Madame Bovary (9 page)

Those who stayed at Les Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen. The children had fallen asleep under the benches.

The bride had begged her father that she be spared the customary
pranks. Nevertheless, one of their cousins, a fishmonger (who had actually brought, as a wedding present, a couple of soles), was about to squirt water with his mouth through the keyhole, when Père Rouault came along just in time to stop him, explaining that the importance of his son-in-law’s position did not permit of such improprieties. The cousin, however, yielded only with difficulty to these arguments. Inwardly, he accused Père Rouault of being proud, and he went off into a corner to join four or five other guests who, having by chance been served the cheapest cuts of meat several times in succession at table, also felt they had been poorly treated and were whispering against their host, quietly hoping he would ruin himself.

The elder Madame Bovary had not opened her mouth all day. No one had consulted her about either her daughter-in-law’s toilette or the arrangements for the banquet; she went to bed early. Her husband, instead of following her, sent to Saint-Victor for some cigars and smoked until dawn, drinking grogs made with kirsch, a mixture unknown to the company, which inspired still greater respect for him.

Charles was not a wit by nature, he had not been brilliant during the wedding festivities. He had responded feebly to the quips, puns, double entendres, compliments, and off-color remarks people felt duty bound to level at him from the moment the soup was served.

The next day, however, he seemed another man. It was he whom one would have taken for the virgin of the day before, while the bride revealed nothing from which one could have guessed anything. Even the shrewdest did not know what to say, and they contemplated her, when she came near them, with inordinately keen attention. But Charles hid nothing. He called her “my wife,” addressed her as
tu
, asked everyone where she was, looked for her everywhere, and would often draw her out into the grounds, where he could be seen from a distance, among the trees, putting his arm around her waist and continuing to walk half bent over her, his head rumpling the lace in the opening of her bodice.

Two days after the wedding, the bride and groom left: Charles, because of his patients, could not stay away longer. Père Rouault had them driven back in his carriage and went with them himself as far as Vassonville. There, he kissed his daughter one last time, got down, and set out for home again. When he had walked about a hundred yards, he stopped, and as he saw the carriage moving away into the distance, its wheels turning
in the dust, he gave a deep sigh. Then he recalled his own wedding, his own earlier days, his wife’s first pregnancy; he, too, had been very happy, the day he took her away from her father’s house to his own, when he had carried her behind him on the horse trotting over the snow; for it was close to Christmas, and the fields were all white; she was holding him with one arm, her basket hooked over the other; the wind was whipping the long lace streamers of her Cauchois headdress, so that at times they
blew across his mouth, and when he turned his head, he would see close to him, against his shoulder, her rosy little face smiling silently under the gold ornament on her bonnet. From time to time, she would warm her fingers by putting them inside his coat. How long ago it all was! By now, their son would have been thirty! Then he looked back; he saw nothing on the road. He felt as sad as an empty house; and, affectionate memories mingling with black thoughts in his brain, which was fogged by the vapors of the feast, for a moment he thought of taking a walk in the direction of the church. As he was afraid, however, that the sight of it would make him even sadder, he went straight back home.

Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived in Toste at about six o’clock. The neighbors came to the windows to see their doctor’s new wife.

The old servant presented herself, curtsied to her, apologized because dinner was not ready, and urged Madame, while waiting, to become acquainted with her house.

The brick housefront was exactly flush with the street, or rather the high road. Behind the door hung a cloak with a short cape, a bridle, a black leather cap, and, in the corner, on the floor, stood a pair of leggings still covered with dried mud. To the right was the parlor, that is, the room they used for eating and for sitting. A canary yellow wallpaper, set off at the top by swags of pale flowers, trembled perpetually over its whole extent on its poorly stretched canvas; curtains of white calico, edged with red braid, crisscrossed the length of the windows, and on the narrow mantelpiece sat resplendent a pendulum clock with a head of Hippocrates, between two silverplated candlesticks under oval globes. On the other side of the hallway was Charles’s office, a small room about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office armchair. The
volumes of the
Dictionary of Medical Science
,
whose pages were uncut but whose bindings had suffered from all the successive sales through which they had passed, by themselves almost entirely filled the six shelves of a pine bookcase. The smell of sauces cooking penetrated through the wall during consultations, just as from the kitchen one could hear the patients coughing in the consulting room and recounting in detail their entire histories. Next, opening directly onto the yard, with its stables, was a large derelict room containing an oven and now serving as woodshed, cellar, and storeroom, full of old pieces of iron, empty barrels, disused garden implements, along with a quantity of other dusty things whose function it was impossible to imagine.

The garden, longer than it was wide, ran back between two clay walls covered with espaliered apricots, to a thorn hedge that separated it from the fields. In the middle was a slate sundial, on a masonry pedestal; four flower beds filled with spindly wild roses surrounded symmetrically the more useful square of serious plantings. At the far end, under the spruce trees, a plaster curé stood reading his breviary.

Emma went up into the bedrooms. The first was not furnished at all; but the second, which was the conjugal bedroom, contained a mahogany bed in an alcove hung with red drapes. A box made of seashells adorned the chest of drawers; and on the writing desk, by the window, there stood, in a carafe, a bouquet of orange flowers, tied with white satin ribbons. It was a bridal bouquet, the other woman’s bouquet! She looked at it. Charles noticed, picked it up, and carried it off to the attic, while, sitting in an armchair (they were placing her things around her), Emma thought about her own wedding bouquet, which was packed away in a cardboard box, and wondered, dreamily, what would be done with it if by chance she were to die.

