, was dressing;
he came up on tiptoe, kissed her back; she gave a cry.
He could not keep from constantly touching her comb, her ring, her
fichu; sometimes he gave her great sounding kisses with all his mouth on
her cheeks, or else little kisses in a row all along her bare arm
from the tip of her fingers up to her shoulder, and she put him away
half-smiling, half-vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you.
Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that
should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought,
have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in
life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so
beautiful in books.
Chapter Six
She had read “Paul and Virginia,” and she had dreamed of the little
bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the
sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for
you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand,
bringing you a bird’s nest.
When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town to place
her in the convent. They stopped at an inn in the St. Gervais quarter,
where, at their supper, they used painted plates that set forth the
story of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. The explanatory legends, chipped
here and there by the scratching of knives, all glorified religion, the
tendernesses of the heart, and the pomps of court.
Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took pleasure in the
society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, took her to the chapel,
which one entered from the refectory by a long corridor. She played very
little during recreation hours, knew her catechism well, and it was she
who always answered Monsieur le Vicaire’s difficult questions. Living
thus, without ever leaving the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, and
amid these pale-faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she
was softly lulled by the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes of the
altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the lights of the tapers.
Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with
their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred
heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the
cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a
whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfil.
When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she
might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined,
her face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest.
The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal
marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of
unexpected sweetness.
In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in
the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or
the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the
“Genie du Christianisme,” as a recreation. How she listened at first to
the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies reechoing
through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the
shop-parlour of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened
her heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to
us only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well;
she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs.
Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to
those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms,
and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.
She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected
as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her
heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking
for emotions, not landscapes.
At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to
mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an
ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution, she dined in the
refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit
of chat with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped
out from the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love songs
of the last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away.
She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on
the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the
pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed
long chapters in the intervals of her work. They were all love, lovers,
sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions
killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre
forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by
moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, “gentlemen” brave as lions,
gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and
weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of
age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events,
dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked
to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines
who, in the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the
stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on
his black horse from the distant fields. At this time she had a cult
for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy
women. Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and
Clemence Isaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of
heaven, where also were seen, lost in shadow, and all unconnected, St.
Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI, a
little of St. Bartholomew’s Day, the plume of the Bearnais, and always
the remembrance of the plates painted in honour of Louis XIV.
In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but
little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes, gondoliers;-mild