Madame Bovary (31 page)

Three days later, Lheureux reappeared.

“I have an arrangement to propose to you,” he said. “If, instead of paying the agreed-upon sum, you would like to take …”

“Here it is,” she said, placing fourteen napoleons in his hand.

The draper was stupefied. Then, to conceal his disappointment, he launched into a stream of apologies and offers of service, all of which Emma refused; then she stood there for a few minutes fingering in her apron pocket the two one-hundred-sous coins he had given back to her. She promised herself she would economize, so that later she could repay …

“Bah!” she thought. “He’ll never give it another thought.”

Besides the riding crop with its silver-gilt knob, Rodolphe had received a signet ring with the motto
Amor nel cor
, a scarf to use as a muffler, and lastly a cigar case just like the Vicomte’s, the one that Charles had once picked up from the road and that Emma had kept. Yet he found these gifts humiliating. He refused several of them; she insisted; and in the end Rodolphe gave in, finding her tyrannical and overly intrusive.

And she had odd notions:

“When midnight strikes,” she would say, “think of me!”

And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there would be a torrent of reproaches, always ending with the eternal question:

“Do you love me?”

“Yes, of course I love you!” he would answer.

“Very much?”

“Certainly!”

“You’ve never loved anyone else, have you?”

“Do you think I was a virgin when you met me?” he would exclaim, laughing.

Emma would weep, and he would make an effort to comfort her, enlivening his protestations with puns.

“Oh! It’s just that I love you!” she would go on; “I love you so much I can’t do without you, do you know that? I sometimes long so much to see you again that I’m torn apart by all the fury of my love. I wonder: ‘Where is he? Maybe he’s talking to another woman? She’s smiling at him, he’s walking up to her …’ No! There isn’t anyone else that you like, is there? Some other women may be more beautiful, but I’m better at loving you! I’m your servant and your concubine! You’re my king, my idol! You’re good! You’re handsome! You’re intelligent! You’re strong!”

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language. He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to
move the stars to pity.

But with the critical superiority possessed by anyone who remains aloof, whatever the relationship, Rodolphe saw other pleasures this love affair might offer. He deemed any sort of modesty to be inconvenient. He
treated her carelessly. He made her into something compliant and corrupt. Hers was a sort of idiotic attachment full of admiration for him, of sensual pleasure for her, a bliss that numbed her; and her soul sank into this intoxication and drowned in it, shriveled like the Duke of Clarence in his butt of malmsey.

Solely from the effect of her amorous habits, Madame Bovary’s behavior now changed. Her glances became bolder, her speech freer; she was even so unseemly as to take a walk with Monsieur Rodolphe with a cigarette between her lips,
as though flouting the whole world;
at last, those who had still doubted no longer did so when they saw her step down from the
Hirondelle
one day with her waist tightly buttoned up in a vest like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who, after a dreadful scene with her husband, had come to take refuge in her son’s home, was as scandalized as any of the townswomen. Many other things displeased her: first of all, Charles had not listened to her advice about forbidding novels; then, she did not like
the way the house was run;
she permitted herself some observations, and they became angry, on one occasion especially, with regard to
Félicité.

Madame Bovary senior, the night before, as she was going down the hall, had surprised her in the company of a man, a man with brown chin whiskers, about forty years old, who, at the sound of her footsteps, had quickly fled the kitchen. At this, Emma burst out laughing; but the good lady flew into a rage, declaring that unless one cared nothing for morals, one had to keep an eye on those of one’s servants.

“What sort of world do you come from?” said her daughter-in-law, with such an impertinent look that Madame Bovary asked her if she wasn’t perhaps defending herself.

“Get out!” said the young woman, leaping to her feet.

“Emma! … Mama! …” cried Charles, trying to get them to make up.

But they had both fled the room in their rage. Emma kept stamping her foot with fury, saying over and over:

“Oh! What nice manners she has! The peasant!”

He ran to his mother; she was in a paroxysm, stammering:

“What a snip! What a featherbrain! Maybe worse!”

And she intended to leave immediately, if the other did not come apologize. Charles therefore returned to his wife and begged her to give in; he went down on his knees; in the end she answered:

“All right! I’ll do it.”

And indeed, she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity of a marquise, saying:

“Forgive me, madame.”

Then, back in her room, Emma threw herself facedown on her bed and cried like a child, her head buried in the pillow.

They had agreed, she and Rodolphe, that in case something extraordinary happened, she would attach a little scrap of white paper to the shutter, so that if by chance he happened to be in Yonville, he could come quickly to the lane behind the house. Emma put up the signal; she had been waiting three-quarters of an hour when suddenly she saw Rodolphe in the corner of the market. She was tempted to open the window and call out to him; but he had already disappeared. She fell back in despair.

Soon, however, she thought she heard someone coming along the sidewalk. Surely it was he; she went downstairs, crossed the yard. He was there, outside. She threw herself in his arms.

“Take care, would you,” he said.

“Oh, if you only knew!” she said.

And she began to tell him everything, hastily, incoherently, exaggerating the facts, inventing a few things, and with such an abundance of parenthetical digressions that he understood nothing.

“Come now, my poor angel, be brave, cheer up, be patient!”

“But for four years now I’ve been patient and I’ve suffered! … A love like ours ought to be confessed before heaven itself! They’re trying to torture me. I can’t bear it any longer! Save me!”

She was clinging to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, sparkled like flames underwater; her chest rose and fell rapidly; never had he loved her so much, so that he lost his head and asked:

“What should we do? What do you want?”

“Take me away!” she cried. “Oh, take me away from here! … I beg you!”

And she pressed her mouth on his, as though to snatch from it the unexpected consent that was exhaled in a kiss.

“But …,” said Rodolphe.

“What?”

“What about your daughter?”

She pondered for a few moments, then answered:

“We’ll take her—it can’t be helped!”

“What a woman!” he said to himself as he watched her go away.

For she had slipped into the garden. They were calling her.

Mère Bovary was very surprised, during the following days, by her daughter-in-law’s metamorphosis. Emma was indeed more docile, carrying deference to the point of asking her for a recipe for pickling gherkins.

Was this the better to deceive them? Or did she wish, through a sort of voluptuous stoicism, to experience more profoundly the bitterness of what she was going to leave behind? But on the contrary, she took no notice; she lived as though engrossed in the anticipated enjoyment of her coming happiness. This was an eternal subject of conversation with Rodolphe. She would lean on his shoulder, she would murmur:

“Just think, when at last we’re in the mail coach! … Can you imagine? Is it possible? The moment I feel the carriage start forward, I think it’ll be as if we were going up in a balloon, as if we were rising into the clouds. Do you know that I’m counting the days? … Are you?”

Never had Madame Bovary been as lovely as she was during this time; hers was that indefinable beauty that comes from joy, enthusiasm, success, and that is nothing more than a harmony of temperament and circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of pleasure, and her ever-youthful illusions had had the same effect as manure, rain, wind, and sun on a flower, developing her by degrees, and she was at last blooming in the fullness of her nature. Her eyelids seemed shaped expressly for those long, loving glances in which her pupils would disappear, while a heavy sigh would widen her delicate nostrils and lift the fleshy corners of her lips, shadowed, in the light, by a trace of dark down. Some artist skilled in depravity might have arranged the coil of her hair over the nape of her neck; it was looped in a heavy mass, carelessly, according to the chance dictates of her adulterous affair, which loosened it every day. Her voice now took on softer
inflections, her body, too; something subtle and penetrating emanated even from the folds of her dress and the arch of her foot. Charles, as in the early days of his marriage, found her delicious and quite irresistible.

When he returned home in the middle of the night, he did not dare
wake her. The porcelain night-light cast a trembling round glow on the ceiling, and the closed curtains of the little cradle formed a sort of white hut that rose up in the darkness by the side of the bed. Charles gazed at them. He thought he could hear the shallow breath of his child. She would be growing now; each season would quickly bring with it another advance. He could already see her coming home from school at the close of the day, wreathed in laughter, her little blouse spotted with ink, carrying her basket on her arm; then she would have to be sent to boarding school, that would cost a good deal; how would they do it? He would ponder this. He thought he might rent a small farm in the area, which he would oversee himself, every morning, on his way to visit his patients. He would save the income, he would put it in a savings bank; then he would buy some shares
somewhere, it didn’t matter where; in addition, his clientele would increase—he was counting on that, because he wanted Berthe to be well brought up, accomplished, learn to play the piano. Ah, how pretty she would be, later, when she was fifteen, when, resembling her mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats in summer! From a distance, people would take them for two sisters. He pictured her working in the evening near them, in the lamplight; she would embroider some slippers for him; she would look after the household; she would fill the whole house with her sweetness and gaiety. Eventually, they would think of getting her settled: they would find her some decent boy with a solid profession; he would make her happy; it would last forever.

Emma was not sleeping, she was pretending to be asleep; and while he dozed off next to her, she would grow more wakeful, dreaming other dreams.

Four galloping horses had been bearing her off, for a week now, toward a new country from which they would never return. They went on and on, their arms entwined, without speaking. Often, from the top of a mountain, they suddenly caught sight of splendid city with domes, bridges, ships, groves of lemon trees, and cathedrals of white marble on whose sharp steeples storks were nesting. They slowed to a walk, because of the large paving stones, and on the ground lay bouquets of flowers being offered by women wearing laced red bodices. One could hear bells ringing, and mules whinnying, along with the murmur of guitars and
the splash of fountains, whose flying spray cooled the mounds of fruit arranged in pyramids at the feet of pale statues smiling under the jets of water. And then, one evening, they would arrive at a village of fishermen, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliff and the line of shanties. It was here that they
would stay and make a life for themselves; they would live in a low house, with a flat roof, shaded by a palm tree, at the far end of a bay, by the edge of the sea. They would go out in a gondola, they would swing in a hammock; their life would be as easy and ample as their silken clothing, all warm and starry like the soft nights on which they would gaze. And yet in the immensity of that future that she created for herself, nothing in particular stood out; the days, all of them magnificent, resembled one another like waves; and all of this hovered on the horizon, infinite, harmonious, blue, and bathed in sunlight. But the child would begin coughing in her cradle, or Bovary would snore more loudly, and Emma would not fall asleep until morning, when the dawn was whitening the windowpanes, and already young Justin, on the square, was opening the pharmacy shutters.

She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux and had said to him:

“I will be needing a cloak, a large cloak, with a broad collar, lined.”

“Are you going off on a trip?” he asked.

“No! But … never mind, I can count on you, can’t I? And quickly!”

He bowed.

“I will also need,” she went on, “a trunk … not too heavy … roomy.”

“Yes, yes, I understand, about ninety-two centimeters by fifty, the way they’re making them nowadays.”

“And an overnight bag.”

“Clearly,” thought Lheureux, “there’s some sort of quarrel behind this.”

“And here,” said Madame Bovary, drawing her watch from her belt, “take this; you can pay yourself out of it.”