第 46 页

‘What did you say?’

She turned her head from side to side with a gentle

movement full of agony, while constantly opening her

mouth as if something very heavy were weighing upon

her tongue. At eight o’clock the vomiting began again.

Charles noticed that at the bottom of the basin there

was a sort of white sediment sticking to the sides of the

porcelain.

‘This is extraordinary—very singular,’ he repeated.

But she said in a firm voice, ‘No, you are mistaken.’

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Then gently, and almost as caressing her, he passed his

hand over her stomach. She uttered a sharp cry. He fell

back terror-stricken.

Then she began to groan, faintly at first. Her shoulders

were shaken by a strong shuddering, and she was growing

paler than the sheets in which her clenched fingers buried

themselves. Her unequal pulse was now almost

imperceptible.

Drops of sweat oozed from her bluish face, that seemed

as if rigid in the exhalations of a metallic vapour. Her teeth

chattered, her dilated eyes looked vaguely about her, and

to all questions she replied only with a shake of the head;

she even smiled once or twice. Gradually, her moaning

grew louder; a hollow shriek burst from her; she

pretended she was better and that she would get up

presently. But she was seized with convulsions and cried

out—

‘Ah! my God! It is horrible!’

He threw himself on his knees by her bed.

‘Tell me! what have you eaten? Answer, for heaven’s

sake!’

And he looked at her with a tenderness in his eyes such

as she had never seen.

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‘Well, there—there!’ she said in a faint voice. He flew

to the writing-table, tore open the seal, and read aloud:

‘Accuse no one.’ He stopped, passed his hands across his

eyes, and read it over again.

‘What! help—help!’

He could only keep repeating the word: ‘Poisoned!

poisoned!’ Felicite ran to Homais, who proclaimed it in

the market-place; Madame Lefrancois heard it at the ‘Lion

d’Or"; some got up to go and tell their neighbours, and all

night the village was on the alert.

Distraught, faltering, reeling, Charles wandered about

the room. He knocked against the furniture, tore his hair,

and the chemist had never believed that there could be so

terrible a sight.

He went home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to

Doctor Lariviere. He lost his head, and made more than

fifteen rough copies. Hippolyte went to Neufchatel, and

Justin so spurred Bovary’s horse that he left it foundered

and three parts dead by the hill at Bois-Guillaume.

Charles tried to look up his medical dictionary, but

could not read it; the lines were dancing.

‘Be calm,’ said the druggist; ‘we have only to

administer a powerful antidote. What is the poison?’

Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic.

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‘Very well,’ said Homais, ‘we must make an analysis.’

For he knew that in cases of poisoning an analysis must

be made; and the other, who did not understand,

answered—

‘Oh, do anything! save her!’

Then going back to her, he sank upon the carpet, and

lay there with his head leaning against the edge of her bed,

sobbing.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said to him. ‘Soon I shall not trouble

you any more.’

‘Why was it? Who drove you to it?’

She replied. ‘It had to be, my dear!’

‘Weren’t you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!’

‘Yes, that is true—you are good—you.’

And she passed her hand slowly over his hair. The

sweetness of this sensation deepened his sadness; he felt his

whole being dissolving in despair at the thought that he

must lose her, just when she was confessing more love for

him than ever. And he could think of nothing; he did not

know, he did not dare; the urgent need for some

immediate resolution gave the finishing stroke to the

turmoil of his mind.

So she had done, she thought, with all the treachery;

and meanness, and numberless desires that had tortured

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her. She hated no one now; a twilight dimness was settling

upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly noises, Emma heard

none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor heart,

sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying

away.

‘Bring me the child,’ she said, raising herself on her

elbow.

‘You are not worse, are you?’ asked Charles.

‘No, no!’

The child, serious, and still half-asleep, was carried in

on the servant’s arm in her long white nightgown, from

which her bare feet peeped out. She looked wonderingly

at the disordered room, and half-closed her eyes, dazzled

by the candles burning on the table. They reminded her,

no doubt, of the morning of New Year’s day and Mid-

Lent, when thus awakened early by candle-light she came

to her mother’s bed to fetch her presents, for she began

saying—

‘But where is it, mamma?’ And as everybody was silent,

‘But I can’t see my little stocking.’

Felicite held her over the bed while she still kept

looking towards the mantelpiece.

‘Has nurse taken it?’ she asked.

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And at this name, that carried her back to the memory

of her adulteries and her calamities, Madame Bovary

turned away her head, as at the loathing of another bitterer

poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe remained

perched on the bed.

‘Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you

are! how hot you are!’

Her mother looked at her. ‘I am frightened!’ cried the

child, recoiling.

Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled.

‘That will do. Take her away,’ cried Charles, who was

sobbing in the alcove.

Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed

less agitated; and at every insignificant word, at every

respiration a little more easy, he regained hope. At last,

when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his arms.

‘Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better.

See! look at her.’

His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as

he said of himself, ‘never beating about the bush,’ he

prescribed, an emetic in order to empty the stomach

completely.

She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became

drawn. Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body

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covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath

the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string nearly

breaking.

After this she began to scream horribly. She cursed the

poison, railed at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust

away with her stiffened arms everything that Charles, in

more agony than herself, tried to make her drink. He

stood up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling sound

in his throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his

whole body. Felicite was running hither and thither in the

room. Homais, motionless, uttered great sighs; and

Monsieur Canivet, always retaining his self-command,

nevertheless began to feel uneasy.

‘The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the

moment that the cause ceases—‘

‘The effect must cease,’ said Homais, ‘that is evident.’

‘Oh, save her!’ cried Bovary.

And, without listening to the chemist, who was still

venturing the hypothesis, ‘It is perhaps a salutary

paroxysm,’ Canivet was about to administer some theriac,

when they heard the cracking of a whip; all the windows

rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up

to their ears in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of

the market. It was Doctor Lariviere.

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The apparition of a god would not have caused more

commotion. Bovary raised his hands; Canivet stopped

short; and Homais pulled off his skull-cap long before the

doctor had come in.

He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of

Bichat, to that generation, now extinct, of philosophical

practitioners, who, loving their art with a fanatical love,

exercised it with enthusiasm and wisdom. Everyone in his

hospital trembled when he was angry; and his students so

revered him that they tried, as soon as they were

themselves in practice, to imitate him as much as possible.

So that in all the towns about they were found wearing his

long wadded merino overcoat and black frock-coat, whose

buttoned cuffs slightly covered his brawny hands—very

beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to

be more ready to plunge into suffering. Disdainful of

honours, of titles, and of academies, like one of the old

Knight-Hospitallers, generous, fatherly to the poor, and

practising virtue without believing in it, he would almost

have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect had

not caused him to be feared as a demon. His glance, more

penetrating than his bistouries, looked straight into your

soul, and dissected every lie athwart all assertions and all

reticences. And thus he went along, full of that debonair

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majesty that is given by the consciousness of great talent,

of fortune, and of forty years of a labourious and

irreproachable life.

He frowned as soon as he had passed the door when he

saw the cadaverous face of Emma stretched out on her

back with her mouth open. Then, while apparently

listening to Canivet, he rubbed his fingers up and down

beneath his nostrils, and repeated—

‘Good! good!’

But he made a slow gesture with his shoulders. Bovary

watched him; they looked at one another; and this man,

accustomed as he was to the sight of pain, could not keep

back a tear that fell on his shirt-frill.

He tried to take Canivet into the next room. Charles

followed him.

‘She is very ill, isn’t she? If we put on sinapisms?

Anything! Oh, think of something, you who have saved

so many!’

Charles caught him in both his arms, and gazed at him

wildly, imploringly, half-fainting against his breast.

‘Come, my poor fellow, courage! There is nothing

more to be done.’

And Doctor Lariviere turned away.

‘You are going?’

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‘I will come back.’

He went out only to give an order to the coachman,

with Monsieur Canivet, who did not care either to have

Emma die under his hands.

The chemist rejoined them on the Place. He could not

by temperament keep away from celebrities, so he begged

Monsieur Lariviere to do him the signal honour of

accepting some breakfast.

He sent quickly to the ‘Lion d’Or’ for some pigeons; to

the butcher’s for all the cutlets that were to be had; to

Tuvache for cream; and to Lestiboudois for eggs; and the

druggist himself aided in the preparations, while Madame

Homais was saying as she pulled together the strings of her

jacket—

‘You must excuse us, sir, for in this poor place, when

one hasn’t been told the night before—‘

‘Wine glasses!’ whispered Homais.

‘If only we were in town, we could fall back upon

stuffed trotters.’

‘Be quiet! Sit down, doctor!’

He thought fit, after the first few mouthfuls, to give

some details as to the catastrophe.

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‘We first had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then

intolerable pains at the epigastrium, super purgation,

coma.’

‘But how did she poison herself?’

‘I don’t know, doctor, and I don’t even know where

she can have procured the arsenious acid.’

Justin, who was just bringing in a pile of plates, began

to tremble.

‘What’s the matter?’ said the chemist.

At this question the young man dropped the whole lot

on the ground with a crash.

‘Imbecile!’ cried Homais. ‘awkward lout! block-head!

confounded ass!’

But suddenly controlling himself—

‘I wished, doctor, to make an analysis, and primo I

delicately introduced a tube—‘

‘You would have done better,’ said the physician, ‘to

introduce your fingers into her throat.’

His colleague was silent, having just before privately

received a severe lecture about his emetic, so that this

good Canivet, so arrogant and so verbose at the time of

the clubfoot, was to-day very modest. He smiled without

ceasing in an approving manner.

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Homais dilated in Amphytrionic pride, and the

affecting thought of Bovary vaguely contributed to his

pleasure by a kind of egotistic reflex upon himself. Then

the presence of the doctor transported him. He displayed

his erudition, cited pell-mell cantharides, upas, the

manchineel, vipers.

‘I have even read that various persons have found

themselves under toxicological symptoms, and, as it were,

thunderstricken by black-pudding that had been subjected

to a too vehement fumigation. At least, this was stated in a

very fine report drawn up by one of our pharmaceutical

chiefs, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de

Gassicourt!’

Madame Homais reappeared, carrying one of those

shaky machines that are heated with spirits of wine; for

Homais liked to make his coffee at table, having,

moreover, torrefied it, pulverised it, and mixed it himself.

‘Saccharum, doctor?’ said he, offering the sugar.

Then he had all his children brought down, anxious to

have the physician’s opinion on their constitutions.

At last Monsieur Lariviere was about to leave, when

Madame Homais asked for a consultation about her

husband. He was making his blood too thick by going to

sleep every evening after dinner.

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‘Oh, it isn’t his blood that’s too thick,’ said the

physician.

And, smiling a little at his unnoticed joke, the doctor

opened the door. But the chemist’s shop was full of

people; he had the greatest difficulty in getting rid of

Monsieur Tuvache, who feared his spouse would get

inflammation of the lungs, because she was in the habit of