第 34 页

*Oh beautiful angel, my Lucie.

‘Yet,’ interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his

rum-sherbet, ‘they say that he is quite admirable in the last

act. I regret leaving before the end, because it was

beginning to amuse me.’

‘Why,’ said the clerk, ‘he will soon give another

performance.’

But Charles replied that they were going back next

day. ‘Unless,’ he added, turning to his wife, ‘you would

like to stay alone, kitten?’

And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity

that presented itself to his hopes, the young man sang the

praises of Lagardy in the last number. It was really superb,

sublime. Then Charles insisted—

‘You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your

mind. You are wrong if you feel that this is doing you the

least good.’

The tables round them, however, were emptying; a

waiter came and stood discreetly near them. Charles, who

understood, took out his purse; the clerk held back his

arm, and did not forget to leave two more pieces of silver

that he made chink on the marble.

374 of 570

Madame Bovary

‘I am really sorry,’ said Bovary, ‘about the money

which you are—‘

The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and

taking his hat said—

‘It is settled, isn’t it? To-morrow at six o’clock?’

Charles explained once more that he could not absent

himself longer, but that nothing prevented Emma—

‘But,’ she stammered, with a strange smile, ‘I am not

sure—‘

‘Well, you must think it over. We’ll see. Night brings

counsel.’ Then to Leon, who was walking along with

them, ‘Now that you are in our part of the world, I hope

you’ll come and ask us for some dinner now and then.’

The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being

obliged, moreover, to go to Yonville on some business for

his office. And they parted before the Saint-Herbland

Passage just as the clock in the cathedral struck half-past

eleven.

375 of 570

Madame Bovary

Part III

376 of 570

Madame Bovary

CHAPTER ONE

Monsieur Leon, while studying law, had gone pretty

often to the dancing-rooms, where he was even a great

success amongst the grisettes, who thought he had a

distinguished air. He was the best-mannered of the

students; he wore his hair neither too long nor too short,

didn’t spend all his quarter’s money on the first day of the

month, and kept on good terms with his professors. As for

excesses, he had always abstained from them, as much

from cowardice as from refinement.

Often when he stayed in his room to read, or else

when sitting of an evening under the lime-trees of the

Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to the ground, and the

memory of Emma came back to him. But gradually this

feeling grew weaker, and other desires gathered over it,

although it still persisted through them all. For Leon did

not lose all hope; there was for him, as it were, a vague

promise floating in the future, like a golden fruit

suspended from some fantastic tree.

Then, seeing her again after three years of absence his

passion reawakened. He must, he thought, at last make up

his mind to possess her. Moreover, his timidity had worn

off by contact with his gay companions, and he returned

377 of 570

Madame Bovary

to the provinces despising everyone who had not with

varnished shoes trodden the asphalt of the boulevards. By

the side of a Parisienne in her laces, in the drawing-room

of some illustrious physician, a person driving his carriage

and wearing many orders, the poor clerk would no doubt

have trembled like a child; but here, at Rouen, on the

harbour, with the wife of this small doctor he felt at his

ease, sure beforehand he would shine. Self-possession

depends on its environment. We don’t speak on the first

floor as on the fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to

have, about her, to guard her virtue, all her banknotes,

like a cuirass in the lining of her corset.

On leaving the Bovarys the night before, Leon had

followed them through the streets at a distance; then

having seen them stop at the ‘Croix-Rouge,’ he turned on

his heel, and spent the night meditating a plan.

So the next day about five o’clock he walked into the

kitchen of the inn, with a choking sensation in his throat,

pale cheeks, and that resolution of cowards that stops at

nothing.

‘The gentleman isn’t in,’ answered a servant.

This seemed to him a good omen. He went upstairs.

378 of 570

Madame Bovary

She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary,

she apologised for having neglected to tell him where they

were staying.

‘Oh, I divined it!’ said Leon.

He pretended he had been guided towards her by

chance, by, instinct. She began to smile; and at once, to

repair his folly, Leon told her that he had spent his

morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town

one after the other.

‘So you have made up your mind to stay?’ he added.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I am wrong. One ought not to

accustom oneself to impossible pleasures when there are a

thousand demands upon one.’

‘Oh, I can imagine!’

‘Ah! no; for you, you are a man!’

But men too had had their trials, and the conversation

went off into certain philosophical reflections. Emma

expatiated much on the misery of earthly affections, and

the eternal isolation in which the heart remains entombed.

To show off, or from a naive imitation of this

melancholy which called forth his, the young man

declared that he had been awfully bored during the whole

course of his studies. The law irritated him, other

vocations attracted him, and his mother never ceased

379 of 570

Madame Bovary

worrying him in every one of her letters. As they talked

they explained more and more fully the motives of their

sadness, working themselves up in their progressive

confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the

complete exposition of their thought, and then sought to

invent a phrase that might express it all the same. She did

not confess her passion for another; he did not say that he

had forgotten her.

Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls

after masked balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the

rendezvous of old when she ran across the fields in the

morning to her lover’s house. The noises of the town

hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if on

purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a

dimity dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of

the old arm-chair; the yellow wall-paper formed, as it

were, a golden background behind her, and her bare head

was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in the

middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds

of her hair.

‘But pardon me!’ she said. ‘It is wrong of me. I weary

you with my eternal complaints.’

‘No, never, never!’

380 of 570

Madame Bovary

‘If you knew,’ she went on, raising to the ceiling her

beautiful eyes, in which a tear was trembling, ‘all that I

had dreamed!’

‘And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I

went away. I dragged myself along the quays, seeking

distraction amid the din of the crowd without being able

to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me. In an

engraver’s shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print

of one of the Muses. She is draped in a tunic, and she is

looking at the moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing

hair. Something drove me there continually; I stayed there

hours together.’ Then in a trembling voice, ‘She

resembled you a little.’

Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might

not see the irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.

‘Often,’ he went on, ‘I wrote you letters that I tore up.’

She did not answer. He continued—

‘I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring

you. I thought I recognised you at street-corners, and I ran

after all the carriages through whose windows I saw a

shawl fluttering, a veil like yours.’

She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without

interruption. Crossing her arms and bending down her

face, she looked at the rosettes on her slippers, and at

381 of 570

Madame Bovary

intervals made little movements inside the satin of them

with her toes.

At last she sighed.

‘But the most wretched thing, is it not—is to drag out,

as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some

use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought

of the sacrifice.’

He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent

immolation, having himself an incredible longing for self-

sacrifice that he could not satisfy.

‘I should much like,’ she said, ‘to be a nurse at a

hospital.’

‘Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see

nowhere any calling—unless perhaps that of a doctor.’

With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted

him to speak of her illness, which had almost killed her.

What a pity! She should not be suffering now! Leon at

once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he

had even made his will, asking to be buried in that

beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her.

For this was how they would have wished to be, each

setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their

past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins

out the sentiment.

382 of 570

Madame Bovary

But at this invention of the rug she asked, ‘But why?’

‘Why?’ He hesitated. ‘Because I loved you so!’ And

congratulating himself at having surmounted the difficulty,

Leon watched her face out of the corner of his eyes.

It was like the sky when a gust of wind drives the

clouds across. The mass of sad thoughts that darkened

them seemed to be lifted from her blue eyes; her whole

face shone. He waited. At last she replied—

‘I always suspected it.’

Then they went over all the trifling events of that far-

off existence, whose joys and sorrows they had just

summed up in one word. They recalled the arbour with

clematis, the dresses she had worn, the furniture of her

room, the whole of her house.

‘And our poor cactuses, where are they?’

‘The cold killed them this winter.’

‘Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? I

often saw them again as of yore, when on the summer

mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds, and I saw

your two bare arms passing out amongst the flowers.’

‘Poor friend!’ she said, holding out her hand to him.

Leon swiftly pressed his lips to it. Then, when he had

taken a deep breath—

383 of 570

Madame Bovary

‘At that time you were to me I know not what

incomprehensible force that took captive my life. Once,

for instance, I went to see you; but you, no doubt, do not

remember it.’

‘I do,’ she said; ‘go on.’

‘You were downstairs in the ante-room, ready to go

out, standing on the last stair; you were wearing a bonnet

with small blue flowers; and without any invitation from

you, in spite of myself, I went with you. Every moment,

however, I grew more and more conscious of my folly,

and I went on walking by you, not daring to follow you

completely, and unwilling to leave you. When you went

into a shop, I waited in the street, and I watched you

through the window taking off your gloves and counting

the change on the counter. Then you rang at Madame

Tuvache’s; you were let in, and I stood like an idiot in

front of the great heavy door that had closed after you.’

Madame Bovary, as she listened to him, wondered that

she was so old. All these things reappearing before her

seemed to widen out her life; it was like some sentimental

immensity to which she returned; and from time to time

she said in a low voice, her eyes half closed—

‘Yes, it is true—true—true!’

384 of 570

Madame Bovary

They heard eight strike on the different clocks of the

Beauvoisine quarter, which is full of schools, churches,

and large empty hotels. They no longer spoke, but they

felt as they looked upon each other a buzzing in their

heads, as if something sonorous had escaped from the fixed

eyes of each of them. They were hand in hand now, and

the past, the future, reminiscences and dreams, all were

confounded in the sweetness of this ecstasy. Night was

darkening over the walls, on which still shone, half hidden

in the shade, the coarse colours of four bills representing

four scenes from the ‘Tour de Nesle,’ with a motto in

Spanish and French at the bottom. Through the sash-

window a patch of dark sky was seen between the pointed

roofs.

She rose to light two wax-candles on the drawers, then

she sat down again.

‘Well!’ said Leon.

‘Well!’ she replied.

He was thinking how to resume the interrupted

conversation, when she said to him—

‘How is it that no one until now has ever expressed

such sentiments to me?’

The clerk said that ideal natures were difficult to

understand. He from the first moment had loved her, and

385 of 570

Madame Bovary

he despaired when he thought of the happiness that would

have been theirs, if thanks to fortune, meeting her earlier,

they had been indissolubly bound to one another.

‘I have sometimes thought of it,’ she went on.

‘What a dream!’ murmured Leon. And fingering gently

the blue binding of her long white sash, he added, ‘And

who prevents us from beginning now?’

‘No, my friend,’ she replied; ‘I am too old; you are too

young. Forget me! Others will love you; you will love

them.’

‘Not as you!’ he cried.

‘What a child you are! Come, let us be sensible. I wish

it.’

She showed him the impossibility of their love, and

that they must remain, as formerly, on the simple terms of

a fraternal friendship.

Was she speaking thus seriously? No doubt Emma did