第 12 页

But at least it is because they are thinking of something.

Myself, for example, how often has it happened to me to

look on the bureau for my pen to write a label, and to

find, after all, that I had put it behind my ear!’

Madame Lefrancois just then went to the door to see if

the ‘Hirondelle’ were not coming. She started. A man

dressed in black suddenly came into the kitchen. By the

last gleam of the twilight one could see that his face was

rubicund and his form athletic.

‘What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curie?’ asked the

landlady, as she reached down from the chimney one of

the copper candlesticks placed with their candles in a row.

‘Will you take something? A thimbleful of Cassis*? A glass

of wine?’

*Black currant liqueur.

The priest declined very politely. He had come for his

umbrella, that he had forgotten the other day at the

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Ernemont convent, and after asking Madame Lefrancois to

have it sent to him at the presbytery in the evening, he left

for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.

When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his

boots along the square, he thought the priest’s behaviour

just now very unbecoming. This refusal to take any

refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy; all

priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back

the days of the tithe.

The landlady took up the defence of her curie.

‘Besides, he could double up four men like you over

his knee. Last year he helped our people to bring in the

straw; he carried as many as six trusses at once, he is so

strong.’

‘Bravo!’ said the chemist. ‘Now just send your

daughters to confess to fellows which such a temperament!

I, if I were the Government, I’d have the priests bled once

a month. Yes, Madame Lefrancois, every month—a good

phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals.’

‘Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel;

you’ve no religion.’

The chemist answered: ‘I have a religion, my religion,

and I even have more than all these others with their

mummeries and their juggling. I adore God, on the

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contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator,

whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here

below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families;

but I don’t need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and

fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who

live better than we do. For one can know Him as well in a

wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault

like the ancients. My God! Mine is the God of Socrates, of

Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the

profession of faith of the ‘Savoyard Vicar,’ and the

immortal principles of ‘89! And I can’t admit of an old boy

of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his

hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies

uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days;

things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed,

moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the

way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid

ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people

with them.’

He ceased, looking round for an audience, for in his

bubbling over the chemist had for a moment fancied

himself in the midst of the town council. But the landlady

no longer heeded him; she was listening to a distant

rolling. One could distinguish the noise of a carriage

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mingled with the clattering of loose horseshoes that beat

against the ground, and at last the ‘Hirondelle’ stopped at

the door.

It was a yellow box on two large wheels, that, reaching

to the tilt, prevented travelers from seeing the road and

dirtied their shoulders. The small panes of the narrow

windows rattled in their sashes when the coach was closed,

and retained here and there patches of mud amid the old

layers of dust, that not even storms of rain had altogether

washed away. It was drawn by three horses, the first a

leader, and when it came down-hill its bottom jolted

against the ground.

Some of the inhabitants of Yonville came out into the

square; they all spoke at once, asking for news, for

explanations, for hampers. Hivert did not know whom to

answer. It was he who did the errands of the place in

town. He went to the shops and brought back rolls of

leather for the shoemaker, old iron for the farrier, a barrel

of herrings for his mistress, caps from the milliner’s, locks

from the hair-dresser’s and all along the road on his return

journey he distributed his parcels, which he threw,

standing upright on his seat and shouting at the top of his

voice, over the enclosures of the yards.

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An accident had delayed him. Madame Bovary’s

greyhound had run across the field. They had whistled for

him a quarter of an hour; Hivert had even gone back a

mile and a half expecting every moment to catch sight of

her; but it had been necessary to go on.

Emma had wept, grown angry; she had accused Charles

of this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a draper, who

happened to be in the coach with her, had tried to console

her by a number of examples of lost dogs recognizing their

masters at the end of long years. One, he said had been

told of, who had come back to Paris from Constantinople.

Another had gone one hundred and fifty miles in a straight

line, and swum four rivers; and his own father had

possessed a poodle, which, after twelve years of absence,

had all of a sudden jumped on his back in the street as he

was going to dine in town.

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CHAPTER TWO

Emma got out first, then Felicite, Monsieur Lheureux,

and a nurse, and they had to wake up Charles in his

corner, where he had slept soundly since night set in.

Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to

madame and his respects to monsieur; said he was charmed

to have been able to render them some slight service, and

added with a cordial air that he had ventured to invite

himself, his wife being away.

When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up

to the chimney.

With the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the

knee, and having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out

her foot in its black boot to the fire above the revolving

leg of mutton. The flame lit up the whole of her,

penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gowns, the

fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she

blinked now and again. A great red glow passed over her

with the blowing of the wind through the half-open door.

On the other side of the chimney a young man with

fair hair watched her silently.

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As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was

a clerk at the notary’s, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur

Leon Dupuis (it was he who was the second habitue of the

‘Lion d’Or’) frequently put back his dinner-hour in hope

that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom he

could chat in the evening. On the days when his work

was done early, he had, for want of something else to do,

to come punctually, and endure from soup to cheese a

tete-a-tete with Binet. It was therefore with delight that

he accepted the landlady’s suggestion that he should dine

in company with the newcomers, and they passed into the

large parlour where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose

of showing off, had had the table laid for four.

Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap,

for fear of coryza; then, turning to his neighbour—

‘Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so

abominably in our ‘Hirondelle.’’

‘That is true,’ replied Emma; ‘but moving about always

amuses me. I like change of place.’

‘It is so tedious,’ sighed the clerk, ‘to be always riveted

to the same places.’

‘If you were like me,’ said Charles, ‘constantly obliged

to be in the saddle’—

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‘But,’ Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame

Bovary, ‘nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant—when

one can,’ he added.

‘Moreover,’ said the druggist, ‘the practice of medicine

is not very hard work in our part of the world, for the

state of our roads allows us the use of gigs, and generally,

as the farmers are prosperous, they pay pretty well. We

have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases of

enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then

a few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the

whole, little of a serious nature, nothing special to note,

unless it be a great deal of scrofula, due, no doubt, to the

deplorable hygienic conditions of our peasant dwellings.

Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur

Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the

efforts of your science will daily come into collision; for

people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the

priest, rather than come straight to the doctor of the

chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad,

and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The

thermometer (I have made some observations) falls in

winter to 4 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which gives

us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54

degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a

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matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by

the forest of Argueil on the one side, from the west winds

by the St. Jean range on the other; and this heat,

moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapours

given off by the river and the considerable number of

cattle in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much

ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen

(no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which sucking up

into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together all

those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to

say, and combining with the electricity diffused through

the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long run,

as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata—

this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side

whence it comes, or rather whence it should come—that

is to say, the southern side— by the south-eastern winds,

which, having cooled themselves passing over the Seine,

reach us sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia.’

‘At any rate, you have some walks in the

neighbourhood?’ continued Madame Bovary, speaking to

the young man.

‘Oh, very few,’ he answered. ‘There is a place they call

La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest.

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Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book,

watching the sunset.’

‘I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets,’ she

resumed; ‘but especially by the side of the sea.’

‘Oh, I adore the sea!’ said Monsieur Leon.

‘And then, does it not seem to you,’ continued

Madame Bovary, ‘that the mind travels more freely on this

limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the

soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?’

‘It is the same with mountainous landscapes,’ continued

Leon. ‘A cousin of mine who travelled in Switzerland last

year told me that one could not picture to oneself the

poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the

gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of incredible

size across torrents, cottages suspended over precipices,

and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the

clouds open. Such spectacles must stir to enthusiasm,

incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I no longer marvel at that

celebrated musician who, the better to inspire his

imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before

some imposing site.’

‘You play?’ she asked.

‘No, but I am very fond of music,’ he replied.

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‘Ah! don’t you listen to him, Madame Bovary,’

interrupted Homais, bending over his plate. ‘That’s sheer

modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the other day in your

room you were singing ‘L’Ange Gardien’ ravishingly. I

heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor.’

Leon, in fact, lodged at the chemist’s where he had a

small room on the second floor, overlooking the Place. He

blushed at the compliment of his landlord, who had

already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to him,

one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of

Yonville. He was telling anecdotes, giving information;

the fortune of the notary was not known exactly, and

‘there was the Tuvache household,’ who made a good

deal of show.

Emma continued, ‘And what music do you prefer?’

‘Oh, German music; that which makes you dream.’

‘Have you been to the opera?’

‘Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at

Paris to finish reading for the bar.’

‘As I had the honour of putting it to your husband,’

said the chemist, ‘with regard to this poor Yanoda who

has run away, you will find yourself, thanks to his

extravagance, in the possession of one of the most

comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience

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for a doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can

go in and out unseen. Moreover, it contains everything

that is agreeable in a household—a laundry, kitchen with

offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He was a gay

dog, who didn’t care what he spent. At the end of the

garden, by the side of the water, he had an arbour built

just for the purpose of drinking beer in summer; and if

madame is fond of gardening she will be able—‘

‘My wife doesn’t care about it,’ said Charles; ‘although

she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always

sitting in her room reading.’