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be seen, inexpressive and peaceful, with their hair and

complexions looking like silver medals tarnished by steam

of lead. The young beaux were strutting about in the pit,

showing in the opening of their waistcoats their pink or

applegreen cravats, and Madame Bovary from above

admired them leaning on their canes with golden knobs in

the open palm of their yellow gloves.

Now the lights of the orchestra were lit, the lustre, let

down from the ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its

facets a sudden gaiety over the theatre; then the musicians

came in one after the other; and first there was the

protracted hubbub of the basses grumbling, violins

squeaking, cornets trumpeting, flutes and flageolets fifing.

But three knocks were heard on the stage, a rolling of

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drums began, the brass instruments played some chords,

and the curtain rising, discovered a country-scene.

It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a fountain

shaded by an oak to the left. Peasants and lords with plaids

on their shoulders were singing a hunting-song together;

then a captain suddenly came on, who evoked the spirit of

evil by lifting both his arms to heaven. Another appeared;

they went away, and the hunters started afresh. She felt

herself transported to the reading of her youth, into the

midst of Walter Scott. She seemed to hear through the

mist the sound of the Scotch bagpipes re-echoing over the

heather. Then her remembrance of the novel helping her

to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by

phrase, while vague thoughts that came back to her

dispersed at once again with the bursts of music. She gave

herself up to the lullaby of the melodies, and felt all her

being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her

nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes,

the scenery, the actors, the painted trees that shook when

anyone walked, and the velvet caps, cloaks, swords—all

those imaginary things that floated amid the harmony as in

the atmosphere of another world. But a young woman

stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green.

She was left alone, and the flute was heard like the

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murmur of a fountain or the warbling of birds. Lucie

attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She plained of

love; she longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life,

would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly

Edgar-Lagardy appeared.

He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the

majesty of marble to the ardent races of the South. His

vigorous form was tightly clad in a brown-coloured

doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against his left

thigh, and he cast round laughing looks showing his white

teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard him

sing one night on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended

boats, had fallen in love with him. She had ruined herself

for him. He had deserted her for other women, and this

sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his artistic

reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to

slip into his advertisements some poetic phrase on the

fascination of his person and the susceptibility of his soul.

A fine organ, imperturbable coolness, more temperament

than intelligence, more power of emphasis than of real

singing, made up the charm of this admirable charlatan

nature, in which there was something of the hairdresser

and the toreador.

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From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed

Lucy in his arms, he left her, he came back, he seemed

desperate; he had outbursts of rage, then elegiac gurglings

of infinite sweetness, and the notes escaped from his bare

neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward to see

him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She

was filling her heart with these melodious lamentations

that were drawn out to the accompaniment of the double-

basses, like the cries of the drowning in the tumult of a

tempest. She recognised all the intoxication and the

anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima

donna seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience,

and this illusion that charmed her as some very thing of

her own life. But no one on earth had loved her with such

love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit night

when they said, ‘To-morrow! to-morrow!’ The theatre

rang with cheers; they recommenced the entire

movement; the lovers spoke of the flowers on their tomb,

of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they uttered the final

adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the

‘But why,’ asked Bovary, ‘does that gentleman

persecute her?’

‘No, no!’ she answered; ‘he is her lover!’

vibrations of the last chords.

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‘Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other

one who came on before said, ‘I love Lucie and she loves

me!’ Besides, he went off with her father arm in arm. For

he certainly is her father, isn’t he—the ugly little man with

a cock’s feather in his hat?’

Despite Emma’s explanations, as soon as the recitative

duet began in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable

machinations to his master Ashton, Charles, seeing the

false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie, thought it was a

love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that he

did not understand the story because of the music, which

interfered very much with the words.

‘What does it matter?’ said Emma. ‘Do be quiet!’

‘Yes, but you know,’ he went on, leaning against her

shoulder, ‘I like to understand things.’

‘Be quiet! be quiet!’ she cried impatiently.

Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, a

wreath of orange blossoms in her hair, and paler than the

white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed of her marriage

day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the

little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not

she, like this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the

contrary, had been joyous, without seeing the abyss into

which she was throwing herself. Ah! if in the freshness of

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her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the

disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life

upon some great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness,

voluptuousness, and duty blending, she would never have

fallen from so high a happiness. But that happiness, no

doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She

now knew the smallness of the passions that art

exaggerated. So, striving to divert her thoughts, Emma

determined now to see in this reproduction of her sorrows

only a plastic fantasy, well enough to please the eye, and

she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when at the

back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man

appeared in a black cloak.

His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he made, and

immediately the instruments and the singers began the

sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury, dominated all the others

with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal

provocations at him in deep notes; Lucie uttered her shrill

plaint, Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the

middle register, and the bass of the minister pealed forth

like an organ, while the voices of the women repeating his

words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were all

in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy,

terror, and stupefaction breathed forth at once from their

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half-opened mouths. The outraged lover brandished his

naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with jerks to the

movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left

with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt

spurs of his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she

thought must have an inexhaustible love to lavish it upon

the crowd with such effusion. All her small fault-findings

faded before the poetry of the part that absorbed her; and,

drawn towards this man by the illusion of the character,

she tried to imagine to herself his life—that life resonant,

extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if

fate had willed it. They would have known one another,

loved one another. With him, through all the kingdoms of

Europe she would have travelled from capital to capital,

sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the flowers

thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then

each evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden

trellis-work she would have drunk in eagerly the

expansions of this soul that would have sung for her alone;

from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked at

her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at

her; it was certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take

refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself,

and to say to him, to cry out, ‘Take me away! carry me

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with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour and all my

dreams!’

The curtain fell.

The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths,

the waving of the fans, made the air more suffocating.

Emma wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors,

and she fell back in her arm-chair with palpitations that

choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to

the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.

He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for

his elbows were jerked at every step because of the glass he

held in his hands, and he even spilt three-fourths on the

shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who feeling the

cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered cries like a

peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband,

who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and

while she was with her handkerchief wiping up the stains

from her handsome cherry-coloured taffeta gown, he

angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement.

At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of

breath—

‘Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there.

There is such a crowd—SUCH a crowd!’

He added—

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‘Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Leon!’

‘Leon?’

‘Himself! He’s coming along to pay his respects.’ And

as he finished these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered

the box.

He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and

Madame Bovary extended hers, without doubt obeying

the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since

that spring evening when the rain fell upon the green

leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the

window. But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the

situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her

memories, and began stammering a few hurried words.

‘Ah, good-day! What! you here?’

‘Silence!’ cried a voice from the pit, for the third act

was beginning.

‘So you are at Rouen?’

‘Yes.’

‘And since when?’

‘Turn them out! turn them out!’ People were looking

at them. They were silent.

But from that moment she listened no more; and the

chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his

servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for her as far

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off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the

characters more remote. She remembered the games at

cards at the druggist’s, and the walk to the nurse’s, the

reading in the arbour, the tete-a-tete by the fireside—all

that poor love, so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so

tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten. And why

had he come back? What combination of circumstances

had brought him back into her life? He was standing

behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of

the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath

the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair.

‘Does this amuse you?’ said he, bending over her so

closely that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek.

She replied carelessly—

‘Oh, dear me, no, not much.’

Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre

and go and take an ice somewhere.

‘Oh, not yet; let us stay,’ said Bovary. ‘Her hair’s

undone; this is going to be tragic.’

But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the

acting of the singer seemed to her exaggerated.

‘She screams too loud,’ said she, turning to Charles,

who was listening.

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‘Yes—a little,’ he replied, undecided between the

frankness of his pleasure and his respect for his wife’s

opinion.

Then with a sigh Leon said—

‘The heat is—‘

‘Unbearable! Yes!’

‘Do you feel unwell?’ asked Bovary.

‘Yes, I am stifling; let us go.’

Monsieur Leon put her long lace shawl carefully about

her shoulders, and all three went off to sit down in the

harbour, in the open air, outside the windows of a cafe.

First they spoke of her illness, although Emma

interrupted Charles from time to time, for fear, she said, of

boring Monsieur Leon; and the latter told them that he

had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large office, in

order to get practice in his profession, which was different

in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe,

the Homais, Mere Lefrancois, and as they had, in the

husband’s presence, nothing more to say to one another,

the conversation soon came to an end.

People coming out of the theatre passed along the

pavement, humming or shouting at the top of their voices,

‘O bel ange, ma Lucie!*’ Then Leon, playing the

dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tambourini,

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Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them,

Lagardy, despite his grand outbursts, was nowhere.