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room, ‘No, stay here; it isn’t worth while going up; she is

just coming down. Warm yourself at the stove in the

meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor,’ (for the

chemist much enjoyed pronouncing the word ‘doctor,’ as

if addressing another by it reflected on himself some of the

grandeur that he found in it). ‘Now, take care not to upset

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the mortars! You’d better fetch some chairs from the little

room; you know very well that the arm-chairs are not to

be taken out of the drawing-room.’

And to put his arm-chair back in its place he was

darting away from the counter, when Binet asked him for

half an ounce of sugar acid.

‘Sugar acid!’ said the chemist contemptuously, ‘don’t

know it; I’m ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic

acid. It is oxalic acid, isn’t it?’

Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make

himself some copperwater with which to remove rust

from his hunting things.

Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying—

‘Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the

damp.’

‘Nevertheless,’ replied the tax-collector, with a sly

look, ‘there are people who like it.’

She was stifling.

‘And give me—‘

‘Will he never go?’ thought she.

‘Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of

yellow wax, and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if

you please, to clean the varnished leather of my togs.’

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The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when

Madame Homais appeared, Irma in her arms, Napoleon

by her side, and Athalie following. She sat down on the

velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a

footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube

box near her papa. The latter was filling funnels and

corking phials, sticking on labels, making up parcels.

Around him all were silent; only from time to time, were

heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low

words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.

‘And how’s the little woman?’ suddenly asked Madame

Homais.

‘Silence!’ exclaimed her husband, who was writing

down some figures in his waste-book.

‘Why didn’t you bring her?’ she went on in a low

voice.

‘Hush! hush!’ said Emma, pointing with her finger to

the druggist.

But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had

probably heard nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma,

relieved, uttered a deep sigh.

‘How hard you are breathing!’ said Madame Homais.

‘Well, you see, it’s rather warm,’ she replied.

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So the next day they talked over how to arrange their

rendezvous. Emma wanted to bribe her servant with a

present, but it would be better to find some safe house at

Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.

All through the winter, three or four times a week, in

the dead of night he came to the garden. Emma had on

purpose taken away the key of the gate, which Charles

thought lost.

To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the

shutters. She jumped up with a start; but sometimes he

had to wait, for Charles had a mania for chatting by the

fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild with

impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have

hurled him out at the window. At last she would begin to

undress, then take up a book, and go on reading very

quietly as if the book amused her. But Charles, who was

in bed, called to her to come too.

‘Come, now, Emma,’ he said, ‘it is time.’

‘Yes, I am coming,’ she answered.

Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned to the wall

and fell asleep. She escaped, smiling, palpitating,

undressed. Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in

it, and putting his arm round her waist, he drew her

without a word to the end of the garden.

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It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks

where formerly Leon had looked at her so amorously on

the summer evenings. She never thought of him now.

The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches.

Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and

again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of

shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and

sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up

and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to

engulf them. The cold of the nights made them clasp

closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their

eyes that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of

the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls

sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied

vibrations.

When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the

consulting-room between the cart-shed and the stable. She

lighted one of the kitchen candles that she had hidden

behind the books. Rodolphe settled down there as if at

home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the

whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he

could not refrain from making jokes about Charles, which

rather embarrassed Emma. She would have liked to see

him more serious, and even on occasions more dramatic;

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as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of

approaching steps in the alley.

‘Someone is coming!’ she said.

He blew out the light.

‘Have you your pistols?’

‘Why?’

‘Why, to defend yourself,’ replied Emma.

‘From your husband? Oh, poor devil!’ And Rodolphe

finished his sentence with a gesture that said, ‘I could

crush him with a flip of my finger.’

She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she

felt in it a sort of indecency and a naive coarseness that

scandalised her.

Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the

pistols. If she had spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous,

he thought, even odious; for he had no reason to hate the

good Charles, not being what is called devoured by

jealousy; and on this subject Emma had taken a great vow

that he did not think in the best of taste.

Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had

insisted on exchanging miniatures; they had cut off

handfuls of hair, and now she was asking for a ring—a real

wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She often spoke

to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature.

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Then she talked to him of her mother—hers! and of his

mother—his! Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago.

Emma none the less consoled him with caressing words as

one would have done a lost child, and she sometimes even

said to him, gazing at the moon

‘I am sure that above there together they approve of

our love.’

But she was so pretty. He had possessed so few women

of such ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was

a new experience for him, and, drawing him out of his

lazy habits, caressed at once his pride and his sensuality.

Emma’s enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense

disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming,

since it was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he

no longer kept up appearances, and insensibly his ways

changed.

He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that

they made her cry, nor passionate caresses that made her

mad, so that their great love, which engrossed her life,

seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of a stream

absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it.

She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and

Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less.

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She did not know if she regretted having yielded to

him, or whether she did not wish, on the contrary, to

enjoy him the more. The humiliation of feeling herself

weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their

voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a

continual seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared

him.

Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever,

Rodolphe having succeeded in carrying out the adultery

after his own fancy; and at the end of six months, when

the spring-time came, they were to one another like a

married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame.

It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his

turkey in remembrance of the setting of his leg. The

present always arrived with a letter. Emma cut the string

that tied it to the basket, and read the following lines:—

‘My Dear Children—I hope this will find you well, and

that this one will be as good as the others. For it seems to

me a little more tender, if I may venture to say so, and

heavier. But next time, for a change, I’ll give you a

turkeycock, unless you have a preference for some dabs;

and send me back the hamper, if you please, with the two

old ones. I have had an accident with my cart-sheds,

whose covering flew off one windy night among the trees.

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The harvest has not been overgood either. Finally, I don’t

know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult now

to leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma.’

Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow

had dropped his pen to dream a little while.

‘For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught

the other day at the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to

hire a shepherd, having turned away mine because he was

too dainty. How we are to be pitied with such a lot of

thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I heard from a pedlar,

who, travelling through your part of the country this

winter, had a tooth drawn, that Bovary was as usual

working hard. That doesn’t surprise me; and he showed

me his tooth; we had some coffee together. I asked him if

he had seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two

horses in the stables, from which I conclude that business

is looking up. So much the better, my dear children, and

may God send you every imaginable happiness! It grieves

me not yet to have seen my dear little grand-daughter,

Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for

her in the garden under your room, and I won’t have it

touched unless it is to have jam made for her by and bye,

that I will keep in the cupboard for her when she comes.

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‘Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you

too, my son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I

am, with best compliments, your loving father.

‘Theodore Rouault.’

She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some

minutes. The spelling mistakes were interwoven one with

the other, and Emma followed the kindly thought that

cackled right through it like a hen half hidden in the

hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes

from the hearth, for a little grey powder slipped from the

letter on to her dress, and she almost thought she saw her

father bending over the hearth to take up the tongs. How

long since she had been with him, sitting on the footstool

in the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of

a bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges! She

remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The

colts neighed when anyone passed by, and galloped,

galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and

sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck

against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What

happiness there had been at that time, what freedom, what

hope! What an abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of

them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul’s life, in

all her successive conditions of lifemaidenhood, her

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marriage, and her love—thus constantly losing them all

her life through, like a traveller who leaves something of

his wealth at every inn along his road.

But what then, made her so unhappy? What was the

extraordinary catastrophe that had transformed her? And

she raised her head, looking round as if to seek the cause

of that which made her suffer.

An April ray was dancing on the china of the whatnot;

the fire burned; beneath her slippers she felt the softness of

the carpet; the day was bright, the air warm, and she heard

her child shouting with laughter.

In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn

in the midst of the grass that was being turned. She was

lying flat on her stomach at the top of a rick. The servant

was holding her by her skirt. Lestiboudois was raking by

her side, and every time he came near she lent forward,

beating the air with both her arms.

‘Bring her to me,’ said her mother, rushing to embrace

her. ‘How I love you, my poor child! How I love you!’

Then noticing that the tips of her ears were rather

dirty, she rang at once for warm water, and washed her,

changed her linen, her stockings, her shoes, asked a

thousand questions about her health, as if on the return

from a long journey, and finally, kissing her again and

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crying a little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood

quite thunderstricken at this excess of tenderness.

That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than

usual.

‘That will pass over,’ he concluded; ‘it’s a whim:.’

And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did

come, she showed herself cold and almost contemptuous.

‘Ah! you’re losing your time, my lady!’

And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs,

nor the handkerchief she took out.

Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she

detested Charles; if it had not been better to have been

able to love him? But he gave her no opportunities for

such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much

embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the druggist

came just in time to provide her with an opportunity.

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