Madame Bovary (18 page)

They returned to Yonville along the water’s edge. In the warm season, the wider banks revealed the garden walls down to their bases, with short flights of steps descending to the stream. It flowed noiselessly, swift and cold to the eye; tall, slender grasses bent over together, pushed by the current and, like loosened green manes of hair, spread through its limpid waters. Now and then, a thin-legged insect walked or settled on the tip of a reed or the blade of a water lily. The sun pierced with a ray the little blue droplets of the waves that came collapsing one after another; old lopped willows mirrored their gray bark in the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was dinnertime on the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard nothing as they walked but the cadence of their steps on the earth of the path, the words they said to each other, and the brushing of Emma’s dress as it rustled around her.

The garden walls, their copings stuck with pieces of bottle, were as warm as the panes of a greenhouse. In among the bricks, wallflowers had grown up; and with the edge of her open parasol, Madame Bovary, as she passed, crumbled a few of their faded flowers into yellow dust, or a branch of the honeysuckle and the clematis that hung outside would trail for a moment over the silk and catch on the fringe.

They were talking about a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected soon at the theater in Rouen.

“Will you be going?” she asked.

“If I can,” he answered.

Had they nothing else to say to each other? Yet their eyes were full of a more serious conversation; and while they forced themselves to find commonplace remarks, they felt the same languor invading them both; it was like a murmur of the soul, deep, continuous, louder than the murmur of their voices. Surprised by a sweetness new to them, they did not think of describing the sensation to each other or of discovering its cause. Future joys, like tropical shores, project over the immensity that lies before them their native softness, a fragrant breeze, and one grows drowsy in that intoxication without even worrying about the horizon one cannot see.

In one spot, the ground had been churned up by the trampling of the cattle; they had to walk on large green stones, spaced at intervals in the mud. Often she would stop for a minute to look where to place her little boot,—and, tottering on the unsteady rock, her elbows in the air, her body bent, her eye irresolute, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles.

When they reached her garden, Madame Bovary pushed open the small gate, ran up the steps, and disappeared.

Léon went back into his office. The boss was not there; he glanced at the files, then trimmed a quill pen for himself, and at last picked up his hat and left.

He went out into the Pasture, at the top of the Argueil hill, at the edge of the forest; he lay down on the ground under the firs and looked at the sky through his fingers.

“How bored I am!” he said to himself; “how bored I am!”

He felt he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais for a friend and Monsieur Guillaumin for a master. The latter, entirely occupied with business, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and red side-whiskers against his white cravat, understood nothing about the finer subtleties of the intellect, although he affected a stiff English manner that had dazzled the clerk at first. As for the pharmacist’s wife, she was the best wife in Normandy, as gentle as a sheep, cherishing her children, her father, her mother, her cousins, weeping over the misfortunes of others, letting everything go in her household, and detesting corsets;—but she was so slow to move, so boring to listen to, so common in her looks and so limited in her conversation that he had never dreamed, even though she was thirty
years old, he was twenty, they slept in neighboring rooms, and he talked to her every day, that she could be a woman for someone, or that she
possessed any attributes of her sex except the dress she wore.

And who else was there? Binet, a few merchants, two or three tavern keepers, the curé, and lastly Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his two sons, wealthy, loutish, dim-witted men who worked their own lands, feasted by themselves at home, were pious besides, and altogether intolerable company.

But against the shared background of all these human faces, Emma’s stood out, isolated and yet more distant; for he sensed between her and him something like a formless chasm.

In the beginning, he had gone to her house several times in the company of the pharmacist. Charles had not seemed extremely interested in receiving him; and Léon did not know what course to take, between his fear of being indiscreet and his desire for an intimacy that he believed was almost impossible.

With the coming of the first cold weather, Emma left her bedroom and moved into the parlor, a long, low-ceilinged room with a piece of coral on the mantel spreading its many branches before the mirror. Sitting in her armchair, beside the window, she could watch the villagers go past on the sidewalk.

Twice a day, Léon went from his study to the Lion d’Or. Emma, from a distance, would hear him coming; she would lean forward, listening; and the young man would glide past behind the curtain, always dressed the same, without turning his head. But at dusk, when, her chin in her left hand, she had abandoned in her lap the tapestry work she had begun, she would often start at the appearance of that shadow suddenly slipping past. She would stand up and order the table to be set.

Monsieur Homais would arrive during dinner. His fez in hand, he would enter with silent steps so as not to disturb anyone and would always repeat the same phrase: “Good evening, all!” Then, when he had settled in his place, close to the table, between husband and wife, he would ask the doctor for news of his patients, and the doctor would
consult him on the likelihood of his being paid. Then they would talk about what was
in the newspaper.
Homais, by that time of day, knew it almost by heart; and he would relay it in its entirety, including the editorials and the stories of each and every catastrophe that had occurred in France or abroad. But, the subject being exhausted, he would soon venture some observations on the dishes he saw before him. Sometimes, half rising, he would even delicately point out to Madame the tenderest morsel or, turning to the servant, give her some advice about the manipulation
of stews or the hygiene of seasonings; his manner of talking about aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatin was dazzling. As his head was in fact more crowded with recipes than his pharmacy with jars, Homais excelled at making any number of jams, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs, and he was also familiar with the latest inventions in economical calefactors, along with the art of preserving cheeses and healing sick wines.

At eight o’clock, Justin would come get him so that he could close the pharmacy. Monsieur would look at him with a cunning eye, especially if Félicité happened to be present, because he had noticed that his pupil was fond of the doctor’s house.

“My young lad,” he would say, “is beginning to get ideas, and I believe, devil take me, that he’s in love with your maid!”

But a more serious fault, and one with which he reproached him, was that he persisted in listening to their conversations. On Sundays, for instance, they could not get him to leave the parlor, where Madame Homais had summoned him to take the children away, for they were falling asleep in the armchairs, their backs dragging down the loose calico slipcovers.

Not many people came to the pharmacist’s soirées, since his scandal-mongering and political opinions had alienated one after another a variety of respectable people. The clerk was unfailingly present. As soon as he heard the bell ring, he would hurry to Madame Bovary, take her shawl, and put to one side, under the pharmacist’s desk, the capacious list slippers she wore over her shoes in snowy weather.

First they would have a few rounds of trente et un; then Monsieur Homais would play
écarté
with Emma; Léon, behind her, would give advice. Standing with his hands on the back of her chair, he would gaze at the teeth of her comb biting into her chignon. With each movement
she made laying down her cards, her dress would lift on the right side. From her pinned-up hair, a brownish shadow descended her back and, paling by degrees, gradually lost itself in the darker shadows. Her skirt lay draped over the chair on both sides, ballooning out in ample folds, and spread down to the floor. When sometimes Léon felt the sole of his boot resting on it, he would draw back, as though he had stepped on someone.

When the card game was finished, the apothecary and the doctor would play dominoes, and Emma would move to another chair, lean her elbows on the table, and leaf through
L’Illustration.
She had brought along her fashion magazine. Léon would sit down next to her; they would look at the pictures together and wait for each other at the bottoms of the pages. Often she would ask him to read some poems to her; Léon would declaim them in a languid voice, which he would carefully let die away at the love passages. But the noise of the dominoes interfered; Monsieur Homais was good at the game, he would beat Charles by a full double six. Then, having reached three hundred, the two of them would stretch out in front of the fireplace and soon fall asleep. The fire was dying down in the embers; the teapot was empty; Léon was still reading. Emma would listen to him, absently turning the lampshade, its gauze painted with
Pierrots in carriages and tightrope dancers with their balancing poles. Léon would stop, indicating with a gesture his sleeping audience; then they would talk to each other in low voices, and the conversation they had would seem the sweeter to them because it was not overheard.

And so a kind of partnership was established between them, a continuing commerce in books and love songs; Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, was not surprised by this.

For his name day, he received a fine phrenological head, all marked out with numbers down to the thorax and painted blue. This thoughtful attention came from the clerk. He paid him many others, even doing his errands for him in Rouen; and when a certain novelist’s latest book inspired a fashionable craze for succulent plants, Léon bought some for Madame and brought them back in the
Hirondelle
, holding them on his knees and pricking his fingers on their hard spines.

She had a small raised shelf installed against her casement window to hold her little pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they would see each other tending their flowers at their windows.

Of the windows in the village, there was one even more frequently occupied; for on Sundays, from morning till night, and every afternoon, if the weather was bright, one could see at an attic dormer the lean profile of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous whirring was audible as far as the Lion d’Or.

One evening, when he returned home, Léon found in his room a coverlet of velvet and wool with foliage designs on a pale background. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin, the children, the cook, he spoke of it to his employer; everyone wanted to see the coverlet; why was the doctor’s wife being so
generous
to the clerk? It seemed odd, and they formed the definite opinion that she must be
his sweetheart.

He implied as much, since he would talk to you incessantly about her loveliness and her wit, so much so that Binet answered him once quite savagely:

“What does it matter to me, since I don’t belong to her circle!”

He tormented himself searching for some means of
making his declaration
to her; and, always torn between a fear of displeasing her and the shame of being such a coward, he would cry with discouragement and desire. Then he would act with energy and decision; he would write letters, which he would tear up, give himself deadlines, which he would then extend. Often he would set off with the intention of risking everything; but that resolution would quickly desert him in Emma’s presence, and when Charles, arriving unexpectedly, invited him to climb into the
boc
and go along with him on a visit to some patient in the environs, he would immediately accept, bid Madame goodbye, and leave. Wasn’t her husband, after all, a part of her?

As for Emma, she never questioned herself to find out if she loved him. Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning,—a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss. She did not know that the rain forms lakes on the terraces of houses when the drainpipes are blocked, and thus she would have lived on feeling quite safe, had she not suddenly discovered a crack in the wall.

It was a Sunday afternoon in February, when the snow was falling.

They had all gone off, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais and Monsieur Léon, to see a flax mill that was being built in the valley, half a league from Yonville. The apothecary had taken along Napoléon and Athalie, to give them some exercise, and Justin was with them, carrying some umbrellas over his shoulder.

Nothing, however, could have been less interesting than this point of interest. A great expanse of empty land, on which lay, here and there, among the heaps of sand and stones, a few already rusty cogwheels, surrounded a long rectangular building pierced with numbers of little windows. It was not yet finished, and the sky could be seen through the joists of the roofing. Attached to the beam of the gable end, a bouquet of straw mingled with ears of wheat was snapping its red, white, and blue ribbons in the wind.

Homais was talking. He was explaining to
the party
how important this establishment would be in the future, computing the strength of the floors, the thickness of the walls, and regretting keenly that he did not have a measuring stick, such as Monsieur Binet possessed for his personal use.

Emma, who had given him her arm, was leaning lightly against his shoulder, and she was watching the far-off disk of the sun suffusing the mist with its dazzling pallor; but then she turned her head: there was Charles. He had his cap pulled down over his eyebrows, and his thick lips were quivering, which gave a stupid look to his face; even his back, his placid back, was irritating to look at, and she found displayed there, on his coat, all the man’s dullness.