Madame Bovary

hapter Seven

She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time
of her life--the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full
sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those
lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of
laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride
slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed
by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of
a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume
of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in
hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her
that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar
to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean
over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch
cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails,
and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked
to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable
uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed
her--the opportunity, the courage.

If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but
once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have
gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by
a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater
became the gulf that separated her from him.

Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and
everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without
exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity,
he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors
from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day
he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come
across in a novel.

A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold
activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements
of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing,
wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm,
this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.

Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand
there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes
half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers,
little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers
glided over it the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb,
and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken
up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the
other end of the village when the window was open, and often the
bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in list
slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.

Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house. She sent the
patients’ accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of
a bill. When they had a neighbour to dinner on Sundays, she managed to
have some tasty dish--piled up pyramids of greengages on vine leaves,
served up preserves turned out into plates--and even spoke of buying
finger-glasses for dessert. From all this much consideration was
extended to Bovary.

Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife.
He showed with pride in the sitting room two small pencil sketches by
her that he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the
wallpaper by long green cords. People returning from mass saw him at his
door in his wool-work slippers.

He came home late--at ten o’clock, at midnight sometimes. Then he asked
for something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited
on him. He took off his coat to dine more at his ease. He told her, one
after the other, the people he had met, the villages where he had been,
the prescriptions he had written, and, well pleased with himself, he
finished the remainder of the boiled beef and onions, picked pieces off
the cheese, munched an apple, emptied his water-bottle, and then went to
bed, and lay on his back and snored.

As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps, his handkerchief
would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was
all tumbled pell-mell about his face and whitened with the feathers of
the pillow, whose strings came untied during the night. He always wore
thick boots that had two long creases over the instep running obliquely
towards the ankle, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight
line as if stretched on a wooden foot. He said that “was quite good
enough for the country.”

His mother approved of his economy, for she came to see him as formerly
when there had been some violent row at her place; and yet Madame Bovary
senior seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She thought “her
ways too fine for their position”; the wood, the sugar, and the candles
disappeared as “at a grand establishment,” and the amount of firing in
the kitchen would have been enough for twenty-five courses. She put her
linen in order for her in the presses, and taught her to keep an eye on
the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma put up with these lessons.
Madame Bovary was lavish of them; and the words “daughter” and “mother”
were exchanged all day long, accompanied by little quiverings of the
lips, each one uttering gentle words in a voice trembling with anger.

In Madame Dubuc’s time the old woman felt that she was still the
favorite; but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion
from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched
her son’s happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through
the windows at people dining in his old house. She recalled to him as
remembrances her troubles and her sacrifices, and, comparing these with
Emma’s negligence, came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to
adore her so exclusively.

Charles knew not what to answer: he respected his mother, and he loved
his wife infinitely; he considered the judgment of the one infallible,
and yet he thought the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madam
Bovary had gone, he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or
two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from his mamma. Emma
proved to him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his
patients.

And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she wanted to make
herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all
the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many
melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after as before, and
Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.

When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without
getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did
not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself
in conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that
Charles’s passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became
regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among
other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony
of dinner.

A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had
given madame a little Italian greyhound; she took her out walking, for
she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see
before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far
as the beeches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion which forms an
angle of the wall on the side of the country. Amidst the vegetation of
the ditch there are long reeds with leaves that cut you.

She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last
she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and
wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and
the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always
closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts,
aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round
and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing
the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield.

Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass
that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to
herself, “Good heavens! Why did I marry?”

She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would have not
been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would
have been these unrealised events, this different life, this unknown
husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been
handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old
companions of the convent had married. What were they doing now? In
town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the
lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands,
the senses bourgeon out. But she--her life was cold as a garret whose
dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was
weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

She recalled the prize days, when she mounted the platform to receive
her little crowns, with her hair in long plaits. In her white frock and
open prunella shoes she had a pretty way, and when she went back to her
seat, the gentlemen bent over her to congratulate her; the courtyard was
full of carriages; farewells were called to her through their windows;
the music master with his violin case bowed in passing by. How far all
of this! How far away! She called Djali, took her between her knees, and
smoothed the long delicate head, saying, “Come, kiss mistress; you have
no troubles.”

Then noting the melancholy face of the graceful animal, who yawned
slowly, she softened, and comparing her to herself, spoke to her aloud
as to somebody in trouble whom one is consoling.

Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in
one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought
even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground,
whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their
summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. Emma drew her shawl
round her shoulders and rose.

In the avenue a green light dimmed by the leaves lit up the short moss
that crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was setting; the sky
showed red between the branches, and the trunks of the trees, uniform,
and planted in a straight line, seemed a brown colonnade standing out
against a background of gold. A fear took hold of her; she called Djali,
and hurriedly returned to Tostes by the high road, threw herself into an
armchair, and for the rest of the evening did not speak.

But towards the end of September something extraordinary fell upon her
life; she was invited by the Marquis d’Andervilliers to Vaubyessard.

Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, anxious to
re-enter political life, set about preparing for his candidature to
the Chamber of Deputies long beforehand. In the winter he distributed a
great deal of wood, and in the Conseil General always enthusiastically
demanded new roads for his arrondissement. During the dog-days he had
suffered from an abscess, which Charles had cured as if by miracle by
giving a timely little touch with the lancet. The steward sent to Tostes
to pay for the operation reported in the evening that he had seen some
superb cherries in the doctor’s little garden. Now cherry trees did not
thrive at Vaubyessard; the Marquis asked Bovary for some slips; made it
his business to thank his personally; saw Emma; thought she had a pretty
figure, and that she did not bow like a peasant; so that he did not
think he was going beyond the bounds of condescension, nor, on the other
hand, making a mistake, in inviting the young couple.

On Wednesday at three o’clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, seated in
their dog-cart, set out for Vaubyessard, with a great trunk strapped
on behind and a bonnet-box in front of the apron. Besides these Charles
held a bandbox between his knees.

They arrived at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park were being lit
to show the way for the carriages.