Madame Bovary (15 page)

At the time of the cholera outbreak, in order to enlarge it, they knocked down a section of wall and bought three acres of land next to it; but that whole new portion is almost uninhabited, the graves, as before, continuing to pile up near the gate. The caretaker, who is at the same
time gravedigger and beadle in the church (thus deriving from the parish corpses a twofold profit), has taken advantage of the empty piece of ground to plant potatoes in it. Year by year, however, his little field shrinks, and when an epidemic occurs, he does not know whether he ought to rejoice at the deaths or lament the graves.

“You’re feeding off the dead, Lestiboudois!” the curé said to him at last, one day.

This grim remark made him think; it stopped him for a time; but even today he continues to cultivate his tubers, and even maintains coolly that they come up by themselves.

Since the events that are about to be recounted here, nothing, indeed, has changed in Yonville. The tin tricolored flag still turns on top of the church steeple; the dry-goods shop still waves its two calico streamers in the wind; the pharmacist’s fetuses, like bundles of white punk, decay more and more in their cloudy alcohol; and above the main door of the inn, the aged gold lion, faded by the rains, still displays to the passersby its poodle ringlets.

The evening the Bovarys were to arrive in Yonville, the widow Madame Lefrançois, mistress of the inn, was so very busy that she was sweating large drops as she stirred her pots. The following day was market day in the town. The meats had to be cut up in advance, the chickens gutted, soup and coffee prepared. In addition, she had the meal to get for her boarders and for the doctor, his wife, and their maid; the billiards room was echoing with bursts of laughter; three millers, in the small parlor, were calling for eau-de-vie; the wood was blazing, the charcoal was crackling, and on the long kitchen table, among the quarters of raw mutton, stood stacks of plates trembling to the jolts of the block where the spinach was being chopped. From the poultry yard, one could hear the squawking of the chickens as the servant girl chased them down in order to cut their throats.

A man in green leather slippers, his skin slightly pitted by smallpox, wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was warming his back at the fireplace. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he seemed as much at peace with life as the goldfinch suspended above his head in a wicker cage: this was the pharmacist.

“Artémise!” shouted the mistress of the inn, “cut some kindling, fill the carafes, and bring some eau-de-vie! And hurry up! If only I knew what
dessert to give these people you’re waiting for! Lord! The moving men are starting up that racket in the billiards room again! And their cart is still planted right in front of the gate! The
Hirondelle
is quite liable to smash into it when it comes! Call Polyte and tell him to put it in the shed! … To think that since this morning, Monsieur Homais, they’ve played perhaps fifteen games and drunk eight pots of cider! … Oh, they’re going to tear my cloth,” she went on, watching them from a distance, her skimmer in her hand.

“No great harm in that,” answered Monsieur Homais; “you’d buy another!”

“Another billiards table!” exclaimed the widow.

“That one is falling to pieces, Madame Lefrançois; I tell you again, you’re hurting yourself! You’re only hurting yourself! And besides, nowadays players want narrow pockets and heavy cues. They don’t play billiards anymore; everything has changed! You’ve got to keep up with the times! Look at Tellier, now …”

The innkeeper turned red with vexation. The pharmacist added:

“Whatever you may say, his billiards table is nicer than yours; and supposing they organized a patriotic tournament for Poland, for example, or the flood victims of Lyon …”

“Beggars like him don’t scare us!” interrupted the innkeeper, shrugging her fat shoulders. “Look here, Monsieur Homais! As long as the Lion d’Or exists, people will come. Don’t worry, we’ve got hay in our boots! And one of these mornings you’ll see the Café Français closed, and a nice big notice stuck up on the shutters! … Change my billiards table,” she continued, talking to herself, “when this one’s so handy for folding my wash, and it’s slept six travelers at once in hunting season! … Now, what’s keeping that slowpoke Hivert!”

“Are you going to wait for him before you give your gentlemen their dinner?” asked the pharmacist.

“Wait for him? What about Monsieur Binet! You’ll see him come in on the stroke of six, because there’s no one on this earth as punctual as he is. He always has to sit in his own place in the little dining room! He’d rather you kill him than make him eat his dinner anywhere else! And how finicky he is! And how fussy about his cider! He’s not like Monsieur Léon; now, that one comes in sometimes at seven o’clock, seven-thirty; he doesn’t even look at what he’s eating. What a good young man! Never one word louder than the last.”

“That’s because there’s a good deal of difference, you see, between someone who’s had an education and an old cavalryman turned tax collector.”

The clock struck six. Binet came in.

He was dressed in a blue frock coat that hung straight down all around his thin body, and a leather cap with ear flaps tied up on top of his head by strings, revealing, under the raised visor, a bald forehead flattened by the long presence of a helmet. He wore a black wool vest, a horsehair collar, gray trousers, and, in all seasons, highly polished boots with two parallel bulges caused by the upward pressure of his toes. Not a hair passed beyond the line of his blond chin whisker, which, outlining his jaw, framed, like the edging of a flower bed, his long, gloomy face with its small eyes and hooked nose. He was skilled at all card games and a good hunter, he wrote in a beautiful hand, and in his home he had a lathe on which he spent his time fashioning napkin rings with which he cluttered his house, with the jealousy of an artist and the egotism of a bourgeois.

He headed for the small dining room; but first the three millers had to be gotten out of there; and during the whole of the time his place was being set, Binet remained silently in his seat next to the stove; then he closed the door and took off his cap as usual.

“If he wears out his tongue, it won’t be from making polite conversation!” said the pharmacist, as soon as he was alone with the innkeeper.

“He never talks any more than that,” she answered; “last week I had two cloth salesmen here, lively fellows, and they told such funny stories that night I laughed till I cried; well, he just sat there like a dead fish, and didn’t say a word.”

“Yes,” said the pharmacist, “he has no imagination, no wit, none of those qualities that make a man good company!”

“And yet they say he has abilities,” the innkeeper objected.

“Abilities!” replied Monsieur Homais. “He! Abilities? In his own line of work, perhaps,” he added more calmly.

And he went on:

“Ah! That a businessman with considerable connections, or a lawyer, a doctor, a pharmacist, should be so engrossed that they become odd or even surly—I can understand that; history is full of such examples! But at least they’re thinking about something. Take me, for instance—how
many times have I searched my desk looking for my pen so as to write a label, and found, at last, that I have put it behind my ear!”

Meanwhile, Madame Lefrançois had gone to the door to see if the
Hirondelle
was coming. She gave a start. A man dressed in black suddenly entered the kitchen. One could make out, in the last gleams of twilight, his florid face and athletic body.

“What may I offer you, Monsieur le curé?” asked the mistress of the inn, reaching to the mantelpiece for one of the brass candlesticks lined up there, with their candles, in a colonnade. “Will you have something to drink? A drop of cassis, a glass of wine?”

The clergyman refused very civilly. He had come to pick up his umbrella, which he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent; and after asking Madame Lefrançois if she would be so kind as to send it around to him at the presbytery that evening, he left for the church, where the Angelus was tolling.

When the pharmacist could no longer hear the sound of his shoes on the square, he pronounced the curé’s behavior of a moment before to have been quite unsuitable. This refusal to accept any refreshment seemed to him the most odious sort of hypocrisy; all the priests tippled where no one could see them, and they were trying to bring back the days of the tithe.

The innkeeper came to her curé’s defense:

“Anyway, he could take four like you and bend them over his knee. Last year, he helped our people get in the straw; he could carry as many as six bundles at once—he’s that strong!”

“Bravo!” said the pharmacist. “Then go ahead and send your girls to confession to strapping fellows with temperaments like his! Personally, if I were the government, I’d want the priests to be bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrançois, every month an ample phlebotomy, in the interests of law and order and morality!”

“Quiet, Monsieur Homais! You’re ungodly! You have no religion!”

The pharmacist answered:

“I do have a religion, my own religion; in fact, I have even more than any of them, with their masquerades and their hocus-pocus! Unlike them, I worship God! I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whoever he may be, I don’t really care, who has put us here on earth to perform our
duties as citizens and family men; but I don’t need to go into a church and kiss a silver platter and reach into my pocket to fatten a pack of humbugs who eat better than we do! Because one can honor him just as well in a forest, in a field, or even by gazing up at the ethereal vault, like the ancients. My own God is the God of Socrates, Franklin, Voltaire, and Béranger! I favor
The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar
and the immortal principles of ’89! I cannot, therefore, accept the sort of jolly old God who strolls about his flower beds cane in hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales,
dies uttering a groan and comes back to life after three days: things absurd in themselves and completely opposed, what is more, to all physical laws; which simply goes to show, by the way, that the priests have always wallowed in a shameful ignorance in which they endeavor to engulf the peoples of the world along with them.”

He fell silent, looking around for an audience, for in his excitement the pharmacist had for a moment believed he was in the middle of a town-council meeting. But the innkeeper was no longer listening to him; she was straining her ears toward a distant sound of wheels. The noise of a carriage could be heard mingled with the clatter of loose horseshoes striking the ground, and at last the
Hirondelle
stopped in front of the door.

It was a yellow box carried by two great wheels that came up as high as the canopy, blocking the travelers’ view of the road and spattering their shoulders. The little panes of its narrow hatch windows trembled in their frames when the carriage was closed, and retained patches of mud, here and there, on their ancient coating of dust, which even the rainstorms did not entirely wash away. It was hitched to three horses, the first alone in front, and when they went down a hill, it would bump against the ground.

Several of Yonville’s citizens appeared in the square; they were all talking at once, asking for news, for explanations, for their hampers; Hivert did not know which of them to answer first. It was he who ran errands in town for the country people. He would go into the shops, bring back rolls of leather for the shoemaker, scrap iron for the farrier, a barrel of herrings for his employer, bonnets from the milliner, toupees from the hairdresser; and all along the road, on the way back, he would distribute his packages, hurling them over the farmyard walls, standing up on his seat and shouting at the top of his voice, while his horses went along by themselves.

An accident had delayed him: Madame Bovary’s greyhound had run off across the fields. They had whistled for it a good quarter of an hour. Hivert had even gone half a league back, expecting to see it at any minute; but he had had to continue on his way. Emma had wept, lost her temper; she had blamed Charles for this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a dry-goods merchant, who happened to be with her in the carriage, had tried to console her with numerous examples of lost dogs recognizing their masters after many long years. He had heard of one, he said, that had come back to Paris from Constantinople. Another went fifty leagues in a straight line and swam across four rivers; and his own father had had a poodle that, after twelve years’ absence, had suddenly jumped up on his back, one evening, in the street, as he was on his way to dine in town.

Emma got out first, then Félicité, Monsieur Lheureux, and a wet nurse, and they had to wake Charles in his corner, where he had dropped off into a deep sleep as soon as night fell.

Homais introduced himself; he offered his compliments to Madame, his respects to Monsieur, said he was enchanted to be of service to them, and added cordially that he had taken the liberty of inviting himself to join them for dinner, his wife, as it happened, being absent.

In the kitchen, Madame Bovary went over to the fireplace. With the tips of two fingers, she grasped her dress at knee height, and, having raised it as far as her ankles, held her foot, shod in its little black boot, out to the flame above the leg of mutton that was turning on its spit. The fire shone on her fully, penetrating with a raw light the weave of her dress, the regular pores of her white skin, and even her eyelids, which she closed from time to time. A bright red glow passed over her each time a gust of wind came through the half-open door.

From the other side of the fireplace, a young man with fair hair was watching her in silence.

Because he was very bored in Yonville, where he worked as a clerk for the lawyer Guillaumin, Monsieur Léon Dupuis (for this was he, the other regular guest at the Lion d’Or) would delay his mealtime, hoping some traveler would come to the inn with whom he could converse during the evening. On days when his work was finished, he had no choice, not
knowing what else to do, but to arrive at the exact hour and endure from soup to cheese the unrelieved company of Binet. So it was with pleasure that he accepted the innkeeper’s proposal that he dine with the new arrivals, and they went into the large room, where Madame Lefrançois, with a sense of occasion, had had the four places laid.