第 28 页

chaser, and that there was never enough cold-cream for

her skin, nor of patchouli for her handkerchiefs. She

loaded herself with bracelets, rings, and necklaces. When

he was coming she filled the two large blue glass vases

with roses, and prepared her room and her person like a

courtesan expecting a prince. The servant had to be

constantly washing linen, and all day Felicite did not stir

from the kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept her

company, watched her at work.

With his elbows on the long board on which she was

ironing, he greedily watched all these women’s clothes

spread about him, the dimity petticoats, the fichus, the

307 of 570

Madame Bovary

collars, and the drawers with running strings, wide at the

hips and growing narrower below.

‘What is that for?’ asked the young fellow, passing his

hand over the crinoline or the hooks and eyes.

‘Why, haven’t you ever seen anything?’ Felicite

answered laughing. ‘As if your mistress, Madame Homais,

didn’t wear the same.’

‘Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!’ And he added with a

meditative air, ‘As if she were a lady like madame!’

But Felicite grew impatient of seeing him hanging

round her. She was six years older than he, and Theodore,

Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, was beginning to pay

court to her.

‘Let me alone,’ she said, moving her pot of starch.

‘You’d better be off and pound almonds; you are always

dangling about women. Before you meddle with such

things, bad boy, wait till you’ve got a beard to your chin.’

‘Oh, don’t be cross! I’ll go and clean her boots.’

And he at once took down from the shelf Emma’s

boots, all coated with mud, the mud of the rendezvous,

that crumbled into powder beneath his fingers, and that he

watched as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight.

‘How afraid you are of spoiling them!’ said the servant,

who wasn’t so particular when she cleaned them herself,

308 of 570

Madame Bovary

because as soon as the stuff of the boots was no longer

fresh madame handed them over to her.

Emma had a number in her cupboard that she

squandered one after the other, without Charles allowing

himself the slightest observation. So also he disbursed three

hundred francs for a wooden leg that she thought proper

to make a present of to Hippolyte. Its top was covered

with cork, and it had spring joints, a complicated

mechanism, covered over by black trousers ending in a

patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use such

a handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to get

him another more convenient one. The doctor, of course,

had again to defray the expense of this purchase.

So little by little the stable-man took up his work again.

One saw him running about the village as before, and

when Charles heard from afar the sharp noise of the

wooden leg, he at once went in another direction.

It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had

undertaken the order; this provided him with an excuse

for visiting Emma. He chatted with her about the new

goods from Paris, about a thousand feminine trifles, made

himself very obliging, and never asked for his money.

Emma yielded to this lazy mode of satisfying all her

caprices. Thus she wanted to have a very handsome

309 of 570

Madame Bovary

ridding-whip that was at an umbrella-maker’s at Rouen to

give to Rodolphe. The week after Monsieur Lheureux

placed it on her table.

But the next day he called on her with a bill for two

hundred and seventy francs, not counting the centimes.

Emma was much embarrassed; all the drawers of the

writing-table were empty; they owed over a fortnight’s

wages to Lestiboudois, two quarters to the servant, for any

quantity of other things, and Bovary was impatiently

expecting Monsieur Derozeray’s account, which he was in

the habit of paying every year about Midsummer.

She succeeded at first in putting off Lheureux. At last

he lost patience; he was being sued; his capital was out,

and unless he got some in he should be forced to take

back all the goods she had received.

‘Oh, very well, take them!’ said Emma.

‘I was only joking,’ he replied; ‘the only thing I regret

is the whip. My word! I’ll ask monsieur to return it to

me.’

‘No, no!’ she said.

‘Ah! I’ve got you!’ thought Lheureux.

And, certain of his discovery, he went out repeating to

himself in an undertone, and with his usual low whistle—

‘Good! we shall see! we shall see!’

310 of 570

Madame Bovary

She was thinking how to get out of this when the

servant coming in put on the mantelpiece a small roll of

blue paper ‘from Monsieur Derozeray’s.’ Emma pounced

upon and opened it. It contained fifteen napoleons; it was

the account. She heard Charles on the stairs; threw the

gold to the back of her drawer, and took out the key.

Three days after Lheureux reappeared.

‘I have an arrangement to suggest to you,’ he said. ‘If,

instead of the sum agreed on, you would take—‘

‘Here it is,’ she said placing fourteen napoleons in his

hand.

The tradesman was dumfounded. Then, to conceal his

disappointment, he was profuse in apologies and proffers

of service, all of which Emma declined; then she remained

a few moments fingering in the pocket of her apron the

two five-franc pieces that he had given her in change. She

promised herself she would economise in order to pay

back later on. ‘Pshaw!’ she thought, ‘he won’t think about

it again.’

Besides the riding-whip with its silver-gilt handle,

Rodolphe had received a seal with the motto Amor nel

cor* furthermore, a scarf for a muffler, and, finally, a

cigar-case exactly like the Viscount’s, that Charles had

formerly picked up in the road, and that Emma had kept.

311 of 570

Madame Bovary

These presents, however, humiliated him; he refused

several; she insisted, and he ended by obeying, thinking

her tyrannical and overexacting.

*A loving heart.

Then she had strange ideas.

‘When midnight strikes,’ she said, ‘you must think of

me.’

And if he confessed that he had not thought of her,

there were floods of reproaches that always ended with the

eternal question—

‘Do you love me?’

‘Why, of course I love you,’ he answered.

‘A great deal?’

‘Certainly!’

‘You haven’t loved any others?’

‘Did you think you’d got a virgin?’ he exclaimed

laughing.

Emma cried, and he tried to console her, adorning his

protestations with puns.

‘Oh,’ she went on, ‘I love you! I love you so that I

could not live without you, do you see? There are times

when I long to see you again, when I am torn by all the

anger of love. I ask myself, Where is he? Perhaps he is

talking to other women. They smile upon him; he

312 of 570

Madame Bovary

approaches. Oh no; no one else pleases you. There are

some more beautiful, but I love you best. I know how to

love best. I am your servant, your concubine! You are my

king, my idol! You are good, you are beautiful, you are

clever, you are strong!’

He had so often heard these things said that they did

not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses;

and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a

garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that

has always the same forms and the same language. He did

not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the

difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of

expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured

such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of

hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must

be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not

sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no

one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of

his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human

speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer

out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the

stars.

But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to

him who, in no matter what circumstance, holds back,

313 of 570

Madame Bovary

Rodolphe saw other delights to be got out of this love. He

thought all modesty in the way. He treated her quite sans

facon.* He made of her something supple and corrupt.

Hers was an idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration

for him, of voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that

benumbed her; her soul sank into this drunkenness,

shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his butt of

Malmsey.

*Off-handedly.

By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary’s

manners changed. Her looks grew bolder, her speech

more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking

out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth,

‘as if to defy the people.’ At last, those who still doubted

doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out

of the ‘Hirondelle,’ her waist squeezed into a waistcoat

like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who, after a

fearful scene with her husband, had taken refuge at her

son’s, was not the least scandalised of the women-folk.

Many other things displeased her. First, Charles had not

attended to her advice about the forbidding of novels;

then the ‘ways of the house’ annoyed her; she allowed

herself to make some remarks, and there were quarrels,

especially one on account of Felicite.

314 of 570

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing

along the passage, had surprised her in company of a

man—a man with a brown collar, about forty years old,

who, at the sound of her step, had quickly escaped

through the kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh, but the

good lady grew angry, declaring that unless morals were to

be laughed at one ought to look after those of one’s

servants.

‘Where were you brought up?’ asked the daughter-inlaw,

with so impertinent a look that Madame Bovary

asked her if she were not perhaps defending her own case.

‘Leave the room!’ said the young woman, springing up

with a bound.

‘Emma! Mamma!’ cried Charles, trying to reconcile

them.

But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was

stamping her feet as she repeated—

‘Oh! what manners! What a peasant!’

He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She

stammered

‘She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps

worse!’

And she was for leaving at once if the other did not

apologise. So Charles went back again to his wife and

315 of 570

Madame Bovary

implored her to give way; he knelt to her; she ended by

saying—

‘Very well! I’ll go to her.’

And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law

with the dignity of a marchioness as she said—

‘Excuse me, madame.’

Then, having gone up again to her room, she threw

herself flat on her bed and cried there like a child, her face

buried in the pillow.

She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of

anything extraordinary occurring, she should fasten a small

piece of white paper to the blind, so that if by chance he

happened to be in Yonville, he could hurry to the lane

behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had been

waiting three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly

caught sight of Rodolphe at the corner of the market. She

felt tempted to open the window and call him, but he had

already disappeared. She fell back in despair.

Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was

walking on the pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went

downstairs, crossed the yard. He was there outside. She

threw herself into his arms.

‘Do take care!’ he said.

‘Ah! if you knew!’ she replied.

316 of 570

Madame Bovary

And she began telling him everything, hurriedly,

disjointedly, exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so

prodigal of parentheses that he understood nothing of it.

‘Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be

patient!’

‘But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years.

A love like ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven.

They torture me! I can bear it no longer! Save me!’

She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed

like flames beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had

never loved her so much, so that he lost his head and said

‘What is, it? What do you wish?’

‘Take me away,’ she cried, ‘carry me off! Oh, I pray

you!’

And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize

there the unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss.

‘But—’ Rodolphe resumed.

‘What?’ ‘Your little girl!’ She reflected a few moments,

then replied—

‘We will take her! It can’t be helped!’

‘What a woman!’ he said to himself, watching her as

she went. For she had run into the garden. Someone was

calling her.

317 of 570

Madame Bovary

On the following days Madame Bovary senior was

much surprised at the change in her daughter-in-law.

Emma, in fact, was showing herself more docile, and even

carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for

pickling gherkins.

Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she

wish by a sort of voluptuous stoicism to feel the more

profoundly the bitterness of the things she was about to

leave?

But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she

lived as lost in the anticipated delight of her coming

happiness.

It was an eternal subject for conversation with

Rodolphe. She leant on his shoulder murmuring—

‘Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think

about it? Can it be? It seems to me that the moment I feel

the carriage start, it will be as if we were rising in a

balloon, as if we were setting out for the clouds. Do you

know that I count the hours? And you?’

Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this

period; she had that indefinable beauty that results from