Madame Bovary (28 page)

“Come, now, Emma,” he would say, “it’s time.”

“Yes, I’m coming!” she would answer.

Meanwhile, because the candles dazzled him, he would turn to the wall and fall asleep. She would make her escape holding her breath, smiling, trembling, wearing almost nothing.

Rodolphe had a large cloak; he would wrap her in it, and, putting his arm around her waist, silently lead her to the bottom of the garden.

It was to the arbor that they went, to that same bench made of rotten sticks from which Léon had once gazed at her so lovingly on summer evenings. She hardly thought of him now.

The stars shone through the branches of the leafless jasmine. They could hear the stream flowing behind them, and from time to time, on the bank, the clacking of dry reeds. Mounds of shadow loomed here and there in the darkness, and sometimes they would quiver with a single motion, rise up, and bend over like immense black waves advancing to submerge them. The cold of the night made them clasp each
other all the more tightly; the sighs on their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes, which they could barely glimpse, seemed larger; and in the midst of the silence, the words they spoke so quietly dropped into their souls, echoing and reechoing with a crystalline sonority in multiplied vibrations.

When the night was rainy, they would take refuge in the consulting room, between the shed and the stable. She would light a kitchen candle that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe would settle there as though he were in his own home. The sight of the bookcase and the desk, of the whole room, in fact, aroused his hilarity; and he could not stop himself from making one joke after another about Charles, which embarrassed Emma. She would have liked to see him more serious, and even, on occasion, more dramatic, as when she thought she heard the sound of footsteps approaching in the alley.

“Someone’s coming!” she said.

He blew out the light.

“Do you have your pistols?”

“What for?”

“Why … to defend yourself,” said Emma.

“From your husband? Oh, that poor fellow!”

And Rodolphe ended his comment with a gesture that meant: “I could annihilate him with a flick of my finger.”

She was amazed by his fearlessness, even though she sensed in it a coarseness and naïve vulgarity that shocked her.

Rodolphe thought hard about that episode involving the pistols. If she had spoken in earnest, it was quite ridiculous, he thought, even abhorrent, for he himself had no reason to hate that good man, Charles, since he was not consumed by jealousy, as people put it; —and indeed, concerning this, Emma had made him a solemn vow that he also found not in the best taste.

Besides, she was becoming quite sentimental. They had had to exchange miniatures, they had cut off handfuls of their hair, and now she was asking for a ring, a veritable wedding band, as a symbol of everlasting union. She often spoke to him about the evening church bells or the
voices of nature;
then she would talk about her mother, and his. Rodolphe had lost his mother twenty years before. Nonetheless, Emma would console
him in affected language, as one would have consoled a bereaved child, and even said to him sometimes, gazing at the moon:

“I’m sure that somewhere up there, they are together and they approve of our love.”

But she was so pretty! And he had possessed few women as ingenuous as she! This love, so free of licentiousness, was a new thing for him and, drawing him out of his easy ways, both flattered his pride and inflamed his sensuality. Emma’s rapturous emotion, which his bourgeois common sense disdained, seemed charming to him in his heart of hearts, since he was the object of it. And so, certain of being loved, he stopped making any effort, and imperceptibly his manner changed.

He no longer spoke those sweet words to her that had once made her weep, nor did he offer her those fervent caresses that had once driven her wild; so that their great love, in which she lived immersed, seemed to be seeping away under her, like the waters of a river being absorbed into its own bed, and she could see the mud. She did not want to believe it; she redoubled her affection; and Rodolphe made less and less of an effort to hide his indifference.

She did not know if she was sorry she had yielded to him, or if, on the contrary, she longed to cherish him even more. The humiliation of feeling so weak was turning into a resentment tempered by sensuous pleasure. It was not an attachment; it was a kind of permanent seduction. He was subjugating her. She was almost afraid of it.

Outward appearances, nevertheless, were more serene than ever, Rodolphe having succeeded in managing the affair as he pleased; and after six months, by the time spring came, they found themselves behaving toward each other like a married couple calmly tending a domestic flame.

It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey, in memory of his mended leg. The gift would always arrive with a letter. Emma cut the string tying it to the basket, and read the following:

And here there was a gap between the lines, as if the old fellow had let his pen drop and daydreamed for a while.

She sat for a few minutes holding the coarse paper between her fingers. The letter was a tangle of spelling mistakes, and Emma followed the gentle thought that clucked its way through them like a hen half hidden in a hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the fireplace, for a little gray powder slid from the letter onto her dress, and she thought she could almost see her father bending toward the hearth to grasp the tongs. How long it was since she used to sit next to him, on the stool, by the fire, burning the end of a stick in the big flame of crackling
furze! … She thought back to summer evenings flooded with sunlight. The colts would whinny when you walked by, and they would gallop and gallop … There was a hive of honeybees under her window, and now and then the bees, circling in the light, would tap against the panes like bouncing balls of gold. How happy those days had been! How
free! How full of hope! How rich in illusions! There were none left now! She had spent them in all the different adventures of her soul, in all those successive stages she had gone through, in her virginity, her marriage, and her love; —losing them continuously as her life went on, like a traveler who leaves some part of his wealth at every inn along his road.

But what was making her so unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe that had overturned her life? And she lifted her head and looked around, as though seeking the cause of what hurt her so.

A ray of April sunshine shimmered over the china on the shelves of the cabinet; the fire was burning; she could feel, under her slippers, the softness of the carpet; the day was clear, the air warm, and she could hear her child bursting into peals of laughter.

In fact, the little girl was rolling around on the lawn, in the midst of the grass that was being dried for hay. She was lying flat on her stomach on top of one of the piles. The servant was holding on to her by the skirt. Lestiboudois was raking close by, and every time he came up, she would lean out, beating the air with her arms.

“Bring her to me!” said her mother, hurrying over to give her a kiss. “How much I love you, my poor child! How much I love you!”

Then, noticing that the tips of the child’s ears were a little dirty, she quickly rang for warm water and cleaned her, changed her underclothes, her stockings, her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as though just back from a trip; and finally, kissing her again and weeping a little, she handed her back to the maid, who was standing there quite astonished at this excess of tenderness.

That night, Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.

“It will pass,” he supposed; “it’s just a whim.”

And he missed three of their rendezvous in succession. When he returned, she was cold and almost disdainful.

“Ah! You’re wasting your time, my pet …”

And he appeared not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the handkerchief she kept bringing out.

It was then that Emma repented!

She even asked herself why she despised Charles, and if it would not have been better to be able to love him. But he did not offer much of an opening for this renewal of affection, so that she was quite foiled in her momentary inclination for sacrifice, when the apothecary happened to provide her with a timely opportunity.

He had recently read an article singing the praises of a new method of correcting clubfeet; and since he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, too, in order
to keep abreast of the times
, ought to be performing operations on strephopodia.

“After all,” he said to Emma, “what risk is there? Look” (and he enumerated on his fingers the advantages of the attempt): “almost certain success, relief and improved appearance for the patient, immediate celebrity for the surgeon. Why wouldn’t your husband, for example, want to help out poor Hippolyte, over at the Lion d’Or? Note that the boy would be sure to tell the story of his cure to all the travelers, and also” (Homais lowered his voice and looked around) “what would prevent me from sending the newspaper a little piece about it? My Lord! An article gets around … people talk about it … the thing ends up snowballing! And who knows? Who knows?”

Indeed, Bovary might make a success of it; Emma had no reason to think he was not skillful, and what a satisfaction it would be for her to have started him on a path that would increase both his reputation and his fortune? All she wanted, now, was to be able to lean on something more solid than love.

Charles, urged by her and by the apothecary, allowed himself to be persuaded. He sent to Rouen for the volume by Doctor Duval, and every evening, his head in his hands, he immersed himself in reading it.

While Charles was studying pes equinus, varus, and valgus, that is, strephocatopodia, strephendopodia, and strephexopodia (or, to be more exact, the various malformations of the foot, downward, inward, and outward), along with strephypopodia and strephanopodia (in other words, downward torsion and upward straightening), Monsieur Homais, by
every kind of argument, was exhorting the innkeeper’s stableboy to submit to the operation.

“You may possibly feel just a slight pain; it’s a simple prick like a mild bloodletting, less than the extirpation of certain types of corns.”

Hippolyte, as he thought about it, was rolling his eyes in bewilderment.

“In any case,” the pharmacist went on, “this has nothing to do with me! I’m thinking of you! Out of pure humanity! I would like to see you relieved, my friend, of your hideous claudication, along with that swaying of the lumbar region, which, though you claim otherwise, must prove a considerable obstacle to you in the exercise of your vocation.”

Then Homais described how much nimbler and more vigorous he would feel afterward, and even implied that he might be more pleasing to women; and the stableboy began to smile foolishly. Then he attacked him through his vanity:

“Aren’t you a man, by heaven! What if you had had to serve in the army, follow your flag into battle? … Ah! Hippolyte!”

And Homais would walk away, declaring that he could not understand such stubbornness, such blindness in refusing the benefits of science.

The poor fellow gave in, for it was a kind of general conspiracy. Binet, who never meddled in other people’s affairs, Madame Lefrançois, Artémise, the neighbors, and even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache—everyone urged him, lectured him, shamed him; but what decided him, in the end, was that
it wouldn’t cost him anything.
Bovary even undertook to provide the apparatus for the operation. This piece of generosity had been Emma’s idea; and Charles agreed to it, telling himself in his heart of hearts that his wife was an angel.

And so, with suggestions from the pharmacist, and after starting over three times, he had the carpenter, with the help of the locksmith, build him a sort of box weighing about eight pounds and containing ample quantities of iron, wood, sheet metal, leather, screws, and nuts.

However, in order to know which of Hippolyte’s tendons should be cut, it was necessary to find out first what sort of clubfoot he had.