Madame Bovary (30 page)

When he had passed like a whirlwind under the porch of the Lion d’Or, the doctor, shouting loudly, ordered them to unharness his horse; then he went into the stable to see if it was really being given oats to eat; for whenever he arrived at the home of one of his patients, he would first look after his mare and his cabriolet. People even said, because of this: “Ah! Monsieur Canivet—what a character!” And he was all the more respected for his unshakable self-possession. The universe might have perished down to the last man, and he would not have neglected the least of his habits.

Homais came up to him.

“I’m counting on you,” said the doctor. “Are we ready? Off we go!”

But the apothecary, blushing, confessed that he was too sensitive to be present at such an operation.

“When one is a mere onlooker,” he said, “one’s imagination, you know, becomes overexcited! And my nervous system is so …”

“Bah!” interrupted Canivet. “On the contrary, you seem to me disposed to apoplexy. And what’s more, that doesn’t surprise me; because you gentlemen, you pharmacists, are always cooped up in your kitchens, which must end by altering your constitutions. Now, look at me: Every day I get up at four in the morning, I shave in cold water (I’m never cold), and I don’t wear flannel, I never catch cold, I’m sound in wind and limb! I eat sometimes one way, sometimes another, and accept it philosophically, taking my meals where I can. That’s why I’m not delicate like you, and it’s all the same to me whether I cut up a good Christian or some chicken that’s put in front of me. It’s all a matter of habit, you’ll say …, just habit! …”

Then, without any regard for Hippolyte, who was sweating with anguish under his bedclothes, the two gentlemen embarked on a conversation in which the apothecary compared the coolness of a surgeon to that of a general; and this comparison was agreeable to Canivet, who launched into some remarks on the demands of his art. He looked upon it as a sacred calling, though the officers of health brought dishonor to it. At last, returning to the patient, he examined the bandages Homais had brought, the same ones that had appeared at the time of the clubfoot operation, and asked for someone to hold the limb for him. They sent for Lestiboudois, and Monsieur Canivet, having rolled up his sleeves, went into the billiards room, while the apothecary remained with Artémise
and the innkeeper, both of them whiter than their aprons and straining their ears toward the door.

Bovary, during this time, did not dare move from his house. He stayed downstairs, in the parlor, sitting by the cold fireplace, his chin on his chest, his hands joined, his eyes fixed. What a mishap! he was thinking, what a disappointment! And yet he had taken every precaution imaginable. Fate had had a hand in it. Even so! —if Hippolyte should die later, he was the one who would have killed him. And then, what reason would he give during his visits to patients, when they asked him? Maybe, though, he had made a mistake somewhere? He searched his mind, found nothing. But even the most famous surgeons certainly made mistakes. That’s what people never wanted to believe! No—instead, they were going to laugh at him, talk about him! The news would spread as far as Forges! Neufchâtel! Rouen! All over! Who could tell if his colleagues wouldn’t write against him? There would be a controversy; he would have to answer in the newspapers.
Hippolyte himself might sue him. He saw himself dishonored, ruined, lost! And his imagination, assaulted by a multitude of possibilities, pitched back and forth among them like an empty cask carried out to sea and rolling about in the waves.

Emma, sitting opposite, was watching him; she did not share his humiliation, she was experiencing a humiliation of a different sort: that she had imagined such a man could be worth something, as though twenty times over she had not already been sufficiently convinced of his mediocrity.

Charles paced back and forth in the room. His boots were creaking on the parquet floor.

“Sit down,” she said. “You’re annoying me!”

He sat down again.

Really, how had she (she who was so intelligent!) managed to misjudge things yet again? And through what lamentable folly had she spoiled her life this way, with one sacrifice after another? She recalled all her natural fondness for luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordid details of marriage, housekeeping, her dreams falling in the mud like wounded swallows, everything she had desired, everything she had denied herself, everything she could have had! And for what! For what!

In the midst of the silence that hung over the village, a harrowing cry rang out through the air. Bovary turned so white he seemed about to
faint. Her brows contracted in a nervous gesture, then she went on. Yet it was for him, for this creature, for this man who understood nothing, who felt nothing! —for there he was, quite calm, not even suspecting that from now on, the ridicule attached to his name was going to soil her as well as him. She had made efforts to love him, and she had repented in tears for having yielded to another.

“Why, perhaps it was a valgus!” exclaimed Bovary suddenly, meditating.

At the unexpected shock of that sentence falling upon her thoughts like a lead ball on a silver plate, Emma, with a shudder, lifted her head to try to understand what he meant; and they looked at each other in silence, almost dumbfounded to see each other there, so far apart had their thoughts taken them. Charles was contemplating her with the clouded gaze of a drunken man, even as he listened, motionless, to the amputee’s last cries, which followed one another in lingering modulations punctuated by sharp shrieks, like the howling of some animal whose throat is being cut in the distance. Emma was biting her pale lips, and, as she rolled in her fingers one of the fragments of coral she had broken off, she fastened on Charles the burning points of her eyes, like two arrows of fire about to be loosed. Everything about him irritated her now—his face, his clothes, what he was not saying, his entire person, his very existence. She repented her past
virtue as though it had been a crime, and what remained of it crumbled under the furious blows of her pride. She relished all the wretched ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover returned to her with dizzying enticements: she flung her soul at it, swept away toward that image by a new fervor; and Charles seemed to her as detached from her life, as forever absent, as impossible and annihilated, as if he were about to die and were suffering his death throes before her eyes.

There was a sound of footsteps on the sidewalk. Charles looked out; and through the lowered blind, he saw by the edge of the market, in the full sun, Doctor Canivet wiping his forehead with his kerchief. Homais, behind him, was carrying in his hands a large red box, and they were both heading in the direction of the pharmacy.

Then, in sudden tenderness and discouragement, Charles turned to his wife, saying:

“Kiss me, my dear!”

“Leave me alone!” she said, red with anger.

“What is it? What is it?” he said, stupefied. “Calm yourself! Don’t be upset! … You know how much I love you! … Come to me!”

“Stop!” she shouted with a terrible look.

And rushing out of the room, Emma shut the door so hard that the barometer leaped from the wall and shattered on the floor.

Charles sank back in his chair, overwhelmed, trying to think what could be wrong with her, imagining a nervous illness, weeping, with the vague sense that in the air around him was something deadly and incomprehensible.

That night, when Rodolphe came into the garden, he found his mistress waiting for him at the bottom of the flight of steps, on the lowest step. They fell into each other’s arms, and all their animosity melted away like snow in the heat of that kiss.

Their love had been reawakened. Often, Emma would even write to him suddenly in the middle of the day; then, through the windowpane, she would signal to Justin, who, quickly untying his apron, would fly off to La Huchette. Rodolphe would come; what she wanted to tell him was that she was bored, that her husband was hateful and her life hideous!

“How can I do anything about it?” he exclaimed one day, impatient.

“Oh! If you wanted to! …”

She was sitting on the ground, between his knees, her hair loosened, her gaze absent.

“Well, what?” said Rodolphe.

She sighed.

“We could go live somewhere else … somewhere …”

“You’re really mad!” he said, laughing. “Did you really say that?”

She returned to the idea; he seemed not to understand, and changed the direction of the conversation.

What he did not understand was all this disturbance over such a simple thing as love. She had a motive, a reason, a sort of auxiliary force strengthening her passion for him.

This affection, indeed, grew each day with her aversion for her husband. The more fully she gave herself to the one, the more she despised
the other; Charles had never appeared to her so unpleasant, with such square fingers, such clumsy wit, such common manners, as when they happened to be together after her meetings with Rodolphe. Then, even as she played at being the wife and virtuous woman, she would become inflamed at the thought of that head with its black hair turning in a curl over the suntanned forehead, of that body at once so robust and so elegant, of that man so experienced in his judgment, so passionate in his desire! It was for him that she would file her nails with the care of an engraver, and that there was never enough
cold cream
on her skin, nor patchouli on her handkerchiefs. She would load herself with bracelets, rings, necklaces. When he was coming, she would fill her two large blue glass vases
with roses, and arrange her room and herself like a courtesan waiting for a prince. The maid had to launder her linens constantly; and so all day long, Félicité would not move from the kitchen, where young Justin, who often kept her company, would watch her as she worked.

His elbow on the long board where she was ironing, he would stare avidly at all these women’s things spread out around him: the dimity petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawstring pantalets, vast at the hips and narrowing lower down.

“What’s this for?” the boy would ask, running his hand over the crinoline or the hooks and eyes.

“Have you never seen a thing?” Félicité would answer, laughing; “as if your own mistress, Madame Homais, don’t wear just the same sort.”

“Well, yes! Madame Homais!”

And he would add in a meditative tone:

“Is she a lady like Madame?”

But Félicité would lose patience when he hovered around her like this. She was six years older, and Théodore, Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, was beginning to court her.

“Leave me in peace!” she would say, moving her jar of starch. “Go grind your almonds; you’re always poking your nose into women’s affairs; don’t get mixed up in all that till you have some hair on your chin, you wicked scamp.”

“Oh, don’t get mad. I’m going to go and
do her boots
for you.”

And immediately he would reach up to the mantelpiece for Emma’s boots, which were caked in mud—the mud from her rendezvous; it would
fall away as dust under his fingers, and he would watch it rising gently in a ray of sunlight.

“How frightened you are of harming them!” said the servant, who took no such care when cleaning them herself, since as soon as the material had lost its freshness, Madame would pass them on to her.

Emma had a quantity of them in her cupboard, and she went through them one after another, without Charles ever allowing himself the slightest comment.

In the same way, he laid out three hundred francs for a wooden leg that she felt ought to be given to Hippolyte as a gift. The leg was lined with cork and had joints with springs; it was a complicated mechanism covered with a black pant leg ending in a patent leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use such a handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to procure him another that would be more convenient. The doctor, of course, covered the expense of this acquisition, too.

And so the stableboy gradually resumed his job. One would see him passing through the village as he used to, and when from far away Charles heard the sharp rap of his stick on the paving stones, he would quickly change his route.

It was Monsieur Lheureux, the dry-goods merchant, who had taken charge of the order; this provided him with an opportunity to visit Emma. He would chat with her about the new goods from Paris, about the dozens of novelties for women, he would make himself very agreeable, and he never asked for money. Emma let herself fall into this easy way of satisfying all her whims. For instance, she wanted to have, in order to give it as a gift to Rodolphe, a very lovely riding crop that was to be found in Rouen in an umbrella store. Monsieur Lheureux, the following week, set it down on her table.

But the next day he appeared at her house with a bill for 270 francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was very embarrassed: all the drawers in the secretary desk were empty; they owed more than two weeks to Lestiboudois, two trimesters to the servant; there were a quantity of other debts as well; and Bovary was waiting impatiently for the remittance from Monsieur Derozerays, who was in the habit, each year, of paying it around Saint Peter’s Day.

She succeeded at first in putting Lheureux off; finally he lost
patience: people were hounding him, his capital was tied up elsewhere, and if he did not recover some of it, he would be forced to take back all the articles she had.

“Well, take them back!” said Emma.

“Oh, I’m joking!” he replied. “Only, I do wish I had that riding crop back. Yes! I’ll ask Monsieur to return it.”

“No, no!” she said.

“Ah! I’ve got you!” thought Lheureux.

And, sure of his discovery, he went out repeating softly with his customary little whistle:

“All right! We’ll see! We’ll see!”

She was musing about how she could extricate herself, when the servant entered the room and deposited on the mantelpiece a little scroll of blue paper,
from Monsieur Derozerays.
Emma leaped on it, opened it up. It contained fifteen napoleons. It was the account. She heard Charles on the stairs; she threw the gold into the back of her drawer and took the key.