Madame Bovary (33 page)

She was seized by a feeling of dread, and while searching for some coins in her pocket, she gazed at the boy with wild eyes, as he in turn looked at her with amazement, not understanding how such a gift could upset someone so much. At last he went out. Félicité was still there. She could not endure it any longer, she hurried into the parlor as though to put the apricots there, overturned the basket, tore the leaves apart, found the letter, opened it, and, as if an inferno were blazing behind her, fled up to her room, overcome with terror.

Charles was there, she saw him; he spoke to her, she heard nothing, and she continued hastily climbing the stairs, breathless, frenzied, beside herself, and still holding that horrible piece of paper, which rattled in her
fingers like a sheet of metal. On the third floor, she stopped in front of the door to the attic, which was closed.

Then she tried to calm herself; she remembered the letter; she had to finish it; she did not dare. Anyway, where? How? Someone would see her.

“Oh, no—here!” she thought; “I’ll be all right in here.”

Emma pushed open the door and went in.

The slate tiles of the roof admitted a sultry heat that dropped straight down, pressing against her temples and stifling her; she dragged herself to the shuttered dormer window; she pulled back the bolt, and the dazzling light sprang in.

Before her, above the rooftops, the open countryside spread out as far as the eye could see. Down below, beneath her, the village square was empty; the stones of the sidewalk sparkled, the weather vanes on the houses stood motionless; at the street corner, from a lower story, came a kind of whirring noise with strident changes of tone. It was Binet at his lathe.

She had leaned against the frame of the window, and she was rereading the letter, now and then giving an angry, derisive laugh. But the more steadily she fixed her attention on it, the more confused her thoughts became. She saw him again, she heard him, she put her arms around him; and her heartbeats, striking her chest like the great blows of a battering ram, came faster and faster one after another, at unequal intervals. She cast her eyes about her, wishing the earth would cave in. Why not put an end to it all? What was holding her back? She was free. And she moved forward, she looked down at the paving stones, saying to herself:

“Go on! Go on!”

The ray of light that rose directly up to her from below was pulling the weight of her body down toward the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground in the village square was swaying back and forth and rising along the walls, and that the floor was tipping down at the end, like a vessel pitching. She was standing right at the edge, almost suspended, surrounded by a great empty space. The blue of the sky was coming into her, the air circulating inside her hollow skull, she had only to give in, to let herself be taken; and the whirring of the lathe never stopped, like a furious voice calling her.

“Emma! Emma!” Charles shouted.

She stopped.

“Where are you? Come here!”

The idea that she had just escaped death almost made her faint from terror; she closed her eyes; then she started at the touch of a hand on her sleeve: it was Félicité.

“Monsieur is waiting for you, madame; the soup is on the table.”

And she had to go down! She had to sit down to dinner!

She tried to eat. The pieces of food made her choke. Then she unfolded her napkin as though to examine the places where it had been darned, and really tried to apply herself to this work, counting the threads of the weave. Suddenly she remembered the letter again. Had she lost it? How would she ever find it? But her mind was so exhausted that she would never have been able to invent a pretext for leaving the table. And she had become a coward; she was afraid of Charles; he knew everything, she was sure! Indeed, oddly enough, he spoke these words:

“It will be some time, so it seems, before we see Monsieur Rodolphe again.”

“Who told you that?” she asked, starting.

“Who told me that?” he replied, a little surprised at her abrupt tone; “it was Girard; I met him just now at the door of the Café Français. He’s gone off on a trip, or he’s about to go off.”

She gave a sob.

“Why should you be so surprised? He does go away like that now and then for his own enjoyment, and my faith! I approve. If you have a little money and you’re not married! … Besides, he knows how to have a good time, our friend does! He’s quite the wag. Monsieur Langlois told me once how …”

He fell silent for the sake of decency, because the servant was coming in.

She put back in the basket the apricots that lay scattered over the étagère; Charles, without noticing how flushed his wife was, asked for them, took one, and bit into it.

“Oh, it’s perfect!” he said. “Here, taste one.”

And he held out the basket, which she pushed gently away.

“Smell them, then: what a fragrance!” he said, passing them under her nose several times.

“I can’t breathe!” she cried, leaping to her feet.

But through an effort of will, she conquered the spasm; then:

“It’s nothing!” she said, “it’s nothing! It’s just nerves! Sit down, eat!”

For she dreaded being questioned, fussed over, never left alone.

Charles, obeying her, had sat down again, and he was spitting the apricot stones into his hand and then depositing them on his plate.

Suddenly a blue tilbury crossed the square at a fast trot. Emma cried out and fell straight over backward onto the floor.

Indeed, Rodolphe, after a good deal of reflection, had decided to leave for Rouen. However, since there is no other route from La Huchette to Buchy but the Yonville road, he had had to drive through the village, and Emma had recognized him by the gleam of the lanterns that sliced like a flash of lightning through the dusk.

The pharmacist, at the sound of the commotion, rushed to the house. The table, along with all the plates, had been overturned; the sauce, the meat, the knives, the saltcellar, and the oil cruet lay strewn about the room; Charles was calling for help; Berthe, frightened, was shrieking; and Félicité, her hands shaking, was unlacing Madame, whose entire body was racked with convulsions.

“I’ll just run,” said the apothecary, “to my laboratory for some aromatic vinegar.”

Then, when she opened her eyes, breathing from the flask:

“I was sure of it,” he said; “this stuff would wake a dead man.”

“Speak to us!” Charles was saying. “Speak to us! Wake up! It’s me, your Charles, who loves you! Do you recognize me? Here now, here’s your little girl: now give her a kiss, won’t you!”

The child held out her arms toward her mother to clasp them around her neck. But Emma, turning her head away, said brokenly:

“No, no … no one!”

She fainted again. They carried her to her bed.

She remained lying there, her mouth open, her eyelids closed, her hands flat beside her, motionless, and as white as a wax statue. From her eyes trickled two streams of tears onto the pillow.

Charles, standing, stayed at the back of the alcove, and the pharmacist, next to him, maintained that meditative silence suitable for the more serious occasions of life.

“Don’t worry,” he said, pressing his elbow, “I think the paroxysm has passed.”

“Yes, she’s resting a little now!” answered Charles, who was watching her sleep. “Poor woman! … Poor woman! … She’s had a relapse!”

Then Homais asked how this accident had happened. Charles answered that she had been stricken suddenly while eating apricots.

“Extraordinary! …” said the pharmacist. “Why, it’s quite possible that the apricots brought on the syncope! Some people are so naturally impressionable when coming into contact with certain odors! And this would actually be a nice topic to study, from the point of view of both its pathology and its physiology. The priests recognize its importance; they’ve always brought aromatics into their ceremonies. They do it to stupefy the understanding and provoke a state of ecstasy, which, of course, is easy enough to achieve in persons of the female sex, who are more delicate than the others. Cases have been cited of women fainting at the smell of burned horn, fresh bread …”

“Take care not to wake her!” said Bovary softly.

“And,” continued the apothecary, “it’s not only humans who are vulnerable to these anomalies, but animals, too. For instance, you’re surely aware of the singular aphrodisiac effect produced by
Nepeta cataria
, vulgarly known as catnip, on the feline tribe; and again, to mention an example I guarantee to be authentic, Bridoux (one of my old schoolmates, presently established in the rue Malpalu) has a dog that falls into convulsions if one offers it a snuffbox. He frequently performs the experiment in front of his friends, at his summerhouse in Bois-Guillaume. Who would ever think that a simple sternutative could work such havoc in a quadruped’s organism? It’s extremely curious, don’t you find?”

“Yes,” said Charles, who was not listening.

“This just proves to us,” the other went on, smiling with an air of benign complacency, “how innumerable are the irregularities of the nervous system. As regards Madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, a genuinely sensitive case. Thus, I would not recommend, my good friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretext of attacking the symptoms, attack the constitution. No, no idle medication! A regimen, and nothing else! Sedatives, emollients, dulcifiers. And also, don’t you think it might be a good thing to rouse her imagination?”

“In what way? How?” asked Bovary.

“Ah! That’s the problem! Such, indeed, is the problem:
That is the question!
” he quoted in English—“as I was reading in the paper the other day.”

But Emma, waking, cried out:

“The letter! The letter!”

They thought she was delirious; and she was, from midnight on: a brain fever had set in.

For forty-three days, Charles did not leave her side. He abandoned all his patients; he no longer went to bed; he was continually taking her pulse, applying mustard plasters, cold-water compresses. He sent Justin to Neufchâtel to get ice; the ice melted on the way home; he sent him back. He called in Monsieur Canivet for a consultation; he had Doctor Larivière, his old teacher, come from Rouen; he was in despair. What frightened him the most was Emma’s prostration; for she did not speak, heard nothing, and even seemed not to be in pain—as if both her body and her soul were resting from all their suffering.

Toward the middle of October, she was able to sit up in bed with some pillows behind her. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first slice of bread and jam. Her strength returned to her; she would get up for a few hours during the afternoon, and one day when she was feeling better, he tried to induce her to go out, leaning on his arm, for a stroll in the garden. The sand on the paths was disappearing under the dead leaves; she walked one step at a time, dragging her slippers; and, leaning her shoulder against Charles, she smiled the whole time.

In this way they went to the far end, close to the terrace. She straightened up slowly, put her hand above her eyes, in order to look out; she looked into the distance, the far distance; but there was nothing on the horizon except great grass fires, smoking on the hills.

“You’re going to tire yourself out, dear,” said Bovary.

And, nudging her gently, to induce her to go into the arbor:

“Sit down on the bench: you’ll be all right here.”

“Oh, no! Not there, not there!” she said in a faltering voice.

She was overcome by dizziness, and that evening, her illness returned, though in a more uncertain guise and with more complex characteristics. Sometimes she felt a pain in her heart, sometimes in her chest, then in her head, then in her arms and legs; she had fits of vomiting in which Charles believed he saw the first symptoms of cancer.

And on top of this, poor man, he had money worries!

First of all, he did not know how he was going to compensate Monsieur Homais for all the medicaments that had come from his pharmacy; and although, as a doctor, he could have chosen not to pay, nevertheless he felt a little ashamed at incurring that obligation. Then the household expenses, now that the servant was in charge, were becoming frightening; the notes were raining down on the house; the tradespeople were complaining; Monsieur Lheureux, above all, was harassing him. Indeed, at the height of Emma’s illness, Lheureux, profiting from the circumstances to pad his bill, had promptly brought over the coat, the overnight bag, two trunks instead of one, an abundance of other things as well. It was in vain that Charles said he did not need them; the merchant answered arrogantly that all these articles had been ordered from him and that he would not take them back; besides, it would be upsetting to Madame during her convalescence; Monsieur
should think it over; in short, he was resolved to pursue him in a court of law rather than give up his rights and take back his merchandise. Charles afterward ordered everything to be sent back to the shop; Félicité forgot; he had other worries; it was not thought of again; Monsieur Lheureux returned to the attack and, by turns threatening and complaining, maneuvered in such a way that in the end Bovary signed a note payable in six months. But scarcely had he signed this note, than a bold idea struck him: to borrow 1,000 francs from Monsieur Lheureux. And so he asked, with a look of embarrassment, if there was not some means of obtaining this amount, adding that it would be for one year and at any rate of interest he liked. Lheureux hurried to his shop, brought back the ecus, and dictated another note, whereby Bovary undertook to pay to his order, on September 1 next, the sum of 1,070 francs; which, with the 180 already stipulated, came to exactly 1,250. Thus,
lending at 6 percent, augmented by a quarter’s commission and a profit of a good third at least on the goods, the whole thing should, in twelve months, yield a profit of 130 francs; and he hoped the matter would not end there, that the notes would not be paid, that they would be renewed, and that his meager capital, having been well nourished in the doctor’s home as though in a private sanatorium, would return to him, one day, considerably plumper, large enough to split open the bag.