Madame Bovary (16 page)

Homais asked permission to keep his fez on, for fear of contracting a coryza.

Then, turning to his neighbor:

“Madame is a little tired, no doubt? One is so dreadfully shaken about in our
Hirondelle
!”

“That’s quite true,” answered Emma; “but I always find disruption interesting; I like a change of scene.”

“It’s such a dismal thing,” sighed the clerk, “always to be stuck in the same place!”

“If you were like me,” said Charles, “constantly obliged to be in the saddle …”

“But there’s nothing more charming, it seems to me,” Léon went on, addressing Madame Bovary. “When one can do it,” he added.

“As a matter of fact,” said the apothecary, “the practice of medicine is not very arduous in our area; for the condition of our roads permits the use of a carriage, and generally one is quite well paid, the farmers being prosperous. Medically speaking, apart from ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious attacks, and so forth, now and then we have some intermittent fevers at harvest time, but on the whole, very little that’s serious, nothing especially noteworthy, except a good deal of scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our peasants’ homes. Ah, yes, you’ll find yourself struggling against a good many prejudices, Monsieur Bovary, a good deal of pigheaded adherence to tradition, which all your scientific efforts will run up against every day; for people still resort to novenas, relics, the curé, instead of doing the natural thing and going to the doctor or the pharmacist. Still, the
climate is not, in truth, bad, and we can even number a few nonagenarians in the community. The thermometer (I have made the observations myself) descends in the winter as low as four degrees and in the warm season reaches twenty-five, thirty centigrade at the very most, which gives us twenty-four Réaumur maximum or, to put it another way, fifty-four Fahrenheit (English measure), and no more!—and, in fact, we’re sheltered from the north
winds by the Argueil forest on the one hand, from the west winds by the Saint-Jean hill on the other; and yet this warmth, which, because of the water vapor given off by the stream and the considerable presence of cattle in the meadows, exhaling, as you know, a good deal of ammonia, that is to say nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen (no, just nitrogen and hydrogen), and which, sucking the moisture from the earth’s humus, mingling all these different emanations, bringing them together in a bundle, so to
speak, and itself combining with the electricity diffused in the atmosphere, when there is any, could eventually, as in the tropical countries, engender unhealthy miasmas;—this warmth, I say, is tempered precisely in the quarter from which it comes, or rather from which it would come, that is, in the south, by the southeast winds, which, having cooled as they passed over the Seine, sometimes swoop down upon us, like breezes from Russia!”

“Do you at least have some nice walks in the area?” asked Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.

“Oh, very few!” he answered. “There’s a place they call the Pasture, at the top of the hill, by the edge of the forest. I go there sometimes on Sundays, and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.”

“I think nothing is as wonderful as a sunset,” she said, “especially at the seaside.”

“Oh, I love the sea!” said Monsieur Léon.

“And doesn’t it seem to you,” replied Madame Bovary, “that one’s spirit roams more freely over that limitless expanse, and that contemplating it elevates the soul and gives one glimpses of the infinite, and the ideal?”

“It’s the same with mountain scenery,” Léon said. “A cousin of mine traveled in Switzerland last year, and he told me you can’t imagine the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the enormous effect of the glaciers. You see incredibly tall pine trees across the torrents, cabins hanging from precipices, and, when the clouds part, entire valleys a thousand feet below you. Such spectacles must inspire one, move one to prayer, to ecstasy! I’m no longer surprised at that famous musician who excited his imagination by playing his piano in front of some imposing scene.”

“Are you a musician?” she asked.

“No, but I’m very fond of music,” he answered.

“Ah, don’t listen to him, Madame Bovary,” interrupted Homais, leaning over his plate. “That’s sheer modesty.—How can you say that, my
boy! Eh! The other day, in your room, you were singing ‘L’Ange Gardien’ so charmingly. I could hear you from the laboratory; you were rendering it like an actor.”

Léon, indeed, lived at the pharmacist’s, where he had a little room on the third floor looking out on the square. He blushed at this compliment from his landlord, who had already turned to the doctor and was enumerating to him one after another the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He was telling anecdotes, offering facts; no one knew exactly how large the notary’s fortune was,
and there was the Tuvache family
, who put on such airs.

Emma went on:

“And what sort of music do you prefer?”

“Oh! German music, the kind that makes you dream.”

“Are you familiar with the Italians?”

“Not yet; but I’ll hear them next year, when I go to live in Paris, to finish my law studies.”

“As I’ve had the honor of explaining to your husband,” said the pharmacist, “speaking of poor Yanoda, who has run off—thanks to his extravagance, you’ll find yourselves enjoying one of the most comfortable houses in Yonville. Its main convenience, for a doctor, is that it has a door opening on
the Alley
, so that people can enter and leave without being seen. Besides that, it’s furnished with everything pleasant to have in a home: laundry room, kitchen and pantry, living room for the family, apple loft, and so on. He was a go-ahead sort who didn’t worry about costs! He had an arbor built at the bottom of the garden, by the water, just for drinking beer in the summer, and if Madame likes to garden, she’ll be able to …”

“My wife doesn’t take much interest in that,” said Charles. “Even though she has been told she ought to exercise, she’d rather stay in her room all the time and read.”

“Like me,” replied Léon; “what could be better, really, than to sit by the fire in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the windowpanes, and the lamp burns? …”

“Oh, yes,” she said, her great, dark, wide-open eyes fixed on him.

“You forget everything,” he went on, “and hours go by. Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines
of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you’re the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he’s wearing.”

“It’s so true! It’s so true!”

“Have you ever had the experience,” Léon went on, “while reading a book, of coming upon some vague idea that you’ve had yourself, some obscure image that comes back to you from far away and seems to express absolutely your most subtle feelings?”

“I have felt that,” she answered.

“That’s why I’m especially fond of the poets,” he said. “I think verses are more tender than prose, and more apt to make you cry.”

“Yet they’re tiresome in the end,” Emma said; “these days, what I really adore are stories that can be read all in one go, and that frighten you. I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life.”

“Yes,” observed the clerk, “those works that don’t touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art. It is so pleasant, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to let one’s mind dwell on noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For me, living here, far away from the world, it’s my only distraction; Yonville has so little to offer!”

“Like Tostes, I suppose,” Emma continued; “that’s why I always belonged to a lending library.”

“If Madame would do me the honor of using it,” said the pharmacist, who had heard these last words, “I myself have at her disposal a library composed of the best authors: Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott,
L’Écho des Feuilletons
, among others, and in addition, I receive different periodicals every day, including
Le Fanal de Rouen
, since I have the advantage of being its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel, Yonville, and vicinity.”

For two and a half hours now, they had been at the table; for the servant Artémise, indolently dragging her worn-out old list slippers over the flagstones, would bring the plates out one at a time, forget everything, pay attention to nothing, and constantly leave the billiards-room door ajar, so that the tip of its latch kept knocking against the wall.

Without noticing, while he was talking, Léon had rested his foot on one of the rungs of the chair in which Madame Bovary was sitting. She was wearing a little blue silk tie that held her collar of fluted cambric as straight as a ruff, and depending on how she moved her head, the lower
part of her face would sink into the linen or gently emerge from it. In this way, sitting side by side, while Charles and the pharmacist talked on, they entered upon one of those aimless conversations in which any remark made at random brings you back to the unvarying core of a shared feeling. Plays in Paris, titles of novels, new quadrilles, the world they did not know, Tostes, where she had lived, Yonville, where they now were—they explored everything, talked about everything, until dinner was over.

When the coffee was served, Félicité went off to prepare the bedroom in the new house, and soon the guests got up from the table. Madame Lefrançois was sleeping by the embers, while the stableboy, a lantern in his hand, was waiting for Monsieur and Madame Bovary, to lead them to their house. There were wisps of straw mingled in his red hair, and he limped on his left leg. When he had taken the curé’s umbrella in his other hand, they set out.

The town was asleep. The posts in the marketplace cast long shadows. The earth was gray, as on a summer night.

But because the doctor’s house was fifty steps from the inn, they had to say good night almost immediately, and the company dispersed.

As soon as she entered the front hall, Emma felt the chill from the plaster descend on her shoulders like a damp cloth. The walls were new, and the wooden steps creaked. In the bedroom, on the second floor, a pale light came through the curtainless windows. One could glimpse the tops of trees, and beyond them the meadows, half drowned in the mist that smoked in the moonlight along the course of the stream. In the middle of the room, heaped together, were dresser drawers, bottles, curtain rods, gilded poles, with mattresses over the chairs and basins on the floor,—the two men who had brought the furniture having left everything there, carelessly.

It was the fourth time she had gone to bed in an unfamiliar place. The first was the day she entered the convent, the second that of her arrival in Tostes, the third at La Vaubyessard, the fourth this one; and each had turned out to be in some sense the inauguration of a new phase of her life. She did not believe that things could seem the same in different places, and since the portion of her experience thus far had been bad, what remained to be consumed would surely be better.

The next day, when she awoke, she saw the clerk in the square. She was in her dressing gown. He lifted his head and greeted her. She gave a quick nod and closed the window.

Léon waited all day for six o’clock to come; but when he entered the inn, he found only Monsieur Binet, already at the table.

The dinner the previous evening had been a notable event for him; never before had he talked for two hours in succession with a
lady.
How, then, had he been able to tell her, and in such language, so many things that he would not have been able to express so well before? He was usually shy and maintained the sort of reserve that partakes at once of modesty and dissimulation. People in Yonville felt that his manners were very
correct.
He would listen to the arguments of his elders and did not seem at all hotheaded in politics, a remarkable thing in a young man. And he possessed talents, he painted with watercolors, knew how to read the treble clef, and was quite likely to occupy himself with literature after dinner, when he was not playing cards. Monsieur Homais esteemed him for his learning; Madame Homais was fond of him because of his amiability, for he would often go out into the garden with the Homais
children, dirty little urchins, very badly brought up and somewhat lymphatic, like their mother. To look after them, they had, besides the maid, the pharmacy student Justin, a distant cousin of Monsieur Homais’s who had been taken into the house out of charity, and who also acted as servant.

The apothecary proved to be the best of neighbors. He advised Madame Bovary about the tradesmen, had his cider merchant come specially, tasted the drink himself, and watched, down in the cellar, to see that the cask was properly placed; he also told her how to acquire a provision of butter at a low price, and concluded an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the sacristan, who, in addition to his ecclesiastical and funerary functions, looked after the principal gardens in Yonville by the hour or by the year, according to the preference of the owners.

The need to occupy himself with another person was not the only motive impelling the pharmacist to such obsequious cordiality; there was a plan behind it.

He had broken the law of 19 Ventôse, Year XI, Article 1, which forbids any individual not possessing a diploma to practice medicine; with the
consequence that, on the basis of mysterious denunciations, Homais had been summoned to appear in Rouen, before the king’s prosecutor, in his private chambers. The magistrate had received him standing, in his robe, ermine on his shoulders and toque on his head. It was morning, before the convening of the court. One could hear the stout boots of the policemen passing in the corridor, and the distant sound of heavy locks turning. The pharmacist’s ears rang so loudly that he thought he was about to have a stroke; he foresaw the deepest of dungeons, his family in tears, the pharmacy sold, all the glass jars dispersed; and he had to go into a café and drink a glass of rum with Seltzer water in order to restore his spirits.