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details, and loathed the characters while he grew

enthusiastic over their dialogue. When he read the fine

passages he was transported, but when he thought that

mummers would get something out of them for their

show, he was disconsolate; and in this confusion of

sentiments in which he was involved he would have like

at once to crown Racine with both his hands and discuss

with him for a good quarter of an hour.

At last Emma remembered that at the chateau of

Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young

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lady Berthe; from that moment this name was chosen; and

as old Rouault could not come, Monsieur Homais was

requested to stand godfather. His gifts were all products

from his establishment, to wit: six boxes of jujubes, a

whole jar of racahout, three cakes of marshmallow paste,

and six sticks of sugar-candy into the bargain that he had

come across in a cupboard. On the evening of the

ceremony there was a grand dinner; the cure was present;

there was much excitement. Monsieur Homais towards

liqueur-time began singing ‘Le Dieu des bonnes gens.’

Monsieur Leon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary,

senior, who was godmother, a romance of the time of the

Empire; finally, M. Bovary, senior, insisted on having the

child brought down, and began baptizing it with a glass of

champagne that he poured over its head. This mockery of

the first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien

angry; old Bovary replied by a quotation from ‘La Guerre

des Dieux"; the cure wanted to leave; the ladies implored,

Homais interfered; and they succeeded in making the

priest sit down again, and he quietly went on with the

half-finished coffee in his saucer.

Monsieur Bovary, senior, stayed at Yonville a month,

dazzling the native by a superb policeman’s cap with silver

tassels that he wore in the morning when he smoked his

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pipe in the square. Being also in the habit of drinking a

good deal of brandy, he often sent the servant to the Lion

d’Or to buy him a bottle, which was put down to his son’s

account, and to perfume his handkerchiefs he used up his

daughter-in-law’s whole supply of eau-de-cologne.

The latter did not at all dislike his company. He had

knocked about the world, he talked about Berlin, Vienna,

and Strasbourg, of his soldier times, of the mistresses he

had had, the grand luncheons of which he had partaken;

then he was amiable, and sometimes even, either on the

stairs, or in the garden, would seize hold of her waist,

crying, ‘Charles, look out for yourself.’

Then Madame Bovary, senior, became alarmed for her

son’s happiness, and fearing that her husband might in the

long-run have an immoral influence upon the ideas of the

young woman, took care to hurry their departure. Perhaps

she had more serious reasons for uneasiness. Monsieur

Bovary was not the man to respect anything.

One day Emma was suddenly seized with the desire to

see her little girl, who had been put to nurse with the

carpenter’s wife, and, without looking at the calendar to

see whether the six weeks of the Virgin were yet passed,

she set out for the Rollets’ house, situated at the extreme

end of the village, between the highroad and the fields.

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It was mid-day, the shutters of the houses were closed

and the slate roofs that glittered beneath the fierce light of

the blue sky seemed to strike sparks from the crest of the

gables. A heavy wind was blowing; Emma felt weak as she

walked; the stones of the pavement hurt her; she was

doubtful whether she would not go home again, or go in

somewhere to rest.

At this moment Monsieur Leon came out from a

neighbouring door with a bundle of papers under his arm.

He came to greet her, and stood in the shade in front of

the Lheureux’s shop under the projecting grey awning.

Madame Bovary said she was going to see her baby, but

that she was beginning to grow tired.

‘If—’ said Leon, not daring to go on.

‘Have you any business to attend to?’ she asked.

And on the clerk’s answer, she begged him to

accompany her. That same evening this was known in

Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife,

declared in the presence of her servant that ‘Madame

Bovary was compromising herself.’

To get to the nurse’s it was necessary to turn to the left

on leaving the street, as if making for the cemetery, and to

follow between little houses and yards a small path

bordered with privet hedges. They were in bloom, and so

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were the speedwells, eglantines, thistles, and the sweetbriar

that sprang up from the thickets. Through openings in the

hedges one could see into the huts, some pigs on a dung-

heap, or tethered cows rubbing their horns against the

trunk of trees. The two, side by side walked slowly, she

leaning upon him, and he restraining his pace, which he

regulated by hers; in front of them a swarm of midges

fluttered, buzzing in the warm air.

The recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which

shaded it.

Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside

it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of

onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a

bed of lettuce, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet

peas stung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and

there on the grass, and all round were several indefinite

rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet

of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the

gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on

one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a

poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the

son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up

with their business, left in the country.

‘Go in,’ she said; ‘your little one is there asleep.’

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The room on the ground-floor, the only one in the

dwelling, had at its farther end, against the wall, a large

bed without curtains, while a kneading-trough took up

the side by the window, one pane of which was mended

with a piece of blue paper. In the corner behind the door,

shining hob-nailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of

the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in

its mouth; a Matthieu Laensberg lay on the dusty

mantelpiece amid gunflints, candle-ends, and bits of

amadou.

Finally, the last luxury in the apartment was a ‘Fame’

blowing her trumpets, a picture cut out, no doubt, from

some perfumer’s prospectus and nailed to the wall with six

wooden shoe-pegs.

Emma’s child was asleep in a wicker-cradle. She took it

up in the wrapping that enveloped it and began singing

softly as she rocked herself to and fro.

Leon walked up and down the room; it seemed strange

to him to see this beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in

the midst of all this poverty. Madam Bovary reddened; he

turned away, thinking perhaps there had been an

impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the little

girl, who had just been sick over her collar.

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The nurse at once came to dry her, protesting that it

wouldn’t show.

‘She gives me other doses,’ she said: ‘I am always a-

washing of her. If you would have the goodness to order

Camus, the grocer, to let me have a little soap, it would

really be more convenient for you, as I needn’t trouble

you then.’

‘Very well! very well!’ said Emma. ‘Good morning,

Madame Rollet,’ and she went out, wiping her shoes at

the door.

The good woman accompanied her to the end of the

garden, talking all the time of the trouble she had getting

up of nights.

‘I’m that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my

chair. I’m sure you might at least give me just a pound of

ground coffee; that’d last me a month, and I’d take it of a

morning with some milk.’

After having submitted to her thanks, Madam Bovary

left. She had gone a little way down the path when, at the

sound of wooden shoes, she turned round. It was the

nurse.

‘What is it?’

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Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an

elm tree, began talking to her of her husband, who with

his trade and six francs a year that the captain—

‘Oh, be quick!’ said Emma.

‘Well,’ the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each

word, ‘I’m afraid he’ll be put out seeing me have coffee

along, you know men—‘

‘But you are to have some,’ Emma repeated; ‘I will

give you some. You bother me!’

‘Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see in consequence

of his wounds he has terrible cramps in the chest. He even

says that cider weakens him.’

‘Do make haste, Mere Rollet!’

‘Well,’ the latter continued, making a curtsey, ‘if it

weren’t asking too much,’ and she curtsied once more, ‘if

you would’—and her eyes begged—‘a jar of brandy,’ she

said at last, ‘and I’d rub your little one’s feet with it;

they’re as tender as one’s tongue.’

Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took Monsieur

Leon’s arm. She walked fast for some time, then more

slowly, and looking straight in front of her, her eyes rested

on the shoulder of the young man, whose frock-coat had a

black-velvety collar. His brown hair fell over it, straight

and carefully arranged. She noticed his nails which were

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longer than one wore them at Yonville. It was one of the

clerk’s chief occupations to trim them, and for this

purpose he kept a special knife in his writing desk.

They returned to Yonville by the water-side. In the

warm season the bank, wider than at other times, showed

to their foot the garden walls whence a few steps led to

the river. It flowed noiselessly, swift, and cold to the eye;

long, thin grasses huddled together in it as the current

drove them, and spread themselves upon the limpid water

like streaming hair; sometimes at the tip of the reeds or on

the leaf of a water-lily an insect with fine legs crawled or

rested. The sun pierced with a ray the small blue bubbles

of the waves that, breaking, followed each other;

branchless old willows mirrored their grey backs in the

water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It

was the dinner-hour at the farms, and the young woman

and her companion heard nothing as they walked but the

fall of their steps on the earth of the path, the words they

spoke, and the sound of Emma’s dress rustling round her.

The walls of the gardens with pieces of bottle on their

coping were hot as the glass windows of a conservatory.

Wallflowers had sprung up between the bricks, and with

the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary, as she

passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a

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yellow dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and

clematis caught in its fringe and dangled for a moment

over the silk.

They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who

were expected shortly at the Rouen theatre.

‘Are you going?’ she asked.

‘If I can,’ he answered.

Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their

eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they

forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same

languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the

soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices.

Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did

not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its

cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the

immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous

wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a

thought of the horizon that we do not even know.

In one place the ground had been trodden down by the

cattle; they had to step on large green stones put here and

there in the mud.

She often stopped a moment to look where to place

her foot, and tottering on a stone that shook, her arms

outspread, her form bent forward with a look of

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indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the

puddles of water.

When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame

Bovary opened the little gate, ran up the steps and

disappeared.

Leon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just

glanced at the briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last

took up his hat and went out.

He went to La Pature at the top of the Argueil hills at

the beginning of the forest; he threw himself upon the

ground under the pines and watched the sky through his

fingers.

‘How bored I am!’ he said to himself, ‘how bored I

am!’

He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village,

with Homais for a friend and Monsieru Guillaumin for

master. The latter, entirely absorbed by his business,

wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red whiskers over a

white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements,

although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the

beginning had impressed the clerk.

As to the chemist’s spouse, she was the best wife in

Normandy, gentle as a sheep, loving her children, her

father, her mother, her cousins, weeping for other’s woes,

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letting everything go in her household, and detesting

corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to,

so common in appearance, and of such restricted

conversation, that although she was thirty, he only twenty,

although they slept in rooms next each other and he spoke

to her daily, he never thought that she might be a woman

for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex

than the gown.

And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers,

two or three publicans, the cure, and finally, Monsieur