She occupied herself, during the first days, with planning changes in her house. She took the globes off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper hung, the stairwell painted, and seats made for the garden, around the sundial; she even asked how she could acquire a pool with a fountain and fish. And her husband, knowing that she liked to go for drives, found a secondhand
boc
, which, once it had new lamps and mudguards of padded leather, looked almost like a tilbury.

So he was happy, without a care in the world. A meal alone with her, a walk in the evening on the big road, the gesture of her hand touching
the bands of her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the hasp of a window, and many other things that Charles had never suspected would be a source of pleasure now formed the continuous flow of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, and side by side on the pillow, he would watch the sunlight passing through the down on her blond cheeks, half covered by the scalloped tabs of her nightcap. Seen from so close, her eyes appeared larger to him, especially when she opened her eyelids several times in succession as she awoke; black when in shadow and dark blue in broad daylight, they seemed to hold layer upon layer of colors, denser deep down and lighter and lighter toward the enameled surface. His own eyes would lose themselves in those depths, and he would see himself in miniature down to his
shoulders, with the silk scarf he wore around his head and the top of his half-open nightshirt. He would get up. She would go to the window to watch him leave; and she would remain there with her elbows on the sill, between two pots of geraniums, her dressing gown loose around her. Charles, in the street, would be buckling his spurs, his foot up on the guard stone; and she would go on talking to him from above, tearing off with her teeth and blowing down to him some bit of flower or leaf, which would flutter, float, make half circles in the air like a bird, and catch, before falling, in the ill-combed mane of the old white mare, motionless at the door. Charles, on horseback, would send her a kiss; she would answer with a wave, she would close the window, he would leave. And then, on the highway stretching out before him in an endless ribbon of dust, along sunken lanes over which the trees bent like an arbor, in paths where the wheat rose as high as his knees, with the sun
on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the joys of the night, his spirit at peace, his flesh content, he would ride along ruminating on his happiness, like a man continuing to chew, after dinner, the taste of the truffles he is digesting.

Up to now, what had there been in his life that was good? Was it his time in school, where he remained shut in between those high walls, alone among schoolmates wealthier or better than he at their studies, who laughed at his accent, who made fun of his clothes, and whose mothers came to the visiting room with pastries in their muffs? Was it later, when he was studying medicine, his purse never fat enough to pay for a contra dance with some little working girl who might have become his mistress? After that, he had lived for fourteen months with the widow, whose feet,
in bed, were as cold as blocks of ice. But now he possessed, for always, this pretty woman whom he so loved. The universe, for him, did not extend beyond the silky contour of her underskirt; and he would reproach himself for not loving her more, he would want to see her again; he would return home quickly, climb the stairs, his heart pounding. Emma, in her room, would be
dressing; he would come in on silent feet, he would kiss her on the back, she would cry out.

He could not refrain from constantly touching her comb, her rings, her scarf; sometimes he would give her great full-lipped kisses on her cheeks, or a string of little kisses up her bare arm, from the tips of her fingers to her shoulder; and she would push him away, with a weary half smile, as one does a clinging child.

Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was experiencing was love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “intoxication,” which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

She had read
Paul and Virginia
, and she had dreamed of the little bamboo house, the Negro Domingo, the dog Faithful, but most of all of the sweet friendship of a good little brother who goes off to fetch red fruit for you from great trees taller than church steeples, or runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.

When she was thirteen years old, her father himself took her to the city, to place her in the convent. They stayed at an inn in the Saint-Gervais quarter, where they were served supper on painted plates depicting the story of Mademoiselle de La Vallière. The explanatory legends, crossed here and there by knife scratches, all glorified religion, refined sentiments, and the splendors of the Court.

Far from being unhappy at the convent in her early days there, she liked the company of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, would take her to the chapel, down a long corridor from the refectory. She played very little during recreation time, understood her catechism very well, and it was always she who answered Monsieur le vicaire when he asked the hard
questions. Living thus, without ever leaving the temperate atmosphere of the classrooms, and among these white-faced women with their rosaries and copper crucifixes, she sank gently down into the mystical languor exhaled by the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the fonts, and the glow of the candles. Instead of following the Mass, she would gaze in her book at the holy pictures with their azure edges, and she loved the sick ewe, the Sacred Heart pierced with sharp arrows, or poor Jesus falling, as he walked, under his cross. She tried, as mortification, to go a whole day without eating.
She searched her mind for some vow she could fulfill.

When she went to confession, she would invent little sins in order to stay there longer, on her knees in the darkness, her hands together, her face at the grille beneath the whisperings of the priest. The metaphors of betrothed, spouse, heavenly lover, and marriage everlasting that recur in sermons stirred unexpectedly sweet sensations in the depths of her soul.

In the evenings, before prayers, a pious work was read aloud to them in the study hall. During the week, it was some digest of Biblical history or Abbé Frayssinous’s
Lectures
, and, on Sunday, for a change, passages from
The Genius of Christianity.
How she listened, the first few times, to those sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholy, reechoing through the earth and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in a room behind some shop in a commercial district, then perhaps she would have been open to those lyrical invasions of nature, which ordinarily come to us only as expressed by writers. But she knew the country too well; she knew the bleating flocks, the milking, the plows. Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive
from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart,—being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes.