第 6 页

Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took

pleasure in the society of the good sisters, who, to amuse

her, took her to the chapel, which one entered from the

refectory by a long corridor. She played very little during

recreation hours, knew her catechism well, and it was she

who always answered Monsieur le Vicaire’s difficult

questions. Living thus, without every leaving the warm

atmosphere of the classrooms, and amid these pale-faced

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women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she was softly

lulled by the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes of

the altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the lights of

the tapers. Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the

pious vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and

she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with

sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross

he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat

nothing a whole day. She puzzled her head to find some

vow to fulfil.

When she went to confession, she invented little sins in

order that she might stay there longer, kneeling in the

shadow, her hands joined, her face against the grating

beneath the whispering of the priest. The comparisons of

betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage,

that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of

unexpected sweetness.

In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious

reading in the study. On week-nights it was some abstract

of sacred history or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous,

and on Sundays passages from the ‘Genie du

Christianisme,’ as a recreation. How she listened at first to

the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies

reechoing through the world and eternity! If her

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childhood had been spent in the shop-parlour of some

business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart

to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to

us only through translation in books. But she knew the

country too well; she knew the lowing of cattle, the

milking, the ploughs.

Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the

contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only

for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when

broken up by ruins.

She wanted to get some personal profit out of things,

and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the

immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament

more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not

landscapes.

At the convent there was an old maid who came for a

week each month to mend the linen. Patronized by the

clergy, because she belonged to an ancient family of

noblemen ruined by the Revolution, she dined in the

refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal

had a bit of chat with them before going back to her

work. The girls often slipped out from the study to go and

see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the last

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century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched

away.

She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the

town, and on the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she

always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of which

the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the

intervals of her work. They were all love, lovers,

sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions,

postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on

every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears

and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady

groves, ‘gentlemen’ brave as lions, gentle as lambs,

virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and

weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at

fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from

old lending libraries.

Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with

historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and

minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old

manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in

the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the

stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume

galloping on his black horse from the distant fields. At this

time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic

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veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc,

Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and

Clemence Isaure stood out to her like comets in the dark

immensity of heaven, where also were seen, lost in

shadow, and all unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the

dying Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI, a little of St.

Bartholomew’s Day, the plume of the Bearnais, and always

the remembrance of the plates painted in honour of Louis

XIV.

In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was

nothing but little angels with golden wings, madonnas,

lagunes, gondoliers;-mild compositions that allowed her to

catch a glimpse athwart the obscurity of style and the

weakness of the music of the attractive phantasmagoria of

sentimental realities. Some of her companions brought

‘keepsakes’ given them as new year’s gifts to the convent.

These had to be hidden; it was quite an undertaking; they

were read in the dormitory. Delicately handling the

beautiful satin bindings, Emma looked with dazzled eyes at

the names of the unknown authors, who had signed their

verses for the most part as counts or viscounts.

She trembled as she blew back the tissue paper over the

engraving and saw it folded in two and fall gently against

the page. Here behind the balustrade of a balcony was a

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young man in a short cloak, holding in his arms a young

girl in a white dress wearing an alms-bag at her belt; or

there were nameless portraits of English ladies with fair

curls, who looked at you from under their round straw

hats with their large clear eyes. Some there were lounging

in their carriages, gliding through parks, a greyhound

bounding along in front of the equipage driven at a trot by

two midget postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming

on sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon through a

slightly open window half draped by a black curtain. The

naive ones, a tear on their cheeks, were kissing doves

through the bars of a Gothic cage, or, smiling, their heads

on one side, were plucking the leaves of a marguerite with

their taper fingers, that curved at the tips like peaked

shoes. And you, too, were there, Sultans with long pipes

reclining beneath arbours in the arms of Bayaderes;

Djiaours, Turkish sabres, Greek caps; and you especially,

pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that often show us at

once palm trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion to the

left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by

a very neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular

sunbeam trembling in the water, where, standing out in

relief like white excoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans

are swimming about.

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And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall

above Emma’s head lighted up all these pictures of the

world, that passed before her one by one in the silence of

the dormitory, and to the distant noise of some belated

carriage rolling over the Boulevards.

When her mother died she cried much the first few

days. She had a funeral picture made with the hair of the

deceased, and, in a letter sent to the Bertaux full of sad

reflections on life, she asked to be buried later on in the

same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill, and

came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had

reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never

attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself glide along

with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to

all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves,

the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the

Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it,

would not confess it, continued from habit, and at last was

surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness

at heart than wrinkles on her brow.

The good nuns, who had been so sure of her vocation,

perceived with great astonishment that Mademoiselle

Rouault seemed to be slipping from them. They had

indeed been so lavish to her of prayers, retreats, novenas,

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and sermons, they had so often preached the respect due

to saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice as to

the modesty of the body and the salvation of her soul, that

she did as tightly reined horses; she pulled up short and the

bit slipped from her teeth. This nature, positive in the

midst of its enthusiasms, that had loved the church for the

sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs,

and literature for its passional stimulus, rebelled against the

mysteries of faith as it grew irritated by discipline, a thing

antipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her

from school, no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady

Superior even thought that she had latterly been

somewhat irreverent to the community.

Emma, at home once more, first took pleasure in

looking after the servants, then grew disgusted with the

country and missed her convent. When Charles came to

the Bertaux for the first time, she thought herself quite

disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing

more to feel.

But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the

disturbance caused by the presence of this man, had

sufficed to make her believe that she at last felt that

wondrous passion which, till then, like a great bird with

rose-coloured wings, hung in the splendour of the skies of

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poesy; and now she could not think that the calm in

which she lived was the happiness she had dreamed.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the

happiest time of her life—the honeymoon, as people

called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have

been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with

sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of

laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken

curtains to ride slowly up steep road, listening to the song

of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with

the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at

sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of

lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces

above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for

the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth

must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and

that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over

balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a

Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet

coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and

frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these

things to someone. But how tell an undefinable

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uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds?

Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.

If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his

look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that

a sudden plenty would have gone out from her heart, as

the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as

the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater

became the gulf that separated her from him.

Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street

pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their

everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or

thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he

lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from

Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and

one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship

to her that she had come across in a novel.

A man, on the contrary, should he not know

everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into

the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all

mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing,

wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented

this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she

gave him.

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Sometimes she would draw; and it was great

amusement to Charles to stand there bolt upright and

watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes half-closed

the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers,

little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her

fingers glided over it the more he wondered. She struck

the notes with aplomb, and ran from top to bottom of the

keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old

instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the

other end of the village when the window was open, and

often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad bareheaded

and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of

paper in his hand.

Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her

house. She sent the patients’ accounts in well-phrased

letters that had no suggestion of a bill. When they had a

neighbour to dinner on Sundays, she managed to have

some tasty dish—piled up pyramids of greengages on vine

leaves, served up preserves turned out into plates—and

even spoke of buying finger-glasses for dessert. From all

this much consideration was extended to Bovary.

Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for

possessing such a wife. He showed with pride in the sitting

room two small pencil sketched by her that he had had