Madame Bovary (34 page)

Everything, moreover, was going well for him. He was the contracting
party for supplying cider to the Neufchâtel hospital; Monsieur Guillaumin had promised him some shares in the Grumesnil peat bogs; and he was thinking of setting up a new coach service between Argueil and Rouen, which would soon, no doubt, spell the end of that old rattletrap at the Lion d’Or and, being faster, costing less, and carrying larger loads, would thus put all the Yonville trade into his hands.

Charles often asked himself how he was going to be able to pay back so much money the following year; and he would search his mind, imagine various expedients, such as appealing to his father or selling something. But his father would have turned a deaf ear, and he himself had nothing he could sell. And he encountered so many difficulties that he would quickly put such unpleasant reflections out of his mind. He would reproach himself for forgetting Emma; as if all his thoughts belonged to her and he was stealing from her if he failed to think about her all the time.

The winter was harsh. Madame’s convalescence was a long one. When the weather was fine, they would push her in her armchair up to the window, the one that looked out over the square; for she now had an aversion to the garden, and the shutters on that side always remained closed. She wanted the horse to be sold; what she had once loved, she no longer liked. All her thoughts seemed to be confined to looking after herself. She would stay in bed eating light meals, ring for the servant to ask about her tisanes or to chat with her. Meanwhile, the snow on the roof of the covered market would cast its motionless white reflection into the room; then, later in the season, the rain would fall. And every day Emma would wait, with a kind of anxiety, for the unfailing recurrence of trivial events, little though they mattered to her. The most important of these was the arrival, in the evening, of the
Hirondelle.
Then the innkeeper would
shout and other voices would reply, while Hippolyte’s lantern, as he lifted the trunks down from the roof of the coach, was like a star in the darkness. At noon, Charles would return home; then he would go out; later, she would have some broth; and toward five o’clock, at the end of the day, the children, on their way home from school, dragging their wooden shoes along the sidewalk, would strike the hooks of the shutters, one after the other, with their rulers.

It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien would come to see her. He would inquire about her health, bring her news, and urge her to piety in
a coaxing little conversation that was not without charm. The very sight of his cassock would comfort her.

One day at the height of her illness, when she believed she was dying, she had asked to be given Communion; and as her room was prepared for the sacrament, as the chest of drawers crowded with syrups was transformed into an altar and Félicité scattered dahlia flowers over the floor, Emma felt some powerful force pass over her that rid her of all her suffering, of all perception, of all feeling. Her flesh, relieved, no longer weighed her down; a new life was beginning; it seemed to her that her whole being, ascending toward God, would dissolve in that love as burning incense dissipates into smoke. Holy water was sprinkled over the sheets of the bed; the priest withdrew the white host from the holy ciborium; and, fainting with heavenly joy, she put her lips forward to receive the proffered body of the Savior. The curtains of her alcove swelled out softly around her, like clouds, and the rays from the two wax tapers burning on the chest seemed to her
like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back, thinking she could hear, through the vastnesses of space, the music of seraphic harps, and could see in an azure sky, on a throne of gold, surrounded by the saints holding fronds of green palm, God the Father in all His brilliant majesty, who with a sign sent angels with flaming wings down to the earth to carry her away in their arms.

This splendid vision lingered in her memory as the most beautiful thing she could ever have dreamed; so that now she kept striving to recapture the sensation of it, which persisted in a less all-encompassing manner but with a sweetness as profound. Her soul, exhausted by pride, was at last reposing in Christian humility; and, savoring the pleasure of being weak, Emma watched within herself the destruction of her will, which was to open wide the way for incursions of grace. So there existed greater delights in place of mere happiness, a love above all other loves, without interruption and without end, one that would continue to increase through all eternity! She could glimpse, among the illusions born of her hopes, a state of purity floating above the earth, merging with heaven, and this was where she aspired to be. She wanted to become a saint. She bought rosaries, she carried amulets; she wished she had a reliquary studded with emeralds in her room, by the
head of her bed, so that she could kiss it every night.

The curé marveled at these tendencies, although he felt that Emma’s
piety might in the end, because of its fervor, verge on heresy and even nonsense. But not being very well versed in these matters once they went beyond certain bounds, he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, Monseigneur’s bookseller, to send him
something particularly good, for a female of high intelligence.
The bookseller, with as much indifference as if he were dispatching cheap trinkets to black Africans, packaged up a hodgepodge of everything then current in the religious book trade. Included were slim handbooks in the form of questions and answers, haughty-toned pamphlets in the manner of Monsieur de Maistre, and novels of a certain sort in pink paperboards and a sickly-sweet style fabricated by troubadour seminarists or repentant bluestockings. There was
Think On It Well; The Man of the World at Mary’s Feet,
by Monsieur de ***, decorated with many orders; The Errors of Voltaire, Intended for the Young
, etc.

Madame Bovary’s mind was not yet clear enough for her to apply herself seriously to anything; what was more, she undertook these readings too hastily. She was irritated by the regulations governing worship; the condescension of the polemical writings displeased her by their relentless pursuit of people she had never heard of; and the secular stories spiced with religion seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world that they imperceptibly distanced her from the very truths she was hoping to see confirmed. She persisted nonetheless, and when the volume fell from her hands, she believed she was filled with the most refined Catholic melancholy ever conceived by an ethereal soul.

As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had thrust it down into the depths of her heart; and there it remained, as solemn and still as a king’s mummy in an underground chamber. From this great embalmed love rose an emanation that permeated everything, imparting a fragrance of tenderness to the atmosphere of spotless purity in which she wanted to live. When she knelt at her Gothic prie-dieu, she would address the Lord with the same sweet words she used to murmur to her lover in the ecstatic transports of her adultery. This she did to induce faith to come to her; but no rapture descended from heaven, and she would get to her feet, her arms and legs tired, with the vague sense that it was all an immense hoax. This quest was, she thought, but an added merit; and in her pride at her devoutness, Emma would compare herself to those great ladies of earlier times over whose glory she had daydreamed before a portrait of La Vallière, and who, trailing behind them
so majestically the spangled
trains of their long gowns, would withdraw to a lonely spot to shed at Christ’s feet all the tears of a heart wounded by life.

Then she plunged into excessive acts of charity. She would sew clothing for the poor; she would send firewood to women in childbirth; and Charles, on returning home one day, found three shiftless fellows at the kitchen table eating soup. She arranged for her little girl to be brought back to the house; her husband, during her illness, had sent the child to the nurse. She tried to teach her to read; though Berthe wept, she no longer became annoyed. It was a decision she had made—to adopt an attitude of resignation, of indulgence toward all. Her language, on all subjects, was full of lofty expressions. She would say to her child:

“Is your stomachache gone, my angel?”

The elder Madame Bovary found nothing with which to reproach her, except perhaps this mania for knitting camisoles for orphans instead of mending her dish towels. But, exhausted by the quarrels in her own home, the good woman was happy in this peaceful house, and she even stayed until after Easter to avoid the sarcastic remarks of the elder Bovary, who never failed, on Good Friday, to order himself a chitterling sausage.

Besides the company of her mother-in-law, who steadied her somewhat because of her rectitude of judgment and her sober ways, Emma also received, nearly every day, other visitors. There was Madame Langlois, Madame Caron, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and, regularly from two to five o’clock, the excellent Madame Homais, who had never wanted to believe any of the ill-natured gossip that people retailed about her neighbor. The Homais children would also come to see her; Justin would bring them. He would accompany them up to the bedroom, and he would remain standing by the door without moving or speaking. Often, indeed, Madame Bovary, taking no notice, would begin to dress. She would start by taking out her comb and shaking her head briskly; and the first time he saw that full mane of hair with its black ringlets tumbling down to her knees, it was for him, poor boy, like suddenly entering something new and extraordinary, something whose splendor
frightened him.

Emma probably did not notice his silent eagerness nor his timidity. She never suspected that love, which had disappeared from her life, was pulsating there, near her, beneath that shirt of coarse linen, in that adolescent heart so open to the emanations of her beauty. Moreover, she now
enveloped everything in such indifference, her words were so affectionate and her glances so haughty, her behavior so changeable, that one could no longer distinguish selfishness from charity, nor corruption from virtue. One evening, for instance, she lost her temper with the maid, who, when asking permission to go out, stammered as she tried to think of an excuse; then, all of a sudden:

“So you love him?” Emma said.

And without waiting for an answer from Félicité, who was blushing, she added sadly:

“Well, go on, then, run to him! Enjoy yourself!”

In early spring, she had the garden completely redone, from one end to the other, despite Bovary’s comments; he was happy, however, to see her showing any sort of spirit at last. She gave more and more evidence of this as her health returned. First, she found a way to get rid of Mère Rolet, the nurse, who had fallen into the habit, during Emma’s convalescence, of coming to the kitchen all too often with her two nurslings and her boarder, whose appetite was more robust than a cannibal’s. Then she distanced herself from the Homais family, dismissed all the other visitors one by one, and even attended church with less diligence, eliciting the hearty approval of the apothecary, who said to her amiably:

“You were beginning to look a bit like a priest yourself!”

Monsieur Bournisien would drop by every day, as he had done before, upon leaving catechism class. He preferred to remain outdoors, taking the air
deep in the grove
, as he called the arbor. This was the time of day when Charles came home. They were hot; sweet cider would be brought out; and together they would drink to Madame’s full recovery.

Binet was there, too, down below them, that is, against the terrace wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary would invite him to have a drink, and he was a perfect expert at uncorking the cider jugs.

“First,” he would say, gazing with satisfaction all around him and out to the far edge of the countryside, “you must hold the bottle upright on the table, like this, and then, after cutting the strings, you push the cork up a little at a time, gently, gently, the way they open Seltzer water in restaurants.”

But the cider, during his demonstration, would often spurt out in their faces, and then the clergyman, with his throaty laugh, never failed to offer this pleasantry:

“Its excellence certainly leaps to the eye!”

He was a decent sort, really, and was not even scandalized one day when the pharmacist advised Charles to take Madame, as a distraction, to the theater in Rouen to see the famous tenor Lagardy. Homais, surprised at his silence, asked his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous to morality than literature.

But the pharmacist took up the defense of letters. The theater, he claimed, served to attack prejudice and, in the guise of pleasure, inculcate virtue.

“
Castigat ridendo mores
, Monsieur Bournisien! For instance, look at most of Voltaire’s tragedies; they’re cleverly scattered with philosophical reflections that constitute a veritable school of morality and diplomacy for the common people.”

“Well,” said Binet, “I once saw a play called
The Urchin of Paris
that has one outstanding character in it, an old general, who’s really first-rate! He lays into the son of a wealthy family who’s seduced a seamstress, and at the end she …”

“Of course,” continued Homais, “there’s bad literature just as there’s bad pharmacy! But to make a blanket condemnation of the most important of the fine arts seems to me a piece of stupidity, a barbarity worthy of that abominable age when they locked up Galileo.”

“I’m quite aware,” objected the Curé, “that good works exist, and good authors; nevertheless, wouldn’t it be the case that people of different sexes coming together in an enchanting hall decorated with worldly pomp, and then the heathenish disguises, the makeup, the footlights, the effeminate voices—all of this must in the end encourage a certain licentiousness of spirit and put unseemly thoughts and impure temptations into one’s head? Such, at least, is the opinion of all the Fathers. Well,” he added, suddenly assuming an exalted tone and rolling a pinch of snuff on his thumb, “if the Church condemned spectacles, it must have been right to do so; we must submit to her decrees.”