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joy, from enthusiasm, from success, and that is only the

harmony of temperament with circumstances. Her desires,

her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever

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young illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and

the sun make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and

she at length blossomed forth in all the plenitude of her

nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for her long

amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a

strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised

the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little

black down. One would have thought that an artist apt in

conception had arranged the curls of hair upon her neck;

they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the

changing chances of their adultery, that unbound them

every day. Her voice now took more mellow infections,

her figure also; something subtle and penetrating escaped

even from the folds of her gown and from the line of her

foot. Charles, as when they were first married, thought her

delicious and quite irresistible.

When he came home in the middle of the night, he did

not dare to wake her. The porcelain night-light threw a

round trembling gleam upon the ceiling, and the drawn

curtains of the little cot formed as it were a white hut

standing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles

looked at them. He seemed to hear the light breathing of

his child. She would grow big now; every season would

bring rapid progress. He already saw her coming from

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school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on her

jacket, and carrying her basket on her arm. Then she

would have to be sent to the boarding-school; that would

cost much; how was it to be done? Then he reflected. He

thought of hiring a small farm in the neighbourhood, that

he would superintend every morning on his way to his

patients. He would save up what he brought in; he would

put it in the savings-bank. Then he would buy shares

somewhere, no matter where; besides, his practice would

increase; he counted upon that, for he wanted Berthe to

be well-educated, to be accomplished, to learn to play the

piano. Ah! how pretty she would be later on when she

was fifteen, when, resembling her mother, she would, like

her, wear large straw hats in the summer-time; from a

distance they would be taken for two sisters. He pictured

her to himself working in the evening by their side

beneath the light of the lamp; she would embroider him

slippers; she would look after the house; she would fill all

the home with her charm and her gaiety. At last, they

would think of her marriage; they would find her some

good young fellow with a steady business; he would make

her happy; this would last for ever.

Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while

he dozed off by her side she awakened to other dreams.

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To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a

week towards a new land, whence they would return no

more. They went on and on, their arms entwined,

without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there

suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and

bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of

white marble, on whose pointed steeples were storks’

nests. They went at a walking-pace because of the great

flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of

flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices.

They heard the chiming of bells, the neighing of mules,

together with the murmur of guitars and the noise of

fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps of fruit

arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that

smiled beneath playing waters. And then, one night they

came to a fishing village, where brown nets were drying in

the wind along the cliffs and in front of the huts. It was

there that they would stay; they would live in a low, flat-

roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a gulf,

by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in

hammocks, and their existence would be easy and large as

their silk gowns, warm and star-spangled as the nights they

would contemplate. However, in the immensity of this

future that she conjured up, nothing special stood forth;

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the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves;

and it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure,

and bathed in sunshine. But the child began to cough in

her cot or Bovary snored more loudly, and Emma did not

fall asleep till morning, when the dawn whitened the

windows, and when little Justin was already in the square

taking down the shutters of the chemist’s shop.

She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to

him—

‘I want a cloak—a large lined cloak with a deep collar.’

‘You are going on a journey?’ he asked.

‘No; but—never mind. I may count on you, may I not,

and quickly?’

He bowed.

‘Besides, I shall want,’ she went on, ‘a trunk—not too

heavy— handy.’

‘Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet by a foot and a

half, as they are being made just now.’

‘And a travelling bag.’

‘Decidedly,’ thought Lheureux. ‘there’s a row on here.’

‘And,’ said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her

belt, ‘take this; you can pay yourself out of it.’

But the tradesman cried out that she was wrong; they

knew one another; did he doubt her? What childishness!

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She insisted, however, on his taking at least the chain,

and Lheureux had already put it in his pocket and was

going, when she called him back.

‘You will leave everything at your place. As to the

cloak’—she seemed to be reflecting—‘do not bring it

either; you can give me the maker’s address, and tell him

to have it ready for me.’

It was the next month that they were to run away. She

was to leave Yonville as if she was going on some business

to Rouen. Rodolphe would have booked the seats,

procured the passports, and even have written to Paris in

order to have the whole mail-coach reserved for them as

far as Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and go

on thence without stopping to Genoa. She would take

care to send her luggage to Lheureux whence it would be

taken direct to the ‘Hirondelle,’ so that no one would

have any suspicion. And in all this there never was any

allusion to the child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her;

perhaps he no longer thought about it.

He wished to have two more weeks before him to

arrange some affairs; then at the end of a week he wanted

two more; then he said he was ill; next he went on a

journey. The month of August passed, and, after all these

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delays, they decided that it was to be irrevocably fixed for

the 4th September—a Monday.

At length the Saturday before arrived.

Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual.

‘Everything is ready?’ she asked him.

‘Yes.’

Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit

down near the terrace on the kerb-stone of the wall.

‘You are sad,’ said Emma.

‘No; why?’

And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion.

‘It is because you are going away?’ she went on;

‘because you are leaving what is dear to you—your life?

Ah! I understand. I have nothing in the world! you are all

to me; so shall I be to you. I will be your people, your

country; I will tend, I will love you!’

‘How sweet you are!’ he said, seizing her in his arms.

‘Really!’ she said with a voluptuous laugh. ‘Do you

love me? Swear it then!’

‘Do I love you—love you? I adore you, my love.’

The moon, full and purple-coloured, was rising right

out of the earth at the end of the meadow. She rose

quickly between the branches of the poplars, that hid her

here and there like a black curtain pierced with holes.

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Then she appeared dazzling with whiteness in the empty

heavens that she lit up, and now sailing more slowly along,

let fall upon the river a great stain that broke up into an

infinity of stars; and the silver sheen seemed to writhe

through the very depths like a heedless serpent covered

with luminous scales; it also resembled some monster

candelabra all along which sparkled drops of diamonds

running together. The soft night was about them; masses

of shadow filled the branches. Emma, her eyes half closed,

breathed in with deep sighs the fresh wind that was

blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in the rush

of their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came back

to their hearts, full and silent as the flowing river, with the

softness of the perfume of the syringas, and threw across

their memories shadows more immense and more sombre

than those of the still willows that lengthened out over the

grass. Often some night-animal, hedgehog or weasel,

setting out on the hunt, disturbed the lovers, or sometimes

they heard a ripe peach falling all alone from the espalier.

‘Ah! what a lovely night!’ said Rodolphe.

‘We shall have others,’ replied Emma; and, as if

speaking to herself: ‘Yet, it will be good to travel. And

yet, why should my heart be so heavy? Is it dread of the

unknown? The effect of habits left? Or rather—? No; it is

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the excess of happiness. How weak I am, am I not?

Forgive me!’

‘There is still time!’ he cried. ‘Reflect! perhaps you may

repent!’

‘Never!’ she cried impetuously. And coming closer to

him: ‘What ill could come to me? There is no desert, no

precipice, no ocean I would not traverse with you. The

longer we live together the more it will be like an

embrace, every day closer, more heart to heart. There will

be nothing to trouble us, no cares, no obstacle. We shall

be alone, all to ourselves eternally. Oh, speak! Answer

me!’

At regular intervals he answered, ‘Yes—Yes—’ She had

passed her hands through his hair, and she repeated in a

childlike voice, despite the big tears which were falling,

‘Rodolphe! Rodolphe! Ah! Rodolphe! dear little

Rodolphe!’

Midnight struck.

‘Midnight!’ said she. ‘Come, it is to-morrow. One day

more!’

He rose to go; and as if the movement he made had

been the signal for their flight, Emma said, suddenly

assuming a gay air—

‘You have the passports?’

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‘Yes.’

‘You are forgetting nothing?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Certainly.’

‘It is at the Hotel de Provence, is it not, that you will

wait for me at midday?’

He nodded.

‘Till to-morrow then!’ said Emma in a last caress; and

she watched him go.

He did not turn round. She ran after him, and, leaning

over the water’s edge between the bulrushes

‘To-morrow!’ she cried.

He was already on the other side of the river and

walking fast across the meadow.

After a few moments Rodolphe stopped; and when he

saw her with her white gown gradually fade away in the

shade like a ghost, he was seized with such a beating of the

heart that he leant against a tree lest he should fall.

‘What an imbecile I am!’ he said with a fearful oath.

‘No matter! She was a pretty mistress!’

And immediately Emma’s beauty, with all the pleasures

of their love, came back to him. For a moment he

softened; then he rebelled against her.

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‘For, after all,’ he exclaimed, gesticulating, ‘I can’t exile

myself—have a child on my hands.’

He was saying these things to give himself firmness.

‘And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no,

no! a thousand times no! That would be too stupid.’

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat down

quickly at his bureau under the stag’s head that hung as a

trophy on the wall. But when he had the pen between his

fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting on his

elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to him to have

receded into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken

had suddenly placed a distance between them.

To get back something of her, he fetched from the

cupboard at the bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in

which he usually kept his letters from women, and from it

came an odour of dry dust and withered roses. First he saw

a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a handkerchief

of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled;

he had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was

a miniature given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to

him pretentious, and her languishing look in the worst

possible taste. Then, from looking at this image and

recalling the memory of its original, Emma’s features little

by little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living

and the painted face, rubbing one against the other, had

effaced each other. Finally, he read some of her letters;

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they were full of explanations relating to their journey,

short, technical, and urgent, like business notes. He

wanted to see the long ones again, those of old times. In

order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe

disturbed all the others, and mechanically began

rummaging amidst this mass of papers and things, finding

pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair—

hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of

the box, broke when it was opened.

Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the

writing and the style of the letters, as varied as their

orthography. They were tender or jovial, facetious,

melancholy; there were some that asked for love, others

that asked for money. A word recalled faces to him,

certain gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes,