Madame Bovary (41 page)

The city, at that hour, was just waking up. Clerks in tasseled caps were polishing the shop windows, and women holding baskets on their hips uttered a resounding cry from time to time at the street corners. She walked with her eyes on the ground, keeping close to the walls and smiling with pleasure under her lowered black veil.

For fear of being seen, she would usually not take the shortest route. She would plunge into dark alleys, and she would emerge all in a sweat at the bottom of the rue Nationale, close to the fountain that stands there. This is the neighborhood of the theater, full of bars and prostitutes. Often a cart would pass by near her, carrying a wobbling stage set. Waiters in aprons were scattering sand over the paving stones, between green shrubs. There was a smell of absinthe, cigars, and oysters.

She would turn down a street; she would recognize him by the curls escaping from under his hat.

Léon would continue on down the sidewalk. She would follow him to the hotel; he would go up, he would open the door, he would go in … How they would hold each other!

Then, after their kisses, the words would pour out. They would tell each other about the difficulties of the past week, their forebodings, their worries about the letters; but now everything would be forgotten, and they would look into each other’s eyes, laughing with sensual delight and calling each other by pet names.

The bed was a large mahogany one in the form of a gondola. The curtains of red Levantine silk, which descended from the ceiling, were looped back too low near the flaring headboard; —and nothing in the world was as lovely as her brown hair and white skin standing out against that crimson, when, in a gesture of modesty, she would bring her two bare arms together, hiding her face in her hands.

The warm room, with its subdued carpet, its playful ornaments, and its tranquil light, seemed perfectly suited to the intimacies of passion. The arrow-tipped rods of the canopy, the brass curtain hooks, and the great knobs on the andirons would gleam suddenly if the sun came in. On the mantelpiece, between the candelabras, were two of those large pink shells in which you can hear the sound of the sea when you put them to your ear.

How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety despite its somewhat faded splendor! They would always find the furniture in its place, and
sometimes a few hairpins she had forgotten the previous Thursday under the base of the clock. They would lunch by the fireside, at a little pedestal table inlaid with rosewood. Emma would carve, prattling all sorts of affectionate nonsense as she put the pieces on his plate; and she would laugh a deep, voluptuous laugh when the froth from the champagne overflowed the rim of the delicate glass onto the rings of her fingers. They were so completely lost in their possession of each other that they believed they were in their own private house and were destined to live there till they died, as an eternally young husband and wife. They would say “our room,” “our carpet,” “our chairs,” she would even speak of “my slippers,” a gift from Léon, a whim she had
had. They were slippers of pink satin, trimmed with swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, now too short to reach the floor, would swing in the air; and the dainty slipper, which had no back to it, would dangle from the toes of her bare foot.

He was savoring for the first time the inexpressible delicacy of feminine refinements. Never had he encountered this grace in language, this reserve in clothing, these drowsy, dovelike postures. He admired the sublimity of her soul and the lace on her petticoat. What was more, wasn’t she
a woman of the world
, and a married woman! —a real mistress, in other words?

Because her moods were so various, by turns mystical and joyful, garrulous, taciturn, fiery, casual, she woke in him a thousand desires, stirring his instincts or his memories. She was the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every drama, the vague
she
of every volume of poetry. He rediscovered on her shoulders the warm amber color of the
bathing odalisque;
she had the long waist of the feudal châtelaines; she resembled, as well, the
pale beauty of Barcelona
, but above all she was an Angel!

Often, as he looked at her, it seemed to him that his soul, fleeing to her, spread like a wave over the contours of her head and was then drawn down into the whiteness of her chest.

He would kneel in front of her; and, with his elbows on her knees, he would gaze at her with a smile, his forehead held up to her.

She would lean down to him and murmur, as though breathless with intoxication:

“Oh, don’t move! Don’t say anything! Look at me! There is something so sweet in your eyes; it does me so much good!”

She would call him “child”:

“Child, do you love me?”

And she would scarcely hear his answer, so quickly did his lips rise to her mouth.

On the clock there was a simpering little bronze Cupid cradling a gilt wreath in its arms. They often laughed at it; but when the moment came for parting, everything seemed serious to them.

Motionless, face-to-face, they would say over and over:

“Till Thursday! … Till Thursday!”

Then she would abruptly take his head in her hands, kiss him quickly on the forehead, crying, “Goodbye!” and run out into the stairwell.

She would go down the rue de la Comédie, to a hairdresser’s, to have her bands of hair arranged. Night would be falling; they would light the gas in the shop.

She would hear the theater’s little bell summoning the players to the performance; and across the street she would see white-faced men and women in faded clothing walking past and entering the stage door.

It was warm in that small room with its too-low ceiling, where the stove hummed amid the wigs and pomades. The smell of the curling irons, along with those plump hands at work on her head, would soon make her drowsy, and she would doze a little in her smock. Often the assistant, as he arranged her hair, would offer her tickets to the masked ball.

Then she would set out! She would walk back through the streets; she would reach the Croix Rouge; she would retrieve her clogs, which she had hidden that morning under a seat, and squeeze into her place among the impatient passengers. Some of them would get out at the bottom of the hill. She would remain alone in the carriage.

At each bend, more and more of the city lights would come into view, forming a broad layer of luminous mist over the mass of houses. Emma would kneel on the cushions and let her eyes wander over that radiance. She would sob, call out to Léon, and send him tender messages and kisses that were lost in the wind.

On the hillside, there was a poor devil wandering along with his stick amid all the coaches. Layers of rags covered his shoulders, and an old staved-in beaver hat, pulled down into a bowl shape, hid his face; but when he took it off, he revealed, in place of eyelids, two gaping, bloody sockets. His flesh was shredding off in red tatters; and from it oozed liquid that dried in green crusts down to his nose, where his black nostrils
sniffled convulsively. When he spoke to you, he would tip his head far back with an idiotic laugh; —then his bluish eyes, rolling incessantly around, would keep coming up, near his temples, against the edges of the open sores.

He would sing a little song as he followed the carriages:

And the rest of it was all about birds, sunshine, and leaves.

Sometimes he would appear abruptly behind Emma, bareheaded. She would draw back with a cry. Hivert liked to tease him. He would urge him to take a booth at the Saint-Romain fair or, with a laugh, ask how his girlfriend was.

Often, they would be moving steadily along when his hat would suddenly come into the coach through the little window, while he held fast with his other arm, standing on the footboard between the spattering wheels. His voice, weak at first, and wailing, would grow shrill. It would linger in the darkness, like the indistinct lamentation of some vague distress; and, heard through the ringing of the harness bells, the murmur of the trees, and the rumbling of the hollow body of the coach, it had something distant about it that would overwhelm Emma. It would descend into the depths of her soul like a whirlwind into an abyss and would carry her away into the spaces of a boundless melancholy. But Hivert, noticing the counterbalancing weight, would lash out at the blind man with long strokes of his whip. The tip would sting him on his sores, and he would drop off into the mud, howling.

Then the passengers on the
Hirondelle
would at last fall asleep, some with their mouths open, others with their chins lowered, leaning against a neighbor’s shoulder, or with an arm through the strap, swaying rhythmically with the motion of the carriage; and the glimmer of the lamp swinging outside over the rumps of the shaft horses, penetrating into the interior through the curtains of chocolate calico, would cast blood-red shadows over all those motionless individuals. Emma, drunk with sadness, would shiver in her clothes; and her feet would grow colder and colder, death in her soul.

Charles, at the house, would be waiting for her; the
Hirondelle
was
always late on Thursdays. Finally, Madame was here! She would barely kiss the child. Dinner was not ready, but it didn’t matter! —she made excuses for the cook. Now, it seemed, the girl was allowed to do anything.

Often her husband, noticing her pallor, would ask if she was not ill.

“No,” Emma would say.

“But,” he would reply, “you seem so strange this evening!”

“Oh, it’s nothing, it’s nothing!”

There were even days when she had no sooner come in than she would go up to her room; and Justin, who happened to be there, would move about with silent steps, cleverer at serving her than an excellent lady’s maid. He would set out the matches, the candlestick, a book, arrange her bed jacket, fold back the bedclothes.

“All right,” she would say, “that’ll do, off you go now!”

For he would still be standing there, his hands hanging at his sides and his eyes wide open, as though enmeshed in the myriad strands of a sudden reverie.

The next day was awful, and the following ones even more intolerable, because of Emma’s impatience to recapture her happiness—hers was a sharp lust inflamed by familiar images, which, on the seventh day, would explode freely under Léon’s caresses. His own raptures were hidden within effusions of wonder and gratitude. Emma would taste that love in a discreet and concentrated way, sustaining it by all the artifices of her affection, a little afraid that it might one day vanish.

Often she would say to him gently, in her melancholy voice:

“Ah, one day you’ll leave me, I know! … You’ll get married! … You’ll be just like the others.”

He would ask:

“What others?”

“Oh—men, you know,” she would answer.

Then she would add, languidly thrusting him away:

“You’re all vile creatures!”

One day when they were talking philosophically about their disillusionment with the world, she happened to say (testing his jealousy, or perhaps yielding to too strong a need to unburden herself) that in the past, before him, she had loved someone else—“not the way I love you!” she quickly added, swearing on her daughter’s head that
nothing had happened.

The young man believed her but nevertheless questioned her to find out what
he
did.

“He was a ship’s captain, my dear.”

Did she not say this in order to keep him from trying to find out more, and at the same time to put herself in a very lofty position, by claiming to have exerted such a fascination over a man who had to be by nature both aggressive and accustomed to deferential treatment?

The clerk felt, then, the lowliness of his own position; he longed for epaulets, medals, titles. She must like all that: he suspected it because of her expensive habits.

However, Emma was silent about a great many of her extravagant ideas, such as her desire to have a blue tilbury, harnessed with an English horse and driven by a groom in top boots, to take her to Rouen. It was Justin who had inspired her with this whim, by pleading with her to take him on as footman in her household; and if this privation did not diminish, at each of her meetings with Léon, the pleasure of her arrival, it certainly augmented the bitterness of her return home.

Often when they were talking about Paris, she would end by murmuring:

“Ah! how good it would be for us, living there!”

“Aren’t we happy?” the young man would reply gently, running his hand over her bands of hair.

“Yes, it’s true,” she would say. “I’m being foolish; kiss me!”

She was more charming than ever to her husband; she would make him pistachio creams and play waltzes after dinner. So he believed he was the most fortunate of mortals, and Emma’s life was free of worry, when one evening, suddenly:

“It is Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn’t it, who’s giving you lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I just saw her,” Charles went on, “at Madame Liégeard’s. I mentioned you to her; she doesn’t know you.”

It was like a thunderbolt. But she replied with a natural air:

“Oh! She’s probably forgotten my name.”

“But perhaps at Rouen,” said the doctor, “there are several Demoiselles Lempereur who teach piano?”

“It’s possible!”

Then quickly:

“But I have her receipts! Here, look!”

And she went to the secretary desk, rummaged in all the drawers, mixed up all the papers, and in the end became so confused that Charles urged her vehemently not to go to so much trouble over those wretched receipts.

“Oh, I’ll find them,” she said.

Indeed, the very next Friday, Charles, as he was putting on one of his boots in the small, windowless room where his clothes were kept, felt a piece of paper between the leather and his sock; he took it out and read:

Received, for three months of lessons, in addition to various supplies, the sum of sixty-five francs.
FÉLICIE LEMPEREUR
,
Music Instructor.