Madame Bovary

hapter Three

The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the Place. She
had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and bowed. She nodded quickly and
reclosed the window.

Léon waited all day for six o’clock in the evening to come, but on going
to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur Binet, already at table. The
dinner of the evening before had been a considerable event for him; he
had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a “lady.” How
then had he been able to explain, and in such language, the number of
things that he could not have said so well before? He was usually
shy, and maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and
dissimulation.

At Yonville he was considered “well-bred.” He listened to the arguments
of the older people, and did not seem hot about politics--a remarkable
thing for a young man. Then he had some accomplishments; he painted in
water-colours, could read the key of G, and readily talked literature
after dinner when he did not play cards. Monsieur Homais respected him
for his education; Madame Homais liked him for his good-nature, for
he often took the little Homais into the garden--little brats who were
always dirty, very much spoilt, and somewhat lymphatic, like their
mother. Besides the servant to look after them, they had Justin, the
chemist’s apprentice, a second cousin of Monsieur Homais, who had been
taken into the house from charity, and who was useful at the same time
as a servant.

The druggist proved the best of neighbours. He gave Madame Bovary
information as to the trades-people, sent expressly for his own cider
merchant, tasted the drink himself, and saw that the casks were properly
placed in the cellar; he explained how to set about getting in a
supply of butter cheap, and made an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the
sacristan, who, besides his sacerdotal and funeral functions, looked
after the principal gardens at Yonville by the hour or the year,
according to the taste of the customers.

The need of looking after others was not the only thing that urged the
chemist to such obsequious cordiality; there was a plan underneath it
all.

He had infringed the law of the 19th Ventose, year xi., article I, which
forbade all persons not having a diploma to practise medicine; so that,
after certain anonymous denunciations, Homais had been summoned to Rouen
to see the procurer of the king in his own private room; the magistrate
receiving him standing up, ermine on shoulder and cap on head. It was
in the morning, before the court opened. In the corridors one heard
the heavy boots of the gendarmes walking past, and like a far-off noise
great locks that were shut. The druggist’s ears tingled as if he were
about to have an apoplectic stroke; he saw the depths of dungeons,
his family in tears, his shop sold, all the jars dispersed; and he was
obliged to enter a cafe and take a glass of rum and seltzer to recover
his spirits.

Little by little the memory of this reprimand grew fainter, and
he continued, as heretofore, to give anodyne consultations in his
back-parlour. But the mayor resented it, his colleagues were jealous,
everything was to be feared; gaining over Monsieur Bovary by his
attentions was to earn his gratitude, and prevent his speaking out later
on, should he notice anything. So every morning Homais brought him “the
paper,” and often in the afternoon left his shop for a few moments to
have a chat with the Doctor.

Charles was dull: patients did not come. He remained seated for hours
without speaking, went into his consulting room to sleep, or watched
his wife sewing. Then for diversion he employed himself at home as a
workman; he even tried to do up the attic with some paint which had been
left behind by the painters. But money matters worried him. He had
spent so much for repairs at Tostes, for madame’s toilette, and for the
moving, that the whole dowry, over three thousand crowns, had slipped
away in two years.

Then how many things had been spoilt or lost during their carriage from
Tostes to Yonville, without counting the plaster cure, who falling out
of the coach at an over-severe jolt, had been dashed into a thousand
fragments on the pavements of Quincampoix! A pleasanter trouble came
to distract him, namely, the pregnancy of his wife. As the time of her
confinement approached he cherished her the more. It was another bond of
the flesh establishing itself, and, as it were, a continued sentiment
of a more complex union. When from afar he saw her languid walk, and
her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when opposite one
another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses in her
armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds; he got up, embraced her,
passed his hands over her face, called her little mamma, wanted to
make her dance, and half-laughing, half-crying, uttered all kinds of
caressing pleasantries that came into his head. The idea of having
begotten a child delighted him. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human
life from end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity.

Emma at first felt a great astonishment; then was anxious to be
delivered that she might know what it was to be a mother. But not
being able to spend as much as she would have liked, to have a
swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, and embroidered caps, in a fit
of bitterness she gave up looking after the trousseau, and ordered the
whole of it from a village needlewoman, without choosing or discussing
anything. Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that
stimulate the tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was from the
very outset, perhaps, to some extent attenuated.

As Charles, however, spoke of the boy at every meal, she soon began to
think of him more consecutively.

She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him
George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected
revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he
may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste
of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once
inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and
legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a
string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws
her, some conventionality that restrains.

She was confined on a Sunday at about six o’clock, as the sun was
rising.

“It is a girl!” said Charles.

She turned her head away and fainted.

Madame Homais, as well as Madame Lefrancois of the Lion d’Or, almost
immediately came running in to embrace her. The chemist, as man of
discretion, only offered a few provincial felicitations through the
half-opened door. He wished to see the child and thought it well made.

Whilst she was getting well she occupied herself much in seeking a
name for her daughter. First she went over all those that have Italian
endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde
pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better.

Charles wanted the child to be called after her mother; Emma opposed
this. They ran over the calendar from end to end, and then consulted
outsiders.

“Monsieur Léon,” said the chemist, “with whom I was talking about it
the other day, wonders you do not chose Madeleine. It is very much in
fashion just now.”

But Madame Bovary, senior, cried out loudly against this name of a
sinner. As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for all those that
recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a generous idea, and it
was on this system that he had baptized his four children. Thus Napoleon
represented glory and Franklin liberty; Irma was perhaps a concession to
romanticism, but Athalie was a homage to the greatest masterpiece of the
French stage. For his philosophical convictions did not interfere
with his artistic tastes; in him the thinker did not stifle the man of
sentiment; he could make distinctions, make allowances for imagination
and fanaticism. In this tragedy, for example, he found fault with the
ideas, but admired the style; he detested the conception, but applauded
all the details, and loathed the characters while he grew enthusiastic
over their dialogue. When he read the fine passages he was transported,
but when he thought that mummers would get something out of them for
their show, he was disconsolate; and in this confusion of sentiments in
which he was involved he would have liked at once to crown Racine with
both his hands and discuss with him for a good quarter of an hour.

At last Emma remembered that at the château of Vaubyessard she had heard
the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from that moment this name was
chosen; and as old Rouault could not come, Monsieur Homais was requested
to stand godfather. His gifts were all products from his establishment,
to wit: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three cakes of
marshmallow paste, and six sticks of sugar-candy into the bargain that
he had come across in a cupboard. On the evening of the ceremony there
was a grand dinner; the cure was present; there was much excitement.
Monsieur Homais towards liqueur-time began singing “Le Dieu des bonnes
gens.” Monsieur Léon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior, who
was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary,
senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing
it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head. This mockery
of the first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien angry; old
Bovary replied by a quotation from “La Guerre des Dieux”; the cure
wanted to leave; the ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they
succeeded in making the priest sit down again, and he quietly went on
with the half-finished coffee in his saucer.

Monsieur Bovary, senior, stayed at Yonville a month, dazzling the
natives by a superb policeman’s cap with silver tassels that he wore
in the morning when he smoked his pipe in the square. Being also in the
habit of drinking a good deal of brandy, he often sent the servant
to the Lion d’Or to buy him a bottle, which was put down to his
son’s account, and to perfume his handkerchiefs he used up his
daughter-in-law’s whole supply of eau-de-cologne.

The latter did not at all dislike his company. He had knocked about the
world, he talked about Berlin, Vienna, and Strasbourg, of his soldier
times, of the mistresses he had had, the grand luncheons of which he had
partaken; then he was amiable, and sometimes even, either on the stairs,
or in the garden, would seize hold of her waist, crying, “Charles, look
out for yourself.”

Then Madame Bovary, senior, became alarmed for her son’s happiness, and
fearing that her husband might in the long-run have an immoral influence
upon the ideas of the young woman, took care to hurry their departure.
Perhaps she had more serious reasons for uneasiness. Monsieur Bovary was
not the man to respect anything.

One day Emma was suddenly seized with the desire to see her little
girl, who had been put to nurse with the carpenter’s wife, and, without
looking at the calendar to see whether the six weeks of the Virgin were
yet passed, she set out for the Rollets’ house, situated at the extreme
end of the village, between the highroad and the fields.

It was mid-day, the shutters of the houses were closed and the slate
roofs that glittered beneath the fierce light of the blue sky seemed to
strike sparks from the crest of the gables. A heavy wind was blowing;
Emma felt weak as she walked; the stones of the pavement hurt her; she
was doubtful whether she would not go home again, or go in somewhere to
rest.

At this moment Monsieur Léon came out from a neighbouring door with a
bundle of papers under his arm. He came to greet her, and stood in the
shade in front of the Lheureux’s shop under the projecting grey awning.

Madame Bovary said she was going to see her baby, but that she was
beginning to grow tired.

“If--” said Léon, not daring to go on.

“Have you any business to attend to?” she asked.

And on the clerk’s answer, she begged him to accompany her. That same
evening this was known in Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s
wife, declared in the presence of her servant that “Madame Bovary was
compromising herself.”

To get to the nurse’s it was necessary to turn to the left on leaving
the street, as if making for the cemetery, and to follow between little
houses and yards a small path bordered with privet hedges. They were
in bloom, and so were the speedwells, eglantines, thistles, and the
sweetbriar that sprang up from the thickets. Through openings in
the hedges one could see into the huts, some pigs on a dung-heap, or
tethered cows rubbing their horns against the trunk of trees. The two,
side by side walked slowly, she leaning upon him, and he restraining
his pace, which he regulated by hers; in front of them a swarm of midges
fluttered, buzzing in the warm air.

They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it.

Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the
dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright
against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuce, a few square feet of
lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here
and there on the grass, and all round were several indefinite rags,
knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse
linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared
with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was
pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula,
the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their
business, left in the country.

“Go in,” she said; “your little one is there asleep.”

The room on the ground-floor, the only one in the dwelling, had at its
farther end, against the wall, a large bed without curtains, while a
kneading-trough took up the side by the window, one pane of which
was mended with a piece of blue paper. In the corner behind the door,
shining hob-nailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of the washstand,
near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth; a Matthieu
Laensberg lay on the dusty mantelpiece amid gunflints, candle-ends, and
bits of amadou.

Finally, the last luxury in the apartment was a “Fame” blowing her
trumpets, a picture cut out, no doubt, from some perfumer’s prospectus
and nailed to the wall with six wooden shoe-pegs.

Emma’s child was asleep in a wicker-cradle. She took it up in the
wrapping that enveloped it and began singing softly as she rocked
herself to and fro.

Léon walked up and down the room; it seemed strange to him to see this
beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this poverty.
Madam Bovary reddened; he turned away, thinking perhaps there had been
an impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the little girl, who
had just been sick over her collar.

The nurse at once came to dry her, protesting that it wouldn’t show.

“She gives me other doses,” she said: “I am always a-washing of her. If
you would have the goodness to order Camus, the grocer, to let me have
a little soap, it would really be more convenient for you, as I needn’t
trouble you then.”

“Very well! very well!” said Emma. “Good morning, Madame Rollet,” and
she went out, wiping her shoes at the door.

The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the
time of the trouble she had getting up of nights.

“I’m that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I’m sure you
might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that’d last me a
month, and I’d take it of a morning with some milk.”

After having submitted to her thanks, Madam Bovary left. She had gone a
little way down the path when, at the sound of wooden shoes, she turned
round. It was the nurse.

“What is it?”

Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an elm tree, began
talking to her of her husband, who with his trade and six francs a year
that the captain--

“Oh, be quick!” said Emma.

“Well,” the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each word, “I’m afraid
he’ll be put out seeing me have coffee alone, you know men--”

“But you are to have some,” Emma repeated; “I will give you some. You
bother me!”

“Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see in consequence of his wounds he
has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider weakens him.”

“Do make haste, Mere Rollet!”

“Well,” the latter continued, making a curtsey, “if it weren’t asking
too much,” and she curtsied once more, “if you would”--and her eyes
begged--“a jar of brandy,” she said at last, “and I’d rub your little
one’s feet with it; they’re as tender as one’s tongue.”

Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took Monsieur Léon’s arm. She walked
fast for some time, then more slowly, and looking straight in front of
her, her eyes rested on the shoulder of the young man, whose frock-coat
had a black-velvety collar. His brown hair fell over it, straight and
carefully arranged. She noticed his nails which were longer than one
wore them at Yonville. It was one of the clerk’s chief occupations to
trim them, and for this purpose he kept a special knife in his writing
desk.

They returned to Yonville by the water-side. In the warm season the
bank, wider than at other times, showed to their foot the garden walls
whence a few steps led to the river. It flowed noiselessly, swift,
and cold to the eye; long, thin grasses huddled together in it as the
current drove them, and spread themselves upon the limpid water like
streaming hair; sometimes at the tip of the reeds or on the leaf of a
water-lily an insect with fine legs crawled or rested. The sun pierced
with a ray the small blue bubbles of the waves that, breaking, followed
each other; branchless old willows mirrored their grey backs in
the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was the
dinner-hour at the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard
nothing as they walked but the fall of their steps on the earth of the
path, the words they spoke, and the sound of Emma’s dress rustling round
her.

The walls of the gardens with pieces of bottle on their coping were
hot as the glass windows of a conservatory. Wallflowers had sprung up
between the bricks, and with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary,
as she passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a yellow
dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and clematis caught in its
fringe and dangled for a moment over the silk.

They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected
shortly at the Rouen theatre.

“Are you going?” she asked.

“If I can,” he answered.

Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full
of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial
phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the
whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices.
Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of
speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like
tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn
softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication
without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.

In one place the ground had been trodden down by the cattle; they had to
step on large green stones put here and there in the mud.

She often stopped a moment to look where to place her foot, and
tottering on a stone that shook, her arms outspread, her form bent
forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling
into the puddles of water.

When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the
little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared.

Léon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the
briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went
out.

He went to La Pâture at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of
the forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and watched
the sky through his fingers.

“How bored I am!” he said to himself, “how bored I am!”

He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais
for a friend and Monsieur Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely
absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red
whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements,
although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the beginning had
impressed the clerk.

As to the chemist’s spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle
as a sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins,
weeping for other’s woes, letting everything go in her household, and
detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so
common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although
she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms next each
other and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might be a
woman for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex than
the gown.

And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers, two or three
publicans, the cure, and finally, Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his
two sons, rich, crabbed, obtuse persons, who farmed their own lands
and had feasts among themselves, bigoted to boot, and quite unbearable
companions.

But from the general background of all these human faces Emma’s stood
out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to
see a vague abyss.

In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the
druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him
again, and Léon did not know what to do between his fear of being
indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible.