第 35 页

not herself know, quite absorbed as she was by the charm

of the seduction, and the necessity of defending herself

from it; and contemplating the young man with a moved

look, she gently repulsed the timid caresses that his

trembling hands attempted.

‘Ah! forgive me!’ he cried, drawing back.

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Emma was seized with a vague fear at this shyness,

more dangerous to her than the boldness of Rodolphe

when he advanced to her open-armed. No man had ever

seemed to her so beautiful. An exquisite candour

emanated from his being. He lowered his long fine

eyelashes, that curled upwards. His cheek, with the soft

skin reddened, she thought, with desire of her person, and

Emma felt an invincible longing to press her lips to it.

Then, leaning towards the clock as if to see the time—

‘Ah! how late it is!’ she said; ‘how we do chatter!’

He understood the hint and took up his hat.

‘It has even made me forget the theatre. And poor

Bovary has left me here especially for that. Monsieur

Lormeaux, of the Rue Grand-Pont, was to take me and

his wife.’

And the opportunity was lost, as she was to leave the

next day.

‘Really!’ said Leon.

‘Yes.’

‘But I must see you again,’ he went on. ‘I wanted to

tell you—‘

‘What?’

‘Something—important—serious. Oh, no! Besides, you

will not go; it is impossible. If you should—listen to me.

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Then you have not understood me; you have not

guessed—‘

‘Yet you speak plainly,’ said Emma.

‘Ah! you can jest. Enough! enough! Oh, for pity’s sake,

let me see you once—only once!’

‘Well—‘She stopped; then, as if thinking better of it,

‘Oh, not here!’

‘Where you will.’

‘Will you—‘She seemed to reflect; then abruptly, ‘Tomorrow

at eleven o’clock in the cathedral.’

‘I shall be there,’ he cried, seizing her hands, which she

disengaged.

And as they were both standing up, he behind her, and

Emma with her head bent, he stooped over her and

pressed long kisses on her neck.

‘You are mad! Ah! you are mad!’ she said, with

sounding little laughs, while the kisses multiplied.

Then bending his head over her shoulder, he seemed to

beg the consent of her eyes. They fell upon him full of an

icy dignity.

Leon stepped back to go out. He stopped on the

threshold; then he whispered with a trembling voice,

‘Tomorrow!’

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She answered with a nod, and disappeared like a bird

into the next room.

In the evening Emma wrote the clerk an interminable

letter, in which she cancelled the rendezvous; all was over;

they must not, for the sake of their happiness, meet again.

But when the letter was finished, as she did not know

Leon’s address, she was puzzled.

‘I’ll give it to him myself,’ she said; ‘he will come.’

The next morning, at the open window, and humming

on his balcony, Leon himself varnished his pumps with

several coatings. He put on white trousers, fine socks, a

green coat, emptied all the scent he had into his

handkerchief, then having had his hair curled, he uncurled

it again, in order to give it a more natural elegance.

‘It is still too early,’ he thought, looking at the

hairdresser’s cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of

nine. He read an old fashion journal, went out, smoked a

cigar, walked up three streets, thought it was time, and

went slowly towards the porch of Notre Dame.

It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate

sparkled in the jeweller’s windows, and the light falling

obliquely on the cathedral made mirrors of the corners of

the grey stones; a flock of birds fluttered in the grey sky

round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with

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cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its

pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses,

unevenly spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and

chickweed for the birds; the fountains gurgled in the

centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst melons, piled up

in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting

paper round bunches of violets.

The young man took one. It was the first time that he

had bought flowers for a woman, and his breast, as he

smelt them, swelled with pride, as if this homage that he

meant for another had recoiled upon himself.

But he was afraid of being seen; he resolutely entered

the church. The beadle, who was just then standing on the

threshold in the middle of the left doorway, under the

‘Dancing Marianne,’ with feather cap, and rapier dangling

against his calves, came in, more majestic than a cardinal,

and as shining as a saint on a holy pyx.

He came towards Leon, and, with that smile of

wheedling benignity assumed by ecclesiastics when they

question children—

‘The gentleman, no doubt, does not belong to these

parts? The gentleman would like to see the curiosities of

the church?’

‘No!’ said the other.

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And he first went round the lower aisles. Then he went

out to look at the Place. Emma was not coming yet. He

went up again to the choir.

The nave was reflected in the full fonts with the

beginning of the arches and some portions of the glass

windows. But the reflections of the paintings, broken by

the marble rim, were continued farther on upon the flagstones,

like a many-coloured carpet. The broad daylight

from without streamed into the church in three enormous

rays from the three opened portals. From time to time at

the upper end a sacristan passed, making the oblique

genuflexion of devout persons in a hurry. The crystal

lustres hung motionless. In the choir a silver lamp was

burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the

church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of

a closing grating, its echo reverberating under the lofty

vault.

Leon with solemn steps walked along by the walls. Life

had never seemed so good to him. She would come

directly, charming, agitated, looking back at the glances

that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her gold

eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that

he had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of

yielding virtue. The church like a huge boudoir spread

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around her; the arches bent down to gather in the shade

the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent

to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she

might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-

smelling odours.

But she did not come. He sat down on a chair, and his

eyes fell upon a blue stained window representing

boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at it long,

attentively, and he counted the scales of the fishes and the

button-holes of the doublets, while his thoughts wandered

off towards Emma.

The beadle, standing aloof, was inwardly angry at this

individual who took the liberty of admiring the cathedral

by himself. He seemed to him to be conducting himself in

a monstrous fashion, to be robbing him in a sort, and

almost committing sacrilege.

But a rustle of silk on the flags, the tip of a bonnet, a

lined cloak—it was she! Leon rose and ran to meet her.

Emma was pale. She walked fast.

‘Read!’ she said, holding out a paper to him. ‘Oh, no!’

And she abruptly withdrew her hand to enter the

chapel of the Virgin, where, kneeling on a chair, she

began to pray.

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The young man was irritated at this bigot fancy; then

he nevertheless experienced a certain charm in seeing her,

in the middle of a rendezvous, thus lost in her devotions,

like an Andalusian marchioness; then he grew bored, for

she seemed never coming to an end.

Emma prayed, or rather strove to pray, hoping that

some sudden resolution might descend to her from

heaven; and to draw down divine aid she filled full her

eyes with the splendours of the tabernacle. She breathed in

the perfumes of the full-blown flowers in the large vases,

and listened to the stillness of the church, that only

heightened the tumult of her heart.

She rose, and they were about to leave, when the

beadle came forward, hurriedly saying—

‘Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts?

Madame would like to see the curiosities of the church?’

‘Oh, no!’ cried the clerk.

‘Why not?’ said she. For she clung with her expiring

virtue to the Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs—anything.

Then, in order to proceed ‘by rule,’ the beadle

conducted them right to the entrance near the square,

where, pointing out with his cane a large circle of block-

stones without inscription or carving—

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‘This,’ he said majestically, ‘is the circumference of the

beautiful bell of Ambroise. It weighed forty thousand

pounds. There was not its equal in all Europe. The

workman who cast it died of the joy—‘

‘Let us go on,’ said Leon.

The old fellow started off again; then, having got back

to the chapel of the Virgin, he stretched forth his arm with

an all-embracing gesture of demonstration, and, prouder

than a country squire showing you his espaliers, went

on—

‘This simple stone covers Pierre de Breze, lord of

Varenne and of Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou, and

governor of Normandy, who died at the battle of

Montlhery on the 16th of July, 1465.’

Leon bit his lips, fuming.

‘And on the right, this gentleman all encased in iron,

on the prancing horse, is his grandson, Louis de Breze,

lord of Breval and of Montchauvet, Count de Maulevrier,

Baron de Mauny, chamberlain to the king, Knight of the

Order, and also governor of Normandy; died on the 23rd

of July, 1531—a Sunday, as the inscription specifies; and

below, this figure, about to descend into the tomb,

portrays the same person. It is not possible, is it, to see a

more perfect representation of annihilation?’

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Madame Bovary put up her eyeglasses. Leon,

motionless, looked at her, no longer even attempting to

speak a single word, to make a gesture, so discouraged was

he at this two-fold obstinacy of gossip and indifference.

The everlasting guide went on—

‘Near him, this kneeling woman who weeps is his

spouse, Diane de Poitiers, Countess de Breze, Duchess de

Valentinois, born in 1499, died in 1566, and to the left,

the one with the child is the Holy Virgin. Now turn to

this side; here are the tombs of the Ambroise. They were

both cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one was

minister under Louis XII. He did a great deal for the

cathedral. In his will he left thirty thousand gold crowns

for the poor.’

And without stopping, still talking, he pushed them

into a chapel full of balustrades, some put away, and

disclosed a kind of block that certainly might once have

been an ill-made statue.

‘Truly,’ he said with a groan, ‘it adorned the tomb of

Richard Coeur de Lion, King of England and Duke of

Normandy. It was the Calvinists, sir, who reduced it to

this condition. They had buried it for spite in the earth,

under the episcopal seat of Monsignor. See! this is the

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door by which Monsignor passes to his house. Let us pass

on quickly to see the gargoyle windows.’

But Leon hastily took some silver from his pocket and

seized Emma’s arm. The beadle stood dumfounded, not

able to understand this untimely munificence when there

were still so many things for the stranger to see. So calling

him back, he cried—

‘Sir! sir! The steeple! the steeple!’

‘No, thank you!’ said Leon.

‘You are wrong, sir! It is four hundred and forty feet

high, nine less than the great pyramid of Egypt. It is all

cast; it—‘

Leon was fleeing, for it seemed to him that his love,

that for nearly two hours now had become petrified in the

church like the stones, would vanish like a vapour through

that sort of truncated funnel, of oblong cage, of open

chimney that rises so grotesquely from the cathedral like

the extravagant attempt of some fantastic brazier.

‘But where are we going?’ she said.

Making no answer, he walked on with a rapid step; and

Madame Bovary was already, dipping her finger in the

holy water when behind them they heard a panting breath

interrupted by the regular sound of a cane. Leon turned

back.

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‘Sir!’

‘What is it?’

And he recognised the beadle, holding under his arms

and balancing against his stomach some twenty large sewn

volumes. They were works ‘which treated of the

cathedral.’

‘Idiot!’ growled Leon, rushing out of the church.

A lad was playing about the close.

‘Go and get me a cab!’

The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quatre-

Vents; then they were alone a few minutes, face to face,

and a little embarrassed.

‘Ah! Leon! Really—I don’t know—if I ought,’ she

whispered. Then with a more serious air, ‘Do you know,

it is very improper—‘

‘How so?’ replied the clerk. ‘It is done at Paris.’

And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her.

Still the cab did not come. Leon was afraid she might

go back into the church. At last the cab appeared.

‘At all events, go out by the north porch,’ cried the

beadle, who was left alone on the threshold, ‘so as to see

the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, Paradise, King

David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames.’

‘Where to, sir?’ asked the coachman.

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‘Where you like,’ said Leon, forcing Emma into the

cab.

And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the

Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai

Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short before the

statue of Pierre Corneille.